Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism (Classical Presences) 9780198723417, 0198723415

Table of contents :
Cover
Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism
Copyright
Preface
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Contributors
Introduction: Pater and Antiquity
Notes
Part 1: Classics and Classicism
Introduction to Part 1
1: Pater as Professional Classicist
Notes
2: Pater the Translator
Notes
3: Pater´s `Winckelmann´: Aesthetic Criticism and Classical Reception
Notes
4: Eternal Moment: Pater on the Temporality of the Classical Ideal in Art
Nachahmung: The Dialectic of the Delicate Pause
Rhythmos: The Configuration of the Pregnant Type
The Temporal Disparity of Pause and Type
Notes
Part 2: Fictions
Introduction to Part 2
5: Tibullus in Marius the Epicurean: or How to Read Pater´s Fiction
Notes
6: Marcus the Stoic in Marius the Epicurean
Notes
7: A Search for Home: The Representation of the Domestic in Marius the Epicurean
The Roman House
Remembering the Past
The Future
Postscript
Notes
8: Reception, Receptivity, and Anachronism in Marius the Epicurean
Notes
9: Pater´s `Apollo in Picardy´: The Art of Scholarly Method
Modelling and Dismantling
Confronting the Classics
Above and Beyond
Notes
Part 3: Greek Art and Culture
Introduction to Part 3
10: Pater´s `Hippolytus Veiled´: A Study from Euripides?
Notes
11: Hellenic Utopias: Pater in the Footsteps of Pausanias
Belated Longings: From Winckelmann to Pater
Reading Pausanias: The Search for Hellenic Traces
Desiring Greece: The Erotics of the Gaze
Colouring the Past: Pater and the Fin-de-Siècle `Pausaniacs´
Notes
12: Pater on Sculpture
`Winckelmann´
Essays on the History of Greek Sculpture, 1880-94
Pater and the Archaeologists
Notes
13: Pater and Greek Religion
Notes
Part 4: Philosophy
Introduction to Part 4
14: Pater´s Heraclitus: Irony and the Historical Method
Notes
15: Animism and Metaphysics in Pater´s Platonism
Introduction
Ideas and Persons
Ideas and `Animism´
Romanticism, Statuary, and `the Gods in Exile´
Conclusion
Notes
16: Pater and Nettleship: A Platonic Education and the Politics of Disciplinarity
The Nettleship of State
Pater´s Platonic Lesson
Plato the Classicist?
Notes
17: The Ethics of Contemplation: Pater´s Reading of Aristotle
Notes
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography on Pater and the Classics
1. General
2. Pater and Classics at Oxford
3. Fiction Connected with Antiquity
4. Greek Culture: Literature, Myth, Religion
5. Ancient Art
6. Ancient Philosophy
Index

Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

JAMES I. PORTER

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Pater the Classicist Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism

EDITED BY

Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, and Elizabeth Prettejohn

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2017 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948403 ISBN 978–0–19–872341–7 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Preface The project that led to this volume began with a two-day interdisciplinary workshop ‘Pater the Classicist’ held in 2012 at the University of Bristol, generously supported financially by the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition and by the University of Oxford (Passmore Edwards Fund). Our thanks to those supportive institutions. Apart from the contributors to this volume other participants were Elisa Bizzotto, Jason Edwards, David Hopkins, Ian Jenkins, Miriam Leonard, Catherine Maxwell, Ellen O’Gorman, Robin Osborne, and Liz Renes. Stephen Bann was unable to attend, but subsequently agreed to write the ‘Afterword’. The aim of the workshop was to focus on those writings by Pater that are directly concerned with classical antiquity; these include Plato and Platonism and the essays on Greek art and culture, which in general have been neglected in comparison with his essays on modern literature and art history, particularly those in his most celebrated publication, The Renaissance, continuously in print and discussed since Pater’s death. There is as yet no really systematic treatment of Pater as a classicist, even though classical literature and culture constituted his main object of study throughout his life. One problem is that today’s classicists (unlike some of their predecessors) rarely write about Pater, while few contemporary Paterians are expert in matters classical. Accordingly the workshop was specifically designed to bring together classical scholars and Pater specialists. We are delighted that as a result, in two cases, a classicist and a Victorianist decided to collaborate on a jointly written chapter for our volume. More generally the workshop encouraged a dialogue across disciplines (Classics, English Literature, Art History, Archaeology, Philosophy), promoting fresh ideas and approaches. We hope that this dialogue will continue to bear fruit, something that is essential if the writings by Pater that themselves cross those boundaries are to be properly understood and evaluated. Should this project and publication lead to more work of the kind, we shall indeed be satisfied. Pater, for years a tutor at Brasenose College, Oxford, was a professional classicist (the only major critic of the High Victorian period to be

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so), with a particular interest in philosophy. He initially approached antiquity obliquely (for example, through the Italian Renaissance or the poetry of William Morris). Later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, particularly about his first love Greece, in Marius the Epicurean (centrally concerned with Greek philosophy and culture along with Latin literature, Roman religion, and early Christianity), in Plato and Platonism, and in the essays collected in Greek Studies. The writings that deal with antiquity treated in this volume are, in the order of their composition (with dates of subsequent collections in brackets), as follows: 1867 1876

1880 1885 1886 1889 1892 1893 1894

‘Winckelmann’ (The Renaissance, 1873, 1877, 1888, 1893) ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ in two parts (Greek Studies, 1895) ‘Romanticism’ (retitled ‘Postscript’, Appreciations, 1889, 1890, 1895) ‘A Study of Dionysus’ (GS) ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ in two parts (GS) ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (GS) Marius the Epicurean (revised later in 1885, 1892) ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (Imaginary Portraits, 1887, 1890) ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ (GS), probably written c.1876–8 ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ (GS) ‘The Genius of Plato’; ‘A Chapter on Plato’; ‘Lacedaemon’ (republished as chapters 1, 6, 8 of Plato and Platonism) Plato and Platonism ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (Miscellaneous Studies, 1895) ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ (GS)

These writings range from literary criticism to art history, archaeology, philosophy, and fiction, to an extent dissolving the distinctions between them. Pater engaged, if often in a characteristically covert and feline way, with the views of his Victorian contemporaries, challenging (if only by implication) dominant views on critical and artistic practice, and on religion and morality, including sexual morality. He was later an important influence, not always fully acknowledged, on many of the major anglophone Modernists, including Woolf, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. And he has been reclaimed for Postmodernism by a number of its leading figures. All these various Paters will be encountered in this collection.

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Quotations from the writings of Pater are cited within the text in abbreviated form (see p. xi for a list of abbreviations). Documentation for all references and citations is given in full in the notes to individual chapters. (For books, where place of publication is not specified, it is London.) Our volume also contains, at the end, a specially compiled general bibliography on the subject: this provides overall guidance on publications about Pater the classicist. For classical names, wherever possible, we use Pater’s own spellings. Our project is particularly timely, since Oxford University Press has commissioned a new multi-volume Pater edition, which is bound to provoke increased interest in his writings. Pater the Classicist is designed to appeal to students of philosophy, art history, and literature (especially in the Victorian period), as well as those interested in classical reception (currently the fastest-growing part of Classics, at least in the UK), where there is considerable attention paid at the moment to the Victorian period. There is also much interest in Pater beyond Britain, as witnessed by The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe edited by Stephen Bann, whose ‘Afterword’ concludes our book (there are modern French and Italian editions of Greek Studies, and a French edition of Plato and Platonism, though as yet no English ones!). As both a theorist and a distinguished practitioner of classical reception, Pater is almost uniquely suited to be the subject of a volume in the Classical Presences series. Reflecting the broad range of Pater’s interests, our list of contributors cuts across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together classicists, literary critics, art historians, and philosophers. The team is fully international, with contributors from North America, the UK, and continental Europe, composed of scholars at the beginning of their careers as well as those who are fully established. We hope that this inclusive, outward-facing approach would have met with the approval of that most cosmopolitan of writers on antiquity and the classical tradition: Walter Horatio Pater. Charles Martindale Stefano Evangelista Elizabeth Prettejohn York and Oxford, 2016

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Contents Abbreviations List of Contributors Introduction: Pater and Antiquity Charles Martindale

xi xiii 1

Part 1. Classics and Classicism Introduction to Part 1

31

1. Pater as Professional Classicist Isobel Hurst

33

2. Pater the Translator Bénédicte Coste

47

3. Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’: Aesthetic Criticism and Classical Reception Stefano Evangelista and Katherine Harloe

63

4. Eternal Moment: Pater on the Temporality of the Classical Ideal in Art Whitney Davis

81

Part 2. Fictions Introduction to Part 2 5. Tibullus in Marius the Epicurean: or How to Read Pater’s Fiction Duncan Kennedy 6. Marcus the Stoic in Marius the Epicurean Richard Rutherford 7. A Search for Home: The Representation of the Domestic in Marius the Epicurean Shelley Hales

101 103 121

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8. Reception, Receptivity, and Anachronism in Marius the Epicurean James I. Porter 9. Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’: The Art of Scholarly Method Caroline Vout

149 163

Part 3. Greek Art and Culture Introduction to Part 3

181

10. Pater’s ‘Hippolytus Veiled’: A Study from Euripides? Lene Østermark-Johansen

183

11. Hellenic Utopias: Pater in the Footsteps of Pausanias Charlotte Ribeyrol

201

12. Pater on Sculpture Elizabeth Prettejohn

219

13. Pater and Greek Religion Robert Fowler

241

Part 4. Philosophy Introduction to Part 4

259

14. Pater’s Heraclitus: Irony and the Historical Method Giles Whiteley

261

15. Animism and Metaphysics in Pater’s Platonism Lee Behlman and Kurt Lampe

275

16. Pater and Nettleship: A Platonic Education and the Politics of Disciplinarity Daniel Orrells 17. The Ethics of Contemplation: Pater’s Reading of Aristotle Adam Lee Afterword Stephen Bann Bibliography on Pater and the Classics Index

293 309 325

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Abbreviations Quotations from the writings of Pater (an inveterate reviser of his own works) are taken, unless otherwise explicitly stated, from the edition of The Renaissance: The 1893 Text by Donald L. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980) and, for the rest, the complete New Library Edition published by Macmillan in 1910. The following abbreviations for Pater’s works are used throughout: App.

Appreciations: With an Essay on ‘Style’ (vol. 5)

Gast.

Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance (vol. 9)

GS

Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (vol. 7)

IP

Imaginary Portraits (vol. 4)

ME

Marius the Epicurean (vols 2–3) (In citations from Marius, i. and ii. refer to the two volumes of the novel; chapter numbers are also given)

MS

Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (vol. 8)

PP

Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (vol. 6)

Ren.

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Hill)

Other abbreviations are: ‘AP’

‘Aesthetic Poetry’, in the first edition of Appreciations (1889), pp. 213–27 (thereafter replaced by ‘Feuillet’s “La Morte”’)

Critical Heritage Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (1980) Inman (1981)

Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858–1873 (New York and London, 1981)

Inman (1990)

Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater and His Reading: 1874–1877: With a Bibliography of His Library Borrowings, 1878–1894 (New York and London, 1990)

IPJT

Walter Pater: Imaginary Portraits, ed. Lene ØstermarkJohansen, MHRA Jewelled Tortoise Volume 1 (2014)

Letters

Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford, 1970)

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List of Contributors STEPHEN BANN, CBE, FBA is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol LEE BEHLMAN is Associate Professor in the English Department at Montclair State University BÉNÉDICTE COSTE is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Burgundy, Dijon WHITNEY DAVIS is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley STEFANO EVANGELISTA is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College ROBERT FOWLER, FBA, is Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol SHELLEY HALES is Senior Lecturer in Classical Art at the University of Bristol KATHERINE HARLOE is Associate Professor in Classics and Intellectual History at the University of Reading ISOBEL HURST is Lecturer in English at Goldsmith’s, University of London DUNCAN KENNEDY is Emeritus Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol KURT LAMPE is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol ADAM LEE teaches at Sheridan College, Ontario CHARLES MARTINDALE is Emeritus Professor of Latin at the University of Bristol DANIEL ORRELLS is Lecturer in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at King’s College London LENE ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Languages at the University of Copenhagen JAMES I. PORTER is Chancellor’s Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ELIZABETH PRETTEJOHN is Professor of History of Art at the University of York CHARLOTTE RIBEYROL is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University RICHARD RUTHERFORD is Professor of Greek and Latin Literature and Tutorial Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford CAROLINE VOUT is University Reader in Classics and Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge GILES WHITELEY is Assistant Professor of English at Stockholm University

Introduction Pater and Antiquity Charles Martindale

The chapters of this book collectively make the case for taking Walter Pater seriously as a classicist. Pater is our greatest aesthetic critic. He was also a professional classicist who lectured and gave tutorials at the University of Oxford, and participated in many of the debates fostered by Classics as an academic discipline. This latter point is often downplayed in discussions of his writings. Yet, from ‘Winckelmann’ onwards, Pater’s aestheticism and his interests as a classicist went closely together. We could say that the classical tradition in its broadest sense (including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities) is Pater’s principal subject as a writer (see e.g. Chapters 3, 4, and 8). Accordingly we need classicists with their particular expertise to explore, explain, and illuminate Pater’s writings on the ancient world, writings largely ignored within English studies (where attention to Pater is most likely to be found) in part because of a lack of that expertise. Moreover in my view Pater is a model of what one important type of classicist could and should be, if the subject is to survive in any meaningful form in the general culture. This is because of the way that, in addition to his particular insights into classical antiquity, Pater also engaged, often in fugitive and oblique fashion, with many of the pressing intellectual issues and debates of his own day, and understood why Classics—not a term he used, incidentally—needed to be approached within the wider context of the humanities generally, in connection with a modernity which was cosmopolitan in scope. Who knows Classics who only Classics knows?

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For Pater, whose conception of the subject was cross-disciplinary and outward-looking and pan-European, a non-aesthetic concern with the past, unrelated to general culture, or present concerns, for historical or scholarly reasons only, is ‘mere curiosity or antiquity’ (‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, GS, 210). Pater is not exactly neglected by students of English literature. He was admired by the original Yale deconstructionists, for example, who recognized that beneath the smoothly seductive prose surface lurked radical doctrines of a potentially deconstructive character, just as he had been a major—though often unacknowledged—influence on most of the great British and American Modernists.1 More recently scholars have engaged particularly with Pater as ‘queer’ theorist avant la lettre, and as an exponent of aestheticism and decadence (a term he himself disliked), as well as with his complex navigation of the publishing scene with respect to both books and periodicals. But the concentration in university syllabuses on poetry and the mainstream novel means that his work is seldom presented to students. And few recognize the not inconsiderable impact Pater has had, inter alia by helping to naturalize some of the words we use to map our world. How many, when referring to the ‘Renaissance’, now stop to ask themselves why we use a French term for this phenomenon? If they do, they probably attribute it to the influence of Michelet (who of course was anyway writing in French) or Burckhardt (not translated into English until 1878). The word took some time to establish itself as normative in English (in early uses it is frequently italicized), while Matthew Arnold, like others, favoured the spelling ‘Renascence’. ‘Renaissance’ is used extensively in the third volume of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–3), but with strongly pejorative overtones (the period is called ‘The Fall’). It is hard not to suppose that its positive use by Pater in his most influential and controversial work played a significant role in normalizing this usage.2 A similar story could be told about ‘aesthetic’ with its Greek lineage via German philosophy, where Ruskin disliked the word, preferring ‘theoretic’.3 Finally, and most relevantly to the concerns of this volume, there is ‘the classical tradition’. Surprisingly, the phrase does not seem to be current before the Victorian period (perhaps in earlier centuries matters classical were too dominant and omnipresent to require such separate designation). In their recent book with that title Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow cite as an early instance J. A. Symonds’s Renaissance

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in Italy (1877), which opposes ‘Christian and Classical Traditions’, a version it might seem of Matthew Arnold’s Hebraism and Hellenism.4 But an earlier and far more influential use occurs in ‘Winckelmann’, an essay that in 1867 the youthful Pater published in the Westminster Review and subsequently included in The Renaissance (first edition 1873). The words ‘classical tradition’, ‘Hellenic tradition’, and just ‘tradition’ recur throughout, not used quite in our way, but always with an etymological sense of something handed down, on one occasion pejoratively (when he writes that ‘Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, more artificial classical tradition which Winckelmann was one day to supplant by the clear ring, the eternal outline of the genuine antique’).5 Pater is already grappling with some of the central paradoxes that preoccupy Silk and his fellow authors. As a good modern, and a student of Hegel, he knows that ‘criticism must never for a moment forget that “the artist is the child of his time” ’ and that indeed ‘To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in spite of its intense outlines, its perfect self-expression, still remains faint and remote’. For art, as Pater puts it a year later in his review essay ‘Poems by William Morris’, ‘anything in the way of an actual revival must always be impossible’.6 But nonetheless ‘an element of permanence’ and action at a distance persists: ‘The supreme artistic products of each generation thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflection of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours.’ Period distinctions must not be drawn too absolutely, since ‘the deeper [view] is that which preserves the identity of European culture’. A central concern for Pater throughout his work is to arrive at ever more subtle formulations of how, and why, and with what results and benefit, this powerful ‘transhistoricality’, as we may call it, through these mediated receptions of antiquity, actually operates, a key point to which I shall be returning. Certainly, classicists have in recent years done little for Pater, despite his having been a Classics don. For example, in the great Harvard compendium The Classical Tradition, Pater, who as we have just seen may be partly responsible for our very use of the phrase, is barely mentioned.7 By contrast there is a long entry on Nietzsche. Yet I would argue that Pater’s insights into antiquity are of comparable importance, if presented with rather less sensational brilliance, and also less often

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merely excitingly misguided (through what Nietzsche’s commentators more charitably term his ‘uniquely productive distortion’).8 It does not help that one classicist who has written about Pater at some length, Richard Jenkyns, still holds to a view of him as in part a purveyor of elegant but ill-informed and solipsistic belletrism. In his contribution to The History of the University of Oxford, volume VII published in 2000 he singles out three Oxford classicists of the period 1873–1914 who had an influence beyond the academy, Jowett, Pater, and Gilbert Murray; of these he regards Murray much the most positively as ‘one of the culture heroes of Oxford classics’.9 This preference seems to me bizarre. Of course Murray is a most attractive individual, much closer in his modus operandi to a modern classical scholar than the other two, and in addition a major figure for anyone studying the reception of classical culture in the period, not least through his translations of Euripides that earned so famous and so lordly a rebuke from T. S. Eliot.10 Some of his writings are still worth reading for more than historical reasons. But on a long view, good scholar though he was, he is hardly in the front rank intellectually; as a textual critic, for example, he is distinctly seconddivision. As a writer and a thinker of permanent importance, whom Jerome McGann has called ‘the strongest as well as the subtlest literarycritical intelligence’ of the High Victorian period, Pater is surely in a completely different league of significance.11 Here by contrast is Jenkyns’s assessment: The importance of Pater in the context of classical studies lies in his lack of importance: this literary demigod, who wrote what Yeats was to call the sacred book for his generation, seems to have made no impression at all upon the study of classical literature within the University. Part of the reason for this can be attributed to the reticence of his personality, more to his limitations: though most of his writings are concerned with Hellenism, he wrote rather little directly about the ancient world, and that of indifferent quality. His picture of Greek society in Plato and Platonism is both naïve and self-indulgent . . . Still, one may well feel that a more congenial atmosphere might both have drawn his remarkable talent more towards classical literature and sharpened his rather hazy view of it.12

Yet Pater wrote a fair amount directly about antiquity; equally importantly he also addressed antiquity obliquely in ways that matter for anyone who cares about the presence of Classics in the general culture. And one wonders exactly what the evidence is for this complete lack of importance. True, Pater was always reticent, although he did initially put

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forward his name for the Chair of Poetry (only to withdraw it again) as well as for the Slade Professorship. As one would expect, his views on the syllabus were liberal and progressive. Where Jowett favoured an exclusively textual focus for Oxford Classics, Pater, despite his deep love of literature, espoused a much broader view of the subject comprising archaeology, art history, comparative religion, anthropology, myth (see the essays in Part 3). He was the first to offer a series of lectures on Pausanias, which opened the subject of archaeology to students. For this he was later dubbed ‘the father of archaeological teaching in Oxford’ by L. R. Farnell, who attended the lectures and was encouraged by them to pursue his subsequent career as an archaeologist: ‘though these lectures were wholly “unscientific”—in the German sense—for neither in Greek nor in any other art was Pater an authority, I enjoyed the faint fragrance of them and resolved to go further afield in this line’ (for the full text see Chapter 12).13 Farnell’s rather patronizing tone reflects the attitudes of a later age; in truth Pater was fascinated by German scientific archaeology, while seeing past its overweening and positivistic character and methodological shortcomings. His four published essays on Greek sculpture (along with Plato and Platonism perhaps his least studied works) make him the most sophisticated sculpture theorist of his day in England: his revision of Winckelmann’s authoritative account of sculptural history as rise and fall was potentially revolutionary, while his enthusiasm for the archaic anticipated High Modernist taste (see Chapter 12). He broke with the stress on whiteness and purity in neoclassical theory—Jenkyns is wrong to say that in Pater ‘the serenely noble Greek of Winckelmann’ was ‘reincarnated’14—to stress the complex materiality of early Greek artefacts: the use of wood, terracotta, ivory, metals, including gold and silver, and colour. From the first he criticized Winckelmann for his limited, overly classicizing view of Greek culture, in contrast to Goethe’s more comprehensive response: ‘a sort of preparation for the romantic temper is noticeable even within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which for his part Winckelmann failed to see’ (Ren., 178). The two terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ are indeed bound together, as Pater recognizes in what is still one of the best and most nuanced discussions of the matter, his essay of 1876 ‘Romanticism’ (reused as the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations). The terms are useful as ‘two real tendencies in the history of art and literature’, Pater acknowledges, if not used ‘too vaguely or too absolutely’ (App., 241), as he puts pressure on the concepts in a sort of

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exercise of deconstruction avant la lettre, moving between their use with respect to particular historical periods and their potential transhistorical valence. He points out that there are proto-romantic elements in the writings of classical antiquity, and is uncharacteristically waspish on the use of classical in a merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it—people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and tame. (App., 241–2)

For, as he says, ‘all critical terms are relative; and there is at least a valuable suggestion in that theory of Stendhal’s, that all good art was romantic in its day. In the beauties of Homer and Pheidias, quiet as they now seem, there must have been, for those who confronted them for the first time, excitement and surprise, the sudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the desire of beauty’ (App., 258). Pater would have had no problem with Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘only that which has no history can be defined’, and he tends to dissolve traditional periodization, recognizing its unacknowledged ideological assumptions. His essays in the 1870s and 1880s on Greek myth and religion forcefully argue for its darker, more chthonic, more ‘romantic’ elements, the strange and the grotesque, the focus on evil and sadness, at the very time Nietzsche is insisting on the importance of Dionysus as well as Apollo to the Greeks (Pater wrote imaginary portraits of both these gods with an almost sadistic emphasis on the violence that their appearance in later ages unleashes). So about ‘the myth of Demeter, like the Greek religion in general’ he writes of its ‘unlovelier side, grotesque, unhellenic, unglorified by art’ (GS, 137). That was in 1876, only four years after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Potentially classicists have much to contribute to a fuller understanding of Pater’s writings. A couple of examples will show the kind of thing I have in mind. In the first chapter of Marius the Epicurean (i. 3) Pater quotes two lines of Tibullus, ‘who has preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage’, from elegy 1. 3. 33–4. Editors duly identify the source, and some of them also point out that the description of the ‘little’ Ambarvalia later in the chapter derives in part from another

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poem of Tibullus. But that is about the limit of what they have to say. Duncan Kennedy in Chapter 5 shows convincingly that Pater’s engagement with Tibullus—not incidentally in general a Victorian favourite but a poet who had slipped out of esteem after his considerable popularity in the later eighteenth century—goes far deeper. Pater is responding, without any overt signalling of the fact beyond the quotation, to scholarly debates about the poet, to Horace’s portrait of the obsessively introspective Albius in Epistles, 1. 4, and to the way that Tibullus’ poems, firstperson discourses akin to the dramatic monologue, seek to ‘perform subjectivity’, whether in the conduct of ritual, or the process of selfrealization as the subject confronts his circumstance. As usual Pater is responding to form and content together, and, as usual, he will align ancient and modern, as when he notes how ‘The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, “touched of heaven,” where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field’ (ME, i. 5). Marius’ Epicureanism is less classic Epicureanism as such than a version of the Cyrenaicism of Aristippus and his successors, whose views only survive in fragmentary form in testimonia, which are hard to make sense of. Kurt Lampe, in his fine book on this philosophic tradition, shows how even in this case, where the evidence is so scanty and fugitive, Pater engages, in detail and with great subtlety, with the likely thought of antiquity, in particular in relation to ‘four elements that remain obscure in ancient Cyrenaic doxography: “unitemporal pleasure,” the relationship of hedonism to traditional virtues, the “economy” of pleasures and pains, and the Cyrenaic argument against the fear of death’.15 This is not to say that Pater necessarily ‘gets Aristippus right’, rather that we can engage with him productively as fellow enquirers, in trying to make sense and coherence of the surviving traces. As a result Lampe gives a splendid demonstration of the value ‘reception study’ can have for philosophical as much as literary texts; in his words ‘the narrative framework of Pater’s novel communicates how and why Cyrenaicism could attract someone better than arid doxography ever could’. Both these discussions by implication refute the curious view still sometimes encountered that Pater was not very learned. Indeed Pater’s wide reading—which encompassed so many fields and scholarly writings about them and several European languages in addition to Greek and Latin—make him a writer

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peculiarly hard for anyone to keep level with, particularly as he so rarely specifies his sources. Many of the chapters of this book demonstrate how conscientiously and widely Pater ‘researched’ the topics he treats. And we should also remember what Pater himself says about ‘learning’ when commending that quality in Vernon Lee’s Euphorion: Very remarkable learning: by which I mean far more than an extensive knowledge of books and direct personal acquaintance with ‘Italy’s self ’ . . . I mean that these essays of yours are evidence of a very great variety and richness of intellectual stock—apprehensions, sympathies, and personal observations of all kinds—such as make the criticism of art and poetry a real part of the ‘criticism of life’.16

Pater’s professional position at Oxford was closest to that of an ancient philosopher today, and he lectured throughout the tenure of his fellowship on Plato and Aristotle. He himself had a particular regard for Plato and Platonism, but for Richard Jenkyns it is a ‘spectacularly bad’ book,17 telling us nothing about the ‘real’ Plato. Certainly it is a problematic work partly because it is unclear who today should most profitably read it and whether it is best regarded as literature or as philosophy. In that respect, however, it replays a similar Platonic problematic, and it clearly sits much more comfortably within the confines of ‘Continental’ philosophy than within the Anglo-American analytic tradition (dissolving the distinction between literature and philosophy became something of a preoccupation of the deconstructionists). Let us take a chapter that has come in for some especial abuse, the one entitled ‘Lacedaemon’. This is unlikely to be many readers’ favourite essay by Pater: how can the retiring, liberally minded, and unbellicose Oxford aesthete come to express so positive a view of the warlike, isolationist, and helot-abusing Spartans?18 Stylistically the chapter is a tour de force that weaves together material from Plato and The Dorians of K. O. Müller, described, with some irony surely, as a ‘laborious, yet, in spite of its air of coldness, passably romantic work’ (PP, 199–200).19 Its central conceit is that of the visit of a young Athenian, a student of the Academy, to the Dorian metropolis inhospitable to such visitors. The irony is clearly signalled at the outset: ‘Stimulated by his master’s unconcealed Laconism, his approval of contemporary Lacedaemon, he is at the pains to journey thither, and make personal inspection of a place, in Plato’s general commendations of which he may suspect some humour or irony, but which has unmistakably lent many a detail to his ideal Republic, on paper, or in thought’ (PP, 202). The humour reaches an almost

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boisterous climax when Pater writes: ‘in the gymnasia of Lacedaemon no idle bystanders, no—well! Platonic loungers after truth or what not— were permitted’ (PP, 220). And with increasing insistence Pater invokes an analogy with the English public school, as at the close: ‘like some of our old English places of education, though we might not care to live always at school there, it is good to visit them on occasion’ (PP, 234). Plato and Platonism derives from lectures on the Republic that Pater gave repeatedly in Oxford—the work is marked throughout by a sense of the speaking voice—and we may suspect some knowing collusion with the young men in his undergraduate audience. We can certainly object to that if we wish, but it is hardly the rebarbative authoritarian ethos of Müller’s The Dorians. In all this Pater is encouraging us to enter sympathetically into the world of Plato, his mind and personality, and the character of his writings, even where, as with his Laconism, we might not feel great initial sympathy: we are made to see in part through Plato’s eyes, as it were. One of the best chapters in Plato and Platonism, ‘The Genius of Plato’, in my view gives a better sense of the experience of reading Plato than any of the books I was given at Oxford when studying the Republic, including the magisterial volumes by my tutor, Ian Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines,20 books which tried to turn Plato into an analytic philosopher. Plato can only become such by virtue of a highly selective reading of the text, a selective reading that Pater will not countenance. Plato did not write doctrines in the form that Pater calls the ‘treatise’, the invention of Aristotle; he wrote dialogues, or as Pater prefers it, ‘essays’, like Montaigne. It is one of the central paradoxes that the philosopher who is usually regarded as articulating perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic metaphysical theory in the history of thought should have done so in a form that is so unsystematic and so literary. It is the implications of that paradox that the book is at pains to explore. And Pater, who combined a love of literature with a technical grasp of philosophic issues (something often denied him by his critics but which he possessed, even if he did not express that expertise in the language that the Anglo-American world now associates with philosophical enquiry), was unusually well qualified for that exploration (see the chapters in Part 4). A good example of the thoroughgoing Platonic imitation that can result is the paragraph on the plane trees of Sparta, the sort of thing that in Plato’s works today’s philosophers tend to call a

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‘digression’ or an ‘interlude’, but which is as much Platonic philosophy as the more technical arguments: Plato, as you may remember, gives a hint that, like all other visible things, the very trees—how they grow—exercise an aesthetic influence on character. The diligent legislator therefore would have his preferences, even in this matter of the trees under which the citizens of the Perfect City might sit down to rest. What trees? you wonder. The olive? the laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal? the cypress? that came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete: the oak? we think it very expressive of strenuous national character. Well! certainly the plane-tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedaemon then and now; a very tranquil and tranquillising object, spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air as regally as the tree of Lebanon itself. A vast grove of such was the distinguishing mark of Lacedaemon in any distant view of it; that, and, as at Athens, a colossal image, older than the days of Phidias—the Demos of Lacedaemon, it would seem, towering visibly above the people it protected. Below those mighty trees, on an island in their national river, were the ‘playing-fields,’ where Lacedaemonian youth after sacrifice in the Ephebeum delighted others rather than itself (no ‘shirking’ was allowed) with a sort of football, under rigorous self-imposed rules—tearing, biting—a sport, rougher even than our own, et même très dangereux, as our Attic neighbours, the French, say of the English game. (PP, 209–10)

The pervasive irony, which breaks cover into open humour at several points through anachronism (something to which I shall return)—the hearts of oak, the reference to football, with the French as Athenians to Britain’s Spartans—serves to naturalize Plato in elegant, witty, and lyrical English prose. Edward Manson, who had been a pupil of Pater from 1869, reports that ‘speaking of the Republic of Plato, he once said he thought it had been taken too seriously as a system of philosophy, when it was probably only a jeu d’esprit’.21 But more importantly this partmerging of his own writing with that of his author is an aspect of the relative spirit, of his particular brand of historicism. Here is Manson again: He lectured mostly on the Ethics and the Republic: but his lectures on the ‘History of Philosophy’ were his best performance. I never heard a better or more interesting lecturer except Ruskin . . . Pater’s delivery, like Ruskin’s, was extemporaneous, and he had an easy flow of choice language, but the charm of his lectures was not in any eloquence, but in the detachment of the lecturer. He treated all systems with grave respect, simply put their tenets before you, whether it was the doctrine of Thales that all was water, or of Anaxagoras that all was air, or Heraclitus’s theory of the ‘perpetual flux,’ or—to pass from the ancient to the modern world—Helvetius’s that the philosopher should test every experience

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in his own person; whatever it was, it was stated and elucidated with all gravity, not a tone or a look betraying any personal sympathy or preference. This cultured toleration had the effect of an exquisite irony, reminiscent of Socrates.

This irony in general does not debunk or rebuke, it complicates. But Pater, in his quiet way, likes at times to provoke—he certainly succeeds in provoking Jenkyns—by way primarily of a process of productive defamiliarization (as the famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance has it, ‘our failure is to form habits’). At Oxford in his day, as in mine, Plato was seen as the beginning of philosophy. Pater begins his enquiry with this correction: If at times we become aware in reading him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing. (PP, 8)22

Pater, as we shall see, likes playing with temporalities in just this way—he does something similar in Marius with Homer, represented as a belated author so that we are asked to consider whether ‘Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to some of the people of his own age, as seemed to happen with every new literature in turn’ (ME, i. 101–2, ch. 6). And Plato and Platonism opens with three chapters on the now fragmentary relics of Presocratic philosophy, the doctrines of motion, rest, and number, that lie behind some of Plato’s central concerns, handled by Pater with that disinterested gravity so well described by Manson. Also Pater is always concerned with the question of exactly where originality is to be located. But doubtless the remarks on form— partly in punning recall of Plato’s most celebrated theory surely—are designed to be provocative. It is not that Pater is uninterested in Plato’s actual ideas, as Jenkyns suggests; exploration of those will constitute the greater part of the book. And anyway for Pater form and content (however quite we construe these categories), the thought and its precise

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expression with all ‘surplusage’ stripped away, as called for in his essay on ‘Style’, always work together in any really distinguished piece of writing. This critical method is in no way a version of formalism; as we shall duly discover, it is rather Plato’s enemies, the Sophists, who are the true formalists with whom ‘art began too precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people’s productions’ (PP, 118). Pater knows that there is a content to the form as well as a form to the content. Ironically the ‘Conclusion’, which so disturbed or delighted its original readers, has likewise been characterized as containing no new idea, as being a tissue of the thoughts of others. Certainly its five brief paragraphs are intertextual with a great many things—the flux of Heraclitus, the English empirical tradition that culminated in the writing of David Hume, or the discoveries of modern scientists, including Darwin, to name just three—but there is certainly nothing else in the world of letters that it in the least resembles; so once again we may say that form, in the full sense, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing. Despite his professional involvement with the study of antiquity Pater started his writing career by approaching the subject obliquely, by indirections finding directions out. Pater’s central concern throughout his life was the classical tradition, with the way that the cultural knowledge of antiquity was disseminated, with the traces of the antique within modernity, and with modernity’s engagement with its multiple pasts. A serious student of Hegel, he was strongly attracted to historicism, at a time when such historicism was new and exciting; for him the modern critic is always a critic of this Hegelian kind. So in Plato and Platonism, where he distinguishes three sorts of criticism of ‘speculative opinion’ that he calls the ‘dogmatic’, the ‘eclectic’, and the ‘historic’, to the last of which the other two have yielded in his own time, he writes: ‘To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek life generally: such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say, of the really critical study of him.’ And so in the Republic we see ‘the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary monument’ (PP, 8–11; my italics). Pater’s aesthetics is one of distinctiveness and difference—everything is unique but for the roughness of the eye. It is only at this moment that the

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hills look just so.23 And he also knows the limitations of both historicism and of positive knowledge (which by implication he critiques, for example, in relation to the ‘scientific’ method as employed by historians of art in attribution and by archaeologists in Kopienkritik). On several occasions he uses the phrase vraie vérité, which he borrows from Sainte-Beuve: ‘a serviceable expression, by which the French recognise those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all intricately occupied men’s attention, lie beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about it’ (Ren., 121). Factual knowledge is never enough; we also need emotion, ‘impression’ in Pater’s special sense of that word, and what he terms in ‘Style’ ‘the imaginative sense of fact’ (App., 8). Everything in a world of flux and relativities (the very marker of modernity) can only be studied ‘under conditions’.24 While in general Pater is positive about tradition in the sense of our complex entanglements with the past, he is not always so: For in truth we come into the world, each one of us, ‘not in nakedness,’ but by the natural course of organic development clothed far more completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity which we mistake for our volitions; in the language that is more than one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs, the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves; in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. (PP, 72)

Pater is absurdly misrepresented when depicted as the conservative upholder of a seamless Western canon. All of this makes him an instructive precursor, indeed a sophisticated proponent, of what from the 1960s we have learned to call ‘reception theory’. Two of the greatest reception insights were given powerful formulation long before the School of Constance. Mieke Bal in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History is one of many reception theorists to quote a famous sentence from T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919): ‘Whoever has approved this idea of order . . . will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.’25 Eliot’s insight is in part a proto-structuralist one. Works of literature

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form an intertextual system; change any part of the system, and to some degree you change the whole. After Virgil’s profound rereading of the Iliad and Odyssey Homer is changed utterly, a different thing. ‘Preposterous’ in Eliot’s sentence means ‘completely absurd’, but also glances at the word’s etymology, ‘topsy-turvy’. History is usually today read forward, but it is experienced backwards, from the present. That present, moreover, is informed by multiple pasts, so that our experience of past texts is always mediated, in complex ways. And of this process of multiple mediation—as when Pater reads the Renaissance through Winckelmann or reads Morris reading the myth of Jason through medieval literature—it is Pater who gives the classic formulation. This is in one of the most radical and provocative of all his writings, a review of the poems of William Morris, later to be divided into two controversial essays, the ‘Conclusion’ to the Renaissance (omitted from the second edition for fear it should mislead the young men) and ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ which he included in Appreciations only to withdraw it again: The composite experience of all the ages is part of each one of us; to deduct from that experience, to obliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of a past age, as if the middle age, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century had not been, is as impossible as to become a little child, or enter again into the womb and be born. But though it is not possible to repress a single phase of that humanity, which, because we live and move and have our being in the life of humanity, makes us what we are, it is possible to isolate such a phase, to throw it into relief, to be divided against ourselves in zeal for it, as we may hark back to some choice space of our own individual life. We cannot conceive the age; we can conceive the element it has contributed to our culture; we can treat the subjects of the age bringing that into relief. Such an attitude towards Greece, aspiring to but never actually reaching its way of conceiving life, is what is possible for art.26

Here Pater is playing with the idea, found in Schiller and the Romantics, and later given memorable expression by Marx, that Greece was the childhood of our world, while also alluding to Christ’s injunction that we must become as children if we are to enter the kingdom of heaven (hence perhaps a certain wistfulness, a divided sensibility, in the passage—we might long to become children like the Greeks, but that longing must remain unfulfilled). Eventually Pater was to focus on what had in some sense always been his primary love: ancient Greece. But earlier he had needed to explore the Renaissance, the period in which there was a great revival of antiquity.

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His approach is a version of reception, a layered transhistoricism (with at least four historical points): Pater reads back from the present, from the period that Wilde, understanding Pater’s point, would later celebrate as ‘The English Renaissance of Art’ (the title of a lecture first delivered in New York in 1882 heavily plagiarized from Pater); through Winckelmann, who according to Hegel opened ‘ “a new organ for the human spirit” ’ so that ‘[o]n a sudden the imagination feels itself free’ (Ren., 141 and 146); through the Renaissance, to the antique. The Renaissance is both a historical occurrence in fifteenth-century Italy and also an idea that can recur in any period, whenever there is a ‘desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life . . . urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not only to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof—new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art’ (Ren., 1–2). All this constitutes an exemplary exploration of what is possible in our relationship to the past. And it is quite different from the universalism of which Pater is sometimes wrongly accused; each point in the journey has its own historical specificity (though there are necessarily limitations to our positive knowledge about it), but equally each had a past and will soon give way to a future it has helped to create. And yet, as we saw in Plato and Platonism, an exact configuration of circumstance will never recur. It is sometimes said that Pater was attracted to Antonine Rome because he saw it as a period of transition and one redolent of nineteenth-century modernity. It is probable that Arnold’s enthusiasm for Marcus Aurelius, subtly undermined indeed in Marius, derives from such a conception.27 But Pater, a much craftier thinker than Arnold, knows that any age can be configured as an age of transition, including those, like the Middle Ages, we tend to think of as comparatively stable. It would be better to say that Pater is attracted to those aspects of Antonine Rome which can most easily be represented as transitional, or which allow him to explore the processes of transition. So his Renaissance includes in its purview both the French Middle Ages and the eighteenth-century Germany of Winckelmann. Every historical moment has a past from which it can be differentiated and a future into which it will be projected, so that it can always and profitably be oriented in either direction. An alertness to multiple temporalities is at the core of Pater’s

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historicism. We may be encouraged to see an antique author as new or a new author as antique. There is an intense focus on the present moment, but we are also invited to ask what that moment will, or might, become. This layering is everywhere in Pater: so too in his depictions of antiquity he is always attentive to the multiple layers of ancient history and to the ancients’ awareness of their own pasts, as well as to the way those pasts will re-emerge as various futures. Marius the Epicurean is Pater’s most extended exploration of the nature and scope of our understandings of the past. It is a book that would certainly not have pleased Alice: not only are there no pictures, but—weirdly and experimentally for a long narrative fiction that in many respects runs parallel with novels about antiquity by Pater’s contemporaries—no conversations; instead we have descriptions, owing much to the ancient tradition of ecphrasis, translations from texts of the period, and explorations often in free, indirect discourse of the thoughts and feelings and perceptions of the protagonist, which have led the critics to see the work as the most important Victorian precursor of the Modernist fictions of Woolf and Joyce. Simon Goldhill protests against this emphasis, which might be represented as at once anachronistic and unduly teleological: ‘Viewed from the perspective of Kingsley’s Hypatia . . . Pater appears more closely embedded within a tradition than the teleological narrative of modernism has allowed.’28 This seems to me both right and wrong. Goldhill writes as a typical historicist de nos jours who, suspicious of any version of the transhistorical, always privileges horizontal relationships over vertical ones. It is certainly true that Marius is profoundly intertextual with novels set in classical antiquity by Kingsley, Newman, Bulwer Lytton, and others, indeed to the extent of constituting an implied critique of their modes of representation. There are innumerable shared elements: libidinous aristocratic Roman women, the gladiatorial games, life in the imperial palace, the frictions between paganism and Christianity, the martyrdom of the protagonists, and so forth. But the boldness of Pater’s breaks from his contemporaries—the emptying out of melodrama (even when dealing with such charged topics as the arena) and to a large extent of incident, the uncertainty about Marius’ relationship with Christianity so that we cannot even be sure that he has not converted before his death, the lack of linearity or clear development—makes the analogies

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with Modernist fiction equally compelling. And certainly none of Pater’s innovations is more startlingly radical than the complete suppression of normal dialogue between the characters (the work is dialogic in another sense in that it models different priorities for living without giving clear priority to any). Pater may well be implying that it is precisely in such dialogue that a sense of the gap between representation and reality in historical novels and plays tends to force itself on our attention most vividly. In today’s costume dramas on television, for example, characters tend to veer between wooden and unconvincing period pastiche and modes of speech that seem jarringly anachronistic (more artful writers like Shaw or Evelyn Waugh use such anachronisms in historical fictions in sophisticated ways to create a deliberate frisson, but this necessitates an overall arch playfulness which clearly would not suit Marius). One feature of Marius is its striking inclusion of extended passages of close translation, from the writings of Marcus Aurelius (including his recently rediscovered correspondence), Fronto, Apuleius (in particular ‘Cupid and Psyche’), Lucian, pseudo-Lucian (the dialogue called the Halcyon), Eusebius, and others. For Stefano Evangelista, ‘[t]his practice creates opportunities for a direct encounter with authentic fragments of antiquity’.29 Certainly the presence of these intertexts contributes a sort of ‘reality effect’ to the proceedings, but of course Pater knows well that all encounters with the past involve mediation. Translation is simply the most basic form that such processes of cultural mediation and transmission—a main concern of Pater’s at all times—take. In his later work Pater regularly uses translation as a significant trope, and he comes to understand the role of the writer as a translator and mediator of his own ‘sense of fact’ (see Chapter 2). For anyone interested in reception, translations are as good a starting point as any, and it would be naive to identify a translation unproblematically with an ‘original’, or to suppose that an encounter with an original wholly collapses historical distance or removes mediation. For Evangelista the presence of translation involves fragmentation and bricolage, but it is also the case that Pater blends his intertexts seamlessly into the texture of his fiction, creating the illusion of historicity, inviting the reader both to inhabit that richly delineated sense of history and, given the supreme self-consciousness of the handling, to reflect on how it has been achieved and what that might tell us about our relationship to the past.

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Marius has been styled, by Evangelista, ‘a novel about historiography’.30 It could equally well be called a novel about reception, and indeed the word and its cognates, ‘receptivity’ for example, are always favourites with Pater, linked to his emphasis on immediate sensory response, aisthesis. Pater exhibits his hero undergoing a ‘life of realized consciousness in the present’ which constitutes an ‘ “aesthetic” education’—‘an education partly negative, as ascertaining the true limits of man’s capacities, but for the most part positive, and directed especially to the expansion and refinement of the power of reception; of those powers, above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, the powers of emotion and sense’ (ME, i. 147, ch. 9). More than one receiver is involved, since along with the exploration of the mind and sensations of Marius (the focalizations through Marius) we have what Evangelista calls ‘the learned and eclectic voice of the nineteenth-century essayist’31 (not necessarily to be unproblematically equated with that of the historical Walter Pater). Goldhill thinks that, like those of ‘the bluff Bulwer or the tearful impulsive Kingsley’, Pater’s narrative ‘still inevitably turns to the antiquity of early Christianity to explain the present’.32 But Pater’s essential thinking is not teleological in quite this way. True, the present moment—the moment of attention paid by the powers of reception—is always crucial for the receiver, but, as we have seen, each and every moment is both instinct with multiple pasts and carries innumerable potential futures, including those as yet unknown. This motion backwards and forwards avoids both teleology and a naive universalism. The aesthetic moment if taken offers a momentary pause amid all this flux, an epiphany even, that demonstrates ‘the desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising one’s self in them, till one’s whole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards the vision—the “beatific vision,” if we really cared to make it such—of our actual experience in the world’ (ME, i. 143, ch. 8). That vision does not need to be of a great work of art; it might be a person, ‘the face of one’s friend’ (‘Conclusion’, Ren., 189), or ‘[t]he drops of falling water, a few wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, a few tufts even of half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of a room that has but light and shadow in it’, things which nevertheless ‘might well do duty for all the glory of Augustus’ (ME, ii. 180, ch. 25). It is a signal triumph of Marius that it repristinates Christianity, gives a sense of it not as the goal of a

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history we know and are at home with but as something new and unfamiliar ‘wonderfully fresh in the midst of a threadbare world’ (ME, ii. 186, ch. 26), but at the same time a complex palimpsest of its Jewish and pagan pasts. After the mannered claustrophobia of the scenes in the imperial palace there is an extraordinary sense of release and ease, but one which also returns us to the very beginning of the work and the mood of the primitive, pastoral ‘religion of Numa’ with which it all began. From time to time the smoothly historicizing surface of the novel, as dense with classical realien as a painting by Alma-Tadema, is ruffled by a gesture of the transhistorical, of anachronism if you will. So the narrator observes, ‘Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives—from Rome, to Paris or London’ (ME, ii. 14, ch. 16); or writes of the landscape that ‘[t]he picturesque, romantic Italy of a later time—the Italy of Claude or Salvator Rosa—was already forming, for the delight of the modern romantic traveller’ (ME, i. 163, ch. 10). Or, more subtly, translations of Aurelius’ writings become intertextual with Shakespeare and the English Bible.33 Pater’s particular brand of historicism thus has links with a current movement in the queering of history and what has been called ‘queer unhistoricism’, an attempt to break out of the treadmill of the assertion of difference against similarity or vice versa, to pursue ‘the difficult task of thinking the relations between a past and present, neither of which is self-identical or identical to the other’. Two such queer theorists Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon end their contribution to this debate with these words: Thus, the idea of unhistoricism that we propose, hence our call for acts of queering that would suspend the assurance that the only modes of knowing the past are either those that regard the past as wholly other or those that can assimilate it to a present assumed identical to itself. We urge a reconsideration of relations between past and present that would trace differential boundaries instead of being bound by and to any one age. Reading unhistorically cannot take the object of queering for granted and should be open to the possibility of anachronism. . . . In keeping alive the undecidable difference between difference and sameness it would refuse what we might term the compulsory heterotemporality of historicism, whether it insists on difference or produces a version of the normative same. Reading unhistorically would validate reading against the categorical collapses so often performed in the name of history. Such an act of queering, we venture to conclude, would be rigorously historical, though not as

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we—subject as we are to the routinized knowledges of the academy—understand the term historical today.34

Interestingly the authors stick with Pater’s term ‘Renaissance’ rather than use its current alternative: If we persist in using the term Renaissance, for example, it is to refuse the teleologically inflected early modern with its certainty that what matters in the past is its relation to a predetermined modernity. With Bruno Latour we would say instead that we have never been modern. To use the older term against the newer one also implies ongoing possibilities of resignification in recognition of the fact that the past is never fully over and never fully known.

There is kinship too between Pater’s approach and the ‘Deep Classics’ recently promoted by Shane Butler, with its focus on the stance of the present towards its pasts, the fundamental unknowability of those pasts, and a sense that we can respond to the tradition as a whole without collapsing it into simple-minded universality, so that it can act as ‘a place-holder for expression still not fully possible’.35 Of the history of homosexuality and of the love of Achilles and Patroclus Butler writes: Those renegade readers, including Symonds, as we already have seen regarding the respective sexual ‘roles’ of Achilles and Patroclus, are hardly just making things up. Rather, they are insisting on reading the tradition as a whole . . . Their reading, however, is anything but traditional, for it does not use that tradition to assert the authority of Homer or Dante or anyone else. They read instead for a networked idea to which even Homer and Dante have contributed, if perhaps unconsciously, along with Aeschylus, Plato, Martial, Beccadelli, Poliziano, plus more peripheral contributors, including readers themselves, sometimes linked in ways that leave smaller textual traces, or even none at all. Depth, in this sense, is not depth at all, but depth of field, an ability to bring into focus what no single text has shown us but which is seen all the same as residing in the tradition itself. The conflicted will and multivalent desires of that tradition trump those of any single author.

Butler’s example of a modern ‘deep classicist’ is John Addington Symonds, and his ancient one is Achilles himself, ‘the first character in the classical tradition to anticipate the pose of the deepest readers of that tradition, who stare with desire and despair at what they cannot fully understand, and who find in the work of time not the dimming or obscuring of classical eloquence, but its wine-dark efflorescence’. But it is Pater who is surely, in these terms, the ultimate deep classicist.

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Another way that Pater can be a guide to the modern classicist is by encouraging not only a concern with what is said but also an equal concern with how it is said, or rather a recognition that the two concerns are, or should be, always implicated one with another. Pater, as we have seen, has often been regarded as an exponent of a belletrism that eschews eager thought in the pursuit of fine writing for its own sake. But, as we have also already seen, that is clean contrary to the central emphasis of the essay ‘Style’. Pater’s insistence on the importance of ‘impressions’ (in his particular sense) does not mean that he writes in a way that is vague or woolly or impressionistic (in the negative sense of the word): the aim is the precise recording of one’s impressions. In ‘Style’ the exemplary writer is Flaubert and the sovereign good the removal of ‘surplusage’, any excess that stands in the way of that precise and accurate expression of the thought which should indeed dictate the choice of every word. Nothing that is otiose or decorative is to be left: ‘Is it worth while, can we afford, to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just then?’ (App., 19). Good writing is thus also the exact and economical expression of the mind of the writer. Accordingly Pater does not recommend any particular style above others; so long as the principle that nothing is superfluous is observed, all varieties of style are in principle allowable, ‘austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from first to last to that vision within’ (App., 23) or again ‘reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic . . . the sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair’ (App., 36). For himself as a scholar Pater favoured a style that was in his sense ‘academic’ which respected, duly, the history and etymologies of the words it employed, and which reflected constant practice in translating the prose of others, not least the Latin classics, with their emphasis on what he termed ‘true composition and not mere loose accretion’ (App., 24). Pater was writing at a time when the discipline of Classics in England was taking on much of the character it retains to this day, with the inauguration of influential specialist journals such as the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1880 and the learned article with extensive footnotes no longer aimed at a general readership. Pater, while Modernist in so many ways, did not contribute to that particular

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development, but Plato and Platonism is an early instance of another emerging genre, the monograph on a single canonical author designed for undergraduates and the educated reading public, a genre now so familiar that we scarcely notice its novelty in the late nineteenth century (another example is Richard Jebb’s Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey of 1887). Pater also invented a new hybrid form that united the critical essay with fiction which he called the ‘imaginary portrait’ (see Chapters 9 and 10 on portraits with classical subjects). For example, ‘The Prince of Court Painters’ is a subtle and extremely sympathetic portrayal (in the light of Pater’s undeserved reputation for misogyny) of the thoughts of a young woman, sister to the painter Antoine Watteau’s disciple Jean-Baptiste Pater, who, in a manner possibly unacknowledged to herself, is in love with Watteau. But it is also an exploration of the character of Watteau’s art, building on the insights of the writings of the brothers Goncourt on French rococo painting. ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ starts reassuringly with the cultured, educated voice of the essayist and educator discoursing on the travels of Pausanias and the demes of Attica only gradually, and thrillingly, to mutate into a fictive recreation of the story of Hippolytus destroyed by the love for him of his stepmother Phaedra, which is also in part a reconstruction of the lost Hippolytus Kalyptomenos of Euripides whose ghostly presence lies behind so much of the myth’s exceptionally rich reception history. (Where Arnold with his notoriously unsuccessful Merope and even Swinburne with his much more successful Atalanta in Calydon tried to ‘enter again into the womb’, Pater knew that such a mere ‘revival’ of Greek tragedy was impossible, and his version of a lost play is in prose and in full productive dialogue with the modern world.) Scholarship alone, and the patient sifting of the evidence, will only get us so far in our understanding of antiquity; imagination too will be needed. Today, when the genres available to scholars have become so routinized and inflexible, Pater’s example might encourage us to greater freedom and innovation (see Chapter 16). And of course Pater can encourage us to think harder about the texture of our writing (Yeats said of Pater’s that it was ‘the only great prose in modern English’36): that too is crucial if Classics is to be a significant part of general culture. Pater destroyed his youthful attempts at poetry, and later advised Wilde to write prose, not poetry, as being more difficult. For him imaginative prose was the modern art form, ‘the

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special art of the modern world’ (‘Style’, App., 11). He also played a significant if almost wholly occluded role in the history of translating the classics of antiquity, in prose. On a broad view the nineteenth century showed a major shift in translation practice.37 In earlier centuries professional writers, the most important included, practised the art of translation, especially poetic translation. There is a case for saying that the most significant—the most influential, even the greatest—poem of the previous century was that ‘poetical wonder’, as Dr Johnson called it, Pope’s Iliad (despite Pater’s limited enthusiasm for Augustan literature, Pope’s is still the translation of Homer he uses). In the Victorian period not only were most translators of the classics amateurs or scholars, but often they chose the vehicle of prose, though all too seldom prose of especial artistry. As we have seen, Pater incorporated passages of prose translation from ancient authors into his essays and books, and his method was to combine high literary finish with precision and accuracy, in accordance with the emphasis of ‘Style’ on ‘fact’ and ‘truth’. As he puts it in ‘Style’: —The right vocabulary! Translators have not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction; whereas, if the original be first-rate, one’s first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper (App., 14–15)

It is time that classical scholars subjected these translations to detailed analysis; it would be profitable, for example, to compare Pater’s versions of Plato with those of Jowett, which Pater may here be criticizing. Denis Donoghue is one of the few contemporary scholars who has attempted to analyse Pater’s style in any detail. He selects a number of passages which he thinks typify that style, including this one from Plato and Platonism, where Pater contrasts the manner of Berkeley and Plato, to the considerable implied advantage of the latter: Thus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer’s own mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the dialogue—that peculiar modification of the essay—anything less than essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the organism of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato’s Dialogues, in fact, reflect, they refine upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in which, by preference to anything

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like formal lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others. (PP, 176–7)

For Donoghue the essential feature of the style here is the movement ‘from qualification to qualification’, and ‘from an objective to a subjective form of attention’, so that ‘mental movement is the real content of the passage’, as the sentences ‘are busy with themselves, but not otherwise with the world’:38 These techniques of delay in Pater’s sentences mark his quiet refusal to live by the rhythms of public life, commerce, and technology. Just as clearly as his indifference to the realistic novel, they express his distaste for bourgeois values. . . . Instead of moving swiftly from point to point, as in a newspaper or a guidebook, his sentences turn aside, replacing the repetitions of technology with activity entirely internal.

There is some real insight here, though also too much of the standard view of Pater as an aesthete somewhat inclined to solipsism, and I would qualify the analysis in two significant ways. The first is to question the notion of typicity. Pater’s writing varies according to the substance of what he has to say, in accordance with the fundamental principles of the essay on ‘Style’. So here, as Donoghue acknowledges, the sentence about Berkeley contrasts structurally with those about Plato, to mimic, or enact, the quite different preoccupations of the two writers; in that sense it is indeed busy with the world. The second is to note that Pater’s sentences, however complex and mannered they become, are always fully resolved syntactically, like those of the classical masters he is imitating, in his words ‘composition’ not ‘accretion’. George Saintsbury sees Pater as ‘the father of all such as essay to write delicately’, a master of quietness and the middle style and of the paragraph. He scans quantitatively two paragraphs from the essay on Leonardo to show Pater’s rhythmic control, ‘that mysterious consonance or symphony’, and his skilful mastery of clausulae (Saintsbury and Pater share a classically trained sense of how such prose rhythms operate and of their benefit).39 Pater’s writings are in many ways classical as well as classicizing, more even than romantic, and in that sense too, however complex and subtle and fugitive the thought, they are busy with ‘fact’, not with the mind alone. The only reality human beings can know is anyway in the interface between the material stuff we call the world and the mind. And thus ‘the world’ after all may be as complex and fugitive and elusive as the mind, and likewise in constant flux, or so perhaps Pater the classicist may teach us.40

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Notes 1. See Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York, 1995), pp. 6–7: ‘Pater is a shade or trace in virtually every writer of significance from Hopkins and Wilde to Ashbery. . . . whatever we mean by modernity, he is an irrefutable part of it, if not as I sometimes fancy its “onlie begetter.”’ 2. For a full discussion see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, 2017), ch. 3 ‘Buried Fire’. 3. See Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 2007), pp. 3–5. 4. Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought (Malden, MA, 2014), p. 3, n. 1. 5. Unsigned review, ‘Winckelmann’, Westminster Review, NS 31 (1867), 80–110 (82); subsequent quotations are from pp. 91, 81, 91, 106. 6. Unsigned review, ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review, NS 34 (1868), 300–12 (307). 7. The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 8. M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche and Tragedy (Cambridge, 1981), p. 166. For all the similarity of some of their insights, the two writers are poles apart in both style and temperament: Nietzsche thundering, self-confident, given to overstatement, his style aphoristic and vigorous, Pater reticent, introspective, oblique, endlessly qualifying his statements as his thought endlessly circles, his writing allusive and carefully wrought. Modernist preferences are clear, but attentive quietness has its own virtue. 9. Richard Jenkyns, ‘Classical Studies, 1872–1914’, in The History of the University of Oxford, VII. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford, 2000), p. 331. 10. ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), pp. 64–70. 11. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven and London, 2003), p. xxii. 12. Jenkyns, ‘Classical Studies’, pp. 329–30. 13. Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), p. 77. 14. Jenkyns, ‘Classical Studies’, p. 331. 15. Kurt Lampe, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life (Princeton, 2014), p. 10 (ch. 9 on Pater). 16. Letter to Violet Paget, 4 June 1884: Letters, pp. 53–4. 17. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), p. 253. This was in its time a landmark study, and as such should be celebrated, but

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19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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in some ways it is unsympathetic to its subject: Jenkyns shares the Modernist distaste for many aspects of Victorian literature and art, and reserves unqualified admiration for George Eliot alone. These are the Victorians in the tradition of Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry. For the complexities of the reception of Sparta and Laconism see e.g. Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969); Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History and Culture, ed. Stephen Hodkinson and Ian Macgregor Morris (Swansea, 2012). For some useful background about German scholarship see Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford, 2011), ch. 1, ‘Paiderastia and the Contexts of German Historicism’, pp. 52–96. I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, 2 vols (1962–3); for the argument in more detail (with further discussion of Pater) see Charles Martindale, ‘Shakespeare Philosophus’, in Thinking with Shakespeare: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Essays for A. D. Nuttall, ed. William Poole and Richard Scholar (2007), pp. 33–50. See Walter Pater: A Life Remembered, ed. R. M. Seiler (Calgary, 1987), p. 34. The passage, unsurprisingly, is a favourite with deconstructionists. For some thoughtful ruminations see ‘Conclusion: Rereading, Revising, and Reshuffling’, in William F. Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 109–24. This follows the formulations of the ‘Conclusion’, Ren., 188–9. See ‘Coleridge’: ‘To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions’ (App., 66). Pater would later learn to avoid such dogmatic formulations when attacking dogmatism! Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago, 1999), p. 1; cf. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, The Sacred Wood, p. 45. Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris’, p. 307. Matthew Arnold, ‘Marcus Aurelius’ (1863), in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, III. Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 133–57. Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, 2011), p. 221. Stefano Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders et al. (Oxford, 2012), pp. 305–26 (313). Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage’, p. 314. Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage’, p. 314. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity, p. 221. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of ’; ‘they are married and given in marriage’ (ME, i. 204, ch. 10).

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34. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, ‘Queering History’, PMLA 120: 5 (2005), 1608–17; the quotations are from pp. 1610 and 1616. See also Sebastian Matzner, ‘Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Intervention of the Unruly Past’, in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, ed. Shane Butler (2016), pp. 179–201. 35. See Butler, Deep Classics, p. 36; the subsequent quotations are from pp. 39 and 43. 36. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1961), p. 302. 37. See e.g. John Talbot, ‘ “The Principle of the Daguerreotype”: Translation from the Classics’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford, 2015), pp. 57–78. 38. Donoghue, Walter Pater, pp. 296–8. 39. George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912), pp. 420–6 (quotations from pp. 420, 424). 40. My thanks for advice and comments to David Hopkins, Fiachra Mac Góráin, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and the audience at the Cambridge Philological Society to which I gave a version of this Introduction.

PART 1

Classics and Classicism

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/1/2017, SPi

Introduction to Part 1 This opening part analyses Pater’s professional and intellectual involvement in classical studies. We start with an essay by Isobel Hurst on Pater as a professional classicist, which places him within the scholarly world of the later Victorian period. (Daniel Orrells in Part 4 will further explore the forms and genres Pater employs to portray the classical past.) Pater incorporated passages of translation from ancient Greek and Roman literature throughout his works, and used his commitment to prose to achieve translations that are at once artistic and accurate; Bénédicte Coste in her chapter explores this neglected aspect of Pater’s writings and its significance for his overall conception of composition and criticism. Pater himself does not use the term ‘Classics’, but carefully distinguishes a transhistorical ‘classicism’ or ‘classical tradition’ from the works produced in antiquity (‘ancient’, ‘antique’). Nonetheless classicism and the ancient world are linked in his writings in various ways, and two chapters exploring those links conclude this part. The first, co-authored by Stefano Evangelista and Katherine Harloe, looks at his debts to, and departures from, eighteenth-century classicism, in relation in particular to Winckelmann and Goethe. In the second Whitney Davis, likewise with an emphasis on Winckelmann, investigates Pater’s complex conceptualization of the temporality of classicism (a matter also pursued in James I. Porter’s chapter in Part 2).

1 Pater as Professional Classicist Isobel Hurst

The expansion of classical studies in the late nineteenth century opened up increasingly diverse perspectives on antiquity, establishing the study of art history, archaeology, and anthropology as alternatives to traditional philology. Christopher Stray describes the development of Classics in English schools and universities ‘from classical dominance to a pluralized field of specialisms’, taking place at the same time as a transition from ‘an earlier world of gentlemanly amateur scholars to that of professional researchers’.1 Working both within the academy and in the London literary world, Pater made a significant contribution to changes in the discipline by supplementing literary, historical, and philosophical texts with lectures on art and archaeology, and by introducing students of the ancient world to the mythic and ritual contexts of their set books. Pater entered the Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1858 with an exhibition from King’s School, Canterbury. His tutor was W. W. Capes of Queen’s College, and he made friends with Ingram Bywater (later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford). After 1850, an Oxford Classics degree was in two parts: in addition to the existing preliminary examination, Responsions (usually taken in the second term), a new examination, Moderations (‘Mods’), marked the transition from a focus on language and literature in the first five terms, to ancient history and philosophy (particularly Plato and Aristotle) for the rest of the course (‘Greats’).2 In Responsions, candidates had to show knowledge of one Latin and one Greek author, ‘the chief object being to ascertain that the principles of these languages

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are well understood’, and to undertake a translation from English into Latin and a paper of grammatical questions as well as several mathematics papers. For Mods the minimum requirements were the four Gospels in Greek (a relic of Oxford’s role in preparing candidates for the Anglican ministry), one Greek and one Latin author (one poet and one orator), and translation, grammar, and mathematics as for Responsions. Candidates for Honours were recommended to study Homer, Virgil, Demosthenes, and Cicero; the highest honours required a Logic examination and offered opportunities for demonstrating skill in both verse composition and ‘elegant and accurate’ translation into Latin and Greek.3 Options to be studied for Responsions were: five books of Homer, any two plays by Greek dramatists, two or three books of Herodotus, two books of Thucydides, four books of Xenophon’s Anabasis; a portion of one Latin author such as Virgil’s Georgics, or the Eclogues plus three books of the Aeneid, or five books of the Aeneid, or portions of Terence, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, or Horace.4 For Mods, the required portion of Homer was six books, the number of plays three, and the other Greek options Pindar and Demosthenes. The Latin authors were Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal. Candidates for Honours were required to offer larger portions of each author—twelve books of Homer and six tragedies—and might offer a wider range of authors including Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Tacitus.5 For Greats the classical requirements for ‘passmen’ included studying one philosopher and one historian (Greek or Latin) and translating passages from the set texts into English. Honours candidates faced much more demanding requirements: ‘the Greek and Latin Languages, Greek and Roman History, Chronology, Geography, Antiquities; Rhetoric and Poetics; Moral and Political Philosophy. These subjects may be illustrated by Modern Authors.’ Translation, questions, and composition in Greek and Latin were compulsory. Logic (mainly Aristotle) was required for first- or second-class degrees, and had ‘great weight in the distribution of Honours’.6 Pater’s interests seem to have centred on philosophy and logic: Edmund Gosse observes that as an undergraduate Pater did not demonstrate a ‘partiality for pure literature or plastic art’ but was ‘fascinated mainly by the study of logic and metaphysic, which were his pastimes, while the laborious business of classical scholarship occupied all but his leisure moments’.7 Frank Turner notes that Pater ‘read deeply in English empiricist philosophy and psychology as well as Hegelian literature’ in

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the 1860s, and was ‘thoroughly receptive to the spirit of relativism in philosophy and religion’.8 He had a good knowledge of German, and read contemporary German philosophers. An essay Pater had written for Benjamin Jowett, then Regius Professor of Greek, impressed Jowett so much that he offered to coach him without payment.9 Jowett’s style of coaching, in which a close relationship between tutor and students was designed to improve academic standards, was crucial to the development of Oxford’s tutorial system. Jowett also maintained connections between the university and the wider world, with weekend parties that brought Oxford together with ‘poets and Prime Ministers’.10 Pater valued Jowett’s teaching and his ‘great originality as a writer and thinker’: Like many others I received much kindness and help from him when I was reading for my degree (1860 to 1862) and afterwards. A large number of hours in every week of Term-time must have been spent in the private teaching of undergraduates, not of his own College, over and above his lectures, which of course were open to all. They found him a very encouraging but really critical judge of their work—essays, and the like,—listening from 7.30–10.30 to a pupil, or a pair of pupils, for half an hour in turn. Of course many availed themselves of the, I believe, unprecedented offer to receive exercises in Greek or English in this way, and on the part of one whose fame among the youth, though he was then something of a recluse, was already established.11

Pater’s wide reading and innovative approach to the classics exceeded the narrow confines of the University’s requirements: ‘It is not, it never has been, the imaginative men—the men of genius—who take the highest honours at a University’, claims Thomas Wright.12 Pater’s achievement of a second in Literae Humaniores in 1862 does not suggest a deficiency in his knowledge of Latin and Greek language and literature, but rather that his scholarly interests did not align well with the Greats curriculum of his time. Helen Law concludes that Pater was ‘thoroughly at home in Greek literature’, and able to make effective and artistic use of his accurate translations from Greek texts.13 Henry Nettleship, awarded a second in 1861, went on to become Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford. The poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman, later Professor of Latin at University College London and Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge, failed the honours examinations for Greats in 1881. Housman excelled in the literature and language papers set for Mods, and devoted himself to the study of Propertius rather than the ancient

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history and philosophy of the Greats curriculum.14 A. C. Benson suggests that Pater was ‘no scholar, in the technical sense of the word’ but ‘answered rather to Lord Macaulay’s definition of a scholar, one who read Plato with his feet on the fender. He . . . was on the look-out for quality rather than definite facts’.15 The ‘technical’ understanding of classical philology to which Benson alludes was perhaps more associated with Cambridge than with Oxford in this period. For philologists, the justification for placing Latin and Greek at the centre of the curriculum was that students would sharpen their intellects by solving the linguistic equivalent of problems in mathematics: Stray notes that the Cambridge model of close analysis of texts was influenced by the ‘relationship between classics and mathematics’ in the curriculum.16 Nettleship commented that the Oxford degree was not well adapted to modern classical scholarship: he spent four months in 1865 at a German university, and found that while he knew how ‘to read the classics, to translate them on paper, to think and talk about them, to write essays on them’, he had learned ‘next to nothing’ of ‘the higher philology, of the principles and methods of textual criticism’.17 Pater became a private tutor, before being elected to the first non-clerical fellowship in Classics at Brasenose College in 1864. Gosse describes Pater’s life as a college lecturer as ‘quiet, cloistered, and laborious’.18 While some critics have argued that Pater did not take his academic career seriously, William Shuter observes that ‘the evidence indicates that Pater conscientiously performed the functions of a don, preparing young men for Moderations and the Final School in Greats, delivering college or catechetical lectures as well as university lectures and meeting with undergraduates in tutorials to review their essays’.19 Lesley Higgins lists some of the essay themes that Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote for his tutorials with Pater, mostly concerned with Plato or with ethical questions.20 Pater took pains with the essays submitted to him; most tutors listened while students read essays aloud and made criticisms ‘as they arise in the mind, without previous preparation’, but Pater ‘had the essays shown up to him, [and] scrutinised them carefully, even pencilling comments upon the page; and then, in an interview, he gave careful verdicts as to style and arrangement, and made many effective and practical suggestions’.21 Wright suggests that Pater’s focus on prose style and biographical writing could be attributed to Jowett’s influence.22

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Pater’s approach to scholarship could prove disconcerting for those students who merely wanted to pass their examinations. Humphry Ward notes that the Brasenose undergraduates reading Greats in 1867 expected their lectures to consist of ‘the old formulae about Thales and some references to Aristotle that we could take down in our books and use for the Schools’. Instead Pater gave ‘a quickly delivered discourse, rather Comtian, on the Dogmatic and Historical methods: quite new to me, and worse than new to some others’.23 Shuter acknowledges that Pater’s published lectures lack ‘the systematic rigor that would recommend [them] to undergraduates preparing for Greats’, although he does treat ‘many of the subjects on which candidates were asked to write’.24 Pater’s reading of ancient philosophy in relation to modern literature and philosophy is consistent with the comparative approach encouraged in students of Greats. Shuter notes that the ‘remarkably ambitious school of Literae Humaniores’ was ‘designed not only to introduce young men to certain designated works of philosophy and history by the principal Greek and Roman authors but to train them to think critically about philosophic and ethical questions and to relate historically earlier to historically later stages of thought’. He demonstrates that Pater’s ‘published writings reflect, or have their origin in, the intellectual culture of which Greats was the centerpiece and the formal embodiment’.25 The feature of Greats that made the course such a useful training for cultural critics such as Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde was that they were encouraged to compare and contrast texts, philosophical arguments, and historical examples from ancient Greece and Rome with ‘modern historical scholarship and to contemporary institutions and problems’, to notice ‘parallels between the ancient and modern worlds and to examine their validity’.26 A system of ‘combined or university lectures’, open to undergraduates from all colleges, developed in the 1870s. This new system ‘altered the style of tutorial teaching, freeing the tutor from the reading of an examination text and permitting him to organize his lectures by a historical period or subject in which he had a special interest’.27 Pater offered thirty-eight lecture courses in twenty years, mostly on Plato, Aristotle, and other Greats texts. He also lectured on Greek art, and was one of the first Oxford academics to address the recent findings of archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann (Mycenae) and Charles Newton (Cnidus).28 His ‘coupling of ancient literature, archaeology, myth and cultural

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history was highly modern’, and perhaps, Lene Østermark-Johansen suggests, a ‘provocation’ to Jowett. Nevertheless, his understanding of Greek sculpture was also ‘highly literary’, based on readings of Homer and Pausanias (for a rather different view see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Chapter 12 in this volume).29 Pater’s book Plato and Platonism (1893) began as a series of ten lectures for Oxford undergraduates studying Plato’s Republic in 1891–2. Higgins compares Pater’s and Jowett’s versions of Plato as examples of ‘an intense intellectual and ideological struggle for control over the Platonic canon’.30 Plato was prominent in the Greats syllabus, and Jowett insisted that texts such as the Republic would equip his students to take their part in public life, as ‘Platonic guardians for Britain and its empire’.31 Stefano Evangelista argues that Pater’s lectures have an ambivalent relationship with Jowett’s version of Plato, and that Pater’s impressionistic psychological reading of Plato undermined Jowett’s emphasis on morality and ‘linguistic and historical precision’. He also presented a more ‘personal challenge’ by making reference to ‘Plato’s frank discussions of homosexual desire, in which it is impossible not to read a pointer to Pater’s own past dealings with Jowett’s authority’.32 Pater’s challenge to established interpretations of Plato is not just a dispute within the academy; in an introductory note to Plato and Platonism, he suggested that the lectures had been written for an undergraduate audience but were intended for all young students of philosophy. Even before the revised lectures appeared in volume form, some of the material was published in a monthly periodical, the Contemporary Review. In 1891 Pater wrote to the editor, Percy William Bunting, about the essay ‘The Genius of Plato’, saying that ‘I have treated the subject in as popular a manner as I could’.33 Pater surveys the history of Greek philosophy to give the uninitiated reader a context for Plato’s ideas, and focuses on the form of the dialogue as a new mode of philosophical expression, comparable with more recent forms such as the essays of Montaigne. Lewis Campbell praised Pater’s approach, arguing that his ‘strong and earnest effort’ to ‘understand and realize Plato’ by means of the ‘historic method’ was enhanced by ‘the wealth of illustration readily afforded by his own full and fertile mind. . . . Not one century alone is present here. Much rather, all the centuries, the bloom of every civilization, flowers culled from every soil, are intertwined to form the delicately broidered framework.’34

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‘Pater’s Hellenic aestheticism was highly influential in the late Victorian period and his writing certainly enjoyed a wide appeal’, writes T. D. Olverson.35 His published lectures were ‘popular’ and ‘very well received by critics’.36 His imaginative approach to ancient texts is exemplified in the essays on Demeter, Dionysus, and Hippolytus that he published in the Fortnightly Review and Macmillan’s Magazine (posthumously collected as Greek Studies). Wright describes Pater’s essay ‘The Bacchanals’ as ‘a kind of paraphrase of Euripides’ play, with which Pater takes very much the liberty that FitzGerald did with the poems of Omar Khayyám and Jami. Those scenes in old Thessaly are brought before us with extraordinary vividness’.37 The reference to Edward FitzGerald, who also translated the Agamemnon in a ‘Version—or Per-version’ to be ‘given away among Friends, who either knew nothing of the Original, or would be disposed to excuse the liberties taken with it’, situates Pater in the context of playful and creative translation and adaptation in Victorian literature (see further Bénédicte Coste, Chapter 2 in this volume).38 Pater’s desire to make Greek literature and philosophy available to readers outside the universities may have been stimulated by his particular social and intellectual environment. From 1869 until 1885, in term time he lived in North Oxford with his sisters Clara and Hester (they spent the vacations in London), surrounded by academic households in which the campaign for the higher education of women gathered pace. Janet Howarth observes that there was support for the higher education of women among ‘members of the university community’. After the statute that allowed dons to marry, the most prominent male supporters of lectures and then colleges for women were ‘husbands and fathers of women who shared their interest in providing higher education for teachers and access to the world of learning for women with an aptitude for scholarship’.39 The Paters belonged to a privileged society with a ‘feminine counter-culture’ in which ‘the exceptional woman intellectual received encouragement’.40 Many of the founders of the women’s colleges that gradually gained acceptance and ultimately membership at Oxford and Cambridge were the sisters or wives of university men. Kali Israel comments that ‘a high proportion of the names by which they survive are those of the men to whom they owed their own access to Oxford: Mrs. Arthur Johnson, Mrs. T. H. Green, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mrs. Mandell Creighton, and, of course, Mrs. Mark Pattison’.41 Walter

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Pater was friends with Mary Ward and Emilia Pattison (later Lady Dilke), and wrote a letter of introduction for the American poet Louise Guiney so that she could gain access to the Bodleian library.42 Clara Pater was involved with the Committee of Oxford Lectures for Ladies and later with the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Oxford (1878).43 These organizations offered lectures and classes for women from 1873, including Latin and Greek texts and prose composition as well as ancient history. Clara Pater attended Nettleship’s Latin class for women in 1874–5 with Matthew Arnold’s niece Mary Ward (later famous as the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward) and Louise Creighton. That Walter and Clara Pater were both tutors in Classics at Oxford colleges was remarkable in an era when, as Valerie Sanders points out, the ‘theme of sisters prevented from studying with their brothers reverberates through nineteenth-century literature, with Latin the favourite symbol of male intellectual exclusiveness’.44 Somerville Hall (later Somerville College) opened in 1879 with twelve students. Clara Pater taught Greek, Latin, and German at Somerville, and was resident tutor in Classics from 1885 to 1894 (she resigned her tutorship shortly before her brother’s death in 1894 and settled in London). As a college with resident tutors, Somerville acted as ‘an extension of the tutorial system’ for women students.45 For women’s colleges, the greatest challenge was to provide intensive coaching so that students without ten years or more of learning grammar and syntax, or memorizing and translating set texts, could sit the same examinations as their brothers. Specialist tuition was also offered by dons from the men’s colleges such as Nettleship (Horace) and Arthur Sidgwick (Demosthenes, Sophocles).46 L. M. Faithfull (later Vice-Principal of the Ladies’ Department at King’s College London) studied Latin with Nettleship. During this time, Somerville students achieved notable triumphs in classical studies: in 1888 Elizabeth Hodge’s first in Mods, the preliminary classical examination, led to women being admitted to the Honour School of Literae Humaniores, in which she obtained a second in 1890.47 Emily Penrose (later Principal of the College) was the first woman to achieve a first in Greats in 1892, although, as women were not yet full members of the University, she had to wait until 1920 to receive her degree. Penrose, who was the daughter of the archaeologist and Director of the British School at Athens Francis Cranmer Penrose, chose to study archaeology as a Special

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Subject for Greats. From 1898 to 1900, Clara Pater taught at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London, where she was lecturer in Greek and Latin.48 Her most celebrated student was Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), with whom she read ‘a considerable amount of Greek’, including Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, and half of the Trachiniae.49 Rather than attempting to compensate for their lack of experience in traditional pursuits such as prose and verse composition, women students often adopted new approaches based on emerging disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, and comparative religion. Pater was an influential precursor for Jane Ellen Harrison, another scholar who combined college life (as tutor in Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge) with a place in the London literary world. In ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, Yopie Prins contends that Pater’s ‘aestheticized and eroticized vision of ancient Greece’ influenced the first generation of women who learned Greek at Cambridge, including Harrison and Katharine Bradley (who was later one of the poetic duo ‘Michael Field’), as examples of the ‘many women influenced by Pater in late Victorian England’.50 Reforms at Cambridge in the late nineteenth century reflected the broadening of professional knowledge in classical studies by adding new options such as philosophy, history, archaeology, and comparative philology. Shanyn Fiske observes that Harrison took advantage of new opportunities to integrate ‘archaeological, ethnological and sociological theories into Hellenic studies’ despite any ‘deficiencies in literary-linguistic knowledge’. Harrison’s controversial theories about Greek art, religion, and myth left behind the textual tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for a combination of scientific knowledge and imaginative insight.51 Harrison’s Introductory Studies in Greek Art (1885) and her commentary on Pausanias in Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890) develop themes notably similar to Pater’s Oxford lectures. She shared Pater’s fascination with myth, religious ritual, and the chthonic deities, and pursued these interests as one of the prominent group of ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ in the early years of the twentieth century. Matthew Arnold, in his lecture ‘Literature and Science’ (1882), spoke of valuing the ‘life and genius’ of the Greeks and Romans, and ‘what we get from them’, instead of concentrating on ‘so much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors, in the Greek and Latin languages’.52 Although Turner states that Victorian professional classical scholars ‘regarded their chief task as the establishment of authentic

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Greek and Latin texts, with the writing of interpretive studies or essays very much a secondary task’, some very influential classicists focused on translating or interpreting classical texts.53 Prominent scholars like Richard Jebb, Benjamin Jowett, and Gilbert Murray were interested in the reception of ancient texts and participated in the dissemination of Greek literature to an audience outside the academy. They published translations and commentaries as well as textual scholarship; these included Jowett’s The Dialogues of Plato translated into English with Analyses and Introductions (1871), his translation of Thucydides (1881), and of Aristotle’s Politics (1885). E. F. Benson claims that Jowett’s lack of pretensions to great scholarship as it was defined in his era was a strength, enabling him to produce ‘readable English versions of exceedingly interesting books, which gave very fairly the sense of the original’. Since Jowett’s own translations were not always accurate, he ensured that they were ‘carefully revised by other scholars’ (including the poet Swinburne, one of his students).54 Jebb translated The Characters of Theophrastus (1870), published a selection of Attic oratory (1876), edited the tragedies of Sophocles with text, critical notes, commentary, and translation (1883–96), and wrote an introduction to Homer (1887). Some classical scholars objected to the effect of such translations and commentaries on students: F. W. H. Myers complained that Greek and Latin had lost some of their ‘educative power’, since ‘Sophocles is gradually depositing his invaluable obscurities as he filters through the brain of Professor Jebb’.55 In The Place of Greek in Education (1889), Gilbert Murray advocated the use of classical texts in translation, since the dissemination of ‘Hellenism’ does not depend on linguistic knowledge: ‘It is quite possible for a man who cannot read a single page of Plato intelligently to acquire a tolerable proportion of the Greek spirit.’56 Murray’s verse translations of Greek plays from Euripides’ Andromache (1900) to Aristophanes’ The Knights (1956) were accompanied by comparative studies of Greek and English literature such as The Classical Tradition in Literature (1927). Pater’s essays on Greek literature, art, and religion contributed to the expansion of classical scholarship into new areas and communicated with a readership beyond the reach even of Jowett’s and Jebb’s works of translation and commentary. In his response to John Churton Collins’s proposal to establish a School of English Literature at Oxford, Pater praised Oxford’s ‘abundant and disinterested devotion, in the

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face of much opposition, to Greek and Latin literature’, arguing that the University’s ‘immense’ influence on English literature was intrinsically linked with the study of antiquity.57 He would not advocate the introduction of a School of English if it would ‘throw into the background that study of classical literature which has proved so effective for the maintenance of what is excellent in our own’, but proposed that classicists should expand and enliven their own discipline by studying the close connections between classical and modern culture, a comparative approach for which his own role in the development of Greats provided a model.

Notes 1. Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 12, 117. 2. Richard Jenkyns, ‘The Beginnings of Greats, 1800–1872: Classical Studies’, in The History of the University of Oxford, VI. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford, 1997), pp. 513–14. See also W. H. Walsh, ‘The Zenith of Greats’ (pp. 311–26), and Richard Jenkyns, ‘Classical Studies, 1872–1914’ (pp. 327–31), in The History of the University of Oxford, VII. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford, 2000). 3. University of Oxford, New Examination Statutes: Abstracts of their Principal Provisions with a Catalogue of Books, Either Expressly Mentioned, or Treating of the Subjects Required (Oxford, 1851), pp. 2–3. 4. New Examination Statutes, p. 7. 5. New Examination Statutes, p. 9. 6. New Examination Statutes, p. 4. 7. Edmund Gosse, ‘Walter Pater: A Portrait’, Contemporary Review, 66 (1894), 795–810 (799). 8. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), p. 406. 9. Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, p. 799. 10. E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show (1930), p. 148. 11. Letter to [Jowett’s biographer] Lewis Campbell, 6 May 1894: Letters, p. 154. 12. Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater (1907), I, p. 197. 13. Helen H. Law, ‘Pater’s Use of Greek Quotations’, MLN, 58: 8 (1943), 575–85 (585). 14. Housman’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge (1911) contrasted Cambridge’s ‘scholarship with no nonsense about it’ with Oxford’s misguided inclusion of

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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literary appreciation in classical studies: A. E. Housman, The Confines of Criticism: The Cambridge Inaugural 1911, ed. J. Carter (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 25–6. See also Stray, Classics Transformed, pp. 121–4, and A. E. Housman: Classical Scholar, ed. David Butterfield and Christopher Stray (2009). Housman’s supremacy in the traditional field of textual criticism might be considered a limitation when contrasted with the opportunities opening up in classical studies at the time: see J. P. Sullivan, ‘The Leading Classic of His Generation’, in A. E. Housman: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Christopher Ricks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968), pp. 146–62. A. C. Benson, Walter Pater (1906), pp. 22–3. Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 122. Henry Nettleship, Lectures and Essays on Subjects Connected with Latin Literature and Scholarship (Oxford, 1885), pp. 1–2. See also S. J. Harrison, ‘Henry Nettleship and the Beginning of Modern Latin Studies’, in Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, 1800–2000, ed. Christopher Stray (2007), pp. 107–16. Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, p. 804. William Shuter, ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of “Greats”’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 46: 3 (2003), 250–78 (250–1). Lesley Higgins, ‘Essaying “W. H. Pater Esq.”: New Perspectives on the Tutor / Student Relationship Between Pater and Hopkins’, in Pater in the 1990s, ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small (1991), p. 81. The essays appear in The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, IV. Oxford Essays and Notes 1863–1868, ed. Lesley Higgins (Oxford, 2006), pp. 218–34. This volume includes ‘Notes on Hopkins’s Tutors’, pp. 50–65. Benson, Walter Pater, pp. 24–5. Wright, Life, I, p. 197. Benson, Walter Pater, p. 20. Shuter, ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas’, p. 252. Shuter, ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas’, pp. 250–1. For example, books 1, 5, and 6 of Pausanias were set texts for a Greek History ‘Special Subject’, and in 1878 Pater gave lectures on those books in a series on the history of Greek art; the lectures ‘evidently formed the basis of the two essays that Pater published in the Fortnightly Review in 1880’. Pater also drew on Pausanias for an account of the Eleusinian mysteries, which informed his lecture on ‘Demeter and Persephone’, given at the Birmingham and Midland Institute on 29 November 1875 and later published in the Fortnightly Review. Shuter, ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas’, pp. 254–5. Iain Ross notes that one of Oscar Wilde’s Mods examinations included a discussion of the Odyssey, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Aristotle’s Poetics (Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2012), p. 37). Ross reproduces the Literae Humaniores syllabus for 1874 in appendix B (pp. 197–9).

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27. William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), p. 80. 28. Shuter, ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas’, p. 251. 29. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), p. 218. 30. Lesley Higgins, ‘Jowett and Pater: Trafficking in Platonic Wares’, Victorian Studies, 37 (1993), 44–5. Edmund Gosse claims that Jowett was impressed by Pater’s book: his ‘cordially’ congratulatory response to Plato and Platonism ended the ‘complete estrangement of sympathy’ that had followed Pater’s involvement with the Balliol undergraduate W. M. Hardinge, and led Jowett to block Pater’s advancement within the University: Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, p. 799. 31. Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 122. 32. Stefano Evangelista, ‘Walter Pater’s Teaching in Oxford: Classics and Aestheticism’, in Stray, Oxford Classics, pp. 72–4. 33. Letters, p. 124. The essay was printed in the Contemporary Review, 61 (February 1892), 249–61, and later revised and published as chapter 6 of Plato and Platonism. 34. Lewis Campbell, ‘Pater’s Plato and Platonism’, Classical Review, 7 (1893), 263–6, repr. in Critical Heritage, pp. 270–7 (270–1). 35. T. D. Olverson, Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 131. 36. Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 235. 37. Wright, Life, II, pp. 1–3. 38. Edward FitzGerald, Agamemnon: A Tragedy, Taken from Aeschylus (privately printed 1865; published anonymously 1876). 39. Janet Howarth, ‘Women’, in The History of the University of Oxford, VIII. The Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Harrison (Oxford, 1994), pp. 346–7. 40. Janet Howarth, ‘“In Oxford but . . . Not of Oxford”: The Women’s Colleges’, in Brock and Curthoys, History of the University of Oxford, VII, pp. 238–42. 41. Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York, 1999), pp. 94–5. 42. Letters, p. 111. 43. Laurel Brake, ‘Pater, Clara Ann (bap. 1841, d. 1910)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (http://www.oxforddnb. com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/view/article/48505, accessed 31 July 2015). 44. Valerie Sanders, The Brother–Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 19. 45. Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (1960), pp. 88–9. 46. Muriel St Clare Byrne and Catherine Hope Mansfield, Somerville College, 1879–1921 (1922), p. 60.

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47. Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College, 1879–1993 (Oxford, 1996), p. 39. 48. See Anna Snaith and Christine Kenyon-Jones, ‘Tilting at Universities: Virginia Woolf at King’s College London’, Woolf Studies Annual, 16 (2010), 1–44. 49. Henry Malley, ‘A Rediscovered Eulogy: Virginia Woolf ’s “Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher”’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 28:3 (1982), 290–301 (290). Clara Pater is said to have provided the inspiration for tutors in Woolf ’s fiction—Lucy Craddock, Kitty Malone’s tutor in The Years (1937) and Julia Craye (sister to a famous archaeologist) in ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ (1928). 50. Yopie Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, 1999), pp. 43–81 (44–6). 51. Shanyn Fiske, Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Athens, OH, 2008), pp. 150–1. 52. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, X. Philistinism in England and America, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI, 1974), pp. 57–8. 53. Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993), p. 286. 54. Benson, As We Were, p. 150. 55. ‘English at the Universities.—IV’, Pall Mall Gazette (27 November 1886), 2. 56. Gilbert Murray, The Place of Greek in Education, An Inaugural Lecture (Glasgow, 1889), quoted in Duncan Wilson, Gilbert Murray, OM, 1866–1957 (Oxford, 1987), p. 44. It was in 1894, while Murray was Professor of Greek, that Pater was awarded an honorary doctorate (LLD) by the University of Glasgow. 57. In 1886–7 the Pall Mall Gazette asked a number of intellectuals (including T. H. Huxley, J. A. Froude, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, F. W. H. Myers, and Pater) to comment on whether it was desirable for universities to provide systematic instruction in English literature, whether any distinction should be made between instruction in literature and in philology, and whether the study of English should be ‘indissolubly associated with the study of ancient Classical literature’; see The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, XI. The Last Word, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI, 1977), pp. 500–1. Pater’s article is reprinted in Letters, pp. 68–9. For a full account of the episode, its context, and wider significance, see D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from Its Origin to the Making of the Oxford English School (1965), ch. 6, ‘John Churton Collins and the Attack on Oxford’, pp. 78–103.

2 Pater the Translator Bénédicte Coste

Walter Pater is rarely considered as a translator, partly because he never wrote an essay specifically on translation. However, he never forgot that he was primarily a cultural mediator of the Greek and Latin classics and, as such, a translator addressing different audiences with various levels of proficiency.1 Taking its cue from Helen Law’s praise of the artistry of Pater’s translations and in keeping with recent studies of Victorian debates on translating the Classics, this chapter explores the different means Pater used to cite, translate, and rephrase classical texts in his works, particularly in ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ (1876), the first of a series of essays on Greek mythology.2 The publication of those essays in leading periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review and the Contemporary Review confronted Pater with a readership whose proficiency in Greek was uncertain—a circumstance that had an undeniable influence upon content, translation strategies, and material presentation. Pater inserted classical quotations into the dense and complex texture of his prose, sometimes explicitly, sometimes covertly. It follows that Greek literature and its traces become a series of fragments carefully brought to light by an archaeologist in order to be observed, appreciated in their cultural otherness, and inserted within a seamless and inlaid textuality. Such use of classical material is related to Pater’s own views on translation, which also appear in fragmentary form in his essays on literature and art. Translations are mentioned in all chapters of The Renaissance (1873), and the topic of translation resurfaces in ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ (1883) and ‘Style’ (1888), to reach a climax in his introduction to his friend Charles Shadwell’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (1892). Pater

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progressively elaborated both a portrait of the ideal translator and a coherent and comprehensive theory of translation, closely linked to his own translations as well as his assessment of those of others. Pater’s theory of translation is indebted to the debate between Francis Newman and Matthew Arnold on the best way to translate the Classics for a modern readership, which took place between the late 1850s and early 1860s. Newman argued that an archaizing style fitted ‘the unlearned English reader’, including the ‘men of business’ and the readers of Dickens and Thackeray he targetted.3 His deliberately archaizing translation of the Iliad (1856) sparked a controversy, Arnold contending that a translation from Homer should have poetic merit and be written in the ‘grand style’, in order to ‘reproduce on the intelligent scholar as nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer’.4 Such a grand style was epitomized by the King James Version of the Bible.5 What was at stake was the democratization of classical texts for an ever-expanding readership, as well as the cultural legitimacy to convey such material.6 It is precisely within the intellectual space opened by these competing demands that Pater chose to lecture on Demeter and Persephone at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1875 and subsequently to publish his lecture in the periodical press. Notoriously punctilious about all aspects of text production, Pater rejected what Lawrence Venuti describes as Newman’s ‘artificially constructed archaism’,7 as well as nineteenth-century practices of standardization and domestication of foreign languages, focusing instead on the material presentation and visual impact of the printed word. In his writings on classical material, Pater gathered fragments of antiquity into coherent and harmonious yet variegated texts. The past became a collection of fragments, ‘a sort of petrified language’, as he writes in ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ (GS, 189), which could be unearthed, as was the ‘flask of lively green glass, like a great emerald’ found in ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (IP, 56). In performing such acts of recovery, Pater became the ventriloquist of irremediably disappeared times. Such a strategy of effacement may be partially understood in terms of Venuti’s theory of the invisibility of the translator, but it also embodies Pater’s contention that the legacy of antiquity could neither be fully ‘obliterat[ed]’ nor totally recovered or revived by poets since individual and collective histories are made up of superimposed layers of memories (‘AP’, 223–4). Pater, however, believed that it was possible ‘to isolate [a single phase of that humanity], to throw it into relief, to be divided

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against ourselves in zeal for it; as we may hark back to some choice space of our own individual life’ (‘AP’, 224). Recovering the past was based on the ability to experience one’s inner division; it led to partial and personal recreations, partial and personal translations. In The Renaissance, Pater made several references to translations as necessary to convey cultural and historical otherness, and to elicit historically variable definitions and debates. In parallel, in ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877, later included in The Renaissance) he rejected the idea that ‘poetry, music, and painting [were] but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented’ by different material qualities (Ren., 102). Pater complicated the prevailing view: art could not be assimilated to the purely mental activity that is translation. In 1883 he went on to discuss a poet and translator who insisted on faithfulness to the source text: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. According to Pater, Rossetti had such an intense and precise experience of the external world that he sought to give the ‘exact equivalence to those data within’. Such a rendering of mental representations was enacted through an ability to control words amounting to a ‘gift of transparency in language—the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it’ (App., 206). Significantly, Rossetti displayed such control in ‘a volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult “early Italian poets”’ (App., 206–7). With characteristic sophistication, Pater maintained that translation was a mental process defining the individual as a speaking subject: because he had the gift of accurately or transparently translating his own experience, Rossetti was a gifted translator. On this view, translation is seen as a fundamentally mental operation, a sifting through of one’s experience of the world through the crucible of language that all individuals constantly perform. Accordingly, in ‘Style’, the essay in which he lays out his ars poetica, Pater turns translation into a defining feature of individuality. He cites the historians Livy, Tacitus, and Michelet in order to differentiate between transcription, as an account ‘of mere fact’, and providing one’s ‘sense of [fact]’ (App., 9–10): in translating his own experience of facts, the artist-translator provides the experience of his linguistic relationship to the world materialized as ‘data’. All expression (including the writing

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of history) therefore becomes translation through the ‘elementary particles’ of language that make up one’s mental representations. Consequently, all translators are called upon to remain attentive both to their own activity and to the source text assimilated to a model they must follow strictly: Translators have not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction; whereas, if the original be first-rate, one’s first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as the pencil follows a drawing under tracingpaper, so only each word or syllable be not of false colour (App., 14–15)

A writer deserving to be translated, such as Plato, is attentive to language by carefully choosing his words so as to be as faithful as possible to his mental representations: [he] has winnowed and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would select . . . , and still more of the words he would reject . . . ; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the strictest sense original. (App., 15)

Written expression testifies to, and translates, the relationship to language of one individual, and such relationship already partakes of the translation of mental representations arising from one’s mental activity. The succession of translations within the psychic apparatus is precisely what the translator must translate according to his own relationship to language, so as to achieve ‘what may be called inspired translation’ (App., 34). When Shadwell published his translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, Pater expressed with greater precision what, in his view, a translation should be. After vindicating the interest of Dante for the late nineteenth-century reader and contending that translation addressed an indefinite, ‘general’ readership, he praised Shadwell’s endeavour as ‘a work of rare patience and scholarship’.8 Shadwell had been ‘faithful’ to Dante’s text in the Rossettian sense, producing ‘a version singular in its union of minute and sensitive fidelity almost to the very syllables of the original, with that general sense of composure and breadth of effect which gives to the great medieval poem the air of a “classic”’ (p. xxv). He had respected both Dante’s metre and composition, and had been compelled to

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abandon so-called ‘free’ translation in order to abide by the particular, precise, sensitive, and expressive ‘particles’ of the medieval poet: The translator’s business with Dante, then, may be likened to the copying of a drawing or other design upon transparent tracing-paper. Let the eye be true, the hand steady, the pencil fine, and, making sure of the fidelity of its movement from point to point, the translator, hardly less than his reader, will be surprised at the large and general faithfulness of the reproduction thus assured. (p. xxvi)

The image of the tracing paper reappears with the added demand for faithfulness to the internal ‘movement’ of the text. Flexing his own relationship to language to accommodate Dante’s, Shadwell has respected the poem’s movement of ‘rise and fall’. Drawing on his own sense of composition, he has aimed to give Dante’s work the ring of a ‘classic’, that is, has brought out a transhistorical quality, while still keeping the ‘romantic’ aspects that had constituted its novelty at the time of its composition, according to Pater’s definition of ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ in ‘Romanticism’ (1876).9 Archaizing effects should therefore be avoided for the sake of producing translations that appear to the reader as modern as the original, achieving ‘a poetic effect, wholly unarchaic, and true to what must be called the un-provincial or cosmopolitan air of the Divina Commedia—cosmopolitan, though Dante’s work be nevertheless the peculiar and perfect flower of the Middle Age’ (p. xxvi). Sensitive to ancient modes of thought, Shadwell succeeded in translating Dante’s medieval cosmopolitanism into the modern literary cosmopolitanism of the 1890s. Arnold’s English bibliolatry and Newman’s deliberate archaisms belonged to the past, although Shadwell embraced both Newman’s plea for an enlarged readership and Arnold’s rejection of cultural provincialism. Pater finally suggested a ‘true test’ for assessing a good translation: ‘it should enfold one, so to speak, in its own atmosphere, that one should feel able to breathe in it’ (p. xxvii). A work of art produced its own impalpable atmosphere that the reader was invited to taste. Conveying such an atmosphere by breathing in accordance with a different voice, so to speak, was the translator’s task. From the late 1870s onwards, translation becomes an overarching trope in Pater’s writings, where it is used to define subjectivity and the self ’s necessarily verbal relationship to the world. The writer becomes a translator and mediator of his own ‘sense of fact’ for readers endowed with a similar encoding–decoding capacity. Arguably such a trope and

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such an interest in translation were largely fuelled by Pater’s own activity in translating from the Classics. Pater may have attempted to overcome the scandal that followed the publication of Studies in the History of the Renaissance by dwelling on Greek mythology, as he suggested in conclusion to the periodical version of ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’.10 Literature and poetry obviously stimulated him into exploring material ‘relics’ from antiquity, a crucial term Pater had first used in 1867 to describe Winckelmann’s ‘key to the understanding of the Greek spirit’ (Ren., 175). They also fuelled his creativity, and his scholarly essays read as both recreations and ‘translations’ of antiquity in the sense I have just explored. In ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, Pater discusses the birth and growth of Greek myths, traces their relation to rituals and religion (GS, 120), and points to their many literary and artistic embodiments. He provides translations and quotations from the ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’, and also from Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Callimachus, Theocritus, Ovid, and Claudian. Boldly envisaging sculpture as one possible material translation of the myth, he relies on Pausanias’ and Pliny’s descriptions as well as on Charles Newton’s A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae (1862–3), which describes his exploration of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and other sites in the 1850s, to conclude with a poetic reconstruction of the sanctuary partly devoted to Demeter at Cnidus. The myth of Demeter and Persephone is described as a ‘relic of the earlier inhabitants of Greece’ (GS, 81) that finally achieved pre-eminence in different phases of later Greek culture. Linking ontogenesis and phylogenesis, Pater argues that such phases have their counterpart in individual phases in modern minds. He differentiates ‘three successive phases of [the myth’s] development’: the first, ‘half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase, in which . . . lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the natural world’; the second, ‘conscious, poetical or literary, phase’, when poets ‘fi[x] its outlines, and simplif[y] or develo[p] its situations’; and the third, ‘ethical phase’, in which figures and narrative ‘are realised as abstract symbols . . . of moral or spiritual conditions’ (GS, 91). Accordingly, in the first phase the figure of ‘Demeter and Persephone . . . in a sort of confused union’ stands for growth and decay associated with natural phenomena, conveyed through oral culture; the second phase occurs as poets and artists create representations

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of both goddesses (GS, 92); and finally, in the third phase, both figures are endowed with an ethical purpose, especially through sculpture, which gives ‘visible aesthetic expression to the constituent parts of that ideal’ (GS, 137). Sculpture is a material presentation of types: Demeter is ‘the type of divine grief ’, while ‘Persephone is the goddess of death, yet with a promise of life to come’ (GS, 93). To present such a complex development, Pater translates canonical Greek texts that range from Hesiod to Pausanias. He also quotes directly from the Greek, either within inverted commas, in quotations that are usually inserted within the text, as Law noted, or in implicit translations appearing without any typographical sign but retrievable through textual hints, therefore providing another case in which he plays with his readers’ variable knowledge of Greek literature. These overt and covert quotations underline Pater’s reliance on canonical authors to write about Greece for a readership possibly devoid of classical education, for whom several shortened translations are provided. However, neither quotations nor translations appear at random. Pater begins his reconstruction of the myth with a reference to the ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’, which he defines as its ‘central expression’ and starting ground for later poetic recreations (GS, 82). Noting that the discovery of an incomplete, possibly altered version of the Hymn in 1777 left many questions unsolved (GS, 83), he supposes following George Grote that it was used during the Eleusinian festival (GS, 82).11 The reference to the radical historian testifies to Pater’s engagement with pre-existing academic research, while the extensive though abbreviated translation of the Hymn (GS, 83–91), which he calls the myth’s ‘central monument’ (GS, 114), asserts Pater’s authority as a translator.12 Different texts elicit different practices: Pater translates excerpts from Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter and Theocritus’ idyll, the ‘Shepherds’ Journey’, before providing a summary of both texts (GS, 125). He translates carefully chosen excerpts from both Ovid’s Fasti—‘a kind of Roman Calendar—for the seventh of April, the day of the games of Ceres’ (GS, 133)—and Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine—‘a work in colour, and excelling in a kind of painting in words, which brings its subject very pleasantly almost to the eye of the reader’ (GS, 130–1). All his translations follow the original text without being awkward, and are devoid of archaisms. The Homeric Hymn also functions as a motif, reappearing through shorter excerpts (GS, 116–17), and therefore contributing to the

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unity of an essay relying on so many texts in translation that it almost reads as a cento. The texture of Pater’s prose is inlaid with foreign texts that are not only translated but also sometimes quoted in Greek, Pater carefully choosing his morsels. While simple quotation in Greek or Latin appears in footnotes (GS, 95, 147), quotation and translation are used to explain descriptions: ‘the solemn goddesses,—θεαὶ σεμναί, the word expressing religious awe, the Greek sense of the divine presence’ (GS, 118).13 Contrasting Greek and English expressions to refer to the same object or phenomenon allows Pater to gloss words, most especially in discussing Homeric epithets: ‘the queen of the dead—ἐπαινὴ Περσεφόνη—dreadful Persephone, the goddess of destruction and death, according to the apparent import of her name’ (GS, 94). Hovering between a strategy of domestication and foreignization, Pater first gives his version, then the Greek expression, which he translates word for word, before pointing to a philological explanation. He frequently provides equivalents rather than stricto sensu translations:14 ‘the things they carried in their hands, εἰνόδια σύμβολα’ (GS, 108); ‘the writer [of the Homeric Hymn] sets Persephone before us, herself like one of them—καλυκῶπις—like the budding calyx of a flower’ (GS, 117). Discreetly drawing the reader’s attention to the process of translation, those equivalents appear as an early embodiment of Pater’s views of the 1880s. Conspicuous on the printed page, quotations usually appear as a tear, a form of éclat d’étrangeté, in Pater’s elaborately seamless textuality. The wealth of phrases and lines in Greek carefully positioned in his text produces an unmistakable visual effect of foreignness, whether an expression is given in Greek before being translated, for example ‘χάρις—a certain gracious air—about [Demeter]’ (GS, 118), or whether translation appears first, followed by a Greek quotation, as with ‘“the gods with Demeter”—οἱ θεοὶ παρὰ Δαμάτρι—Aidoneus, and the mystical or Chthonian Dionysus’ (GS, 141). Indeed critics such as William Shuter and Jean-Baptiste Picy have noted that Pater’s writing is inlaid with fragments of other texts, other words, and other alphabets.15 Most of his published works present a mosaic of typographical devices: inverted commas, italics, footnotes, or the double dash enclosing and foregrounding Greek words, testifying to his interest in the visual appearance of the printed page. In all of them the Greek alphabet is used. Italics are commonly used either to emphasize a word or expression, or to mark the foreign words Pater uses liberally, as John Morley

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remarked in 1873.16 Some sentences make use of both functions: ‘Symbolism intense as this, is the creation of a special temper, in which a certain simplicity, taking all things literally, au pied de la lettre, is united to a vivid pre-occupation with the aesthetic beauty of the image itself, the figured side of figurative expression, the form of the metaphor’ (GS, 99). Pater uses italics to stress the status of the goddesses for the Greeks: ‘preeminently the venerable, or aweful, goddesses’ (GS, 104). Sometimes italics point to his own translation: ‘The flowery town of Pyrasus—the wheat-town,—an ancient place in Thessaly, is [Demeter’s] sacred precinct’ (GS, 93).17 The italics of the biblical ‘Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust!’ (Isaiah 26:19) stand both as a firm contrast and an appropriate conclusion to Pater’s celebration of the pagan ‘death, resurrection, rejuvenescence’ of Persephone (GS, 95). Also printed in italics is transliteration, a different way to make Greek otherness resonate. Italics may indicate a Greek transliterated term which Pater rightly wants to foreground, or point to the strangeness of a still persisting past, as is, once again, the case with epithets: ‘Demeter Courotrophos . . . Demeter Erinnys [sic]’ (GS, 105). The visibility of transliteration generates echoes. In ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, Pater introduces one of his keywords—‘the Hierophantes, or Interpreter’ (GS, 83), the translated word also later used to qualify Rossetti (App., 214). Immediately the translated Greek reappears as a nuancing of expression in a discussion of the Hymn: ‘the prize-poet, or the Interpreter, the Sacristan of the holy places’ (GS, 83); and later in the essay Pater’s interpreter reappears again within simple inverted commas, which hint at his prestigious ancestry: ‘the “interpreter” of the holy places’ (GS, 120). In another sentence we have a Latin word followed by a translation, a Greek word, and an explanation, showing to what extent multilinguistic play and typography are used to express cultural otherness: ‘The dirae or spells,—κατάδεσμοι—binding or devoting certain persons to the infernal gods, inscribed on thin rolls of lead’ (GS, 143). Such an elaborate presentation fuels Pater’s imagination as he immediately goes on to provide instances of those dirae simply mentioned by Newton: ‘A woman binds with her spell the person who seduces her husband away from her and her children; another, the person who has accused her of preparing poison for her husband; another devotes one who has not restored a borrowed garment, or has stolen a bracelet’ (GS, 143–4).18 Far from being mere displays of translating skills, Pater’s nuancing of

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expressions usually develops into vignettes mixing pagan and Christian references, foregrounding the continuous presence of certain themes and images within European culture. The visually alien Greek alphabet works to fix these images on the page and reinforce their impression, at the same time disrupting the experience of the Greekless reader. Such practices sometimes achieve even greater complexity, as when Pater inserts a Greek quotation from the Homeric hymn within his translation of Ovid’s Fasti to describe a statue of Demeter: the goddess is ‘seated on the πέτρα ἀγέλαστος, which, as Ovid told us, the people of Attica still called the stone of sorrow’ (GS, 147).19 Rhetorical sophistication artfully masks the fact that Pater is describing the remains of statues from ‘the little temple and precinct of Demeter, at Cnidus’ (GS, 82). The inlaid reference turns Pater’s text into a sophisticated work of art that both pays homage to Greek sculpture and stands in contrast with the extant ‘mutilated’ statues (GS, 146). Greek words develop into motifs whose recurrence gives coherence to this cento-like text. Although it does not appear in 1876, a striking word in Pater’s lexicon illustrates such a device—ποικιλία. In ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture I’ (1880), ποικιλία is first translated as ‘an Asiatic curiousness’ (GS, 216). It then reappears, with a slightly different translation: ‘That Asiatic ποικιλία, that spirit of minute and curious loveliness’ (GS, 222); before being simply hinted at: ‘to variegation, to what is cunning or “myriad-minded”’ (GS, 253). Italics now function as a typographical reference to the vanished Greek original while ‘myriad-minded’ functions as the clue to the original poikilia. Besides being an effective teaching method, quite appropriate for Pater’s intended readership and possibly indebted to his experience in Oxford, such repetitions enable Pater to create echoes that diffract Greek words, like ‘strange echoings and dying of sound’ made visible (‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, 16). Whether in its own alphabet or transliterated, Greek appears as a series of visual signs, producing motifs that both enrich the musical texture of Pater’s textual poetics and increase the visual poikilia of the page. ‘[H]is very vocabulary becoming chryselephantine’ (GS, 200), Pater adopts effective strategies not so much of foreignization as of visual otherness. Such a highly elaborate poetics, relying on quotations, translations, italicization, and transliteration, has the effect of visually disseminating Greek literature throughout Pater’s writing. While the original utterance

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undergoes striking metamorphoses, Pater deliberately becomes a stage manager or a ventriloquist of his own performance as interpretertranslator. Discussing ‘scenes of translating utterance’, Lieven D’hulst notes that the ‘textual staging of translators or interpreters’ results in an otherness both ‘constructed and held at a distance’.20 ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ displays Pater’s skill in adapting himself to different artistic media and adopting an ambiguous authorial position that ranges from making pointed references to his narrating activity— ‘Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated version of [the Hymn]’ (GS, 83)—to hiding behind canonical authors in an artful ventriloquism of Greek texts. Pater effaces his narrative personae to present Claudian’s elaborate display of mythological figures ‘with the utmost clearness, like the figures in an actual procession’ (GS, 131), opposing his magnificence to Ovid’s simplicity: ‘like one of those old painters who, in depicting a scene of Christian history, drew from their own fancy or experience its special setting and accessories’ (GS, 133). Such a strategy becomes more complex when Pater silently relies on past and contemporary writers to develop his own vision of the statues of Demeter and Persephone. Pater relies on Newton’s description of the sanctuary of Cnidus, but he also mentions both Pausanias’ account ‘of his visit to the cave of the Black Demeter at Phigalia’ (GS, 137) and coins bearing the ‘image of Kore or Demeter’ (GS, 138), thereby directing readers’ attention to absent texts or sights. His progressive self-effacement continues with a description of the image of Demeter in the sanctuary as it ‘probably’ (GS, 139) was. The use of several passive clauses eventually enables him to disappear from his enunciation (GS, 140, 141, 142). Along with translations, hypothetical and passive clauses result in a strange disembodied utterance, perfectly in accordance with the content of the description of the long-deserted place. Such self-effacement is, however, only temporary as the utterer resurfaces and finally merges with his readers in order to ‘enter’ a carefully built ‘later arrangement’ (GS, 142): ‘We have watched the growth of the merely personal sentiment in the story; and we may notice that, if this figure be indeed Demeter, then the conception of her has become wholly humanised’ (GS, 146; my italics). Pater has played ‘the Hierophantes, or Interpreter’ (GS, 83) of his personal reconstruction of Cnidus, and such interpretation has relied on multiple translations, which are themselves echoes of Ovid, who ‘translate[d]

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the story into something very different from the Homeric hymn’ (GS, 133). Pater the ‘interpreter’ can invite readers to discover his own creative vision of the statues brought to the British Museum by Newton, whose ‘descriptions’ (GS, 140) his own performance progressively effaces before it culminates in a striking ecphrasis of Persephone. Fixing his ‘glance into an actual religious place dedicated to [Demeter], and with the air of her worship still about it’ (GS, 143), Pater tends to obscure the precarious contextual conditions previously and discreetly mentioned: ‘knowing so little, as we do’ (GS, 142). References to Pausanias, Pliny, and Newton both mask and frame the fact that all the images of the goddesses Pater describes are either imaginary or no longer visible: ‘All alike have perished’ (GS, 139; my italics). Writer and reader are thus left to contemplate ‘perhaps some more or less faint reflexion’ (GS, 139–40) in multiple texts on various objects which are evoked by an ambiguous utterer hovering between presence and disappearance. Greek literature appears as an extensive collection of fragments to be collected, assembled, and sometimes repeated, in order to be re-collected, Pater anticipating Heidegger’s meditations on legein—to gather and to read.21 Eliding himself with the original utterers, Pater proceeds in turn to self-effacement and thus morphs into a container of ancient phrases, becoming the ‘disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’ that Arthur Symons famously defined as ‘the ideal of Decadence’.22 Pater brought this ideal to perfection in his later texts on Greek sculpture, which are replete with others’ Greek and Latin voices. Through original or translated quotations, Pater provides elaborately constructed ‘glimpses’ (‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, 44) of antiquity that are purely mental, almost severed from historical truth or ‘as in an actual history’ (GS, 25; my italics), demonstrating the impossibility of recalling the past, as he had already argued in 1868. This rhetoric conveys Pater’s vision of history as a multilayered, incomplete, and subjective text. By typographically foregrounding intertextuality and otherness, Pater turns the act of reading into an act of deciphering, of intellectual tactility,23 like an archaeologist uncovering buried second-hand, possibly fake fragments of antiquity—or like a translator. Such a reconstruction produces a paradoxical image to be understood as eikon. Attempting to delineate ‘a total impression’ of that ‘[a]lien’ myth (GS, 82, 81), Pater’s translations provide a series of ‘images of the beautiful girl going down into the darkness, and the weary woman who

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seeks her lost daughter’ (GS, 113), which reach their climax in the final portrait of Persephone: compact of sleep, and death, and flowers, but of narcotic flowers especially,—a revenant, who in the garden of Aidoneus has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the secret of decay in her, of return to the grave, in the mystery of those swallowed seeds; sometimes, in later work, holding in her hand the key of the great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also; . . . sometimes, like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds, of the dreams . . . that may intervene between falling asleep and waking. (GS, 148–9)

A pagan image that is the counterpart of the ‘Lady Lisa’ of The Renaissance (Ren., 98–9), ‘Aphrodite-Persephone’ conflates death and life, Eros and Thanatos. Simultaneously, her ‘image’ ‘as it is here composed’ (GS, 149), is also a final rememberment of all the translated ‘morsels’, ‘bits’, ‘fragments’, and ‘glimpses’ scattered throughout Pater’s text. Translation is an incessant mental activity producing an imaginative picture for the sake of ‘the modern observer’ (GS, 150). In ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, Pater plays with his readers, providing them with skilful reconstructions of Greek literature and art, tricking them into believing that they have been presented with a perfect ‘image’ of antiquity—the one he has interpreted, that is translated, for them.

Notes 1. See William F. Shuter, ‘Pater as Don’, Prose Studies, 11: 1 (1988), 41–60. 2. Helen H. Law, ‘Pater’s Use of Greek Quotations’, MLN, 58: 8 (1943), 575–85. The Victorian debate has been revived by Lawrence Venuti’s studies of the ‘dominance of transparency in English-language translation’, which can lead to the ‘wholesale domestication of the foreign text’; see Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), p. 5. 3. F. W. Newman, The Odes of Horace (1853), pp. iii–v. 4. Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer, in On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1960), pp. 187 and 118. Newman responded with Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: A Reply to Matthew Arnold, Esq. (1861). For a discussion of that controversy, see Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, pp. 118–47, and Bénédicte Coste, ‘“Rather Will the Poetry of Homer Make Us Forget His Philology, than His Philology Make Us Forget His Poetry”: On Translating Homer de Matthew Arnold’, in Traduire les Anciens

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

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(Grecs et Latins) en Europe du début du XIXe siècle à nos jours, ed. Claire Lechevalier and Laurence Pradelle (Caen, 2013), pp. 23–39. Arnold, On Translating Homer, p. 156. See Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Cultural Life (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 286–7. Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, p. 123. Pater, ‘Introduction’ to Charles Lancelot Shadwell, The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri (Purgatorio I–XXVII): An Experiment in Literal Translation (1892), p. xxiv. Page references hereafter in text. Pater, ‘Romanticism’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 35 (November 1876), 64–70. ‘[F]or me, at least, I know it has been good to be with Demeter and Persephone, all the time I have been reading and thinking of them’ (‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ [Part Two], Fortnightly Review, ns 19 (February 1876), 260–76 (276)). See George Grote, The History of Greece, 12 vols (1846–56), I, pp. 50–5. In ‘A Study of Dionysus’, Pater referred to the Homeric ‘Hymn to Pan’ (GS, 16); in ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ (1889), he gave a version of the Bacchae ‘in English prose, abbreviating, here and there, some details which seem to have but a metrical value’ (GS, 71). Cf. also ‘Demeter the seeker,—Δηώ—as she was called in the mysteries’ (GS, 145). I use the term as defined by Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet in Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation (Amsterdam, 1955). William Shuter, ‘Pater’s Reshuffled Text’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 43:4 (1989), 500–25 (513), and Jean-Baptiste Picy, ‘Pater’s Poikilia: Autoréférences, métaphores et impressions dans Platon et le platonisme (1893)’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 68 (2008), 135–54. John Morley, Review of Studies in the History of the Renaissance in the Fortnightly Review, 13 (April 1873), quoted in Critical Heritage, pp. 63–71 (67): ‘quotations from foreign writers ought, as I presume to think, to be given in English, and not in French, German, Greek, Italian, excepting of course quotations in verse’. See Homer, Iliad, 2. 695. Cf. C. T. Newton, A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae, 2 vols (1862–3), II, p. 382. ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’, 97, and Ovid, Fasti, 4. 401–621. Lieven D’hulst, Essais d’histoire de la traduction: Avatars de Janus (Paris, 2014), p. 241: ‘[des] scènes d’énonciation traductives, . . . également à des mises en scène textuelles de traducteurs ou d’interprètes, d’opérations traductives diverses’, ‘altérité construite et tenue à distance’.

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21. Martin Heidegger, ‘Logos’, in Early Greek Thinking, tr. David Farrel Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, 1975), pp. 59–78 (76): ‘legein, being a laying, is also legere, that is, reading’. 22. See Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 87 (November 1893), 858–69 (867). 23. See Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), p. 37.

3 Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’ Aesthetic Criticism and Classical Reception Stefano Evangelista and Katherine Harloe

Pater did not derive his understanding of classical culture exclusively from the direct study of Greek and Roman sources, but also from observing how the classical ‘original’ is constantly modified through time, as it is appropriated by successive ages: the passing of time transforms not only the materiality of antiquity, as remains are lost and found, broken, worn away by the elements, or restored by archaeologists and textual scholars, but also its significance and value. It was only at a relatively advanced stage of his career as professional classicist that Pater started publishing work that deals with classical subject matter directly, in the essays on classical mythology of the late 1870s. Before then, in the early writings that are still the most widely discussed, Pater’s handling of antiquity took place in mediated form, notably through the work of artists of the Renaissance. For such an allusive writer, though, this seeming distance from the Greek and Roman world is anything but an expression of lack of interest. If anything the remote object, glimpsed rather than fully revealed through the texture of Pater’s prose, appears more desirable, enticing, and productive than what is closer to hand. For instance, in the early essay on William Morris, Pater describes the ancient world as a dream or echo ‘heard across so great a distance only as through some miraculous calm, subdued in colour and cadence’.1 The transformation of antiquity into a disembodied sound implies no diminution in value; on the contrary, the process described here should be

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read in conjunction with Pater’s famous observation in ‘The School of Giorgione’ that ‘[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ (Ren., 106; original italics): material loss confers aesthetic distinction. Morris’s poetry is praised for capturing the echoes of this vanishing voice, transfiguring its forms and renewing its effect without becoming antiquarian. The best form of classicism is realized in work that, like Morris’s, is aware of its belatedness and eclecticism: ‘the choice life of the human spirit is always under mixed lights, and in mixed situations’.2 In The Renaissance, Pater brings to light this transitional world in ‘Two Early French Stories’, where he glimpses ‘the taste for sweetness [that] becomes the seed of the classical revival’ in the very heart of the Middle Ages (Ren., 2). In the other essays, classical antiquity is revealed to the reader in similarly surprising places, such as Botticelli’s depiction of a ‘cadaverous’ Venus in a Gothic landscape, which according to Pater gives ‘a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves even of the finest period’ (Ren., 45–6), and Michelangelo’s portrait of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, which for Pater is a hybrid between ‘the young men of the Elgin marbles’ and a satyr (Ren., 59). The Renaissance for Pater is neither a precisely defined historical period nor a simple return to antiquity as a set of models and formal rules for artists (and a canon of texts for writers). It is, rather, a mode of reception—a way of understanding and desiring the classical past not as dead but as alive, alluring, and pregnant with creative possibilities for the modern mind. The Renaissance occurs when modernity is simultaneously shaped and challenged by antiquity. Nowhere are these dynamics of reception explored in more detail than in ‘Winckelmann’, an essay that seems at first a peculiar addition to the book because it brings the Renaissance right up to the middle of the eighteenth century. This chronological eccentricity enabled Pater to build a bridge between the Italian Renaissance and the German eighteenth century, showing an affinity between two neoclassical ideals. Winckelmann was moreover attractive to Pater because he was, like himself, primarily a scholar rather than an artist. More than any of the other figures discussed in The Renaissance, Winckelmann brings together the important parallel strands Pater develops in the book: on the one hand, defining and promoting ‘aesthetic criticism’ and, on the other, studying the ‘Hellenic element’ as a powerful underground current in cultural history that periodically breaks to the surface in order to affect the

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present. In outlining Winckelmann’s achievement Pater’s essay becomes a celebration of ‘the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect’ (Ren., 158). Winckelmann is important because his passion is the spark that ignites German philhellenism; at the same time he is the prototype of the classicist as aesthetic critic and thus an important precursor for Pater himself. More immediately, though, Pater presents Winckelmann as an antecedent of Goethe. The towering presence of Goethe tends to overshadow Winckelmann in places, as when Pater claims that ‘[t]he aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground’ (Ren., 181). By establishing an intellectual relationship between Winckelmann and Goethe, the essay traces the evolution of Hellenism from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, portraying their relationship as a crucial episode in the classical tradition. Even though the two never met, Winckelmann helped Goethe to find the classical world. As much as Winckelmann’s own scholarship, therefore, the relationship between the two becomes the model for an orientation towards the classical past: rather than promoting a series of intellectual habits and constraining influences, the encounter with antiquity generates new forms of knowledge and culture. The framework in which Winckelmann will be established as an exemplary aesthetic critic is set out in the ‘Preface’. Here Pater distinguishes between two different orientations to beauty. While the first seeks ‘to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula’, the second strives ‘[t]o define beauty . . . in the most concrete terms possible’, to find ‘the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it’ (Ren., p. xix). The latter approach, which Pater privileges as ‘the aim of the true student of aesthetics’, involves a reference to the self that is both hedonic and sensual: in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. . . . What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? (Ren., pp. xix–xx)

Aesthetic criticism is therefore a project of self-discovery and selfformation: a development which begins from the acknowledgement in

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oneself of ‘a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects’ (Ren., p. xxi) and strives over time to articulate, refine, and deepen those responses. These considerations go some way towards explaining why Pater structures this work around a series of engaging personalities, penning a series of critical portraits that pay attention to the individual circumstances of his subjects’ intellectual development and also to psychological and emotional details, often including seemingly trivial episodes. In ‘Winckelmann’, Pater not only finds his subject’s refined, yet still sensual and concrete, language of connoisseurial appreciation worthy of admiration. He also commends Winckelmann’s biography as a paradigm of the aesthetic critic’s continual striving for self-education, integration, and harmonization through the senses and the intellect. The first half of Pater’s essay traces Winckelmann’s life story from his impoverished childhood in Prussia and his early encounters with the beautiful Greeks in their literature, through his first exposure to genuine antiquities in Dresden and his eventual arrival in Italy, where, bathed finally in ‘the happy light of the antique’, he experienced ‘a sense of exhilaration almost physical’ (Ren., 142). Pater figures Winckelmann’s biography as an ‘Odyssey’: a nostos, homecoming. It is Winckelmann’s intuitive and sensual appreciation of Greek beauty in all its media (literature, material objects, and life) that reveals his ‘native affinity to the Hellenic spirit’ and renders him proof of the continuing, generative, and nourishing potential of the Hellenic in modern culture. In several of his Renaissance studies Pater draws on Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists was a well-established source in art-historical writing. But his choice to organize the first part of his essay around an account of Winckelmann’s life references a different tradition. Pater takes up a strand of Winckelmann’s German reception which had tended to lay an emphasis on his life story rather than his scholarship as such, making extensive use of his letters, which had appeared in a number of editions since the eighteenth century.3 In treating Winckelmann’s biography as the story of the progressive realization of a remarkable individual’s innate affinity towards the Hellenic, Pater’s essay betrays its genealogy in the tradition of the Winckelmannsrede (speeches celebrating Winckelmann himself and the scholarly disciplines to which his work had given rise), a tradition which had grown up in German universities and archaeological institutes since the 1830s. Pater certainly knew at least one

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specimen of the genre: Otto Jahn’s address delivered in Greifswald in 1843 and reprinted in his Biographische Aufsätze of 1866, which was one of the two works under review in the first publication of Pater’s essay (the other was G. H. Lodge’s partial translation of the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums).4 He may also have been aware of some of the examples composed by Eduard Gerhard, founding secretary of the German Archaeological Institute and director of the sculpture department of the Prussian Royal Museum. This tradition in turn informed the monumental, hagiographic biography of Winckelmann composed by Carl Justi, the first volumes of which appeared, like Jahn’s Aufsätze, the year before Pater’s essay. The conventions of the Winckelmannsrede—which became increasingly formulaic as the century progressed—likewise involved a focus on Winckelmann’s life, portrayed as the ardent, and ultimately successful, strivings of an exemplary character to realize its inner affinity with the Hellenic. But while Winckelmann’s German panegyrists located the telos of this development in his foundation of a new scholarly discipline and educational ideal—Altertumswissenschaft—for Pater, the telos seems to be a figure of the next generation of culture heroes: Goethe. Goethe’s own account of Winckelmann’s life, published at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, in fact forms the single most important intertext for Pater’s essay.5 Pater’s assessment of Winckelmann is focalized through Goethe throughout, from the initial assessment of him as providing ‘an abstract type of culture, consummate, tranquil, withdrawn already into the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life’ (Ren., 141), through the account of Winckelmann’s murder which draws on Goethe’s autobiographical reflections in Dichtung und Wahrheit, to Pater’s lament that Winckelmann’s untimely death may have deprived German literary history of ‘one of those famous friendships, the very tradition of which becomes a stimulus to culture, and exercises an imperishable influence’ (Ren., 157). It is therefore appropriate to look back behind Pater’s essay and its immediate, scholarly predecessors to Goethe’s essay, which in any case provided the template for the later appreciations. Goethe’s essay is pervaded by ambiguities that were to prove productive for Pater’s elucidation of the character of the aesthetic critic and of the revivifying potential of the Hellenic in modernity. Goethe’s essay was published in 1805, as the first of three ‘Skizzen zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns’ (‘Studies towards a Portrait of

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Winckelmann’) appended to an edition of Winckelmann’s letters to his childhood friend, Hieronymus Dieterich Berendis.6 The status of the essay as parergon to a letter collection is significant, for, both in the essay itself and in his general introduction to the volume, Goethe privileges an author’s private correspondence as providing a unique window onto his or her thoughts, feelings, and desires: Letters are among the most important monuments an individual can leave behind him. Just as, when talking to themselves, persons endowed with lively imaginations sometimes picture an absent friend as present, with whom to share their inmost thoughts, so in the same manner a letter comprises a form of conversation with the self. For often the friend to whom one is writing provides more the occasion for, than object of, the letter. What cheers or saddens, oppresses or concerns us, comes from the heart, and as enduring traces of a particular existence or condition such pages are the more important for posterity, the more the writer has considered only the immediate moment and the less he takes notice of posterity.7

For Goethe, ‘Winckelmann’s letters have this advantageous character (diesen wünschenswerthen Charakter) throughout’, in that they provide an authentic monument of an exemplary individual’s innermost feelings and strivings.8 The three ‘sketches’ are presented as guides or initial notes to the correspondence, and the introduction to Goethe’s essay sharpens the themes of exemplarity and monumentality in relation to the letters: The memory of remarkable men, like the presence of major works of art, periodically stimulates the spirit of reflection. Both exist as legacies to every generation, the former in the shape of deeds and posthumous fame, the latter through their continued reality as ineffable creations. All men of insight know very well that the only worthwhile approach is to contemplate each as an individual whole; nevertheless, we repeatedly try to extract some meaning from them with the help of reflection and words. We have a particular incentive to do so when new information comes to light on such subjects; and accordingly, our renewed reflections on Winckelmann, on his character and achievement, will not seem inappropriate at a time when the letters which have just been published throw a clearer light on his outlook and circumstances.9

For Goethe, Winckelmann’s letters perform this memorializing function by virtue of their author’s lack of self-awareness or self-consciousness— his unconcern, even as he sat down to his desk, with thoughts of posterity or even of the addressee who formed the pretext for his writing exercise.

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This contestable interpretation enables Goethe to privilege Winckelmann’s letters above his published writings, for in the latter he did write with a self-consciousness, a sense of status, and an eye for posterity. It also sets up a particular, hierarchical relationship between Goethe the commentator or editor and Winckelmann the subject or author. Goethe insinuates that the commentator is able to bring to light new meanings in the author’s expressions and pronouncements, the true significance of which escaped the author himself.10 It is as furnishing the raw materials for such transformative interpretation that Goethe recommends the serious and prolonged study of Winckelmann’s letters in chronological order, going so far as to provide an index to all previous published editions of his correspondence as an indispensable aid for ‘anyone who wishes to obtain an unobstructed view of such a character’ (‘demjenigen, der Lust hat einen solchen Charakter unmittelbar anzuschauen’).11 Yet at other points in his introduction, the primary conceit is not so much the Italian traveller gazing out over the Roman Campagna as the artist twisting his model into a series of expressive poses after the manner of a neoclassical art theorist such as Charles Le Brun: If this excellent man, who had educated himself in isolation, was reserved in society, serious and cautious in life and action, on the page he nonetheless felt his full natural freedom and often portrayed his inner emotions without reservation. We see him worried, fearful, confused, doubting and hesitant; elsewhere cheerful, excited, confident, bold, fatalistic to the point of cynicism, but throughout a man of upright character, trusting in himself, who—though external circumstances presented him with a number of choices—for the most part chose the best path, up to the time of that last, rash, unfortunate step, which cost him his life.12

Goethe’s framing of Winckelmann’s letters thus raises questions about the relative agency of subject (or ‘artwork’) and critic (‘editor’ or ‘artist’), and provides an element of hierarchical distancing to counterbalance the dominant tone of admiration. It is unsurprising that scholars have been unsure what to make of Goethe’s essay: although it has for the most part been treated as a profession of classicizing faith and an anti-Romantic Streitschrift, some recent discussions have emphasized instead how Goethe’s treatment tends to contain Winckelmann, confining him to his own age—‘sein Jahrhundert’—even as it praises him.13 Pater picks up on both sides of Goethe’s treatment. He paints an intimate portrait of the young Winckelmann’s ‘painful apprenticeship’ (Ren., 142) in eighteenth-century Germany, where he spent solitary

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nights reading Herodotus and Homer and his sleep was troubled by nightmares of the Odyssey. He brings Winckelmann close to his readers with a moving psychological description of his desire for a different life nurtured by classical studies, so that the arrival in Rome marks, in a sense, the onset of his real life. Like Goethe, Pater cites Winckelmann’s letters to create a sense of emotional proximity, relying on Winckelmann’s readiness to articulate his frustrations and desires in correspondence. For instance, Pater cites a letter in which Winckelmann seems to confess his feeling of alienation in Rome, caught between the sense of familiarity with the classical heritage of the city that he had acquired through his studies and the foreignness of the actual place: ‘I am one of those whom the Greeks called ὀψιμαθεῖς.—I have come into the world and into Italy too late’ (Ren., 150).14 For Pater, as for Goethe, the letters disclose a temperamental and psychological attitude to antiquity that is the most precious legacy of Winckelmann for modern students. Pater presents Winckelmann’s uniqueness—what makes him, paradoxically, both eccentric and central to the culture of his age—in essentialist terms: he speaks of ‘Winckelmann’s native affinity to the Hellenic spirit’ and glosses this inborn sentiment as a form of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘bodily temperament’ (Ren., 152). Throughout the essay Pater contrasts images of light and colour in order to portray Hellenism and passion as the twin elements that shaped Winckelmann’s life and that might at first glance seem incompatible. While Hellenism ‘is the principle preeminently of intellectual light’—a definition that emphasizes elements of distance and abstraction—‘our modern culture’ is characterized by its predominance of colour, by which Pater means sentiment (Ren., 151). Winckelmann, as a Hellenist, is instinctively attracted to light; yet Pater seems particularly keen to recover those traces of colour that insinuate themselves inside Winckelmann’s legacy. Winckelmann’s letters make ‘with their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light around the mute Olympian family’ (Ren., 154). And, paraphrasing Goethe, he characterizes Winckelmann as a tranquil, classicizing figure, who nonetheless ‘retain[ed] colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life’ (Ren., 141). Pater’s evocations of colour recall the technique of late nineteenth-century literary impressionism, which has obvious affinities with the method of aesthetic criticism, while also glancing back to the rhetorical tradition which relates colour to expression and passion. By

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insisting on Winckelmann’s passion, Pater is arguing for the rehabilitation of the body and its instinctual drives in approaches to antiquity. In Pater’s essay the human body, as represented in classical statues, becomes a site of meanings occluded by Christian history, which Winckelmann is able to recover thanks to his unembarrassed close observation: ‘he catches the thread of a whole sequence of laws in some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair’ (Ren., 154–5). Writing at a time when British classical scholarship was embracing the ‘scientific’ method, Pater goes against this trend, revaluing an eighteenthcentury ideal of amateurism based on a sentimental approach to the object. Winckelmann’s capacity to be ‘moved’ by ‘the buried fire of ancient art’ is what makes him repeat in Pater’s eyes the spirit of the Early Renaissance (Ren., 146); just as his geographical migration from a dark and frozen North to the ‘happy light of the antique’ (Ren., 142) makes him the embodiment of Enlightenment—an idea Pater would later develop in his imaginary portrait ‘Duke Carl von Rosenmold’, also set in the German eighteenth century. The stress on Winckelmann’s deep-seated emotional response to antiquity is clearly connected to the definition of aesthetic criticism that Pater had set out in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance: Winckelmann illustrates the imperative to abandon ‘abstract theory’ in favour of a critical practice based on ‘the exercise of sight and touch’ (Ren., 147). Hellenism and aestheticism are interlocked in a mutually reinforcing relationship: while ancient Greece discloses to the moderns a tradition of integrating the senses and understanding in pursuit of a balanced ideal of culture, aestheticism reveals the importance of seeking knowledge of antiquity through the senses. An intensified vocabulary of sensual impression, especially of touch, punctuates Pater’s descriptions of Winckelmann’s practice as a classical scholar. Winckelmann is shown handling not only statues but even ‘the words . . . of Greek poetry, stirred indeed and roused by them, yet divining beyond the words some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the relics of plastic art’ (Ren., 146). ‘[H]e feels after the Hellenic world, divines those channels of ancient art, in which its life still circulates’ (Ren., 158). Antiquity comes to life under Winckelmann’s receptive touch, as alert to ‘pulsations’ as the idealized aesthetic subject of The Renaissance’s ‘Conclusion’. In line with Goethe and the tradition of the Winckelmannsrede, Pater is not worried about Winckelmann’s mistakes in attribution. He repeats

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Goethe’s comparison of Winckelmann to Columbus as someone whose ‘science was often at fault’ (Ren., 154) but who nonetheless succeeded in effecting an enormous advancement in knowledge. He admits that later critics have questioned the authenticity of some of Winckelmann’s ‘most significant examples of Greek art’, and that Winckelmann, working on Roman collections, was without realizing it only glimpsing Greek works through later copies. Consequently, Winckelmann set too much store on Hellenistic grace over the authentically classical, ‘severe and chastened grace of the palaestra’. Pater suggests that modern critics could now correct Winckelmann’s mistakes but, for now, he is uninterested in taking on this role systematically. He would later tackle this question in the essays on archaic Greek art, which Elizabeth Prettejohn studies in Chapter 12 in this volume. At present he is more interested in elucidating the mechanism through which a tradition of classical art is transmitted to subsequent ages—capturing the sound of the ‘echo’, as he puts it in the essay on Morris, which gains a distinctive and haunting quality just as it loses intensity with each repetition. If Roman art constitutes a ‘turbid medium’ (Ren., 155) through which authentic Greek works survive into later ages, the modern classicist should accept discoloration and muddiness as part of the organic mutation of the classical matter through the centuries. The value of Greek antiquity is not per se but as a stimulus to the present, whether it be the historical present of the Romans, the eighteenth century, or Pater’s own time. Yet, like Goethe, Pater also introduces an element of distance in the essay via a series of revisions. The insistence on colour that we have already seen could be read as a corrective, which Pater deploys with characteristic indirectness, to canonical receptions of Winckelmann’s downplaying of polychromy in his discussions of classical sculpture.15 Pater addresses this question explicitly, speaking of the ‘unfixed claim to colour’ that sculpture had since its earliest days in archaic Greece (Ren., 169). Pater also expands and corrects the canon of Winckelmann’s art history by praising the Parthenon frieze, which Winckelmann had not seen, as the ‘single product only of Hellenic art [that ought] to be saved in the wreck of all beside’ (Ren., 174). The sculptures from the Parthenon acquired by the British Museum in 1816 (and known as the Elgin Marbles) were fundamental in forming a new, romantic taste for the antique that eventually superseded eighteenth-century classicism. Pater underlines this history by referring to the figures depicted on the frieze as

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a ‘beautiful multitude’—a quotation from Keats (Endymion, 3. 818) that is perhaps meant to highlight the affinity between the poetic celebrations of the Elgin Marbles by Keats and some of Winckelmann’s own ecphrastic descriptions of ancient sculpture. Their inclusion prepares the ground for what is in fact Pater’s most severe critique of Winckelmann: his inability to detect ‘a sort of preparation for the romantic temper’ in Greek art and culture more generally, entirely committed as he was to an ideal of ‘exquisite but abstract and colourless form’ (Ren., 178). The alternative to this model is Goethe, who will capture a more comprehensive, earthly, and sensual relation to antiquity in his Roman Elegies. Here and extensively in the course of the essay Pater bases his revisions of Winckelmann on Hegel’s Ästhetik—a work on which Jahn had also drawn. Pater paraphrases Hegel when he argues that ‘[t]he placid minds even of Olympian gods are troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession’ (Ren., 179);16 this is the same ‘touch of the corpse’ in the ancient sculptural nude that Botticelli would capture in his paintings of classical myth. The very materiality of the ancient object has been changed by the history of its reception: looking back to Greece from our modern vantage point, we can now see in the gods that once seemed so fair and above history ‘a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements of the pale, medieval artists’ (Ren., 179). The concept of ‘refinement’ brings back the theory of reception as refinement put forward in the essay on Morris: in the Winckelmann essay the medieval saints of Fra Angelico and his contemporaries reveal to Pater latent meanings that are dormant in the classical object until they are brought to light by a later artistic culture, no matter how different that culture might appear to be on the surface. To return to Pater’s German sources, three themes in the handling of Winckelmann’s life had proved particularly problematic for his hagiographic biographers. The first was class: Winckelmann’s transition from the humblest of backgrounds to association with princes. Second was his religious conversion, widely understood by contemporaries as an impious act undertaken for material gain. Finally, in the eighteenth century as now, the homoeroticism of many of the paeans to Greek beauty contained in Winckelmann’s writings fuelled rumours about his life, particularly once his murder by Francesco Arcangeli appeared to confirm deeply held cultural prejudices that associated homosexuality with sin, violence, and punishment.17 Goethe’s essay is notable for its

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frank treatment of all three of these themes, deriving them from Winckelmann’s profound—and profoundly ‘ancient’—need for friendship and beauty. Winckelmann’s preference for male friendship betrays his truly antique nature, for one of the greatest differences between ancient and modern times is that ‘[r]elations with women, which have become so tender and spiritualised in our era, scarcely rose in antiquity above the level of most basic necessity’. ‘The passionate fulfilment of affectionate duties, the bliss of inseparability, the sacrifice of oneself for another’ occurred only ‘in a relationship between two youths’. Winckelmann’s unashamed pursuit of male friendships is once again proof of his unselfconscious Hellenism, that remarkable naivety which drove him to ‘[transform] all the worthy people who sought his company into friends on this model’.18 Winckelmann conceived his relationships with his patrons in similar fashion. Goethe emphasizes this point in his discussion of the impressions of contemporary Roman society presented in Winckelmann’s letters: Although he did not at first feel wholly at ease in society—ill-prepared as he was by his earlier way of life—a feeling of his own worth soon made up for lack of training and practice, and he very quickly learned to behave as circumstances required. His pleasure in associating with distinguished, rich, and famous people, and his delight at enjoying their esteem are always conspicuous; and as regards ease of social relations, he could not have found a more favourable environment than that of Rome. He himself observes that prominent people there, particularly in clerical circles, live on a relaxed and familiar footing with members of their households, however ceremonious they may outwardly appear; but he failed to observe that this familiarity is in fact a disguise for the oriental relationship between master and servant. All the southern nations would find it infinitely tedious if they had to sustain that constant reciprocal tension to which the northerners are accustomed in their domestic relations. . . . [T]he southerner likes to have periods of relaxation, and those around him benefit accordingly.19

Yet, viewed in another perspective, these comments of Goethe’s show what is limited or mistaken in Winckelmann’s outlook. Winckelmann’s partisanship for the Hellenic leads him to mistake the ‘ease’ of hierarchical social relations in Rome for a genuinely free and equal companionship on the ancient model, just as he pursues heroic friendships with (sometimes) unworthy men in ignorance of the superior erotic, spiritual, and affective potential of heterosexual partnerships in modernity. Goethe punctures

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these illusions, demonstrating his superior understanding of social and intimate relations. Like Goethe, Pater smooths over these potentially problematic areas. He pays little attention to class, but devotes several pages to Winckelmann’s religious conversion, noting Goethe’s argument that Winckelmann was a pagan at heart and finally absolving Winckelmann’s insincerity ‘at the bar of the highest criticism’ (Ren., 149)—that is, from the point of view of a secularist modern criticism that values intellectual integrity above religious morality. It is the ‘problem’ of homosexuality that interests Pater most, and in treating this issue he expands on Goethe, adding material that is not present in his account. A prominent example is Pater’s quotation of two substantial extracts from Winckelmann’s ‘letter on taste’ to Friedrich Reinhold von Berg—a correspondent not mentioned by Goethe in his list of the noblemen to whom Winckelmann acted as cicerone. In fact this is an essay published in 1763 entitled ‘Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in derselben’ (‘Essay on the Capacity of the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and on Instruction in it’), in which Winckelmann declares his attraction to Berg and speaks of male beauty as the ‘supreme beauty’ of Greek art (Ren., 153). The fact that Pater presents as a letter what is actually an aesthetic treatise written in letter form (Sendschreiben) underscores, on the one hand, his insistence on the correspondence as a source of privileged knowledge about Winckelmann, while, on the other, it introduces a certain euphemistic quality, given that the more personal correspondence with Berg published after Winckelmann’s death, evoked but occluded in the text, is more explicit in its handling of erotic intimacy. By interpolating this material into his account, Pater wants to endorse this type of eros as foundational to the practices of connoisseurship. Another passage from Winckelmann’s ‘Abhandlung’, which occurs between the two that Pater quotes, presents the intellectual desire for antiquity as a bodily drive: In early youth, this capacity, like every inclination, is wrapped in dark and confused emotions and announces itself like a fleeting itching in one’s skin, the actual location of which one cannot find to scratch. It is to be sought sooner in well-formed boys than in others, because we commonly think as we are made, but is to be sought less in form than in character and temperament: a soft heart and tractable senses are signs of such a capacity.20

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The Berg correspondence shows that ‘temperament’ at work, providing Pater with evidence that Winckelmann’s tendency to form ‘romantic, fervent friendships with young men’ (Ren., 152) repeats classical models of male intimacy, and developing that ‘temperamental’ affinity with Hellenism that constitutes Winckelmann’s distinction. Pater is on dangerous territory here: his argument might be read as normalizing Winckelmann’s homosexual leanings or, even, as an elevation of homoeroticism into a marker of intellectual distinction—the foundation of Winckelmann’s ability to achieve a privileged insight into the ancient world.21 The direct quotation, which brings Winckelmann’s voice into the text in almost unmediated form, is also a clever strategy to insert a sense of distance between critic and subject—something which goes against the principles of Pater’s aesthetic criticism and, for that reason, bespeaks Pater’s uneasiness in the handling of this subject. In Goethe’s essay this subtle distancing reaches its climax in the section entitled ‘Rome’. For both Goethe and Pater this is, of course, the pivotal point in Winckelmann’s biography: when the Hellenic plant, transferred back into ancient soil, could finally take root and flower. Goethe’s description does not disappoint: Winckelmann was now in Rome, and who could be more worthy than he of feeling the effects which that great experience is capable of producing on a truly receptive nature? He saw his wishes fulfilled, his happiness assured, his hopes more than satisfied. He saw his ideas in corporeal form around him as he wandered in amazement through the ruins of a gigantic age; the greatest glories ever produced by art stood out in the open air; he could look up at such wonders of art as freely as at the stars in the heavens, and every private treasure-house opened its doors for a modest fee. The newcomer crept around unnoticed like a pilgrim, and visited the most splendid and sacred monuments in inconspicuous dress; he did not yet permit any individual impression to take hold of him, the whole acted upon him in infinitely varied ways, and he could already feel in anticipation that harmony which would eventually arise for him out of the many often seemingly hostile elements. He saw and contemplated everything, and, to complete his satisfaction, he was mistaken for an artist, a role in which all of us would at heart be happy to appear.22

But what follows undercuts this picture. Instead of Winckelmann’s own words, Goethe approvingly quotes a letter addressed to him from Rome by Wilhelm von Humboldt: Rome is the place where, in our view, the whole of antiquity is fused into one, so that what we feel about the ancient poets or political constitutions seems, in

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Rome, more than just a feeling: we can see it with our own eyes. Just as Homer cannot be compared with other poets, so also is it impossible to compare Rome and its surroundings with any other place. It is true that most of this impression derives from ourselves rather than from the object; but it is not just the sentimental thought of standing where this or that great man once stood—it is as if we were powerfully transported into a past which, if only through a necessary illusion, strikes us as nobler and more sublime than the present. We cannot resist this force even if we wish to, because the derelict state in which the present inhabitants have left the country and the incredible mass of ruins themselves lead our eye in that direction. And since this past appeals to the inner sense in a grandeur which is beyond the reach of envy, and in which one is more than happy to participate, if only in the imagination (for we cannot conceivably do so in any other way), and since at the same time the loveliness of forms, the grandeur and simplicity of the figures, the richness of the vegetation (which is not, however, as luxuriant as in regions further south), the definition of the outlines in the translucent medium, and the beauty of the colours transport the outer sense into a realm of universal clarity—our enjoyment of nature here is a pure aesthetic pleasure without a trace of desire. Everywhere else, it is coupled with contrasting ideas, and our pleasure becomes elegiac or satirical. But of course this is only our subjective impression. Tibur seemed more modern to Horace than Tivoli does to us, as his Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis proves. But it is also merely an illusion if we ourselves wish we were citizens of Athens or Rome. For we must view antiquity only from a distance, purged of base reality, purely as something of the past.23

The force of Goethe’s preamble, focalized through the enthusiastic Winckelmann, is very different from that of Humboldt’s words. When Goethe endorses Humboldt’s conclusion that ‘it is merely an illusion if we ourselves wish we were citizens of Athens and Rome’, this judgement cannot fail to modify our response to Winckelmann’s fantasy that ‘[h]e saw his ideas in corporeal form around him as he wandered in amazement through the ruins of a gigantic age’. And when Goethe approvingly cites Humboldt’s characterization of the Roman prospect as furnishing ‘a pure aesthetic pleasure without a trace of desire’, this undercuts his prior portrayal of Winckelmann’s erotic and tactile orientation to antiquity. By contrast with Humboldt’s refined and self-reflective standpoint, Winckelmann’s unselfconscious and urgent, imitative relation to the Roman cityscape might appear less a Pygmalionesque bringing of the past to life through a kiss than a Quixotism. Just how far Goethe intended to establish Winckelmann as exemplary therefore remains problematic; despite its panegyrical aspects, the essay creates a distance between Goethe’s and Winckelmann’s orientations to antiquity and a hierarchy,

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in which Winckelmann functions as an artistic model for Goethe’s plastic powers as much or more than a life to be emulated. Pater understood the profound importance of Goethe’s distancing from Winckelmann and presented it as a key event in the evolution of the classical tradition. In the essay he shows Goethe following Winckelmann’s footsteps in Rome, where he finds ‘the stimulus of Winckelmann’s memory ever active’ (Ren., 151) but also charts his independent evolution beyond the master he was never to meet. In Pater’s eyes, Winckelmann’s passionate life was crucial for Goethe because it reproduced the Greek ideal of self-fashioning seen in the ancient sculptures. But Goethe also detected what Pater calls Winckelmann’s ‘narrow perfection’ and used Winckelmann’s integrity as a negative example, from which he developed into his own, superior model of a general culture (Ren., 147). Winckelmann, with his intense focus on the ‘unity and repose of the highest sort of sculpture’, failed to see those elements of Greek culture in which Pater sees ‘a sort of preparation for the romantic temper’ (Ren., 178). But Goethe combined Hellenism and Romanticism in a way that proved generative for nineteenth-century culture. The Hellenism embodied by Winckelmann translates itself into ‘a watchful, exigent intellectualism’ in Goethe (Ren., 182). This evolutionary argument with which Pater concludes the essay should not, however, blind us to his positive evaluation of Winckelmann as a revolutionary figure: he reminds us that ‘that note of revolt against the eighteenth century, which we detect in Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann’. While he elevates Goethe’s general culture above Winckelmann’s connoisseurship as a more evolved model of classical knowledge, Pater also salvages Winckelmann as an example, explaining his uniqueness and value to late nineteenth-century readers. Winckelmann demonstrates better than any other ‘Renaissance’ figure that Hellenic culture is not ‘a lost art’ (Ren., 181) to the modern world. He is the hero of Pater’s vision of ‘the classical tradition’ and a precious medium through which moderns can still see ‘the reflected, refined light’ of the classical world.

Notes 1. Pater [unsigned], ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review, NS 34 (October 1868), 300–12 (307).

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2. Pater, ‘William Morris’, 307. 3. Notably Johann Winckelmanns Sämtliche Werke, ed. Joseph Eiselein, 12 vols (Donauöschingen, 1825–35), X–XI: Freundschaftliche Briefe: 1747–1768; and Winckelmanns Briefe, 3 vols, ed. Friedrich Förster (Berlin, 1824), the latter as an addition to the ‘Weimar’ edition edited by Karl Ludwig Fernow. See Martin Disselkamp, Die Stadt der Gelehrten: Studien zu Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Briefe aus Rom (Tübingen, 1993). 4. ‘Winckelmann’ was originally published anonymously in the Westminster Review in January 1867. 5. Stefano Evangelista, ‘The German Roots of British Aestheticism: Pater’s “Winckelmann”, Goethe’s Winckelmann, Pater’s Goethe’, in Anglo-German Affinities and Antipathies, ed. Rüdiger Görner (Munich, 2004), pp. 57–70 (61ff.); Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), p. 73. 6. Goethe, Winkelmann [sic] und sein Jahrhundert in Briefen und Aufsätzen (Tübingen, 1805). The volume also contained essays by Friedrich August Wolf, Karl Ludwig Fernow, and Johann Heinrich Meyer. 7. Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. xi–xii. Although the full volume has not been translated into English, Goethe’s biographical essay is translated by H. B. Nisbet in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 236–58. We use, and refer to, Nisbet’s translation whenever possible; translations from other parts of the volume are our own. 8. Goethe, Winkelmann, p. xii. 9. Goethe, Winkelmann, p. 389 (tr. Nisbet, p. 236). 10. Goethe’s position here seems to anticipate some understandings of Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as Auerbach’s influential characterization of figural interpretation. See Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature (New Haven, 1990); Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (1938; Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 11–76. 11. Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. 471–2. 12. Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. xii–xiii. 13. See esp. Volker Riedel, ‘Zwischen Klassizismus und Geschichtlichkeit: Goethes Buch “Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert”’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 13 (2006), 217–42; Harald Tausch, ‘Die Winckelmann-Rezeption in der klassisch-romantischen Moderne um 1800’, in Winckelmann-Handbuch, ed. Martin Disselkamp and Fausto Testa (Stuttgart, 2017). 14. Winckelmann to von Riedesel, 2 June 1767; German text in Johann Joachim Winckelmann Briefe, III. 1764–1768, ed. Walter Rehm (Berlin, 1956), p. 268. This letter, first published in 1777 and reprinted in Eiselein’s Freundschaftliche

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15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

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Briefe, is one of a number in which Winckelmann discusses his desire to travel to Greece. Its addressee, Johann Hermann von Riedesel, was one of the young men to whom Winckelmann offered aesthetic education among the sites of Rome. On Winckelmann’s activities as a cicerone, see Jeffrey Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Oxford, 1996). Winckelmann wrote this letter in German, and not in French, as Pater claims in his essay. This is particularly evident in the ‘Weimar’ edition of Winckelmann’s works, which is likely the one Pater used; see Inman (1981), p. 119. For Winckelmann and polychromy, see Oliver Primavesi, ‘Artemis, Her Shrine, and Her Smile: Winckelmann’s Discovery of Ancient Greek Polychromy’, in Circumlitio: The Polychromy of Ancient and Medieval Sculpture, ed. Vinzenz Brinkmann, Oliver Primavesi, and Max Hollein (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), pp. 24–76. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford, 1975), I, p. 485: ‘The blessed gods mourn as it were over their blessedness or their bodily form. We read in their faces the fate that awaits them.’ See Lionel Gossman, ‘Death in Trieste’, Journal of European Studies, 22 (2002), 207–40. Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. 398–9 (Nisbet, pp. 239–40), section entitled ‘Freundschaft’. Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. 433–4 (Nisbet, p. 255), section entitled ‘Gesellschaft’. Winckelmann, ‘Essay on the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and on Instruction in it’, in Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, ed. and tr. Curtis Bowman, 3 vols (2005), I, pp. xxi–xlvii (xxv). Winckelmann himself had claimed as much in the ‘Abhandlung’: ‘Moreover, since human beauty, in order to be known, is to be grasped in a general concept, I have noticed that those who attend only to the beauties of the female sex, and are touched little or not at all by the beauties in our sex, possess the sentiment for the beautiful in art but little in an innate, general, or lively fashion. The same will be lacking in these people with regard to the art of the Greeks, since the greatest beauties of their art are more of our sex than of the other’ (‘Essay’, p. xxvi). Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. 407–8 (tr. Nisbet, p. 244). Goethe, Winkelmann, pp. 408–9 (tr. Nisbet, p. 245).

4 Eternal Moment Pater on the Temporality of the Classical Ideal in Art Whitney Davis

Every artwork is an Augenblick [lit., an eye’s glance]; every successful work is a cessation, a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye. Theodor W. Adorno1 The moment Now is a potential eternity. John Addington Symonds2

‘Hellenism . . . is the principle’, wrote Walter Pater in 1867 in ‘Winckelmann’, ‘pre-eminently of intellectual light’—a light in which the ‘eternal outline, of the genuine antique’ remains visible in the classical tradition in art, inherited by the modern world as an ideal standard of taste, an ‘artistic orthodoxy’ (Ren., 151, 144, 159). Only the year before, however, Pater had written that the artistic and philosophical quest to ‘arrest every object in an eternal outline’, ‘to fix . . . types of life’, was a specifically ancient concern (‘Coleridge’, App., 66). By contrast, relativistic modern thought recognizes ‘a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change’ (App., 68). How, then, does the eternal outline (let us suppose that it is literally a drawing, a painting, or a sculpture) convince us that it can accommodate ‘fine gradations’, especially the fact that we ourselves change? What is the spatio-temporal principle of an artwork that can lay claim to the ideal and to eternity?

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When Pater began writing, one of the most influential answers on offer had been proposed by G. E. Lessing in 1766: the painter must discover the ‘visible arrested action’ (as Lessing put it) that William James would describe in 1890 as the ‘thickened present’ of the Now— the ‘small window in time’ that can be opened within ‘monophase’ images (as present-day narratologists sometimes describe depictions of one moment in a story). Because a painting putatively depicts the temporally coexisting elements of a narrative scene, that is, ‘one single moment of the action’, it must, Lessing said, ‘choose the most pregnant, from which what precedes and follows will be most easily apprehended’. Indeed, this is the basis of its mnemic power: supposedly we recall movement—implied in the before/after of the ‘pregnant moment’— ‘more easily and vividly than mere forms and colours’.3 Of course, Lessing’s notion of the pregnant moment belongs to a wider, longer discourse about pictorial images, including the Earl of Shaftesbury’s principle of ‘anticipation and repeal’ and Henry Fuseli’s notion of ‘momentaneous energy’ in painting, reflections on the identity and perception of sculpture by J. W. Herder and G. W. F. Hegel, and such contributions in the twentieth century as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the ‘decisive moment’ in photographic ‘images on the run’.4 In Pater’s context, these concerns about the temporality of images were not merely theoretical—a matter of strictly philosophical and critical disputations. As Carolyn Williams has put it, ‘one question that occupied a great deal of attention in just about every field of endeavor [in the nineteenth century] was the question of how to get the picture moving’.5 Theory aside, this was partly a practical question of depictive configuration and narrative composition, and many sophisticated options were available to resolve it. For example, Martin Meisel’s incisive study of the ‘visual conventions of pictorial simultaneity’ in mid-nineteenth-century British painting has shown that a varied and highly developed ‘art of expanding the pictorial moment’ had managed to ‘push out the boundaries of the putative moment to an astonishing extent’.6 Commenting on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image (‘dialectic at a standstill’), Theodor W. Adorno wanted partly to invert Lessing’s original formulation. For Adorno, the issue was not really that certain representations manage to capture and stabilize some kind of privileged moment. What counts is what ‘flashes up . . . only to disappear in the instant one tries to grasp it’. As Adorno added, ‘the objectivation of

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this aporia, the paradoxical unity of the vanishing and the preserved, constitutes the “temporal nucleus” of artworks and lends their experience a “processual” character’.7 (By ‘processual’ Adorno seems to mean the experience of an integration, of a ‘process’ of apprehension of form, regardless of actual length of time.) In Pater’s hands, as we will see, such a paradoxically ‘processual’ instant—and the degree of its maker’s (or its subject’s) self-consciousness about the ‘paradoxical unity’ in question— constituted not only the ideal formal order of classical Greek sculpture, what Hegel called its Heiterkeit and Allgemeinheit, its ‘breadth and generality’ (Ren., 170), but also the historical possibility of its continuous cultural regeneration over time.

Nachahmung: The Dialectic of the Delicate Pause Let us begin with the latter phenomenon. After all, Pater’s own writings about classical Greek civilization became instances of its historical renewal, as it were its latest expressions—his ‘critical activity’, as Williams has written, ‘in clearly delineating objects by endowing them with the distinctive values that they can only be seen to have after time passes’, situating them ‘within but arising against a prior period, a sequence’ that stretches from Athens in the fifth century BC to Oxford in the final third of the nineteenth century.8 As Pater noted in ‘Winckelmann’, many distinct cultural traditions were originally rooted in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds—‘spontaneous growths’ of the human spirit, especially of religious sentiment. In later European culture, however, like ‘some persistent vegetable growth’ (Ren., 160) they mostly had ‘an absorbed, underground life’ (Ren., 158), as it were ‘encapsulated’. (I use the suggestive term applied by the philosopher R. G. Collingwood to such historical phenomena as the Celtic temperament in art that he argued had been encapsulated throughout three centuries of the Roman occupation in Britain and spectacularly revived as newly Celtic after the Roman withdrawal.9) According to Pater, however, Hellenic culture was not content with an underground existence. Periodically it ‘started to the surface’ in the ascension of a ‘conscious tradition’—an ‘intellectual tradition’—that by definition as conscious remains fully in view and in mind, or, more exactly, in view of the mind

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(Ren., 158–9). Indeed, insofar as certain modern intellects had been able to attain a ‘perfected . . . reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture’, as Pater said Winckelmann had done in the 1750s (Ren., 152), to understand such modern classicists would also be to understand the classical as such— its transhistorical vitality. The classical tradition might be conceived, in fact, as ‘a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours’ (Ren., 159). Of course, ‘[w]e can only see it at all in the reflected, refined light which a great education creates for us’ (Ren., 181)—a classical education and presumably a specifically Paterian one. As Williams has summed Pater’s point, then, great works of art—and in this context great works of the classical ideal in art above all— are already made, past and separate, but they are also ‘made’ anew through their revival within the aesthetic critic in the present, who trusts them as evidence (of a world outside the self, of a past different from the present), receives their impressions deeply, and, then, interpreting, critically projects them away from the subject once more . . . Objects from the past can be trusted as data to be interpreted . . . but only if they are ‘revived’ within and through a present, critical subject.10

What, then, is—or was—this ‘strange light’, as it were both the medium of the transhistorical reflection and the substance transhistorically reflected? In part, it was the ‘unbroken daylight’ of the Apollonian side of the higher Greek religion, which had cast a ‘sharp edge of light across [the] gloom’ of an undergrowth of pagan superstition, and from which it had ‘sublimed’ itself (Ren., 162). (In Pater’s allegorics, Apollo often represents the ‘“spiritual form” of sunbeams’ turned ‘exclusively ethical,—the “spiritual form” of inward or intellectual light’ (‘The Marbles of Aegina’, GS, 254). Still, a darker Apollo also appears—demanding and aloof, even sinister.11) This religion found its sensuous forms in the figurative sculpture, temple architecture, and tragic drama that Hegel had described in ‘Religion in the Form of Art’ in the Phenomenology of Mind, a text which Pater mined deeply and repeatedly in ‘Winckelmann’. But if Pater closely followed Hegel’s account he also had to confront its internal quandary. Precisely as sensuous form, classic art must be susceptible to the inexorable dialectical Aufhebung of spirit in art and finally beyond it in the development of modern science and philosophy after art. In the modern world, at

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any rate, classic art should be wholly replaced by the Romantic art described in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics—replaced, that is, by sensuous forms that are commensurable with modern life and consciousness.12 (Following Hegel yet again, Pater took care to recognize the foreshadowings of a post-classic moment within ancient Greek culture—in the later tragedies; in the ‘note of romantic sadness’ in Theocritus (Ren., 178).) But classic art in its ‘high’, ‘pure’, or ‘ideal’ synthesis has not been wholly replaced, and if Pater would have his way—Winckelmann’s way—it never would be replaced. As he put it, in classic art and the classical tradition that (re)generates it the dialectic of spirit in art somehow came in the past (and now continues to come) to a kind of self-conscious self-cessation, a ‘delicate pause’ (Ren., 165)—a delicate pause nonetheless robust enough to ensure an ‘eternal outline’. Commentators have devoted a good deal of attention to this intriguing metaphor.13 Pater employed it partly as a specifically narratological concept; the Paterian equivalents of Lessing’s ‘pregnant moments’, for example, are the ‘exquisite pauses’ in which the painter Giorgione condensed ‘all the interests and effects of a long history . . . in an intense consciousness of the present’ (‘The School of Giorgione’, Ren., 118). I will return to this sense—the temporality of the image—in due course. For the moment we can stay with Pater’s dialectical proposition. According to Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’, as noted, it was the classical Greeks who paused in producing the sensuous form of Idea (the ‘unbroken daylight’ of Apollonian spirituality), proleptically resolving the dialectical paradox of the eventual superfluity of their art—the sense in which it should have undone and outrun itself, to be superseded ineluctably by different constellations of form and commensurate Idea (let alone pure Idea, the Absolute as such). As Pater put it with reference to such High Classical sculptures as the Melian Aphrodite in the Louvre, ‘Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflexion, but was careful not to pass beyond it’. Finding a ‘happy limit’, it did not ‘become too inward’, and avoided precipitating the ‘defiance of form . . . [and] exaggerated idealism’ (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 164) that modern critics will find in the medieval and later arts that became too intellectual, too inward and mystical. Ideal classic art was not ‘self-analytical’ (Ren., 168): thought did not ‘outstrip or lie beyond the proper range of its sensible embodiment’ (Ren., 165), and if form was recognizably ‘saturated’ with its spiritual motive it was

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not yet ‘overcharged’ by it (Ren., 164). Rather, in its relative ‘repose’ supposedly it enabled the figuration of ‘unchanging characteristics’ of man in a ‘first naïve, unperturbed recognition’ by man (Ren., 170). By contrast, modern Romantic art ‘brood[s] with delight over itself ’ (Ren., 168) in ‘cobweb[s] of allusion’, involving ‘double and treble reflexions of the mind upon itself ’ (Ren., 171)—a ‘gaudy, perplexed light’ thrown on the bewilderments of modern life (Ren., 182). Well! we might say, with Pater himself, what ‘supreme good luck’ (Ren., 165) had visited the happily not-too-inward Greeks of the classic age! But ‘good luck’ is a weak explanation in historical criticism. Another master of dialectical narrative in cultural history, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, found himself forced to introduce contingent extra-artistic factors in order to explain (even to explain away) an impossible art, an art dialectically out of place, namely, the highly linear art of the German Nazarenes in Rome in the early nineteenth century—what he counterdialectically had to call a ‘recommencement’ (Neu-Anfang) of a form of pictorial representation that should have been superseded by the painterly styles of the baroque.14 Pater found himself in the same boat. The delicate pause of classical art as an ideal in its own time was a moment in Greek self-reflection made possible by an external condition, namely, the ‘perfect animal nature’ and ‘comely’ life of the Greeks (Ren., 165)—the latter including the possibility of embodied intellectual and moral achievement. This was the Winckelmann (as distinct from the Hegel) speaking in ‘Winckelmann’: to account for the Greek achievement in producing the zenith of ideal beauty in art, the great antiquarian (spiritually Greek himself) had cited the environmental determinations of Greek culture: a favourable climate(!), in which the human body could be maximally visible, lightly dressed, and in the case of young men often naked; the intrinsic beauty of that young male body, cultivated as a bodily work of art in games—‘the severe and chastened grace of the palaestra’, the gymnastic grounds (Ren., 165–6, 155). (By ‘chastened’, Pater meant something like ‘below that degree of intensity at which it must necessarily be transitory’ (Ren. 172)—a feeling under discipline, and, of course, ‘chaste’.) Above all, Winckelmann had credited the ancient Greek culture of admiring and honouring the young male body in poetic praises and artistic images of it. Each new ode to a victor and each new statue of him continued to galvanize a cycle of emulative reproduction, what Winckelmann called Nachahmung: an athlete

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emulated a statue; a sculptor imitated that athlete in bronze or marble; the new statue solicited another athlete’s emulation; and so on. As Pater put it, summing Winckelmann, ‘[t]he beauty of the palaestra, and the beauty of the artist’s workshop, reacted on one another’: the human form is ‘itself one entire medium of spiritual expression’ and sculpture is the ‘perfect medium . . . for [that] one peculiar motive of the imaginative intellect’ (Ren., 166, 168, 169). In his ‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture’ of 1754, Winckelmann had made it clear to readers who were literate in the classics that the cycle of Nachahmung had not only agonistic parameters and purposes—competitive and militaristic—but also pederastic ones—androcentric and homoerotic. And Winckelmann’s essays on beauty (especially on ‘the perception of the beautiful in art’ of 1763) and his letters to friends (a selection was published in 1781 after his shocking murder in 1768) made it clear that as a modern beholder he shared the ancient erotic affection for the beautiful youth/ statue—a point underscored by Goethe in 1805 when he undertook to explain Winckelmann’s capacity to be Greek, to ‘[become] something’ (Ren., 147), opening ‘a new organ for the human spirit’, as Hegel would put it (Ren., 141), in recommencing the aesthetics of classical eros. (To be sure, in Pater’s portrayal Winckelmann was the last ancient classical Greek as it were, and Goethe was the first modern classical Greek—he himself following them both.) Pater had but to allude to Winckelmann’s friendships (Ren., 152–4, 157) to recall the full cycle of Nachahmung— the history of a ‘series of elevated points’ stretching from the victorious Diagoras praised by Pindar to the statues of athletes made by the sculptors Myron and Polycleitus to the lives and aesthetic creations of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Pater themselves. Still, as Pater made clear, in his friendships Winckelmann suffered agonies of homoerotic longing, anger, and loss (Ren., 152–4). Like his Greek predecessors, however, he was never ‘one-sidedly self-analytical’, at any rate about the artistic side of the equation (Ren., 176). For it was (and is) specifically in sculpture—in the moment of sculpture in the overall cycle of Nachahmung that continually regenerates the ideal—that the restless motion of thought, the ‘harmonies, storms, [and] victories, of the unseen and intellectual world’ (Ren., 168), could be figured in ‘suddenly arrested life’ (Ren., 166), a ‘little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure form’ (Ren., 169).

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At risk of strain and contradiction, then, Pater treated Winckelmann both as a subject of erotic feeling at its most tempestuous and as the serene product of his own ‘Greek’ self-becoming through the contemplation and emulation of art, ‘finger[ing] those pagan marbles with unsinged hands’ (Ren., 177). In sum, the strange light of the classical tradition—a reflection from one elevated point to another in the historical series—is the ‘white light’ both of classical Greek sculpture (as it were ‘abstract and colourless’ (Ren., 178) even if painted) and of the vision of moderns like Winckelmann and Goethe (and Pater himself) who can manage to see it with classical eyes, catching ‘the thread of a whole sequence of [artistic] laws in some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair’ (Ren., 154–5).15

Rhythmos: The Configuration of the Pregnant Type We can now move from the dialectical sense of the ‘delicate pause’ of classical Greek art to its correlates in art—its objectification. According to Pater, the delicate pause of the classical tradition was constituted formally in what he called the ‘pregnant types’ configured in classical sculpture (Ren., 170): in a continuous feedback, the temporal pause generates the ideal type—the configuration in space and light—and the type shelters the temporality. ‘With this model,’ as Williams has rightly written, ‘temporal flux may be stabilized in a spatialization, a figure within which fleeting experience may be fixed, secured, contained (and thus objectified as “content”), conserved, and comprehended—but only after time passes.’16 So long as the type is stable, the pause persists, and so long as the pause endures, the type is recognized. Of course, Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’ and related writings in the 1860s were not about classical Greek art per se, and his spatio-temporal principle of the classical ideal—the principle of delicate pause/pregnant type—was forged chiefly in his dialogue with modern aesthetics and criticism. Lene Østermark-Johansen has pointed out that Pater’s invocation of the ‘pregnant type’ in sculpture served partly (perhaps mostly) as a subtle riposte to Lessing’s concept of the ‘pregnant moment’ in pictorial art, whether painting or sculpture; certainly Pater identified the distinctive characteristics of the several arts—painting, sculpture,

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poetry, music—in his own way.17 For my purposes, however, the question again comes down to temporality: how, when, and why does the ‘moment’ become the ‘type’? The moment is a monophase expanded to include immediate (and sometimes more distant) befores and afters. But the type would seem to have an indefinite duration constituted not so much by depiction of definite action (however extended) as by rhythmic composition, opening up possibilities of polyphase representation—a frieze-like panorama of many moments of the type mutually articulated in time, as much like dance and music as like painting or sculpture. Along with many other writers, Pater found the paradigmatic example in the riders of the Parthenon frieze, ‘pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world’ (Ren., 174). But it was not until much later that he attempted a fuller—and a more art-historical—explication of the principle and its artistic exemplifications. In an unfinished project for a history of ancient Greek art that he began in the late 1870s, Pater rooted his established critical terms in their intellectual contexts and prototypes in ancient Greek thought, no doubt because he partly wrote specifically as a Classics don for an undergraduate audience at Oxford. Notably, for example, the idealism of classical sculpture became its Platonism and its abstraction became its Parmenideanism (‘The Marbles of Aegina’, GS, 253), with each strain relative to (and in productive tension with) a background ‘Heraclitanism’—the doctrine (quoted in Greek as Pater’s epigraph to the Conclusion to the first and third editions of The Renaissance) that ‘[a]ll things give way: nothing remaineth’ (see PP, 14).18 For this very reason, Pater’s claim to focus critically on the ‘purely sensuous aspects’ of Greek art (as he averred in ‘The Marbles of Aegina’) sat uneasily with his historicizing reconstruction of its ‘philosophical aspect’—an interest in its ‘ideal or abstract element’ that he had earlier taken to be ‘one-sided’ when pursued by Lessing and other modern critics (GS, 251). After all, Plato could recommend nothing in the Greek painting and sculpture being made in his own time—he preferred the putatively timeless art of Egypt—and it is likely that classical Greek artists, if philosophically versed at all, were attracted to geometricalnumerical system (Pythagoreanism) and perhaps to some version of contemporary phenomenalism (Protagoras). Still, Pater found a middle ground in a range of Greek terms that matched his own descriptive rhetoric for Greek art—his critical perspective as it were translated back into the original Greek (though he left key terms in English).

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In this regard, Pater characterized the ideals of classical Greek sculpture in terms that the Greeks themselves would have applied to human bodily comportment and moral character—terms Pater transferred to artistic form. According to ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, for example, the pedimental sculptures for the temple manifest an ‘embodied equity’ (GS, 254); their ‘subdued and tranquil’ repose—the description in ‘Winckelmann’ after Winckelmann and Hegel—could be explicated, now using specifically Greek language, as moderation, self-control, or ‘temperance’ (sophrosyne), the virtue acclaimed (and embodied) by Socrates in Xenophon’s account of him and generally applied to the behaviour of male citizens in public and male lovers in private (GS, 262–3). (In Kantian aesthetics, we might find such terms used in Kant’s analysis of the teleology of the beautiful when ‘the perfected ideal of beauty’, as Kant hoped, genuinely becomes a ‘symbol of the morally good’—of modesty, benevolence, magnanimousness, and the like.) In ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, Pater alluded initially to the pederastic and homoerotic contexts of Greek cultural production (specifically to Pindar’s odes to victorious youths), and therefore implicitly to the corporeal and moral beauty—the ethically admirable identity—of the male subjects of poetry and sculpture, figured in ‘purged and perfected essence’ as ‘ideal souls’ in the statues of the victors at Olympia (GS, 281). But his emphasis quickly shifted to the formal properties and configurative challenges of making the sculptures as such. ‘For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world’, and ‘there can be no successful evasion of the natural difficulties of the thing to be done—the difficulties of competing with nature itself, or its maker, in that marvellous combination of motion and rest’ (‘Athletic Prizemen’, GS, 282). Pater focused this matter on the artistic phenomenon of ‘severe composition everywhere’ (‘Marbles of Aegina’, GS, 253; original italics)—the artistic action that Cartier-Bresson later emphasized in explaining how a photographer captures the ‘decisive moment’ in ‘a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression’, ‘instinctively fix[ing] a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless’.19 In Pater’s essays on Greek art, then, the modern critical question of delicate pause and pregnant type has retrodictively become the ancient question of the visual–spatial challenge in creating what the Greeks called rhythmos—a

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special ‘combination of motion and rest’ potentially seen (and/or heard) as a sequence, ‘a process [as Cartier-Bresson would later say] unrolling itself before [our] eyes’.20 Carefully following the relevant ancient texts and testimonia, Pater-the-classicist undertook to identify how classical Greek sculptors generated rhythmos, though in the event he wrote only a fragmentary text on what likely would have been his culminating example, already invoked in ‘Winckelmann’: the ‘breaks [and] pauses’ of the frieze of the Parthenon, a work, he said, ‘like liturgic music’.21 As sources for ancient theories of art tend to go, the Graeco-Roman sources for classical Greek ideas about rhythmos in diction, song, dance, architecture, and the plastic arts of painting and sculpture are comparatively plentiful. As such they have attracted clashing interpretations in classical scholarship. In 1917, Eugen Petersen published a thorough review in which he summed up the philological research and critical interpretation since Winckelmann, some of which was known to Pater.22 In the 1870s, Pater had depended mostly on the ancient sources collated by Johannes Overbeck—not on academic scholarship, though he occasionally alluded to certain scholarly opinions, perhaps by following Overbeck’s references to the modern scholarship. But for this very reason he could forward his classicist’s interpretations and translations, albeit interpretations and translations tailored to fit his overall rhetorical tapestry. In the most general sense, rhythmoi can be understood as forms, patterns, shapes, and/or compositions. More narrowly, however, they are forms, patterns, shapes, and/or compositions that have been ordered by temporalized images of action in which repetition is involved, as it were catching its ‘time’ or beat. Not surprisingly, then, Greek and Latin authors often connected rhythmos with geometry, proportion, and/or number. (In Latin rhythmos was generally given the translation numerus, not forma.) When these connections between sensuous form and mathematical regularity were described as objective laws of relation, the Greeks ordinarily would have applied the term symmetria, usually translated as ‘commensurability’. Correlatively, then, rhythmos might be taken to denote the specifically phenomenal aspect and aesthetic status of the organizing procedures and their results, that is, the ‘subjective evaluation of [the objective] laws by the artist’, as the classical art historian J. J. Pollitt has well put the point.23

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With reference specifically to the visual, spatial, and plastic arts, however, it might seem intuitively more natural to speak not so much of ‘time’ and ‘beat’ as of ‘flow’, especially the flow of contour lines and the axes of compositional direction and force. Before Pater, antiquarians and art historians like Winckelmann and Otto Jahn (in his Museum antiker Kleinkunst in 1853) had defined rhythmos in just this sense—as ‘repetition within flow’ (to use Petersen’s phrasing of their consensus) and specifically as the ‘rhythmic flow of lines’ that Jahn’s student Carl Robert and other later nineteenth-century art historians associated with the sculpture of Myron in particular.24 But Pater’s approach departed subtly from the earlier antiquarians. In ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ he noted carefully that ancient Greek arenas for the creation and admiration of the significance and beauty of the human body and for the artistic performance of its corporeal and moral affections included not only the palaestra—the crucible of Nachahmung identified by Winckelmann and in ‘Winckelmann’—but also the ‘sacred dance’ (GS, 255), a topic at the heart of Pater’s concerns in many of his studies of Greek culture and later engaged by such ‘ritualists’ in classical scholarship as Jane Harrison.25 In 1917, Petersen would argue that originally rhythmos denoted the repeated postures of the body in dance. In these terms, the problem for the maker of plastic art was to transfer the concrete expression of rhythmos from music and motion (temporally flowing, physically changing) to sculpture (materially static even if multisided)—a spatial management of the representation of temporal process. (As Pollitt has put it, ‘rhythmos limited space so as to produce form’.) According to Petersen, the early classical sculptors had understood that at a certain point (and/ or at repeated points) a steady compositional limitation of the image of motion can transmute flow into pause: ‘fleeting movements [come] to a temporary halt . . . on a particular position that characterized the movement as a whole’, what Petersen called a Stillstandsmoment (roughly, a ‘standstill-moment’) that had been designed by the sculptors (he argued) on the model of the ‘rests’ in music theorized by Aristotle’s pupil Aristoxenus, our major source for Greek musical theory.26 Pollitt has found Petersen’s suggestion to be ‘interesting and compelling’, regardless of its chronological and philosophical difficulties. But as far as I can tell it has not been much developed by subsequent classical scholars.

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More than thirty years earlier, Pater had an intuition similar to Petersen’s, though without the latter’s philological and musicological specificity. As Pater reminded his readers, the ancient sources had related that the sculptor Myron had treated his model athletes as a natural force (anima), as an ‘animal’ not expressing the ‘sensations of the mind’, the movements of the ‘reasonable soul’ (animus)—for an athlete’s selfsensations of his mind (presumably self-analysing) would merely perturb him (‘Athletic Prizemen’, GS, 286–7). Instead, ‘like a child finding little by little the use of its limbs’, the athlete enacts ‘the testimony of [his] senses, at a definite moment’ (GS, 283). In part following Quintilian’s use of the statue as an analogy for the harmony of motion and rest in discourse, and well aware that Pliny suggested Myron had invented a greater number of formal patterns than his contemporaries, Pater wrote that Myron’s Discobolus displays the ‘moment of rest . . . between two opposed motions’ (GS, 287); ‘for a moment’ the discus-thrower more or less ‘rests . . . between the animal and spiritual worlds’ (GS, 288).27 Ever since, most art historians of early classical Greek art have not deviated from Pater’s description of rhythmos in the statue, whether or not they have read it. Mostly sifting the same texts collated by Overbeck and interpreted by Pater and Petersen, Pollitt writes, for example, that the Discobolus ‘above all illustrates rhythmos as it was produced in a rest. The figure is represented at the farthermost point in his backswing, thus, like the pendulum of a clock, suggesting to the viewer both the fact of the backswing and the potentiality of the forward swing.’28 Or as Andrew F. Stewart has put it, whether or not Myron had actually looked to the ‘pregnant pauses’ that ordered Greek acting and dancing he ‘created rhythmoi evocative of the entire process [of throwing the discus] . . . a brilliant and compelling synopsis that narrates the entire event with unmatched compactness and economy’.29

The Temporal Disparity of Pause and Type Notwithstanding the dancer’s and the athlete’s flow of motion and rests, the sculptor’s composition of rhythmos in the figure can serve as ‘the type, the rectified essence, of many such [dancers and athletes], at the most pregnant, the essential, moment, of the exercise of their natural powers, of what they really were’ (‘Athletic Prizemen’, GS, 289–90). This is not because the discus-thrower (or the runner) thinks rhythm; as

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noted, he simply is ‘veritable rhythmus’ (GS, 282). (As Cartier-Bresson would put it, ‘photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things’.30) If the athlete is depicted in the ‘most pregnant, the essential, moment, of the exercise of [his] natural powers’, and can thus serve as ‘type, the rectified essence, of many such’, it is only because Myron’s ‘reasoned memory’ has supervened. There are two essences here, then: on the one side the natural essence of the athlete’s pregnant moment and on the other side the ‘rectified essence’ of the sculptural type, the sculptor’s collation of images of many such youths seen in such moments ‘sub specie eternitatis, under the eternal form of art’ (GS, 290)—a line that could have been written by Arthur Schopenhauer or George Santayana. In the Winckelmannian paradigm of classical art, these two essences are recursively entwined in the continuous cycle of Nachahmung. But Pater’s account of Myron begins to prise apart ‘moment’ and ‘type’, which hitherto he tried to hold together. Indeed, Pater’s characterization of Polycleitus, Myron’s contemporary, starkly exposes the spatiotemporal conundrum of the artistic project in question. Known as the author of a rule book of sculpture, a Canon (now lost), possibly based on numerical-geometric principles, Polycleitus (Pater said) could pursue an ‘academic’ practice—a practice as it were driven exclusively by the internal rules of art as canonically formalized—and his ‘growing readiness of hand’ with its formal permutations potentially enabled him to portray a ‘bewildering infinitude of motion’ (GS, 293–4). In order to be a ‘modest priest’—temperate and respectful—of the ‘worship of the body’, he therefore had voluntarily to ‘pause’, to ‘hesitate’ in self-exacting restraint, in order to enjoy the depiction of rest, however fleeting (GS, 294–5). For only there can type and tradition be sustained: in ‘bewildering infinitude of motion’ there is neither type nor tradition, or at any rate there is no classical type and tradition. Let us transpose this account from ancient to modern times—to the eternal classical moment today. If we re-enact the feelings of Myron, Polycleitus, and their models and beholders, a Paterian and aestheticist melancholy becomes palpable, a distinctive inflection of Winckelmann’s erotic and archaeological ‘enthusiasm’ (Ren., 152). Along the Cherwell and the Cam and on the cricket grounds of the universities, living prototypes of classical Greek statues might be found, whether or not a Socrates is at hand to converse with them or a Myron to portray them.

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But they are not the tradition out of which they spring and to which they contribute. ‘For though they pass on from age to age the type of what is pleasantest to look on, which, as type, is indeed eternal, it is, of course, but for an hour that it rests with any one of them individually’ (GS, 296–7). Here pause and type are mutually positioned as maximally distant: on the one side, the beauty of the athlete persisting ‘but for an hour’—‘flashing up . . . only to disappear in the instant one tries to grasp it’, to use Adorno’s words—and, on the other, the artistic type enduring forever.

Notes 1. Aesthetic Theory (1970), ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, tr. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), p. 6. 2. Studies of the Greek Poets, 2nd series (2nd edn., 1879), p. 400. 3. G. E. Lessing, Laocoon or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), tr. William A. Steel, rev. H. B. Nisbet, in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 98–9, 119. According to James, the ‘thickened present’ lasts three seconds (Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890), II, pp. 608–9). For ‘monophase’ and ‘polyphase’ images and the ‘small window in time’, see Werner Wolf, ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman et al. (2005), pp. 431–5; Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘Narrativity in Various Media’, in The Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (2nd edn., Berlin, 2014), p. 273. 4. For the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse, a lucid overview (with full references) remains E. H. Gombrich’s ‘Moment and Movement in Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), 293–306. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Images à la sauvette (Paris, 1952), tr. as The Decisive Moment (New York, 1952); for commentary, see Estelle Jussim, Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image (New York, 1989). Useful studies of the modern discourse include Louis Rose, The Survival of Images: Art Historians, Psychoanalysts, and the Ancients (Detroit, 2001), esp. pp. 15–38 (on ‘image-making and movement’), and Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th and 20th-Century Western Philosophy (Aldershot, 2008). 5. Carolyn Williams, ‘Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama’, in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York, 2004), p. 137. 6. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), esp. pp. 17–28 on ‘the moment’s story’ (quotations from pp. 27, 20).

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7. As Adorno also put it, ‘To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill’—an idea that might have already ‘nourished the central concept of Lessing’s aesthetics, that of the “pregnant moment”’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 72, 84, 177). For useful commentary, see Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute: NineteenthCentury German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, 2002), and Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012), esp. pp. 236–50 on ‘movement, time, [and] music’. 8. Carolyn Williams, ‘Walter Pater’s Impressionism’, in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY, 2001), pp. 99, 85. 9. R. G. Collingwood (with J. N. L. Myres), Roman Britain and the English Settlements (Oxford, 1937), pp. 252–62; see also his An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939), pp. 137–45. 10. Williams, ‘Pater’s Impressionism’, p. 82. 11. See esp. William F. Shuter, ‘Pater’s “Grudge Against Apollo”: Mythology and Pathology in “Apollo in Picardy”’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 44: 2 (2001), 181–98; Robert Fowler, Chapter 13 in this volume. Pater’s Apollo is certainly not Matthew Arnold’s figure of ‘sweetness and light’. 12. For discussion of Pater’s interpretation of Hegel’s view of classical art, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 2007), chapters 5 and 9, and Prettejohn, ‘The Modernism of Frederic Leighton’, in English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester, 2000), pp. 31–48. 13. William F. Shuter has reviewed the many appearances of ‘pause’ and ‘pauses’ in Pater’s rhetoric; in his characterization of Pater as a ‘periegetic’ critic he goes so far as to say that Pater himself ‘is always pausing’: ‘the creature of a later age, [Pater] revisits the places in which the past is stored and secreted and assumes the function of their interpreter or exegete’ (Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 28–9). 14. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (7th edn. 1923), tr. M. D. Hottinger (1932), pp. 232–4. 15. Much could be said about Paterian ‘white light’ not only in relation to form, surface, and colour in sculpture but also in relation to gender, sexuality, spirituality, and divinity; see Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 67–73 (on Pater’s rhetoric of ‘Hellenistic [sic] light’). Not surprisingly, the first mention of ‘white light’ occurred in Pater’s comments in ‘Diaphaneitè’ on the diaphanous character of Goethe, his paradigm in ‘Winckelmann’ of a modern classical Greek:

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16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

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despite the ‘tumultuary richness’ of Goethe’s nature, one can discern a ‘thread of pure white light’ in him (MS, 254). Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 91. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), pp. 77–8. For relevant studies, see Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Walter Pater Across the Arts, ed. Elicia Clements and Lesley Higgins (Basingstoke, 2010). See Walter Pater, ‘Plato and the Doctrine of Motion’, PP, 5–26. Donald L. Hill has pointed out that Pater’s citation of the Heraclitan dictum (in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance) was meant to describe modern philosophy (in the notes to his edition of The Renaissance, Ren., 451–2); as Shuter puts it, ‘it [had] occurred to [Pater] that modern philosophy was anticipated in its conclusion by an ancient thinker’ (Rereading Walter Pater, p. 62). Cartier-Bresson, Decisive Moment, pp. 14, 8. Overall, Cartier-Bresson’s phrasings echo Pater’s; I like to think that Cartier-Bresson had read him. Cartier-Bresson, Decisive Moment, p. 2. Quoted by Østermark-Johansen, Pater and Sculpture, p. 77, from Pater’s MS fragment on the sculptures of the Parthenon, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard. Eugen Petersen, ‘Rhythmus’, Abhandlungen der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Phil.-Hist. Kl. NF 16 (1917), 1–104. J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, Terminology (New Haven, 1974), pp. 221–2. Throughout this and the next paragraphs I depend on Pollitt’s careful sifting of etymological and philological evidence, though I reduce it to its barest bones. Pollitt, Ancient View, pp. 174 (quoting Petersen), 413 (for Winckelmann and Jahn), 411 (citing Robert). For Rhythmus and art historians such as Wölfflin, see Hans Hermann Russack, Der Begriff des Rhythmus bei den deutschen Kunsthistorikern des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Weida, 1910). According to Harrison, classical sculptures retained their ritual background as ‘rites caught and fixed and frozen’ (Ancient Art and Ritual (Cambridge, 1913), p. 197). Pollitt, Ancient View, p. 225. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 2. 8–12; Pliny, Natural History, 34. 57. On Pliny’s characterization of Myron’s many ‘rhythmics’ (numerosior), see Pollitt, Ancient View, pp. 135, 335. As Russack pointed out in Der Begriff des Rhythmus, later nineteenth-century art historians could take advantage of experimental studies of rhythm conducted in Gustav Fechner’s physiological aesthetics. Even if Pater did not read Fechner, the English art writer

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and the German psychologist had a common interest in the ‘interdependence’ of the inner and outer worlds, as Perry Meisel has put it (‘Psychoanalysis and Aestheticism’, in The Literary Freud (2007), p. 91; see also Anna Budziak, Text, Body, and Indeterminacy: Doppelgänger Selves in Pater and Wilde (Newcastle, 2008), p. 101). 28. Pollitt, Ancient View, p. 227; compare his description of the ‘frozen moment’ at the beginning of the chariot race portrayed by the sculptures of the temple at Olympia (Art and Experience in Classical Greece (New Haven, 1972), pp. 33–5, and 54–60 for the phenomenon at the temple at Aegina). 29. Andrew F. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration, 2 vols (New Haven, 1990), I, p. 148. For perspicuous discussion of this ecphrastic tradition in classical studies, see Richard T. Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago, 2011), pp. 11–19. 30. Cartier-Bresson, Decisive Moment, p. 7; my italics.

PART 2

Fictions

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Introduction to Part 2 Pater pioneered a new literary form which he called the ‘imaginary portrait’, a hybrid of fiction and critical essay that had a considerable influence, first on Wilde and Vernon Lee, and then on the Modernist generation. In these experimental and complex works, Pater used fiction to investigate the past in a way that was different from a scholarly essay but nonetheless intellectually probing. Pater published a number of such imaginary portraits independently, as well as collecting four of them in a volume with that title; and it is possible to see his major novel as an agglomeration of such portraits or as a vastly extended one. Marius the Epicurean is in intertextual dialogue, in a characteristically oblique way, with contemporary novels set in antiquity, as well as anticipating many of the strategies of Modernist fiction; but it also represents a substantial scholarly research project on a period which is now a very fashionable object of study and which today we generally call the ‘Second Sophistic’. Pater incorporates both Latin and Greek quotations (not all as yet identified) and numerous translations of texts from the period, including passages of Marcus Aurelius, Fronto, Apuleius, and Lucian. This part starts with three chapters on how Pater uses different sorts of classical material in Marius. Much in the novel is not made explicit; thus its first chapter contains a quotation from the elegist Tibullus, but Duncan Kennedy in his chapter shows how Pater’s engagement with this author (not a particular Victorian favourite) goes far beyond this one quotation, being profound, exact, and scholarly. Richard Rutherford explores Pater’s use in Marius of sources relating to Marcus Aurelius for his presentation of the emperor, one of the novel’s major characters. Shelley Hales looks at Pater’s treatment of Roman houses (both pagan and Christian) and the domestic sphere. In the final chapter on Marius James I. Porter, developing the view of Charles Martindale and Stefano Evangelista that Pater is a sort of reception-theorist avant la lettre, argues

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that today’s scholars of classical reception can learn much by pondering the lessons of the novel. And Pater in his depictions of antiquity is also attentive to the multiple layers of ancient history, to reception within antiquity. This part ends with a close reading by Caroline Vout of one of three shorter imaginary portraits that employs a classical theme: ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (another, ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, is discussed by Lene Østermark-Johansen in Part 3).

5 Tibullus in Marius the Epicurean or How to Read Pater’s Fiction Duncan Kennedy

The first classical author explicitly alluded to, and quoted, in Marius the Epicurean is the Augustan elegist Tibullus (d. 19 BC). His presence is striking, since the texts the novel engages with are predominantly those of the second century AD. There are passing references to his Augustan contemporaries Virgil and Horace, but the prominence given to a Roman poet who had fallen so completely out of fashion in nineteenth-century England, in both literary and scholarly terms, is remarkable. As the American Kirby Flower Smith, a rare enthusiast, put it in the introduction to his commentary in 1913, the eighteenth century had been far more appreciative of his work: ‘In this age of Pope, Watteau, and Voltaire, of Dresden shepherdesses and pastoral operas, of petit-maîtres and cœurs sensibles, the prominence of Tibullus in the literatures of Europe was more marked than it has ever been except in his own time.’1 His elegies were particularly admired in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, influencing Goethe (himself author of Römische Elegien) and the Göttinger Dichterbund,2 and had a central place in German classical scholarship. There had been a series of editions produced by Christian Gottlob Heyne, an avowed devotee and sympathetic commentator, between 1755 and 1810.3 The last major commentary had been Ludolph Dissen’s of 1835, but the text had been edited by the great critic Karl Lachmann (1829), and the manuscript

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tradition importantly elucidated in the recent edition of Emil Baehrens (1878). By contrast in Victorian England, when not simply ignored,4 Tibullus could be treated dismissively. Dean Stanley wrote of Thomas Arnold of Rugby: ‘The Greek tragedians, though reading them constantly, and portions of them with the liveliest admiration, he thought on the whole greatly overrated; and still more, the second-rate Latin poets, but whom he seldom used; and some, such as Tibullus and Propertius, never.’5 This period had produced but one translation in Britain, that of the largely forgotten James Cranstoun (1872). That Pater should reject such philistine attitudes in favour of the judgement of those he admired, perhaps Goethe above all, is not surprising, for the poetry of Tibullus was transmitted from the ancient world with glowing testimonies to its qualities. References to Tibullus by his own contemporaries mostly occur in his own genre of Roman love elegy and thus tend to highlight the erotic aspects of his poetry.6 In particular, Ovid mentions him on a number of occasions and marked his early death with an elegy (Amores, 3. 9) that playfully and affectionately celebrates some of the most characteristic themes of his erotic poetry. Over the next century, his standing as a love poet remained high. Indeed, at the end of the first century AD, the rhetorical theorist Quintilian had suggested in his survey of the qualities of the major Greek and Latin authors that Tibullus, tersus atque elegans (‘polished and elegant’), had a claim to be the pre-eminent Roman elegist (Institutio Oratoria, 10. 1. 93). There is no testimony to his reception in the second century, the setting of Marius, when, as the novel suggests, literary tastes were undergoing profound changes, towards what Pater calls Euphuism (chapter 6). Pater’s use of what had attracted many admirers of the poet’s work in his own time, the eroticism, is so subtle as to easily escape modern readers, as we shall see. Moreover, he exploits a very different, and much more serious, characterization of the poet himself that is found in Horace (Epistles, 1. 4) and seems likewise to have been overlooked. Nonetheless, Pater found not only in the content but also, crucially, in the form of Tibullan elegy resources from which he could develop distinctive aspects of exposition in Marius, as well as in the characterization of its protagonist and his subtle interaction with the novel’s narrator. It is to focus attention on the form of these texts, for reasons that should emerge in the course of the argument, that I usually refer to the novel’s ‘narrator’, rather than ‘Pater’, just as I shall use the

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phrase ‘the poem’s speaker’, rather than ‘Tibullus’, when referring to poems that exclusively view their world from the perspectives voiced by their first-person protagonist. If we are to appreciate how to read Pater’s fiction, one way is to try to match the depth and sophistication of the engagement which the narrator of Marius has with both the form and the content of these elegies, and to track the distinctively ‘Tibullan’ sensibility with which he endows Marius. At the opening of chapter 1, the narrator discourses on the ‘older and purer forms of paganism’, which he calls ‘the religion of Numa’, and which survived ‘in places remote from town-life’. ‘Glimpses of such a survival,’ he continues, ‘we may catch below the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage’ (ME, i. 3, ch. 1). This reference to ‘the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry’ signals a distancing from a reception of Tibullus’ poetry as prettified or idyllic in favour of a deeper undercurrent of sentiment. He goes on to cite Tibullus, 1. 3. 33–4, glossing it ‘—he prays, with unaffected seriousness’: At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:

He forbears to translate or to offer a context, but the couplet expresses the wish of the poem’s speaker (who represents himself as having fallen ill on campaign far away from home and believing himself to be on the point of death) to be able to worship the household gods of his ancestors (patrios celebrare Penates) and to offer incense each month (menstrua thura) to the ancient divinity of the hearth (antiquo . . . Lari). The couplet is expressive of a desire (characteristic of this speaker) to seek solace in times of trouble in nostalgia, specifically focused on domestic ritual: the Penates and Lares were the guardian deities of the household often housed in a shrine by the hearth.7 The narrator continues: ‘Something liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice’ (i. 4). The reference here is to the relatively short second elegy of book 2, which celebrates the birthday, and perhaps also the wedding, of its addressee, Cornutus. Poetic details of old Roman religious usage and ‘something liturgical’ are the explicit motives for reference to this poem, but the narrator does not allude to it again. Rather, chapter 1 is dominated by his description of the Ambarvalia, which takes its cue from the first elegy of

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book 2, where the speaker represents himself as celebrating a ritual on his country estate, with himself taking on the role of celebrant of the ritual, just as ‘the lad Marius . . . the head of his house, took a leading part in the ceremonies of the day’ (i. 8). The form of Tibullus, 2.1 is, precisely, ‘liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words’, some examples of which are emphasized in the text which follows. The poem consists solely of the words of its firstperson speaker, which performatively enact the ritual through imperatives and jussive subjunctives, and present it as taking place in ordered sequence as we read (2. 1. 1–18): Quisquis adest, faveat: fruges lustramus et agros ritus ut a prisco traditus exstat avo. Bacche, veni, dulcisque tuis e cornibus uva pendeat, et spicis tempora cinge, Ceres. luce sacra requiescat humus, requiescat arator, et grave suspenso vomere cesset opus. solvite vincla iugis: nunc ad praesepia debent plena coronato stare boves capite. omnia sint operata deo: non audeat ulla lanificam pensis imposuisse manum. vos quoque abesse procul iubeo, discedat ab aris cui tulit hesterna gaudia nocte Venus. casta placent superis: pura cum veste venite et manibus puris sumite fontis aquam. cernite fulgentes ut eat sacer agnus ad aras vinctaque post olea candida turba comas. di patrii, purgamus agros, purgamus agrestes: vos mala de nostris pellite limitibus.

5

10

15

Whoever is present, keep silent. We purify the crops and fields in the ritual handed down from our ancestors of old. Come, Bacchus, and let the sweet grape cluster hang from your horns, and, Ceres, bind your temples with corn-ears. On this holy day let the ground rest, let the ploughman rest. (5) Hang up the ploughshare and let heavy work cease. Loose the straps from the yokes; now by the laden manger the oxen should stand with garlanded heads. Let all things be at the service of the god; none should look to lay her hand on wool to spin it. (10) You too I order to stand away—depart from the altar any to whom Venus brought pleasures yesterday night. Purity is welcome to the powers above: come in garments that are clean, and take water from the spring with hands that are clean. See how to the gleaming altar goes the sacred lamb, (15) and behind the

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household in white, hair bound with olive. Gods of our ancestors, we cleanse the lands, we cleanse the people of the lands: outside our boundaries drive all evil.

Direct speech is eschewed in Marius, and the young Marius does not similarly enact the ritual. The narrator’s paraphrase shifts the details he selects to third-person narration, but the repeated present tenses similarly conjure up the ritual as taking place before the reader’s eyes: At the appointed time all work ceases [cf. Tibullus, 2. 1. 5, 9–10]; the instruments of labour lie untouched [cf. 2. 1. 6, 7], hung with wreaths of flowers [cf. 2. 1. 8], while masters and servants together go in solemn procession [cf. 2. 1. 15–16] along the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose blood is presently to be shed [cf. 2. 1. 15–16] for the purification from all natural [cf. 2. 1. 11–14] or supernatural taint [cf. 2. 1. 17–18] of the lands they have ‘gone about’. (ME, i. 6)

‘[A]ll natural . . . taint’ draws a discreet veil over the explicit detail the poem’s speaker introduces to suggest the broader narrative context of everyday domestic life in which the ritual takes place: the abstinence from sexual activity the previous night (2. 1. 11–12). The inverted commas around ‘gone about’ are an early opportunity for the narrator of Marius to assert a scholarly competence. The commentators on Tibullus debate whether the ritual enacted in the poem is the Feriae Sementivae (or Paganalia) celebrated in January or the Ambarvalia celebrated in May. In the etymology he offers (amb-arva-lia suggests ‘about the fields’, which is probably also allusively referenced in Tibullus, 2. 1. 1 and 17–18), he makes the basis for his own judgement clear. Walter Pater had clearly spent his time in the library to good effect following up recent research on the Ambarvalia, though the exact limits of his enquiries cannot be definitively established; the details to which the narrator draws attention in any case subserve the artistic aims of the novel. The narrator’s antiquarian interest in the ritual certainly seems to go beyond the sensations and ideas it inspires in the young Marius that are the focus of the latter part of the opening chapter: ‘The day of the “little” or private Ambarvalia was come, to be celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it, as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in the interest of the whole state’ (ME, i. 6). There is only one reference to the Arval Brothers in the literature of the Roman Republic (Varro, De Lingua Latina, 5. 85), and their renewed prominence at the time of Tibullus has been attributed to Augustus’

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revival of numerous old Roman religious institutions, as the narrator acknowledges: ‘More than a century and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but the restoration of religious usages, and their retention where they still survived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence of imperial example’ (ME, i. 5). Not merely imperial example, but imperial patronage as well, as membership of such an exclusive body (the number of Arval Brothers was restricted to twelve, appointed for life) was a sign of particular favour. The sacrifices of the priestly college of the Fratres Arvales were associated with their sacred grove situated five miles outside Rome along the Via Campana, the site of the Temple of Dea Dia. In his description of the decoration during the Ambarvalia of ‘the quaint images of the gods—Ceres and Bacchus’ (the images mentioned in Tibullus, 2. 1. 3–4), the narrator adds ‘and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia’ (ME, i. 7). Inscriptions on marble tablets related to the activities of the Arval Brothers (the so-called Acta Arvalia) had been fastened to the walls of this temple; substantial fragments were excavated by the epigraphist Wilhelm Henzen between 1866 and 1869 and published by him in 1874.8 Preserved in these records for the year AD 218, though dating from remote antiquity, is the song sung at the ritual, the carmen arvale, to which the narrator alludes: ‘The old Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long since become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in the hall, together with the family records’ (i. 6–7). The distinction between the private and the official Ambarvalia seems to be subtly touched upon in Tibullus 2. 1. Following the conclusion of the sacrifice (2. 1. 27–36), the speaker enjoins the breaking open of good wines to toast his eminent patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, who is explicitly described as ‘absent’ (absentis, 2. 1. 32). Tibullus’ commentators had debated the reasons for this absence: thus Heyne assumed that the reference to Messalla’s triumph over the tribes of Aquitania in 2. 1. 33–4 suggested that he was still away on campaign.9 However, the Acta Arvalia had cast possible new light upon this, as the name of Messalla turns up in the records, suggesting that he was a member of the exclusive brotherhood. It may be that his absence was associated with involvement in the official rituals and Tibullus is obliquely honouring this signal mark of his patron’s status.10 Was Pater aware of this? Impossible to say.

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What we are reading is a novel, not a scholarly article, and its form is to be respected. The character of the narrator of Marius is marked by his alighting upon virtually every detail the speaker of 2. 1 gives of the Ambarvalia, but equally by his never evincing interest in reconstructing the immediate historical circumstances of Tibullus himself.11 We have been speaking of the narrator’s antiquarian interests here, but he could be seen as focalizing these interests through Marius. In a later chapter in the novel, which purports to be an extract from the journal Marius kept of ‘conversations with himself ’ (ME, ii. 172, ch. 25)—and so notionally not mediated by the narrator—Marius recounts how when he first came to Rome he attended the ceremony of the Arval College. Marius himself characterizes the earthen vessels used in the ritual as ‘veritable relics of the old religion of Numa’, echoing the very phrase on the opening page of the novel. The comments of Marius that follow are themselves shot through with reminiscences of Tibullus and suggest that his responses have been prompted by his own reading of the elegist: ‘They were, in fact, cups or vases of burnt clay, rude in form: and the religious veneration thus offered to them expressed men’s desire to give honour to a simpler age, before iron had found place in human life: the persuasion that that age was worth remembering: a hope that it might come again’ (ii. 179). This is an amalgam of two Tibullan passages. The first comes from 1. 1. 37–40: adsitis, divi, neu vos e paupere mensa dona nec e puris spernite fictilibus. fictilia antiquus primum sibi fecit agrestis pocula, de facili composuitque luto. Be with me, gods: and do not despise gifts from a poor man’s table and on clean earthenware. Of earth were the drinking-cups which a countryman in ancient times first made for himself, shaping them from pliant clay.

When Marius refers to ‘a simpler age, before iron had found place in human life’ and muses ‘[t]hat a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or the dream of some, in every period’ (ME, ii. 179), he seems to recall Tibullus, 1. 10, in which the speaker asks, punning ruefully on the Latin words for ‘savage’ and ‘iron-hearted’ (1. 10. 1–2): ‘Who was it who first produced terrifying swords? How ferous he was— no, ferrous is the word!’ (quis fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses? | quam ferus et vere ferreus fuit!) He imagines a distant past in which ‘there were no wars, when a beechwood cup stood beside the feast’ (nec bella

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fuerunt, | faginus astabat cum scyphus ante dapes, 1. 10. 7–8); ‘I wish my life were in that age’ (tunc mihi vita foret, 1. 10. 11). We shall return in due course to consider further the interplay between the responses to Tibullus of Marius and his narrator. The figure of the young Marius is to some extent played off against the self-representation of the speaker we find in the poetry of Tibullus. At the beginning of chapter 2, we are told that Marius’ estate ‘had come down to him much curtailed’ (ME, i. 14), as the speaker represents his own estate in Tibullus, 1. 1. 19–20: ‘You, my Lares, receive your gifts also—guardians of an estate now poor, though prosperous once’ (vos quoque, felicis quondam, nunc pauperis agri | custodes, fertis munera vestra, Lares). But the speaker’s self-representation also suggests temperamental differences in Marius. During the Ambarvalia, it is said of Marius: One thing only distracted him—a certain pity at the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial victims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher’s work, such as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then present certainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted them on a religious pretext. (ME, i. 9)

The narrator here alludes to Tibullus, 2. 1. 25–6, a couplet that marks the climax of the rite in an act of divination as it robustly invites visual attention to the innards of the victim as indications of the favour of the gods: ‘My prayers will be fulfilled: do you see in the entrails that bode well how the liver sends a message that the gods are pleased?’ (eventura precor: viden ut felicibus extis | significet placidos nuntia fibra deos?) The dramatic enactment of the Ambarvalia in Tibullus, 2. 1 includes not only the religious ritual but also the associated activities of the holiday: copious drinking and the breaking at nightfall of the ritual celibacy that has been part of the occasion are integral features of the speaker’s evocation of the occasion. Thus immediately after the sacrifice follows the instruction to break out fine wines and drink deeply without inhibition (2. 1. 27–30): nunc mihi fumosos veteris proferte Falernos consulis et Chio solvite vincla cado. vina diem celebrent: non festa luce madere est rubor, errantes et male ferre pedes. Now bring me out smoked Falernians of a vintage year, and break the seal on the jar of Chian. Celebrate the day with wines: on a festal day, it is no shame to be sodden and lose control of unsteady feet.

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By contrast in Marius, ‘Old wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper in the great kitchen’, whilst ‘[t]he young Marius himself took but a very sober part in the noisy feasting’ (ME, i. 11). In Tibullus, 2. 1 the day ends under the influence of Cupid (67–90) who, it is suggested, can inflict erotic madness on young and old alike (73–4). But not on Marius: ‘A devout, regretful after-taste of what had been really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished took him early away that he might the better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the celebration of the day’ (ME, i. 11). At the end of chapter 1, we are left with the image of Marius in bed alone, but surrounded by his household gods. Those gods too are to be found in the poems of Tibullus. At the end of the first paragraph of chapter 1, talking of the old pagan religion, the narrator speaks of ‘that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines’ (ME, i. 4). This paraphrases Tibullus, 1. 10. 19–20: ‘People kept faith better in those days, when a wooden god stood humbly adorned in a tiny shrine’ (tunc melius tenuere fidem, cum paupere cultu | stabat in exigua ligneus aede deus). But the broader context of this poem seems also of relevance to ways in which the sensibility of Marius is shown to develop as he grows from boy to man. The poetry of Tibullus repeatedly presents fantasies of impending death from a first-person perspective: death in war or death from illness, coloured (often with indulgent self-regard) by the imagined reactions of friends or lovers—death ‘spectated’ in such a way as to provide some present comfort or reassurance as well as a subjective sense of the magnitude of the loss. Tibullus, 1. 10 is a variation of this, its first-person speaker, faced with the prospect of going to war, harking back to an imagined age in the past when there was no war (11–14): tunc mihi vita foret, {vulgi{ nec tristia nossem arma nec audissem corde micante tubam. nunc ad bella trahor, et iam quis forsitan hostis haesura in nostro tela gerit latere. I wish my life were in that age; I would not have known grim warfare or heard the trumpet-call with beating heart. Now I am dragged to war; and perhaps some foe already bears the weapon that is to be embedded in my side.

He asks his ancestral Lares to preserve him now: ‘you are the very ones who watched over me when as a little boy I scampered before your feet’

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(sed patrii servate Lares: aluistis et idem, | cursarem vestros cum tener ante pedes, 1. 10. 15–16). The prospect of imminent suffering and death prompts, but simultaneously overshadows, this sentimental recollection of a childhood free from care, which is picked up in further vignettes of humble domesticity involving small sons and daughters (cf. 1. 10. 24) that emphasize the disruption warfare brings to the continuity of rural working life and bonds between the generations. Thus in 1. 10. 39–42, he says the one who really deserves to be extolled is not a soldier but ‘he whom, with the children he has begotten, creeping old age steals up on in his humble cottage. He herds his sheep, his son the lambs; his wife prepares hot water for her weary man’ (quin potius laudandus hic est quem prole parata | occupat in parva pigra senecta casa? | ipse suas sectatur oves, at filius agnos; | et calidam fesso comparat uxor aquam); and in 1. 10. 51–2, apparently describing the journey home from a ritual celebration, ‘the countryman, himself far from sober, drives back from the grove his wife and children in his cart’ (rusticus e lucoque vehit, male sobrius ipse | uxorem plaustro progeniemque domum). Although there is no explicit allusion to these passages, the sentiments there resonate with the tone of a recurrent theme in Marius, a poignancy associated with children observed from an adult awareness of their innocence and their capacity to induce a civilizing response. They are filtered through the sensibility of Marius as we read his ‘own’ words in the ‘journal’ of chapter 25, where he associates the affection of parents and children with an ‘age of gold’: I notice sometimes what I conceive to be the precise character of the fondness of the roughest working-people for their young children, a fine appreciation, not only of their serviceable affection, but of their visible graces: and indeed, in this country, the children are almost always worth looking at. I see daily, in fine weather, a child like a delicate nosegay, running to meet the rudest of brickmakers as he comes from work. She is not at all afraid to hang upon his rough hand: and through her, he reaches out to, he makes his own, something from that strange region, so distant from him yet so real, of the world’s refinement . . . There, surely, is a touch of the secular gold, of a perpetual age of gold. (ME, ii. 180–1)

The poignancy of the relationship of parents and children is an insistent theme in Marius: ‘the feigned cheer of the mother who sets her last morsels before her famished child as for a feast’ (i. 116, ch. 7); the death of Marcus Aurelius’ young son (ii. 56, ch. 18); the graves of the children

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in the catacombs (ii. 101, ch. 21); the funeral of the child in the house of Cecilia (ii. 187–9, ch. 26)—the list is a long one, and what for Marius in his own thoughts, with their Tibullan inflexions, is ‘a touch of the secular gold’ takes an increasingly insistent Christian colouring, as the ‘visionary scene’ of Cecilia with her ‘little . . . child in her arms’ (ii. 105, ch. 21) starts to fuse with that of the image ‘discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine Sibyl, amid the aurora of a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and the Child, just then rising upon the world like the dawn!’ (ii. 113–14, ch. 22). Marius emerges as an altogether deeper and more reflective character than the vacillating fantasist that is the first-person speaker of the elegies. However, the ancient literary tradition gives us two contrasting images of Tibullus, one focusing on the character represented in the poems, the other on the poet who has fashioned them. The former dominates Ovid, Amores, 3. 9, a tribute to the poet in the wake of his death. Ovid presents an affectionately humorous take on Tibullus’ self-representation as a lover in his elegies, with Delia and Nemesis, the mistresses he names in books 1 and 2 respectively, squabbling over the poet’s funeral pyre, Nemesis claiming that it was her hand he was holding as he was dying (me tenuit moriens deficiente manu, 58)—whereas in Tibullus, 1. 1. 59–60, to which Ovid alludes, the lover fantasizes gazing at Delia and holding her hand in his final hour (te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora; | te teneam moriens deficiente manu). This tradition gives us the Tibullus of scholarly interpretation in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the playful poet given to strings of ingenious wordplay, and the adroit representation of the comically and pathetically self-deluding protagonist of the elegies, much given to erotic wish fulfilment and self-indulgently contemplating his own demise. However, the Tibullus we encounter in Marius is rather the one coloured by Horace’s portrait of an ‘Albius’ who cannot be definitively identified but has been generally taken since antiquity to be the elegist.12 Horace distances ‘Albius’ somewhat from the persona we find in the elegies. In Odes, 1. 33. 1–4, Horace chides him for unrequited erotic longing, and for writing self-pitying elegies: ‘Albius, you shouldn’t grieve too much when you think of cruel Glycera, or keep singing plaintive elegies, wondering why, trust wronged, someone younger outshines you.’ Scholarship points to the problem that neither ‘Glycera’ nor the precise scenario Horace depicts are found in the poems of Tibullus transmitted to us. Nonetheless, the depiction of Albius

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and the teasing tone seem consistent with the more substantial portrait in the Epistles (1. 4), a collection of poems addressed to individual friends that takes an eclectic approach to the philosophical challenge of living a good life: Albius, fair critic of my ‘chats’, what shall I say you are doing now in the country at Pedum? Writing something to surpass the works of Cassius of Parma? Or strolling silently amid the healthful woods, and giving your thoughts to all that is worthy of one wise and good? (5) You were never a body without a soul. The gods have given you looks, the gods have given you wealth, and the art of enjoying them. What more would a fond nurse pray for her sweet charge, who, like you, is able to show wisdom and to speak of what he feels, and to whom there falls in full measure favour, fame, health, (10) with decent livelihood and a purse that doesn’t fail? Amid hope and care, amid fears and passions, believe every day that has dawned to be your last. Welcome will come upon you an hour unhoped for. As for me, you will find me in top condition, fat and sleek, (15) when you want to laugh at a hog from Epicurus’ herd.

Horace suggests to Albius that he has it all—he is enviably good-looking, rich, and able to enjoy it (6–7), but also has the capacity for wisdom and eloquence (9). Horace wonders what his friend, currently near Praeneste (2), is up to: writing poetry (3; the rest of the poem suggests that the tone here is teasing) or wandering in the woods meditating on the good life (4–5)? There is a hint here that Albius is trying to confront a philosophical or spiritual challenge, but is doing so on his own without talking to anyone else (tacitum, 4). This introspective—perhaps over-introspective—figure is encouraged to loosen up a bit and to live each day as if it were his last (12–14); whenever he wants a laugh, he is invited to visit Horace, who humorously describes himself as a porker from the herd of Epicurus (Epicuri de grege porcum, 16). A reference in Marius to the ‘Epicurean stye’ (ME, i. 150, ch. 9) alludes to this recurrent slur on the Epicureans as swinish on account of their reputed hedonism: the Epicureans pointed to animals as evidence that all creatures were driven by the pursuit of pleasure, and their opponents countered that this reduced humanity, not least the Epicureans themselves, to the level of beasts. The ‘Epicurean stye’ could be taken as an echo of this poem, perhaps fused with a memory of a line from Tibullus. A stye is hara, whereas Horace refers to the ‘herd’ (grex) of Epicurus,13 but Horace may also be making an allusive joke, associating himself with the very kind of sensual pleasures celebrated in his friend’s verse (Tibullus, 1. 10. 26): ‘a pig from the full stye, a farmer’s victim’ (hostiaque e plena rustica porcus hara). Albius,

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fair critic of Horace’s poetry that he is (1; Horace refers to poems like this one self-deprecatingly as ‘chats’), can be expected to appreciate the many facets of the joke, and to accept if he will the invitation to sympathetic chat in person. Horace’s portrait of Albius suggests someone with an active inner life, sometimes oppressively so, given to solitary communion with nature. This helps to develop the characterization of Marius at the end of chapter 2: ‘And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the lad’s pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble [cf. reptare, Epistles, 1. 4. 4] to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender’ (ME, i. 26). An Albius who responds to inner turmoil by seeking solitude on the move resonates also with the opening of chapter 3: ‘That almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of the country [cf. silvas . . . salubris, Epistles, 1. 4. 4], were both alike developed by the circumstances of a journey, which happened about this time’ (ME, i. 27). A ‘certain over-tension of spirit’ attributed to Marius again later is likewise ‘relieved a little by his preparations for travelling’ to Rome (i. 158–9, ch. 10). But whose ‘Tibullus’ is it that we encounter in the novel? As we have seen, the relationship between the narrator of Marius and its protagonist is one that readers must constantly negotiate.14 Recall that opening citation of Tibullus, 1. 3. 33–4 and the gloss placed upon it: ‘he prays, with unaffected seriousness’. This is ostensibly the interpretation of the narrator, but we could perhaps feel these words as also focalized through Marius—as so much of the classical literature in the novel—if we imagine his sensibility to have been formed in part through some youthful reading of Tibullus that moulded to his own sensibility and circumstances certain elements he found in the text. Following the lengthy story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius, the narrator comments on the response of Marius to the texts he reads: ‘So the famous story composed itself in the memory of Marius, with an expression changed in some ways from the original and on the whole graver.’ Marius filters out the sentiments he finds uncongenial, or elevates them to an ideal plane: ‘Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, this episode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation, already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean’ (ME, i. 92, ch. 6). This tendency of Marius has been evident already in the celebration of the Ambarvalia, but may extend deeper into his response to Tibullus. His

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widowed mother, devoted to the memory of her departed husband, is a sustained object of her son’s attention: ‘And Marius the younger, even thus early, came to think of women’s tears, of women’s hands to lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want’ (i. 21, ch. 2). This can be read with Tibullus, 1. 3. 5–8 in mind, in which the prospect of imminent death far from home prompts the following regret: ‘I have no mother here to gather my burned bones to her grieving embrace; no sister to bestow Assyrian perfumes on my ashes and weep by my tomb with streaming hair’ (non hic mihi mater | quae legat in maestos ossa perusta sinus; | non soror, Assyrios cineri quae dedat odores | et fleat effusis ante sepulcra comis). Mother and sister: women’s tears, women’s hands.15 Marius has no sister, and no mistress; but the elegiac lover’s erotic desire (elsewhere channelled, as we have seen, into an elaborate fantasy of Delia’s emotions at the moment of his death, Tibullus, 1. 1. 59–68) is sublimated and rendered ‘a natural want’ in a filial fantasy of continuing maternal devotion. A Tibullan wish-fulfilment, thus sublimated, may even colour the feelings Marius harbours for Cecilia. He fleetingly entertains the notion of marriage to her (‘if Marius thought at times that some long-cherished desires were now about to blossom for him, in the sort of home he had sometimes pictured to himself ’16), a desire that is displaced into a sibling affection (‘that in this woman, to whom children instinctively clung, he might find such a sister, at least, as he had always longed for’), only to recall a Christian rule forbidding second marriages as well as ‘ominous incidents . . . warning a susceptible conscience not to mix together the spirit and the flesh, nor make the matter of a heavenly banquet serve for earthly meat and drink’ (ME, ii. 187, ch. 26). An internalization of the text of Tibullus seems to underlie another of Marius’ recurring reflections, a reflection initially prompted by the sight of Marcus Aurelius as he departed in ceremonial procession for war: Through the fortune of the subsequent years . . . Marius seemed always to see that central figure, with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent armour worn by the emperor on this occasion, as it had been worn by his predecessor Hadrian. —Totus et argento contextus et auro: clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous lightsomeness. (ii. 59, ch. 19)

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The line of verse cited is given no reference, but comes (misquoted) from Tibullus, 1. 2. 71, totus et argento contextus, totus et auro, which likewise refers to a ceremonial military procession. How to interpret this? To whom should we refer the intrusive and unattributed (mis-)quotation? To Marius, from an author much loved in his youth but now perhaps somewhat eroded in memory? Or to his narrator, no less a devotee of Tibullus, but perhaps distracted by recalling the armour made by Hephaestus for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad?17 There can be a gap between the perspectives of Marius and his narrator, but it is never precisely measurable, and there can be signs that encourage the reader to reduce that gap towards nothing. Consider this passage from chapter 2, which follows on from the thoughts of Marius, refracted through Tibullus, ‘of women’s tears, of women’s hands to lay one to rest’: ‘For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating hard without’ (ME, i. 21). Marius, here styled a poetic soul, has taken to heart, in his characteristic manner, the scene in Tibullus, 1. 1. 45–8: quam iuvat immites ventos audire cubantem et dominam tenero continuisse sinu! aut gelidas hibernus aquas cum fuderit Auster, securum somnos igne iuvante sequi! How delightful to hear the harsh winds as I lie, and to confine a mistress in my gentle embrace! Or, when the wintry South Wind scatters the freezing showers, to seek after sleep without a care, with the help of the fire!18

The erotic physicality in these lines has been overlooked or suppressed— almost: myrtles were sacred to Venus, as poetic souls of the nineteenth century, no less than the second, will have surely known, and could act as a symbol of love poetry. Fireside reading of Tibullus, a writer remote in time for Marius no less than his narrator, can summon up the poet’s presence (‘the very dead warm in its generous heat’), and serves to draw the ‘English’ narrator, though separated by history and geography, into an intense identification with his protagonist that elides the distances between them. An important metaphysical issue is being explored in this interplay. For both Marius and his narrator, works of art are anthropogenic. In the various ways we respond to them over our lifetimes, they make us the

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beings that we are.19 Of course, far more went into making Walter Pater what he was than the intense interplay between narrator and protagonist in Marius. Nonetheless, an insistent theme of the novel is that, as the narrator remarks in his discussion of Euphuism, given the ways ‘human nature is limited’, modes of expression will recur and ‘such fashions must necessarily reproduce themselves’ (ME, i. 98, ch. 6). Such a historical vision also underlies the use of Tibullan elegy in Marius. Though the elegies of Tibullus have significant elements of narrativity through which one can construct the progress of a ritual such as the Ambarvalia and the context in which it is performed, or the backstory of the lover as he reacts to his present dilemmas,20 they are not straightforwardly narrative in form. Rather they can be seen, in their intricate first-person discourse, to perform subjectivity as it experiences and confronts its circumstances, with the tantalizing separation and convergence of author (Tibullus) and character (‘Tibullus’)21 an important exemplar for the shifting distance between the narrator and character in Marius. Typology is a crucial mode of narration and of understanding history in the novel:22 Tibullan elegy is one of the key texts Marius co-opts and configures as an earlier counterpart to its own concerns.

Notes 1. K. F. Smith, The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (Boston, 1913), p. 64. 2. On the members of the Göttinger Dichterbund (founded in 1772), which included J. H. Voss who translated Tibullus, see Mathilde Skoie, ‘Romantic Scholars and Classical Scholarship: German Readings of Sulpicia’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders et al. (Oxford, 2012), p. 90. She comments: ‘It was mostly the element of rural idyll and the paupertas theme in Tibullus’ poems that appealed to these poets, and in their poetry they merged the ancient idyllic landscape with German country life.’ 3. Skoie, ‘Romantic Scholars’, has some excellent comments on approaches to Tibullus in the commentaries of Heyne (pp. 94–7), who suggested that the reader ‘should put on the lover’s state of mind’ (amantis sensum . . . quasi induere), and of Dissen (pp. 99–100). 4. Tellingly, Tibullus is never mentioned in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford, 2015). Elizabeth Prettejohn reminds me that Tibullus has a greater presence in painting of the period than he has in literature.

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

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Rossetti’s The Return of Tibullus to Delia (watercolour 1853 plus several replicas in the 1860s) became well known for the motif of Delia with a strand of hair in her mouth (borrowed by other artists later); see also AlmaTadema’s Tibullus at Delia’s of 1866 (now Boston Museum of Fine Arts, http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/tibullus-at-delias-house-31688). A. P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. (n.d.), p. 83. The full ancient evidence is collected in Tibullus: Elegies. Text, Introduction and Commentary, ed. Robert Maltby (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 33–9. That the narrator of Marius was familiar with these testimonies is likely, as we shall see later. Compare especially the speaker’s self-characterization as a figure of traditional rustic piety in Tibullus, 1. 1, praying at solitary tree-stumps or stones in the fields garlanded with flowers (11–12), offering first-fruits to the gods of the fields (13–14), hanging a garland of wheat-ears on the door of the temple of Ceres (15–16), or sacrificing a lamb to the Lares in the hope of a good harvest (21–4). This may have coloured the description of the young Marius’ response to the countryside around his home: ‘A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life—that conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe . . . had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, “touched of heaven,” where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place’ (ME, i. 5, ch. 1). W. Henzen, Acta Fratrum Arvalium quae supersunt (Berlin, 1874); a copy was held in the Bodleian Library. There is a modern edition of the Acta Arvalia which contains material discovered since Henzen: John Scheid, Commentarii Fratrum Arvalium qui supersunt: Les Copies épigraphiques des protocoles de la confrérie arvale: 21 av.–304 ap. J.-C. (Rome, 1998). The standard modern work on the Arval Brothers is also by Scheid: Romulus et ses frères: Le Collège des frères arvales, modèle du culte publique dans la Rome des empereurs (Rome, 1990). Chr. G. Heyne, Albii Tibulli Carmina (3rd edn, Leipzig, 1798), p. 99. This is first asserted by F. Cairns, Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome (Cambridge, 1979), p. 130. Cf. Stefano Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Saunders, Romans and Romantics, p. 317: ‘Pater believes that history can be better understood through emotion than factual knowledge and for this reason the novel, with its capacity for subtle

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

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psychological study, is a more sophisticated medium for the reconstruction of antiquity than the academic essay or historical treatise.’ Cf. the discussion of R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace Odes Book 1 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 368–72. Cicero uses hara in his version of the jibe, In Pisonem, 37. This is, in microcosm, ‘the hermeneutics of indeterminacy that the novel celebrates’ (Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage’, p. 317). Ovid’s tribute to the dead Tibullus evokes this very scene: ‘here at home, at least, the poet’s mother closed his tearful eyes as he departed, and brought offerings to his ashes; here his sister, tearing her unadorned hair, came to share the wretched mother’s grief ’ (Amores, 3. 9. 49–52). Relevant here is Tibullus, 1. 5. 18–36, where the lover recalls an earlier fantasy of an idealized domesticity with Delia in the country, only now to realize how unrealistic his hopes were. A memory, perhaps, of Walter Pater’s analysis of Homer’s Shield of Achilles in his essay ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, first published in 1880. This scene was iconic for Statius in the first century AD. He mentions Tibullus alongside Propertius and Ovid in a phrase that gives a humorous twist to the way the Tibullan lover represents himself in 1. 1. 5–6 and here in 47–8 (in foreign parts to repair his impoverishment and fantasizing all the while about the comfort of home by his own fire): divesque foco lucente Tibullus (‘and Tibullus feeling flush by his glowing hearth’, Silvae, 1. 2. 255). In an essay on Wordsworth written in 1874, analysed by Adam Lee, Chapter 17 in this volume, Pater had said ‘the end of life is not action but contemplation—being as distinct from doing’ (App., 62; original italics). For a recent discussion of narrative and first-person subjectivity in Tibullus, see Benjamin Todd Lee, ‘The Potentials of Narrative: The Rhetoric of the Subjective in Tibullus’, in Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of Story, ed. Genevieve Liveley and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (Columbus, OH, 2008), pp. 196–220. Cf. Duncan F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 13–21. See especially Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989).

6 Marcus the Stoic in Marius the Epicurean Richard Rutherford

In Pater’s novel the emperor Marcus Aurelius has a conspicuous role. This chapter seeks to clarify the nature of that role, as well as shedding more general light on the background and themes of Marius the Epicurean. Marcus Aurelius, originally Marcus Annius Verus, was born in AD 121, adopted by Antoninus Pius on Hadrian’s instructions in 138, and married Faustina (Pius’ daughter) in 145. Groomed for the succession, he became emperor in 160 (at first with Lucius Verus as junior partner until the latter’s death in 169). During his reign problems on the frontiers occupied much of his attention, and he campaigned himself for extended periods during 168, 170–5, and in Pannonia and Germany from 177 until his death, on campaign near Vienna, in March 180. He was succeeded by his son Commodus, whose reputation as a cruel and incompetent tyrant set his father’s reputation for devotion to philosophy and imperial duties in sharper relief.1 The reign of Marcus is not well documented in terms of narrative history. For continuous accounts we depend on the history of Rome by Dio Cassius, which for this period survives only in epitome2, and on the very unreliable series of biographies which are misleadingly entitled the Historia Augusta.3 The biography of Marcus seems to draw on some good material, and can be supplemented by those of Antoninus Pius and Lucius Verus.4 A fitful light is cast on the period by the works of various contemporaries: the satirist Lucian, the hypochondriac sophist Aristides, and the voluminous medical writings of Galen.

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But more important and influential than any of these is the work known as the Meditations, the product of the emperor’s own pen.5 This text, composed in Greek in Marcus’ later years, gives us unique access to a Roman emperor’s personality. It is virtually certain that it was never intended for publication, but composed for private use—part commonplace book, part spiritual diary, part moral exhortations. Though divided by later hands into separate books and ‘chapters’, it has no real structure except in book 1, which consists of a list of debts (principally moral lessons) which the author acknowledges to a series of relatives and friends; this list culminates in lengthy statements of what he owes to his predecessor Pius and to the gods (Meditations, 1. 16 and 17). Elsewhere the writing is varied, the style shifting from the epigrammatic to the expansive. Vivid metaphor and eloquent writing can be juxtaposed with curt, even ungrammatical, aides-memoires or bald statements of Stoic doctrine. Although there is plenty of forceful writing, the author is not concerned to compose artfully or elegantly, and there are several dismissive references to the flowery rhetoric which he is determined to avoid (1. 7. 3, 1. 17. 8; cf. 8. 30). In such passages we may catch an echo of debates conducted earlier in life between the emperor as young prince and Cornelius Fronto, his tutor in rhetoric. Whereas the Meditations, though apparently unknown to contemporaries, must have been preserved in a family archive or by a faithful secretary and have thus come down to modern times in a continuous tradition, the same is not true for Fronto. For many centuries he was known only by repute, based on admiring references in surviving authors such as Aulus Gellius. In the early 1800s extensive parts of the correspondence between the rhetorician and his imperial pupil were discovered in Milan by Cardinal Mai on a palimpsest, and were published in 1815. Although an English translation did not appear until the twentieth century, Pater would have had access to the important edition by Naber (1867), and also to a French version of the letters published in 1830, of which Pater owned a copy.6 The material is scrappy and not easily deciphered; chronology is difficult, but most letters date from before Marcus succeeded to the throne. These letters shed light not only on the relations between the two men but also on the domestic and cultural activities of the court in general (some letters to and from Lucius Verus also figure).7 ‘Letters’ is not an adequate description of the whole text: the correspondence also includes set-piece rhetorical

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exercises and some more formal essays. The discourse on the myth of sleep in chapter 13 of Marius is a version of a passage in one of Fronto’s letters (Loeb, II. 4–18). By contrast the lecture on Stoicism put in Fronto’s mouth in chapter 15 has no basis in the correspondence, and is indeed out of character given his attitude to philosophy.8 Before we turn to the use made of Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations in Pater’s novel, something should be said about his importance more generally as a cultural icon, almost a symbolic figure of the late antique world.9 In the first place there is his historical role as the last of a line of ‘good emperors’: in Gibbon’s classic formulation, he stands at the end of ‘the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous . . . that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus’ (Decline and Fall, I, ch. 3, ed. David Womersley, i. 103). Second there is the combination in one man of philosophic principle and imperial power, the fulfilment, at least potentially, of the Platonic dream of the philosopher-king. Third and most relevant to Pater’s enterprise, there is the accident of philosophic and religious history which makes Marcus the last Stoic writer whose work survives for our study, so that it appears that his Meditations, themselves constantly preoccupied with death and dissolution, represent the dying words of the Stoic creed—at the very time at which Christianity was beginning to blossom. This coincidence has encouraged many critics, both scholars and amateurs, to compare the ethical foundations of the two systems. Both ethics and expression in the Meditations may often be found parallel to the teachings of the Gospels (though some have preferred comparisons with the wisdom books of the Old Testament). Bishop Thomas Gataker in his monumental commentary on the Meditations (1652) cited countless parallels of this kind. Jeremy Collier (1701) expressed more reserve, complaining that Gataker drew the parallel so determinedly that ‘one wou’d imagine the emperor had Transcribed part of his philosophy from the four evangelists’.10 Despite scepticism and some absurdities of argument, the comparison persists. John Stuart Mill declared that ‘his writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind, differ scarcely perceptibly, if they differ at all, from the most characteristic teachings of Christ’.11 But Mill also emphasized the ‘error’ of Marcus Aurelius in persecuting the Christians, with whom he shared so many beliefs: ‘To my mind this is one of the most tragical facts in all history.’

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The final part of Pater’s novel is a dramatization of that tragic error, but subtle and fraught with ambiguity in its design. No document of the nineteenth century provides as memorable an account of Marcus Aurelius from this perspective as Matthew Arnold’s famous essay, published in 1863 and reprinted in Essays in Criticism (First Series) (1865). Rich in suggestive observations and immensely quotable, it presents the emperor as the best man that pagan antique beliefs and philosophy could produce—so near, yet so far. ‘What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor of the Christians!’ The closing paragraph powerfully adapts a famous line from Virgil (Aeneid, 6. 314), describing the souls of the dead reaching out in desperate desire to traverse the River Styx: ‘We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond,—tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore’ (Virgil has tendebant).12 The image is highly suggestive—Marcus is dead for Arnold and ourselves, but in a way was also dead when alive, representative of a dying world. These are motifs that Pater takes over, but with less sympathy for the emperor (and probably with some antagonism towards Arnold). It is not Marcus Aurelius but Marius to whom Pater applies in his final chapter-title the label, derived from Tertullian (Apology, 17. 6), anima naturaliter Christiana. It is plausible that Arnold’s essay was at least one of the stimuli which led Pater to pursue the project that became Marius the Epicurean, and that the essay partly explains the prominence of Marcus’ work in the novel.13 If so, however, the seed was slow to grow: in the late 1860s and the early 1870s Pater was principally occupied with his works on the Renaissance. However that may be, we can be sure that work had begun on the book by the summer of 1882 at latest. Thanks to the immense industry of B. A. Inman, we are well informed on Pater’s borrowings from libraries during the period in question.14 He certainly borrowed Gataker’s edition of Marcus Aurelius from Brasenose Library for almost a month in April 1881; other works which he was apparently using in the relevant period include a multi-volume compilation of photographs of Rome including pictures of the reliefs on the Column of Marcus Aurelius (borrowed November 1881); Champagny’s 1863 study of the Antonines (borrowed February–July 1882); Gaston Boissier’s two-volume work, published in 1874, entitled La Religion romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins (borrowed April–October 1882); and V. Schultze’s Die Katakomben, die

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Altchristlichen Grabstätten, ihre Geschichte und ihre Monumente (newly published in 1882; borrowed March–May 1883). The last work (as Inman stresses) includes drawings of at least four works described by Pater in chapter 21 of the novel; it also cites an inscription commemorating a Christian martyr named Cornelius. Marius the Epicurean is a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel of education. But the progress of its ‘hero’ is defined in the subtitle, ‘his sensations and ideas’: the emphasis on sensuous experience means that this cannot be purely a narrative describing Marius’ advance in understanding. Nevertheless, the novel is evidently structured in terms of progress through different stages of beliefs (a model of education used frequently by Lucian for satiric purposes and in serious vein by Justin Martyr15). Marius’ youth is set against the background of ‘the religion of Numa’, ancient pagan practices preserved in the country villa where he is raised. The opening sentence declares that ‘the old religion lingered latest in the country’. He also encounters the cult of the healing god Aesculapius (ch. 3). In his youth he progresses to the Cyrenaicism of Aristippus, often seen as a predecessor of Epicurus. Summoned to Rome to play a rather vaguely defined part in the service of Marcus Aurelius, he makes his way to ‘the most religious city in the world’ (title of ch. 11) and comes to know something of ‘Stoicism at court’ (title of ch. 15). Generic convention leads us to expect that our hero will in due course discover Christianity, still in its early stages, and this new experience dominates ‘part the fourth’ of the novel, though foreshadowed at earlier points. Cornelius, the young friend for whom Marius will eventually sacrifice himself, is introduced as early as chapter 10, but it is only gradually that his faith is explicitly revealed. Yet Pater subverts the expectations of the reader, since the novel does not trumpet the victory of Christianity or declare unambiguously whether Marius has himself undergone conversion. In Pater’s novel Marcus Aurelius is used as an emblem of the old world of paganism, its achievement and its limitations. In chapter 14 a contrast is drawn between that world and the new hope represented by Cornelius. Marius is suffering from the burden of ‘an existence . . . so intolerably empty; in which people, even at their best, seemed only to be brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over a world’s disillusion. For with all the severity of Cornelius, there was such a breeze of hopefulness—freshness and hopefulness, as of new morning, about him’ (ME, i. 232).16 Pater seems fascinated by the conception of the slow death of paganism, a

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melancholy and gradual end, represented by the emperor, a dedicated figure, a good man and a good ruler, but weary, even despairing. In one scene the emperor, clad in magnificent armour, ‘looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere comfortless shadow’ (ME, ii. 59, ch. 19). Stoic philosophy, however devoutly followed, cannot match the promise of the new religion. The artificiality of the occasion of Marcus’ main discourse is worth emphasis. The emperor has returned from the wars to receive an ovation; the Senate is assembled in the Curia Julia to receive his words. They might reasonably expect, if not fresh news from the battlefield, at least the ruler’s judgement on appropriate strategy or policy. Instead, to quote Pater, ‘There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the very simplicity or triteness of the theme: as it were the very quintessence of all the old Roman epitaphs, of all that was monumental in that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people’ (ME, i. 199–200, ch. 12). Transience, dissolution, vanity are the themes, and the emperor continues till evening (‘The discourse ended almost in darkness, the evening having set in somewhat suddenly, with a heavy fall of snow’ (ME, i. 211)). Pater has taken a hint from passages in the sources which refer to the emperor as delivering lectures prior to the campaign against the Macromanni (SHA, Avidius Cassius, 3), or answering philosophers’ conundrums in public before setting forth to the wars (Victor, de Caesaribus, 16. 9). But the incongruity is heightened by setting the scene in the Senate itself. The remoteness, even the irrelevance, of the emperor’s philosophy is enhanced. Traditionally Marcus has been blamed by historians for his choice of his son, the deplorable Commodus, as his successor (and Commodus’ defects are made clear enough in the novel);17 for his indulgence towards his wife Faustina, whom scandal accused of adulterous affairs;18 and also for persecution of the Christians, in particular an episode in AD 177 at Lyons, narrated with lurid details by Eusebius.19 In chapter 14 the event is foreshadowed, though with typical evasiveness: ‘when, a few years later, certain things came to pass in Gaul, under his [Marcus Aurelius’] full authority’ (ME, i. 240). Again, in chapter 22 Pater allows himself a rather cryptic anticipation of this action—the Church is said to have lost some of its ancient simplicity because of external events, ‘partly through the fatal mistake of Marcus Aurelius himself ’ (ii. 123). The reference is explained when we reach chapter 26 ‘The Martyrs’: ‘For the “Peace” of

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the church had been broken—broken, as Marius could not but acknowledge, on the responsibility of the emperor Aurelius himself, following tamely, and as a matter of course, the traces of his predecessor’ (ii. 190–1). (Pater is naturally familiar with the famous exchange between Pliny and Trajan on the subject, Letters, 10. 96–7.20) Marius hears of the executions while witnessing a church service, having now become a habitué of the Christian rites. In the next chapter he resolves to visit the emperor one more time, ‘with an appeal for common-sense, for reason and justice’ (ME, ii. 201), that is, to share with him his knowledge of the virtue and merits of the Christians. But in the end he finds the emperor occupied21 and (rather feebly, we may think) lets the opportunity pass, being committed to a journey that he can delay no further. ‘The thing was not to be—Vale, anima infelicissima!’ (ii. 204). We are led to suppose that the emperor really knows nothing of the Christians; the fact that Marius does not share his knowledge leaves Aurelius’ possible reaction unknown. More than once in the novel Marius is described as being fundamentally a spectator; here, he misses his chance to be a doer.22 It is one of the historical might-have-beens. Marius and the emperor are in a way doubles—Aurelius never learns the truth about the new faith, Marius does but fails to take the final step, and although he sacrifices himself for a Christian friend, standing in for Cornelius, it is left ambiguous whether he does so with complete commitment. Pater evidently knew the Meditations very well indeed (see Appendix), and he is also familiar with the other evidence from Marcus Aurelius’ reign. In general his imaginative portrait of the era is in line with the interpretation prevalent in his day and still influential well into the twentieth century.23 Modern scholarship has done much to reshape our understanding of the Antonine period and of late antiquity in general: most scholars would now see far more vitality and variety in paganism during Marcus’ reign and indeed for a long period thereafter, while also emphasizing the divergent strands in early Christianity, and the improbability of its ultimate triumph.24 It would be unfair to criticize Pater for failing to anticipate the researches of his successors, even if we were discussing a treatise on ancient religion rather than a novel. It may be more useful to point out a number of significant omissions from Marius, points of which it is hard to believe Pater was ignorant: rather, he seems to have excluded them deliberately because they would conflict with or unduly complicate the picture that he wishes to paint.

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(1) Pater makes no reference to the Christian apologists, Greek writers who attempted to present the case for their religion in terms which would make sense to the pagan authorities, and who deployed to that end the techniques of pagan rhetoric and argumentation. Some of these works were formally addressed or dedicated to Marcus Aurelius or his adoptive father Pius (e.g. that of Athenagoras). Experts are sceptical as to whether the emperors personally received or read these submissions, but they certainly date from the period in question.25 Most of them are in Greek, but the attractive dialogue by Minucius Felix, Octavius, is a Latin example. Assuming that Pater did know of these texts, he surely omits them because he is concerned to distance the emperor from any informed judgement of the Christian sect. (2) Although Pater refers frequently to Marcus’ labours in the German wars, he makes no use of the so-called Rain Miracle. This is an episode narrated by Dio Cassius, whereby a powerful storm gave decisive assistance to the Roman forces. Coins of AD 172-3 and scenes on the Column of Marcus Aurelius commemorate this success and ascribe the victory to a pagan divinity.26 The epitomator of Dio transfers the credit to the Christian God, who answers the prayers of believers in the Roman army; a fragment of Apollinaris, one of the apologists, shows that the Christians already tried to take the credit in Marcus’ lifetime.27 Here it is obvious that neither version will suit Pater’s needs: a pagan deity cannot be allowed to offer effective aid in a novel which has the failure of paganism as its defining theme, yet for Christian hopes and prayers to be justified by heavenly intervention would load the scales on the other side and be equally damaging to the melancholy ambivalence of Pater’s narrative. (3) The most important omission is the one passage in which Marcus himself refers to the Christians by name, namely Meditations, 11. 3.28 The passage is important enough to quote in full: Οἵα ἐστὶν ἡ ψυχὴ ἡ ἕτοιμος͵ ἐὰν ἤδη ἀπολυθῆναι δέῃ τοῦ σώματος͵ [καὶ] ἤτοι σβεσθῆναι ἢ σκεδασθῆναι ἢ συμμεῖναι. τὸ δὲ ἕτοιμον τοῦτο ἵνα ἀπὸ ἰδικῆς κρίσεως ἔρχηται͵ μὴ κατὰ ψιλὴν παράταξιν ὡς οἱ Χριστιανοί͵ ἀλλὰ λελογισμένως καὶ σεμνῶς καὶ ὥστε καὶ ἄλλον πεῖσαι͵ ἀτραγῳδως.

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What a noble thing is the soul ready for its release from the body, if now must be the time, and prepared for whatever follows— extinction, dispersal or survival! but this readiness must come from a specific decision: not in mere revolt, like the Christians, but thoughtful, dignified, and—if others are to believe it— undramatic. (Martin Hammond, Penguin translation) The phrase ‘like the Christians’ has been ejected as a gloss or later addition (first by Eichstaedt in 1821), a view taken seriously in the twentieth century by distinguished scholars,29 but I doubt if Pater knew of the suggestion. Assuming the phrase is authentic, the emperor appears to be endorsing the possibility of dignified departure from life but condemning histrionic self-destruction— a negative verdict, it would seem, on Christian martyrdom. It will be clear that I regard these three significant gaps in Pater’s picture as having a common explanation. His design for the conclusion of the novel meant that he needed to distance Marcus from the new hope and the rising faith. It would be more problematic if he had to allow that Marcus Aurelius had sufficient knowledge of their activities or even their beliefs to produce an informed negative judgement. Even with regard to the martyrs of Lyons he minimizes the emperor’s involvement and alludes to it as a ‘mistake’. Pater can thus maintain the melancholy portrait of Aurelius as yesterday’s man, a symbol of an exhausted age that is gradually lapsing into oblivion. Yet by a pleasant irony he presents in the final chapter a death which satisfies the emperor’s strict criteria in this extract: for the self-sacrifice of Marius is not ostentatious revolt (what Pliny labelled obstinacy and insanity, Letters, 10. 96. 3), but is indeed ‘thoughtful, dignified, and undramatic’.

Appendix: Rendering the Meditations Besides the numerous passing allusions, brief tags, epigraphs, and characteristic phrases which appear every few pages in the novel, it is Pater’s practice to take over longer passages from ancient authors and use them, often but not always with acknowledgement, in the body of his text, often translating direct but sometimes more freely adapting. The most conspicuous example is the extended version of Apuleius’ delightful fable of Cupid and Psyche, which occupies the greater part of chapter 5. Other

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such remaniements include the adaptation of Lucian’s Hermotimus in chapter 24, the extracts from Lucian’s Halcyon and from Apuleius’ essay On the God of Socrates in chapter 20, and the passage of Fronto already cited. Not surprisingly, he also translates or adapts many passages of Aurelius’ Meditations. He makes most extensive use of the work in chapter 12 (Marcus’ lecture to the Senate) and chapter 18 (where Marius peruses the emperor’s memoranda), but they are often quoted and paraphrased elsewhere. The last citation of all comes in the penultimate chapter of the book (ME, ii. 207, ch. 27): ‘His own epitaph might be that old one—ἔσχατος τοῦ ἰδίου γένους—He was the last of his race! ’ (from Meditations, 8. 31), already quoted in the emperor’s discourse to the Senate. But here the phrase is applied by Marius to himself. It is appropriate, but not the whole story, as the closing chapter will show. Modern editions of Marius do not offer much detailed help in identifying the complex mosaic of Pater’s allusive citations. The annotated edition by Michael Levey, for example, admirable within its limits, merely remarks on chapter 12 that ‘the discourse is made up of quotations from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, skilfully woven together and combined’.30 I here offer a list of the passages paraphrased in Marcus’ discourse to the Senate (ME, i. 201–10), to illustrate Pater’s extensive familiarity with the text and how ready he was to combine or juxtapose passages from different sections of the Meditations.31 Space forbids more detailed study, but a few comments on Pater’s changes and additions are appended, indicated by the bold letters. ‘The world, within me and without . . . ’: 4. 43. [a] ‘Art thou in love with men’s praises . . . ’: 9. 27. ‘For of a truth, the soul . . . ’: 4. 19. ‘To him, indeed, whose wit . . . ’: 10. 34. ‘Bethink thee often of the swiftness . . . ’: 5. 23. ‘Think of infinite matter, and thy portion . . . ’: 4. 3 (end). ‘yield thyself readily to the wheel of Clotho . . . ’: 4. 34. ‘As one casting a ball . . . ’: 8. 20. ‘All but at this present . . . ’: 7. 25 (closely paralleled in 12. 23). [b] ‘Awake, then!’: 6. 31. ‘so that in forty years . . . ’: 7. 49, 11. 1. ‘Ah! from this higher place . . . ’: 9. 30. ‘Consider, for example . . . ’: 4. 32. ‘Think again of life . . . ’: 9. 30. [c] ‘a sand-heap under the senseless wind . . . ’: 5. 33. ‘This hasteth to be . . . ’: 6. 15. [d] ‘Bethink thee often . . . ’: 8. 25. ‘a pigmy soul’: 4. 41 (citing Epictetus). ‘Nay! in the very principles . . . ’: 9. 36. ‘I find that all things . . . ’: 9. 14. ‘Does the sameness, the repetition . . . ’: 5. 4. ‘To cease from action’: 9. 21. ‘Thou climbedst into the ship . . . ’: 3. 3. ‘at least thou wilt rest from . . . ’: 6. 28. ‘Art thou yet more than dust and ashes . . . ’: 4. 33. ‘When thou lookest upon . . . ’: 10. 31. ‘As words

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once in use . . . ’: 4. 33. ‘those who doated on a Capreae . . . ’: 12. 27. ‘Alexander . . . ’: 6. 24. ‘Well-nigh the whole court . . . ’: 8. 37. ‘Think again of those inscriptions . . . ’: 8. 31. ‘burial of whole cities . . . ’: 4. 48. ‘Thou hast been a citizen in this wide city . . . ’: 12. 36. [e] Observations [a] In the initial citation there is a biblical touch: ‘therefore will I turn away my eyes from vanity’ (ME, i. 201). The rhythm and expression irresistibly recalls Ecclesiastes. The word ‘vanity’ recurs later in the discourse. The concept is not entirely alien to late Stoicism, but Pater characteristically blurs the line between classical and Judaeo-Christian expression: cf. note [c]. [b] In this passage Pater adds an obvious Shakespearean touch: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of—disturbing dreams’ (ME, i. 204), which provides a transition to the next citation, beginning ‘Awake, then!’ [c] ‘Think again of life as it was far off in the ancient world; as it must be when we shall be gone; as it is now among the wild heathen’ (ME, i. 205). Here ‘heathen’, another Christianizing touch, replaces en tois barbarois ethnesi (‘among barbarian peoples’) in the Greek. [d] In his rendering of this extract Pater writes, ‘It were as if one set his love upon the swallow, as it passeth out of sight through the air!’ (ME, i. 205). In the original the bird is a ‘tiny sparrow’ (a contemptuous diminutive), stroutharion, and it is translated thus by Long and others. Presumably Pater found ‘swallow’ more poetic. [e] It is obviously deliberate that the discourse ends with the passage which concludes the actual text of the Meditations. Although this was probably not intended as a closing chapter by Marcus himself,32 Pater like others must have found it an appropriate close.

Notes 1. For biography, see Anthony R. Birley, Marcus Aurelius (2nd edn., 1987), Jorg Fündling, Marc Aurel, Kaiser und Philosoph (Darmstadt, 2008). For historical context, see David Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay (2004), pp. 61–3, 73–80. For a recent collection of essays, see A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, ed. Marcel van Ackeren (2012). 2. Books 71 and 72 covered the reign of Marcus. I cannot detect any passage in Marius that must be dependent on Dio, and think it possible that Pater had not consulted the History.

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3. Historia Augusta will be abbreviated as SHA. Pater refers to this work in chapter 18 (‘Augustan Histories’, ME, ii. 45) and uses material from it elsewhere, e.g. on the emperor’s generous provision of lions in the amphitheatre in chapter 14, quoting tam magnanimus fuit from SHA, Marcus 17 (ME, i. 236); also ME, ii. 61, ch. 19, from the same context in the vita. See Ian Small, ‘Marius the Epicurean and the Historia Augusta’, Notes and Queries, 34 (1987), 48–50. 4. On the Vita Marci, see Geoff Adams, Marcus Aurelius in the Historia Augusta and Beyond (Lexington, KY, 2013); on both Dio and the SHA, see A. R. Birley in van Ackeren, Companion, pp. 13–28. 5. A. S. L. Farquharson, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 2 vols (Oxford, 1944); on the character of the work, see P. A. Brunt, ‘Marcus Aurelius in His Meditations’, Journal of Roman Studies, 64 (1974), 1–20 (= Brunt, Studies in Stoicism (Oxford, 2013), ch. 10); R. B. Rutherford, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study (Oxford, 1989); Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel (Cambridge, MA, 1998). 6. Armand Cassan, Lettres inédites de Marc Aurèle et de Fronton retrouvées (Paris, 1830); see Inman (1981), p. 337. Pater mentions the discovery of Fronto’s letters; see ch. 13, the paragraph beginning ‘For a strange piece of literary good fortune’ (ME, i. 223). 7. Loeb ed. C. R. Haines, 2 vols (1919–20); commentary in M. van den Hout, A Commentary on the Letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto (Leiden, 1999). 8. Particularly off-key is Pater’s reference to Fronto as ‘the Stoic professor’ in chapter 15 (ME, ii. 12). Nor is the statement in chapter 13 that Fronto is now ‘his [Marcus’] most trusted counsellor’ (i. 221) justified by any ancient source. 9. See the important studies by Jill Kraye, especially ‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus: Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot’, in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. J. Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (2000), pp. 107–34. I am also indebted to an unpublished Dublin thesis by Gavin Clarke (2000). 10. Jill Kraye, ‘Marcus Aurelius and Neostoicism in Early Modern Philosophy’, in van Ackeren, Companion, pp. 515–31 (527). 11. On Liberty (1859), ch. 2. 12. Matthew Arnold, ‘Marcus Aurelius’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, III. Lectures and Essays on Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI, 1962), pp. 156–7. 13. David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold and Pater (Austin, TX, 1969), ch. 19. 14. Inman (1990), esp. pp. 445, 451, 456–7. 15. Lucian, Hermotimus, Piscator, 6, Menippus, 3ff., etc.; Justin, Dialogue, 2.

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16. Cf. e.g. ‘That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached its perfection in the things of poetry and art—a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of decline’ (ME, i. 172, ch. 11); also i. 180 (the old unaffected paganism of Pius is gone forever). 17. e.g. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, I, ch. 4 init.; Arnold, ‘Marcus Aurelius’, pp. 143, 146. More recently there have been efforts to rehabilitate Commodus: see Olivier Hekster, Commodus: An Emperor at the Crossroads (Amsterdam, 2002), and his briefer treatment in van Ackeren, Companion, pp. 234–8, e.g. p. 241: ‘modern authors have argued for a considered change in imperial selffashioning, aimed at the plebs and the legions’. 18. See now Barbara M. Levick, Faustina I and II: Imperial Women of the Golden Age (Oxford, 2014). 19. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5. 1. 1–63. 20. See G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?’, Past and Present, 26 (1963), 6–38. 21. He is in fact engaged in charitable activity, organizing the scheme for the support of young orphans, which he establishes in memory of his dead wife Faustina. This scheme is mentioned in SHA, Marcus, 26.6. 22. Marius as spectator: ME, i. 46, 231; ii. 43, 75, 129. See also the closing chapter, where the point is emphasized that he has always valued ‘the seeing . . . above the having, or even the doing, of anything’ (ME, ii. 218, ch. 28). 23. e.g. S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904); E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965). 24. e.g. Johannes Geffcken, The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism (Engl. tr. Amsterdam, 1978); Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (1986); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (2003, rev. 2013). Survey by Mark J. Edwards, ‘Religion in the Age of Marcus Aurelius’, in van Ackeren, Companion, pp. 200–16. 25. Essays in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews and Christians, ed. Mark J. Edwards et al. (Oxford, 1999) provide detailed studies and further bibliography. 26. Dio, 72. 14; cf. SHA, Marcus, 24. 4 (possibly a different event); illustrations in Birley, Marcus Aurelius, plates 25 and 26. Further Péter Kovacs, Marcus Aurelius’ Rain Miracle and the Marcomannic Wars (Leiden, 2009). 27. Apollinaris, cited in Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5. 5. 4. 28. Scholars have detected implicit references elsewhere (see e.g. the citations in the Loeb Marcus Aurelius, pp. 383–7), but see P. A. Brunt, ‘Marcus Aurelius and the Christians’, in Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History, I, ed. C. Deroux (Brussels, 1979), pp. 483–520 (= Brunt, Studies in Stoicism, ch. 12). Brunt rejected all such allusions: some are indeed very improbable. J. M. Rist, ‘Are You a Stoic? The Case of Marcus Aurelius’, in Jewish and

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30. 31. 32.

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Christian Self-Definition, III. Self-Definition in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Ben F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders (1982), pp. 23–45, 190–2 (190 n. 15) is still inclined to think that Marcus refers to Christians in Meditations, 3. 16. The phrase is bracketed as spurious in the Teubner text by Joachim Dalfen (Leipzig, 1979). Independently the deletion is forcefully supported by Brunt, ‘Marcus Aurelius and the Christians’, part 1; counter-arguments in Birley, Marcus Aurelius, 263–5. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. Michael Levey (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 308 (n. 9). Not all passages have been certainly identified, partly because of Pater’s tendency to blend material from different passages on the same theme. Brunt, ‘Marcus Aurelius in His Mediations’, 1–4.

7 A Search for Home The Representation of the Domestic in Marius the Epicurean Shelley Hales

John Miller Gray’s review of Marius the Epicurean praised Pater’s vivid scene-setting, which he demonstrated through reference to the description of the first of the ‘two curious houses’ that form the pivot of the novel: the Tusculan home that hosts the novelist Apuleius is the epitome of elegant pagan retrospection, to which the second, Cecilia’s Christian household, will provide the forward-looking antidote. Pater overwhelms the reader with the sensory impact of its ‘old inlaid panelling’, ‘aromatic oil from the ready-lighted lamps’, ‘crystal vessels darkened with old wine’, all lit by the ‘opulent sunset’ (ME, ii. 77–9, ch. 20), creating a scene so overstuffed with decadent props that Miller Gray, recently appointed curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, could compare it to Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings of Roman interiors.1 This vivid quality of the novel was then (and now) attributed to Pater’s considerable archaeological knowledge and his talent for pictorial description, which saw his prose images also compared to the paintings of Albert Moore and even to Roman frescoes.2 For some reviewers uncomfortable with the innovative form of Pater’s novel, this pictorial quality appeared reliable and familiar, somehow extractable from the oddities; it is better regarded as deeply embedded in the novel’s unsettling strategies, mimicking Marius’ own commitment to visual experience and allowing Pater to play on his readers’ trust in the apparently visual and material to create the disturbingly alien literary world—and

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more importantly the very homes—in which Marius and the reader can only fail to dwell. Manipulation of the ‘authentic’ evidence for ancient houses, the rhetorical tropes Romans themselves used to explore their home lives, and contemporary representations of ancient domesticity play a crucial part in this strategy.

The Roman House The domestic sphere is central to the novel as Marius’ journey towards self-knowledge is both reflected in the ambience of a series of domestic locations and set within a vast time- and space-scape that is itself domesticated; the centre of imperial power, the emperor himself, is repeatedly encountered at home in his palace or villas. Even war on the distant frontiers is couched in domestic terms as an assault on ‘that unknown world of German homes’ (ME, ii. 45, ch. 18). Similarly, Rome’s past glories are recalled by the ruins of Cicero’s Tusculan villa (a villa the late Republican orator mentioned frequently in his letters), and a Christian future is portended by Cecilia’s elegant home on the Via Appia. Even as he forsakes it for life in Rome, Marius is forever seeking ‘Whitenights’, his childhood home, which offers the promise of security, the perfect foil for his own sensibilities, and a space in which the ideal is lent concrete reality (i. 22, ch. 22). On first sight, Marius’ idealization of the sanctity of the home appears to mirror the sentimentalized domesticity of Pater’s own time. Marius’ memories of sheltering by the fire with his mother would seem utterly familiar even without Pater’s explicit interjection on the ‘pleasures . . . of the hearth’ (i. 21, ch. 2).3 Marcus Aurelius’ role as ‘good’ emperor is demonstrated by his decision to ‘live’ on the Palatine, to which he brings a ‘genuine homeliness’ (i. 216, ch. 13), ruling with a paternal piety that is reflected in a ‘dim fresco’ in the palace lararium, or household shrine, which retells the story of Lucius Albinius who, escaping Rome with his family ‘on the morrow of a great disaster’ (the Sack of Rome in 390 BC), descends from his cart to allow some priests to ride to safety with his family (i. 229, ch. 13). The story suggests a cosy paternalistic heroism, in which Albinius sacrifices his own safety to keep his home and city fires burning. By the second half of the nineteenth century, too, increased interest in individual, subjective experience had perhaps inevitably fuelled a

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fascination with the seclusion and security of private space. The home was explored as a platform for aesthetic experience and introspective fantasy, both literally (as in novels such as Huysmans’s À rebours) and metaphorically (as in Pater’s own reimagination of the ‘House Beautiful’).4 In framing the domestic sphere in this way in Marius, Pater also drew heavily on his own ‘The Child in the House’, itself a kind of literary White-nights or haunting precursor to his later novel,5 an ‘imaginary portrait’ charting the ways in which the character and memories of the child, Florian, are formed by his home environment. For Marius, as for Florian, the home represents the safe retreat from which the wider world might be encountered and through which its dangers might be mediated. Throughout the novel, windows represent the portal through which that outside world enters the personal. They are often parlous, liminal places—the dying Flavian lies at a window as if to facilitate his imminent departure. Light is the medium of penetration, filtering through even closed shutters as at the villa of Cornelius’ friend (i. 170, ch. 10). Marcus Aurelius’ improvements to the Palatine include the installation of large windows admitting a clarity of daylight noted on both Marius’ visits (i. 216, ch. 13; ii. 35, ch. 17). Safe within his homes, Marius can view the outside world. Whitenights boasts a prospect tower, which confines the landscape beyond in a series of manageable framed tableaux. Entering Rome for the first time at night (i. 170–1, ch. 10), his first view of the city is framed from his family domus on the Caelian—the view revealed in a striptease, hidden behind ‘curtain and shutter’, until laid bare by the act of stepping out on the balcony. The cityscape becomes a personal, domesticated experience that conforms to his own ‘oft-repeated dream’ (i. 72, ch. 11). Such framing paraphernalia make safe a threatening outside by reconfiguring it as representation. Arriving at the Tusculan house, only once safely inside the atrium does Marius turn to note the waterfalls outside, which, framed by the door, have retreated into a picture and lost their ‘natural terrors’ (ii. 77, ch. 20). In apparently transferring contemporary domesticity to an ancient setting, Pater was enormously helped by the fact that Rome was increasingly being identified as inhabitable antiquity. Partly this was due to contemporary Rome’s familiarity and accessibility. Pater repeatedly makes his readers complicit in verifying the objective reality of his antiquity, even as the text’s evocation of the domestic sphere relies

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almost entirely on Latin literary tropes: tourists will have seen the imperial portraits (i. 224–5, ch. 13; ii. 34, ch. 17) in the Capitoline Museum, they will have sauntered in the underground passage on the Palatine (ii. 33, ch. 17).6 Meanwhile, excavations at Pompeii had revealed Roman homes for the first time, encouraging contemplation of an ancient everyday life inconceivable in the case of the Greeks.7 Such familiarity also came with popular misconceptions. Discussions of Roman domesticity often overlooked the fact that Roman houses were manifestly not the private retreats of nuclear families and their domestic staff.8 They were designed for social and political impact and dominated not by ancient counterparts of Florian’s aunts but by the paterfamilias. Pater is aware of the sleights of hand that must be played in order to overcome the dissonance. White-nights is only feminized by the convenient death of Marius’ father, and Lucius Albinius becomes the gallant Victorian patriarch only by some hefty revision. In Livy’s version of the story (History of Rome, 5. 40), Albinius invites not priests but Vestal Virgins into the cart, and does not climb down himself but turns out his wife and children. By such means Pater appears to conjure an unproblematic domestic world but the accounts of the houses he has Marius pass through soon disrupt this comfort. The tour of White-nights sets the precedent (ME, i. 18–20, ch. 2); we see it first from the road, admiring its façade before moving into the atrium. Apparently gearing up for an extended tour of the villa which Marius’ ancestor, Marcellus, has rendered so elegant, we move on to the fashionable oval gallery that houses Marcellus’ art collection. However, the only object we meet is a Medusa mask, her repellent gaze apparently blinding us to the rest of the collection. From there we move straight to the prospect tower, from which our eyes are cast back out onto the countryside beyond. The eviction is no accident. The impossibility of fully penetrating the villa is apparent from its very name. ‘[W]hite things’ are ‘ever an afterthought . . . half–real’ (i. 13–14, ch. 2). The house is a dream, simultaneously a rehearsal for, and a second version of, the true home for which Marius finds himself ever striving. The passage to adulthood for both Florian in ‘The Child in the House’ and Marius is prefigured by a dislocation from this comfortable space, to which nostalgia will always guide them in their dreams. Both will learn that they can never go home again. As much as Pater appears to create an environment in

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which Marius might dwell, the deliberate incompleteness of the description renders this home uninhabitable.9 The brevity of our tour of White-nights is particularly unexpected because its obvious literary model, Pliny the Younger’s account of his own properties, is so exhaustive.10 Pliny, a Roman senator, consul in AD 100, and mostly known for his corpus of letters, provides extensive guided tours of two of his villas. Pater uses this source material simultaneously to lend credibility to White-nights’s authenticity and to draw attention to its unusual inscrutability, undermining the villa’s tangibility even as he appears to build it. In particular, the preoccupation of Pliny (from whose description of his Laurentine villa the prospect tower is an almost direct lift) and other Roman homeowners, such as Cicero, with windows and views is central to justifying the many windows Pater needs to insert in his houses for Marius to peer through. The favouring of an essentially rhetorical trope by which windows and views assert their owners’ authority through the technology of glazing, ingenuity of their architects, and surveillance of the landscape puts him at direct odds with the archaeological evidence, which had demonstrated the lack of exterior windows in Roman town houses.11 The clash is made overt when, in order to exaggerate the innovative nature of the enlightened emperor’s new windows, Pater must bemoan the darkness in which most Romans dwelt, a complaint that makes little sense given Marius’ experiences of glazing, shutters, curtains, and sills. The overtly literary nature of Pater’s homes is raised again on the one occasion, Marius’ first visit to the Palatine, on which Pater offers an extended description of two frescoes. The first is of a woman knocking at a doorway, and the text marvels at its illusionistic architecture and the painted fruit ‘you might have gathered’ (i. 213, ch. 13), again overtly adopting a second-century voice by invoking a standard trope of ancient ecphrasis in which the potential of illusionistic painting to fool its spectators is a constant theme. The appearance of this trope might seem perfectly reasonable both within the narrative (as the sort of reaction we might expect a viewer such as Marius to have had to the painting) and in terms of the framework of the novel (readers might recognize here yet another literary debt Pater owes to the sources of the period, to the elegant descriptions of works of art by ecphrasists such as Philostratus). But Pater is surely playing here by choosing explicitly to adopt this tone to describe paintings which did not demonstrably ever

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exist and one of which (the Albinius scene) depicts a ‘history’ scene which is itself a partial fabrication on Pater’s part. The ecphrases published by ancient ecphrasists did not necessarily need a pre-existing painting to ‘describe’—they are literary exercises designed to showcase the skill of the writer rather than that of the imagined artist.12 As a result Pater’s ecphrastic tone draws attention to the made-upness of the objects described even as they seem to promise readers a vivid ‘realistic’ setting for Marius and a ‘real’ archaeological knowledge on Pater’s part. Pater’s most vivid settings undermine rather than confirm confidence in his archaeological realism. They poke away at the realities of the secondcentury world both for readers and for Marius himself. The result of entrapment within this unreal world is most obviously demonstrated by the inhabitants of the Tusculan house who are suspended between their own in-narrative reality, their literary doubles, and their place as Pater’s creations. Apuleius is like a character in one of his novels, in the perception of his second-century audience, as a deliberate affectation on his own part and because Pater traps him in a house that echoes his own rich description of Cupid’s Palace in the Golden Ass, which is itself quasi-reproduced in the novel as Flavian’s favourite text. The host meanwhile not only wears someone else’s toga but also has somebody else’s personality: that of the senator Lucius Arruntius Stella, consul in AD 101 and a friend of the poet Martial, in whose epigrams he sporadically appears. Marius himself is, within the text, the double of his ancestor Marcellus and, without the text, of Florian. Throughout the book, we are presented with characters who hover somewhere between antiquarian ‘fact’ and Pater’s fiction as transfigurations or amalgams of historical figures: Albinius, Cecilia, and Hyacinthus.13 Marius could never feel at home in the world of simulacra that Pater makes him inhabit. Marius’ tendency to reconfigure experiences as images figures his own aesthetic temperament and disengagement from reality, but is also made to be symptomatic of life in second-century Rome. Roman culture appears to be ruled by strategies of representation, most obviously manifest in the public spectacles of the amphitheatre (knowingly described as the novel-reading of the age (i. 239, ch. 14))14 and the triumph (explicitly evoked as the old ‘mode of viewing things’ (ii. 199, ch. 27)), in which successive interplays between presentation and representation enable Romans to watch the suffering of others as detached

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spectacle.15 The dehumanizing effect is confirmed by a brief moment of rupture when a child draws attention to the living nature of a prisoner’s flesh; flesh that has been rendered ‘benumbed and lifeless’ (ii. 200, ch. 27) not simply by its shackling in handcuffs but also by its part in the spectacle of triumph—and its sole existence as a component of Pater’s fictional vignette. The moment disrupts both the triumph itself and Pater’s own ecphrasis, which focuses not on the spectacle being witnessed first-hand by Marius but on Mantegna’s series of paintings, The Triumphs of Caesar, in Hampton Court (allowing us a Marian quasidomestic vantage point from which to encounter the most public of ancient spectacles). Thus we look upon a much later representation which depicts a triumph that long predates the one that we and Marius are supposedly witnessing (ii. 198, ch. 27). Oscillations between reality and representation are here also revealed as oscillations in time inherent in the reliving and re-representation of past events.16 The original referent is lost as both the content and framework of the narrative further problematize the ontological status of ancient Rome both for its inhabitants and for the Victorian audience.

Remembering the Past One of the most crucial roles of representation for Marius is to capture and idealize ephemeral experience, a strategy whose forlornness is most desperately seen as he hovers around Flavian’s corpse, trying to capture a lasting memory (ME, i. 119, ch. 7). As with the first impressions given of Roman domesticity, the ways in which Marius and other characters cope with death and loss initially appear comfortably relatable to Victorian mourning culture. Certainly contemporary readers would have recognized a strategy of making a permanent spectacle of the dead to soften the blow of inevitable evanescence, and Pater was able to exploit tendencies to elide Roman and contemporary attitudes to the dead.17 In domestic terms, its respect for the memory of the past was a particularly admired feature of the Roman house in nineteenth-century discourse.18 Marcus Aurelius is attracted to the Palatine by the ‘many-coloured memories’ that abide there (i. 216, ch. 13). Domestic shrines (sacella or lararia) are key locations in White-nights, the imperial palace, and Cecilia’s house as centres of familial piety. Preoccupation with past generations is established from our first steps into White-nights when

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we meet Marius’ ancestors before his living relatives. In the Tusculan house, too, ancestor effigies feature as prominent props. Family tombs accompany White-nights and Cecilia’s villa. For both Marius and the Victorian traveller (surviving evidence again apparently verifying Pater’s Roman world), the Etruscan house tombs passed en route to Rome (i. 161, ch. 10) or those on the Appian Way (ii. 142, ch. 24), monumental versions of the ‘tiny, delicately carved marble house’ in which the remains of Marius’ own father reside (i. 17, ch. 2), become permanent ‘doubles’ of a once lived-in domestic architecture. No surprise that the first monument mentioned in Rome is Hadrian’s Mausoleum (i. 170, ch. 10). The preponderance of tombs signals Rome’s profound dependence on its past which is also exercised in the ritual of triumph, in which reliving spectacle witnessed by previous generations is part of being Roman, a way of asserting tradition to the point of becoming ‘evocative of ghosts’. But here again, Pater leans on an apparently familiar aspect of Roman life only to twist it to highlight Rome’s non-generative present.19 The ‘piteous spectacle’ of dead children litters the narrative: an infant’s bony hand spills out of its container in Marius’ family tomb, whilst the body of another child usurps Marius’ own place next to his mother (ii. 206, ch. 27); Cecilia earns her ideal status as she cradles a dead child in her arms (ii. 187–8, ch. 26); Marcus Aurelius’ paternal duty is conveyed most poignantly as he carries away his dead son (ii. 56, ch. 18). Rome has no real future; she is on the cusp of ruin. Picturesque decay pervades the forum, the countryside around Rome, and White-nights itself, which is already crumbling as the novel opens. Mosses grow on ledges, revetment has slipped, and weeds poke through the mellowed marble façade. Inside, the mosaic is uneven but ‘looked . . . its best in old age’ (i. 19, ch. 2), as if the whole of Rome was built deliberately for the aesthetic appreciation of Pater’s own generation, which, of course, for the sake of the novel, it was. Marius is cast as an anti-Aeneas to Marcus Aurelius’ Evander (the incumbent king of the Palatine, now the emperor of the world) as the latter orates in the Senate House (i. 199–200, ch. 12). Whereas, in Virgil’s Aeneid, Evander guided Aeneas round the future heart of the Augustan city, Marius is offered a vision of destruction and loss: ‘a grass-grown Forum, the broken ways of the Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupation’ (i. 200, ch. 12), a deliberate echo of Virgil’s impassable Capitol, pastoral Forum, and humble palace.20

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The second century and its emperor are stranded between the glorious past and a barely-glimpsable post-Roman future. Only the novel light admitted by Marcus Aurelius’ new ‘quite medieval’ windows can answer the ‘purer, early light’ of the Greek objects preserved in the Palatine collections, hitherto in danger of being smothered by the manufactured ‘splendours’ of Roman clutter (i. 216, ch. 13). The haul of Greek treasures that clog up the palace, imperial counterparts to Marcellus’ Medusa (i. 19–20, ch. 2), are merely redundant spectacle, the ‘favourite toys’ of previous emperors (i. 214, ch. 13). Pater’s chosen terminology disrupts both ancient and modern complacency, since ‘toy’ was becoming the chosen pejorative term for the idle domestic trinkets of the cluttered nineteenth-century interior, objects which promised comfort and status but only provided distraction and alienation.21 Back in Pater’s Rome, Marcus Aurelius uses the excuse of fundraising for the war to auction off all the palace’s trappings (ii. 35–6, ch. 17). Unencumbered, the philosopher-emperor is free to think. And where do those trappings end up? In the Tusculan house where the host wraps himself in a vintage toga purchased from the auction (ii. 78, ch. 20), so as to play in the past. His house sits under the ‘haunted’ ruins of Cicero’s own villa, home of his Tusculan Disputations, one of his most important philosophical works and fundamental to the formation of a peculiarly Latin form of philosophical discourse. These ruins, then, are a sign of a distant golden age of intellectual endeavour and literary form that neither the characters in the novel nor the reader is able to penetrate.22 Whilst the triumph evokes the ghosts of the past, the ‘haunting’ of Cicero’s Tusculan villa is of quite a different order, the ghosts not Cicero and colleagues impinging on the present but the second-century fops who swan around in their handme-down togas. Pater is not disingenuously pictorial in his lavish description of this home, he plays Alma-Tadema for a reason: the ‘Antonines in togas’ are just as out of time as the ‘Victorians in togas’, which Alma-Tadema’s later critics would so disdain.23 Trapped in the exaggerated and mannered materiality Pater creates for them, the host and his guests (and his readers) live out the dilemma of secondcentury Rome, weighed down by its pasts, seeking novel refinement through retrospection and creative transfiguration of past tropes. As Didier Maleuvre observes, ‘one cannot dwell in a spectacle: it is a (non-)space of derealization and alienation’.24

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The Future Pater does, however, offer a future domestic vision. The forces of Rome’s imminent destruction, the Christianity and barbarism that Marcus Aurelius mistakenly battles, are prefigured in the two most important houses of the novel. Cecilia’s house is the only house to achieve aesthetic perfection. It prepares for the future by blending the past and present (ME, ii. 95–8, ch. 21), just as she herself combines the grace of classical Greek sculpture with Christian charity and chastity (ii. 105, ch. 21).25 Its interior is aesthetically decorous and accommodates a righteous domesticity in which the matrona cares ceaselessly for the children in her care (no surprise that the miracle that converted this household was the revivification of a dead child (ii. 187, ch. 26)). Her family tomb is not like Marius’, a mouldering memento of one family’s non-generation shortly to be wiped out by the last of his line himself but, through the growing Christian community it welcomes, rapidly becoming a whole city—a necropolis (ii. 98, ch. 21). There too the material finds its proper place as appropriate adjunct to the needs of its users. Toys become again the much-loved and played-with belongings of the children with whom they are buried. These children are interred as if tucked up in bed (ii. 101, ch. 21), a recognizably sentimental and properly domestic laying-to-rest that contrasts with the ineffectual public memorials through which Marcus Aurelius attempts to mourn his own young son (ii. 57, ch. 19). A Christian way of life does not eschew domestic embellishments, but puts them to good use—the house is of the type that Marius ‘had sometimes pictured to himself ’ (ii. 187, ch. 26), so perfect that it transfigures his own outlook and experiences ‘into an actual picture’ (ii. 96–7, ch. 21).26 As usual, Marius is constrained by his insistence on mediating life through representation: Cecilia, first likened to a statue, eventually retreats even further from direct experience.27 As she becomes like ‘a picture on the wall’ (ii. 189, ch. 26), we are perhaps reminded of the enigmatic woman knocking for attention in the fresco that Pater describes during Marius’ first visit to the Palatine. Meanwhile, Cecilia’s own spiritual focus is conjured by a return to the image of Medusa—at White-nights a material ‘toy’, here used figuratively to imply the exclusive and transforming power of Christianity (ii. 108, ch. 21). The house in which ideal domesticity will be properly realized, however, is so alien that, like Cicero’s villa, it is completely impenetrable to

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the Roman gaze. It is the German hut, eventually brought physically to Rome: among the spoil, set forth on a portable frame that it might be distinctly seen (no mere model, but the very house he had lived in), a wattled cottage, in all the simplicity of its snug contrivances against the cold, and well-calculated to give a moment’s delight to his new, sophisticated masters. (ii. 198, ch. 27)

Paraded in the spectacle of triumph, it is assimilated as another pleasurable toy, but Pater is emphatic: this was the real thing. Reality again punctures (for us if not the Roman audience) the deliberate obfuscations of the triumph. Here is the future and it is ours, the German prisoner explicitly ‘our own ancestor’ (ii. 197, ch. 27). It is in fact not a novel domesticity; the huts are imagined to be ‘warm . . . with those innocent affections of which Romans had long lost the sense’ (ii. 45, ch. 18). In crediting barbarians with the simple ideals long lost in a city corrupted by its own success, Pater inserts another familiar rhetorical trope, much used by Tacitus,28 but one made ‘fact’ within the world of the novel through Pater’s own version of the Lucius Albinius story.

Postscript Pater’s attestation of this domesticated future—our present—is itself a retrospective representation. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘cosy cottage’ was already the focus of sentimental nostalgia in an industrial, urbanized world. As Stefano Evangelista notes, Marius’ journey from Pisa to Rome evokes the Grand Tour:29 we are invited to see the countryside through our recollection of the works of Claude Lorrain or Salvator Rosa (ME, i. 163, ch. 10), and, when the comparison is made between Marius’ wide-brimmed travelling hat and that of a modern pilgrim, it is hard not to picture Tischbein’s famous painting of Goethe sprawled in the Roman Campagna (i. 159, ch. 10). Such a tour is itself a figment of a romanticized past—Pater did not take it, travelling to northern Italy (including Pisa) in 1865 and not trying Rome until 1882, staying only a few weeks.30 There, the future prophesied by Marcus Aurelius had already past. Rome was no longer predominantly a site of romantic nostalgia, it was the capital of Europe’s newest nation. Ambitious building works necessitated the destruction of huge swathes of Rome’s past and new excavations uncovered others, whilst the ruins of

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old romantic appeal were being remodelled. In the months immediately prior to Pater’s visit the Farnese gardens were disfigured to join the Forum to the Palatine and expose the remains of the senatorial housing on its slopes. In his bulletins in The Athenaeum, the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani described the Forum as a battlefield, no longer the ‘peaceful retreat where we used to admire the glory of the past’.31 Denuded of its grass, it was very definitely not the picturesque site evoked in Marcus Aurelius’ speech. Like Marius, Pater and his readers have been born too late.32 Rome can only be rendered as nostalgic dream or ecphrastic representation (the city you might have visited), enticingly vivid but exasperatingly uninhabitable.

Notes 1. John Miller Gray, Academy, 27 (21 March 1885), 197–9 (Critical Heritage, p. 122). 2. Stefano Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders et al. (Oxford, 2012), p. 312. On Pater’s pictorial turn, see, for example, Jerome Bump, ‘Seeing and Hearing in Marius the Epicurean’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 37 (1982), 188–206 (188); on Albert Moore, F. J. Wedgwood, Contemporary Review, 47 (May 1885), 750–1; on Roman fresco, G. E. Woodberry, The Nation, 41 (10 September 1885), 219–21 (both reviews in Critical Heritage, pp. 142 and 145–7 respectively). 3. Woodberry, Critical Heritage, p. 145. 4. Tamar Katz, ‘“In the house and garden of his dream”: Pater’s Domestic Subject’, Modern Language Quarterly, 56 (1995), 167–88; Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (Oxford, 1987), pp. 22–5, 81–3; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford, 1987); Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989), pp. 7–9; Maureen Moran, ‘Walter Pater’s House Beautiful and the Psychology of Self-Culture’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 50 (2007), pp. 291–312. On the domestic in French literature: Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 115–88; Robert Snell, Théophile Gautier: A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts (Oxford, 1982), pp. 156–9. 5. Miller Gray, Critical Heritage, p. 122. On ‘The Child in the House’, see Gerald Monsman, ‘Pater’s “Child in the House” and the Renovation of the Self ’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 28 (1986), 281–95; Iser, Aesthetic

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

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Moment, pp. 22–4; Giles Whiteley, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post Hegelianism (2010), pp. 81–5. Bernard Richards, ‘Stopping the Press in Marius’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 27 (1984), 90–9; William F. Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 30–2. Shelley Hales, ‘Re-casting Antiquity in the Crystal Palace’, Arion, 14: 1 (2006), 99–133; Returns to Pompeii, ed. Anne-Marie Leander-Touati and Shelley Hales (Stockholm, forthcoming); Shelley Hales, ‘The History of Human Habitation: Ancient Domestic Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Housing New Romans, ed. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Katharine von Stackelberg (Oxford, forthcoming); Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1997). This association might be added to the reasons Evangelista (‘Romantic Heritage’) offers for Pater’s choice of Rome over Greece. Hales, ‘Re-casting Antiquity’. On the Roman house see Andrew WallaceHadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton, 1994); Shelley Hales, Roman Houses and Social Identity (Cambridge, 2003). Richards, ‘Stopping the Press’, p. 90 notices the extent to which readers are rebuffed from Pater’s settings but interprets the most vivid scenes as bringing us closest to Marius (p. 97). Pliny, Letters, 2. 17; 5. 6. On the views from villas, see Diana Spencer, Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity (Cambridge, 2010), p. 114. On the games of second-century ecphrasis see Philostratus, ed. Jaś Elsner and Ewen Bowie (Cambridge, 2009). Williams (Transfigured World, p. 191) is wrong, I think, to recognize Cecilia as a specific character, but does offer an excellent account of the nature of second-order transfigurations (p. 203). The same observation is made about Dutch genre painting in Pater’s imaginary portrait of Sebastian van Storck (IP, 81). On the layering of representations in Roman spectacle see Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA, 2007); The Art of Ancient Spectacle, ed. Bettina Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon (Washington, 1999). Iser, Aesthetic Moment, pp. 129–52 interrogates the ways in which these oscillations reflect Pater’s aesthetic philosophy. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, tr. Helen Weaver (1981), pp. 409–556; Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester, 1992), pp. 76–94. Shelley Hales, ‘Living with Arria Marcella: Novel Interiors in the Maison Pompéienne’, in Leander-Touati and Hales, Returns. Evangelista, ‘Romantic Heritage’, p. 322.

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20. Virgil, Aeneid, 8. 347–65; see Duncan Kennedy, ‘A Sense of Place: Rome, History and Empire Revisited’, in Roman Presences, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 19–34. 21. Maleuvre, Museum Memories, pp. 137–8; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, 1993), pp. 56–7; Hales, ‘History of Human Habitation’. 22. Modern readers could also experience these ruins, which were a standard part of guidebook itineraries to the area; see Karl Baedeker, Italy: A Handbook for Travellers, Second Part: Central Italy and Rome (Leipzig, 1883), pp. 360–2. 23. Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Lawrence Alma-Tadema and the Modern City of Ancient Rome’, Art Bulletin, 84 (2002), 115–29. 24. Maleuvre, Museum Memories, p. 181. 25. Evangelista, ‘Romantic Heritage’, p. 316. 26. On the importance of this see Williams, Transfigured World, p. 228. 27. Jean Sudrann, ‘Victorian Compromise and Modern Revolution’, ELH, 26 (1959), 425–44 (441). 28. Ellen O’Gorman, ‘No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus’, Ramus, 22 (1993), 135–54. 29. Evangelista, ‘Romantic Heritage’, pp. 321–3. 30. Letter to William Sharp, 4 Nov. 1882; letter to Violet Paget, 18 Nov. 1882: Letters, pp. 68–71. 31. Rodolfo Lanciani, Notes from Rome, ed. Anthony L. Cubberley (Rome, 1988), p. 118 (The Athenaeum, 70 (28 October 1882), 569–70). 32. Letter to William Sharp, 15 Jan. 1883; letter from Hester Pater to Violet Paget, 24 Feb. 1883: Letters, pp. 47–9.

8 Reception, Receptivity, and Anachronism in Marius the Epicurean James I. Porter

Why Pater now? There are any number of possible justifications for reconsidering this great but somewhat faded Victorian writer, and these have everything to do with the current state of the field of Classics and with the promise that the reception of Classics, the study of the afterlife (rather than the ‘survival’) of Greek and Roman culture from late antiquity to the present, holds out for academic scholarship today. This is a point that the contributors to the present volume grasp well, as do its editors, above all Charles Martindale, who has been insisting for some time now that Pater’s writings contain unique resources that can help us reimagine antiquity in unforeseen ways.1 Martindale’s appeal, in particular, to refashion classical reception as a new transhistorical humanism, with the model of Pater set firmly before our eyes, is both eloquent and timely.2 Given the appalling rate of departmental closures, the defunding of classical studies both in Europe and in the States, and the general onslaught against the humanities, any call for a renewed humanism is bound to take on a heightened meaning today. Humanism can only serve as a rallying cry in a world that seems to be increasingly dehumanized, that seems to value less and less the core concerns of learning that has accumulated over the centuries and millennia, and that is caught up in a blind panic about its own present business. How could the recipe of classical reception, humanism, and pedagogy fail to be meaningful in these sad times?

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Pater is indeed a useful figure to turn to for guidance, in part because of his spiritual largesse (about which more in a moment), and in part because he was, in a sense, one of the first practising theorists of classical reception. He was also a powerful advocate of humanism, which he defined as the belief that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality—no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal. (‘Pico della Mirandola’, Ren., 38)

So Pater in The Renaissance. While respecting the past as a once-living organism is an admirable and even ethical goal, that is not all there is to Pater’s message. ‘Humanism’ is not simply a museum of life, however vivid that life may appear to be. And yet the essays in The Renaissance might at times seem to admit of an easy, dehistoricized aestheticism, one that celebrates the erasure of differences and singles out the musical play of surfaces in any art form—what Pater describes as those ‘ideal instants’ that ‘seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present’ and thereby delineate ‘exquisite pauses in time . . . which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of life’, realized in ‘perfect moments’ for which the art of music supplies the readiest paradigm and whose perfection all the other arts aspire to replicate (‘The School of Giorgione’, Ren., 117–18). This is a seductive model, though if we wish to turn to Pater, and I believe Pater has much to offer, then we need to recognize that his vision is not that of an at-first attractive but ultimately dissatisfying idea of ‘aesthetic historicism’ which grasps history aesthetically like some ideally realized image that is full, resplendent, and self-contained.3 History understood aesthetically for Pater is not just a matter of giving up history for some unhistoricized understanding of beauty or for some object of interest that never loses its vitality over time—for instance, by giving up Giorgione for the Giorgionesque ‘wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time’ (Ren., 117), if by the label we understand the signature of an artist reproducible over time and thereby transcending its historical moment. Pater is hinting at a different kind of communication across time. For what he says is that these ‘ideal instants’, arrested with such great ‘vivacity’, are legible only in

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the future, and in fact they have a futural destiny that is already inscribed within them. They ‘seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present’ (Ren., 118). As such, these instants give us a glimpse of the quintessence not so much of Giorgione the painter or of the age in which he lived—the period known as ‘the Renaissance’ and whose name typically signals the project of historical recovery and the rebirth of a long-gone past—as of the never-ending process of renaissance itself. By ‘Renaissance’, a word provocatively left capitalized but applied without regard to its epochal meaning, Pater understands the startling juxtaposition of the past with the future along a timeline that confounds the very idea of historical sequence, because it involves the literal contemporaneity of past, present, and future at any historical time. Renaissance is thus both an event in time and time’s confounding. This perturbation of time, complicating and skirting the easy traps of historicism (reaching back to the past ‘as it was’) and presentism (foregrounding our stake in whatever we consider relevant), is a constant that runs through Pater’s writings. Pater recognized that receiving the classical past is ‘a two-way process of understanding, backwards and forwards, which illuminates antiquity as much as modernity’4—illuminates, but also changes, for antiquity changes with every interpretation of it, as does the meaning and character of the present moment in which antiquity is ‘received’, which is to say produced anew and seemingly for the very first time. While the recourse to Pater can indeed be fruitful, there is a lesson to be learnt here that needs to be underscored, perhaps less in the spirit of a new ‘transhistorical humanism’ that seeks to discover the places where ‘often fugitive human communalities across history . . . emerge’,5 than with an eye to the possibilities for a new, expanded sense of time, temporality, and experience that Pater’s writings encourage—and perhaps nowhere more insistently than in his literary and philosophical meditation from 1885, Marius the Epicurean. Once we turn to Marius the Epicurean, a decade after The Renaissance first appeared, we discover how in this work Pater gives us a strikingly novel picture of time and of life that is still more directly relevant to the problem of classical reception than The Renaissance, even if a similar picture can be teased out of that earlier work.6 Marius, in fact, offers a challenging paradigm for any theory of reception, one that is only slightly grazed in its description as a

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complex intertextual web of . . . writing [that] incorporates words of Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, the author of Pervigilium Veneris, Lucian, Roman inscriptions, religious texts both pagan and Christian, and so much else, within its distinctively Paterian voice. The specificity of classical studies is richly present in Marius, justifying its place on a Classics syllabus.7

Marius is instructive, but not because it offers a smorgasbord of the classical past in one lusty feast. For what, after all, is to be made of the specificity of Pater’s vision of this rich pastiche of elements in Marius? This is what I want to dwell on for the next few pages. As we shall see, Pater’s idea of the reception of antiquity is in many ways a refractory one, and it poses a vigorous challenge to current models of reception, redemptive and other. I have to admit, I was a reluctant reader of this work when I approached it for the first time. The book is slow-going, indulgent, ornate, and above all oppressively Roman—not the Pater I know and admire above all from his Greek Studies. But once I got past the incense and the catacombs I was hooked. There is perhaps more to say about Pater’s theory of the ‘positive’ and not merely passive ‘receptivity in aesthetic experience’ that can help us understand more clearly what it is to receive the classical past.8 But doing so will mean re-evaluating each of these three terms, both severally and in their different combinations: experience, aesthetic, and receptivity itself. The novel is devilishly complicated. Through it Pater constructs an ancient world, set in the age of the Antonines, that knows no one temporality and is not a simple past because it is made up of plural temporalities. It is the product of several pasts and presents that are superimposed one upon the other and that reach right into Pater’s own contemporary reality. This is a world, for example, that knows it is already ‘late’ and ‘antique’. Pater speaks of ‘that late age in which Marius lived, amid the dust of so many centuries of philosophical debate’ (ME, i. 151, ch. 9; my italics) and of ‘objects which had been as daily companions to people so far above and remote from them—things so fine also in workmanship and material as to seem, with their antique and delicate air, a worthy survival of the grand bygone eras, like select thoughts or utterances embodying the very spirit of the vanished past’ (ii. 61–2, ch. 19; my italics). Marius is living in a twilight era on the threshold of a newer age, of a modernity to come and for which it absolutely yearns with a burning desire—a desire that is perhaps even stronger than any desire we might ourselves have for the past.

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Thus, as Marius beholds one of Marcus Aurelius’ pontifical speeches before the assembled Senate, he is struck by the ‘imaginative anticipation’ of Rome’s own future ruination that runs through this speech: There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the very simplicity or triteness of the theme: as it were the very quintessence of all the old Roman epitaphs, of all that was monumental in that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people. . . . [Marcus] seemed to be composing . . . the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples; nay! the very epitaph of the living Rome itself. (i. 199–200, ch. 12)

Marius himself lives in the mood of anticipation: ‘as he listened, [he] seemed to foresee a grass-grown Forum, the broken ways of the Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupation. That impression connected itself with what he had already noted of an actual change even then coming over Italian scenery’ (i. 200, ch. 12). Awakened to a crepuscular consciousness, Marius is caught in a ‘dilemma . . . between that old ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him’, and a dimly visible ‘ampler vision’ that includes not only the rise of the Christian church but also the whole of ‘European thought’ (i. 125, ch. 8; ii. 219, ch. 28; ii. 15, ch. 16). The would-be Epicurean struggles between a desire for the sensuous and embodied present, full of life and of life’s ‘fulness’ (i. 151, ch. 9), and a desire for the future to come, ‘a feeling . . . not reminiscent but prescient of the future’ (i. 114, ch. 7) and available only ‘in dim anticipation’ (ii. 123, ch. 22). And as Marius is leaning forward into the future, we—Pater’s contemporary and posthumous readers—are leaning into the past, straining to get hold of that era in all its fragile presence, at precisely that ‘little point of this present moment [which] alone really is, between a past which has just ceased to be and a future which may never come’ (i. 139, ch. 8). What should we make, then, of ‘an erotics of reception’ when the arrow of desire is reversed like this?9 Compare another moment: listening to his schoolboy friend Flavian intoning a poetry that itself points forward ‘in anticipation of wholly new laws of taste, . . . a new range of sound itself ’ that has something of ‘the medieval Latin’ that has not yet arrived, Marius experiences ‘a feeling, the exact inverse of that, known to every one, which seems to say, You have been just here, just thus, before!—a feeling, in his case, not reminiscent but prescient of the future’—he has a ‘foretaste of an entirely novel world of poetic beauty to come’ (i. 113–14, ch. 7). This is no simple moment of nostalgic recuperation or pining for a loss that can never be made good, not

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simply because it is being confounded by a nostalgia for the future. It is the confounding of time itself. To be sure, there are transhistorical impulses in reception. But what shall we do when we are faced with no stable object to receive, but only a moving object that shifts historical registers whenever its author turns it around ever so slightly, as Pater never tires of doing? What, exactly, is there to receive here? At every moment, every scintilla of the Roman past being experienced by Marius and stage-managed by the nineteenthcentury narrator over his shoulder has itself already been received countless times over, through a ‘centuries’ growth, layer upon layer’ of successive pasts and successive presents (i. 181, ch. 11)—all of them products of reiterated receptions. Objects show this in their being worn, like the pavement of a hall that has ‘lost something of its evenness; but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age’ (i. 19, ch. 2), or like travertine and brickwork that is ‘already mouldering’ (i. 173, ch. 14). Culture shows this in its aura of decadent survival, in ‘the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form’ (i. 53, ch. 4), in its exhaling the ‘last splendour’ of its classicalness and its prophetic touches of a dawning ‘middle age’ (i. 114, ch. 7). One of the models developed by Pater to name this phenomenon is that of the ‘palimpsest’, whereby ‘the new [writing is] woven into the faded letters of an earlier one’ (ii. 99, ch. 21). Try to read that text. Another is the necropolis (ii. 99, ch. 21). Hold your nose. But this is no late Victorian’s revelling in aestheticist decadence. It is a radical experiment in a novel and powerfully dislocating sense of time.10 The challenge for any model of reception theory, classical or other, is to locate a provisionally stable object to receive, but here there is none. Nor does the experiment end here, for every present moment of this hoary past is overlaid with a sense of its own modernity and futurity (these can, but need not, be distinct), which makes further havoc of our sense of time. Moments can be modern in relation to their past (the way Hadrian is said to be ‘modernising’, ii. 3, ch. 15), but present in relation to the modernity that we know but that exceeds the consciousness of the Antonine agents, except in their dimly lit intuition of things to come. Worse still, every event in the present of the past is futural in two ways: first by being loaded with a burden of change, and second by being anachronistically sifted through an alien perspective, whether the event is marked or unmarked by the tag ‘in retrospect’ (i. 160, ch. 10).

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Thus, ‘modernising’—the term used in connection with Hadrian— appears in scare quotes. How do you say that in Latin? Marius has his own ‘modernisms’: ‘confess[ing] himself ’ is one of these (ii. 172, ch. 25); being ‘ready to boast in the very fact that [the present] was modern’, now that it had ‘really advanced beyond the past’, is another (i. 48, ch. 4). The story is cluttered with other literal impossibilities: ‘pagan saints’ (ii. 119, ch. 22), ‘a quite medieval window here and there’ (i. 216, ch. 13), the ‘modern pilgrim’s’ hat that Marius (sort of ) wears (i. 159, ch. 10), the anticipations of Rome, Paris, London, or America (‘Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives—from Rome, to Paris or London’, ii. 14, ch. 16; ‘America is here and now’, i. 139, ch. 8), Saint Francis of Assisi (ii. 117, ch. 22), Goethe (i. 129, ch. 8), German sayings, in German (‘[t]hat Sturm und Drang of the spirit’, ii. 19, ch. 16), as if all this were right and proper. This is not ahistoricism. Nor is it transhistoricism (though it is the nightmare of both). The real thrust of such a model of temporality, wherein everything is anticipated and prophesied, is that no event is ever truly or genuinely modern. It is always already ‘ancient and venerable’ whenever it comes to pass (ii. 126, ch. 22). Pater’s own present modernity is itself already decrepit and antique, a foregone conclusion; it is old before it can be new. Thus, the ‘languor’ of the present day looks back upon the languor of the past that ‘for some reason . . . seemed to haunt men always’ (i. 101, ch. 6), while we are told that ‘[t]hat age and our own have much in common’ (ii. 14, ch. 16). The claim that Pater’s world is populated by Marius’ ‘modern representatives’ cuts both ways. ‘Modern’ is a characteristic that is available to every age, and hence to none in particular. In rendering each moment of his narrative into a veritable traffic jam of historical temporalities, Pater challenges and confounds our sense of temporal sequence and our very phenomenology of time. The problem that Pater poses for us so acutely is how we should link up our various senses of temporality. In a word, do we need more historicity or less to achieve Pater’s ideal? The answer is likely to be that we need both more and less—more and deeper appreciations of the layers that make up historical time, including our own, but that also give us the freedom to invade the past and to see how the past invades us freely and unpredictably today. Pater is discovering a way of being in time that escapes all precise historical measure. We would do well to follow his example.

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It seems to me that every historical moment has as its counterpoint an ‘exquisite pause in time’ (‘The School of Giorgione’, Ren., 118)—that ‘little point of this present moment [which] alone really is, between a past which has just ceased to be and a future which may never come’ (ME, i. 139, ch. 8), or else has already arrived—and that we should learn to embrace both together, for it is through multiplying both that we can arrive at the fullest possible picture of the past and the present as (in different ways, each) a past, present, and future. It is the deepest irony of Pater’s conception in this book that religion (like Platonism), while in ways the most idealist and other-worldly of all human ideas, is a way of cultivating a lively, this-worldly interest: ‘In truth, it was the Platonic Idealism, as he [sc. Apuleius, as read through Marius’ eyes] conceived it, which for him literally animated, and gave him so lively an interest in, this world of the purely outward aspects of men and things’ (ii. 87, ch. 20). Yet, what finally justifies this interest and gives it its true ethical weight is not the ability to claim ‘Vivo!’, but rather the ability to claim ‘Vixi!’ (ii. 218, ch. 28). But that is not a claim anyone can make for herself while she still draws breath. It has to be made for her by another: it has to be received. Reception would require drastic remodelling if we were to take Pater’s lessons to heart. Which is not a reason not to try, and possibly a good reason to do so. One name that he gives to this generous view of reading time is ‘Renaissance’, a notion that he literally walks us through as we accompany Marius through a doorway into an interior outdoor space—the doorway leads in, then out—that he discovers in a ‘curious house’ on the outskirts of Rome. Once within, Marius undergoes a peculiar experience, as do we, though it is by now strangely familiar: All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were the quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste—a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised, with effects . . . so delicate as to seem really derivative from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance—being indeed the way of nature with her roses, the divine way with the body of man, perhaps with his soul—conceiving the new organism by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times. The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner-stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, a new and singular

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expressiveness, an air of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically, very seductive. (ii. 95–6, ch. 21)

And a few pages on, Pater returns to the conceit, labelling Marius’ experiences those of ‘an earlier, and unimpeachable Renaissance’, one that stands already ‘in anticipation of the sixteenth century’: the church onto whose grounds he has stumbled was itself already ‘becoming “humanistic”’ (ii. 125, ch. 22). Living in time, Marius is simultaneously living outside time altogether. Or rather, time has crumpled and folded in on itself, shortcircuiting, yet again, the linearities that we think we understand as history. Renaissance is not rebirth, nor is it a principle of repetition. It is the vigorous and repeated juxtaposition of discrepant times. A similar thought reappears in Plato and Platonism (1893). The passage is worth quoting in full, because it stands like an emblem of everything we have seen so far: The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use[,] . . . are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had their earlier proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, . . . form . . . is everything (PP, 7–8; original italics)

To read Plato’s writings is to encounter the paroxysm of time that Pater calls ‘Renaissance’. But such an encounter can occur only in a moment of reception, which is to say, in a moment that exposes the full extent of one’s receptivity to time’s discrepant nature. Plato’s pages ‘seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present’ (‘School of Giorgione’, Ren., 118). Whether Plato could share Pater’s sense of the historical catastrophe that Plato’s thought represents to him is a separate question altogether. Reading Pater, we at least begin to share his sense of things. And once we do, Plato will never be the same again. What about Pater’s humanism? Humanism is for Pater rooted in receptivity. And receptivity and reception (the terms) do interesting

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things in Pater’s novel. Among the most interesting of these are considerations that throw into question the neat rupture between ancient and modern times. Every present can be modern, and none is truly that. We might call this the ‘we have never been modern’ view of the present that runs through Pater’s novel.11 Another temporal problem at work in Marius has to do with a further set of competing desires. Let us suppose that we desire the past (though to what end? to possess it? to equal it? or just to loiter in it?), and let us accept that the past desires the future (to some uncertain end yet to be determined). The difficulty here is that the protagonist, Marius, at least much of the time, desires the present—even when he is desiring the future (desiring the future to be here now, present and accounted for). Whence his ardent Epicureanism. To be an Epicurean means, first, to learn to be receptive to your experiences and your senses. It requires what Pater calls a ‘reception of our experience’, an attentiveness of mind, an immersion in ‘the present moment’, and ultimately a ‘reception of life’ itself (ME, i. 130, 139, 142, 140, ch. 8). This broad-minded view of receptivity—as an active passivity12 and a generous stance of being open to the world—is the source of so many fetching passages on sensuous beauty in Pater’s novel and in his writing generally. This is the true goal of Marius’ ‘“aesthetic” education’ (i. 147, ch. 9) and indeed of Pater’s theory of reception tout court. All of Pater’s thinking in this vein funnels into a view of the conduct of life, of embracing ‘Life as the end of life’, into a kind of presentism, a releasing of one’s self to that ‘single pulsation’ (i. 143 and 132, ch. 8) that comes from experience in its most refined character, the animated vitality of sensible things in all their variety (ii. 87, ch. 8). This is a very rich, ethically rich, view of reception, and one that reception theory today could benefit from by reflecting upon further—not least because the reception of experience, of life as its own end, and of one’s present sensations, goes against the grain of reception studies as they have conventionally been conceived—namely, as historically and objectoriented enquiries: From that maxim of Life as the end of life, followed, as a practical consequence, the desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising one’s self in them, till one’s whole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards the vision—the ‘beatific vision,’ if we really cared to make it such—of our actual experience in the world. (i. 142–3, ch. 8; original italics)

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But just how do you receive something as meaningful to life as the present-tensed moment of one’s experience? What theory do you follow? The peculiar problem that arises for Marius is the nagging question, which present? Just to grasp the present as an Epicurean is itself a retrograde move for a citizen of the late second century AD: it is to take up a philosophy that is by then fairly defunct.13 But the historicist charge of anachronism is the wrong way to go here: Epicureanism is not Marius’ link to the past, and still less to some ‘satisfying moment’ in the present that will endure ‘for ever’14—not least because the flip side of the Epicurean embrace of the moment is that it exposes the illusions (‘the radical flaw’) that surround any present when it is naively taken as a sign of permanence, namely this false or uncorrected sensation [that] attributes to the phenomena of experience a durability which does not really belong to them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmly out-lined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead what is in reality full of animation, of vigour, of the fire of life. (i. 129, ch. 8)

This is the Heraclitan contribution to the Epicurean philosophy of the present to which Marius turns (i. 128, ch. 8). Change on this materialist view is life; stasis is death; ‘all is new’ and ‘enhanced . . . by the thought of its brevity’ (ii. 17–18, ch. 16). With this realization comes ‘a perpetual, inextinguishable thirst after experience’ (i. 136, ch. 8), a thirst that, once felt, can never be sated, a thirst after ‘the beauty of the visible things around him; their fading, momentary, graces and attractions’ (ii. 25, ch. 16; my italics). Following these Epicurean impulses, Marius becomes attached to disattachment, a devotee of the ‘perpetual after-thought’ (ME, ii. 221, ch. 28), caught rather than torn between the old and the new, between the past still rooted concretely in the present and the actual world around him, urging him on towards another, future reality (i. 101, ch. 6, and passim). Receptive to both influences, he becomes ‘modern’: His entire rearing hitherto had lent itself to an imaginative exaltation of the past; but now the spectacle actually afforded to his untired and freely open senses, suggested the reflection that the present had, it might be, really advanced beyond the past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact that it was modern. (i. 48, ch. 4)

Discovering the present creates less a rupture with the past than its defetishization, and it thereby paves the way for Marius’ embrace of a

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future conception of life as the end of life, one that has not yet been truly named. For he dies a pagan martyr, if not a pagan saint, having prepared, unwittingly, his entire life by laying a route ‘towards [some] possible further revelation some day—towards some ampler vision’ (ii. 219, ch. 28; cf. ii. 116–17, ch. 22). What that vision represents in its particulars, however, Pater forbears to say, and so the novel ends as it begins, in the purest and most unresolved form of receptivity. Pater does indeed make an excellent place to begin complicating our models of reception today, not that they are in any danger of exhaustion, but only, perhaps, of repeating themselves. But if so, it is because Pater sets up antiquity as an object that is highly resistant to reception, resistant to ‘the enchanted-distance fallacy’ that allows us to exalt the past as other (i. 101, ch. 6),15 in part by displaying the past as an object of layered and conflicting desires, and in part by highlighting the radical role of anachronism that is an essential and inevitable ingredient of any reading of the deep past. Reception, then, as the studied practice of anachronism? Most assuredly, especially if anachronism is embedded in the very objects that we want to receive. The premise that they are has recently been made into a methodological precept by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood in their study of the ‘anachronic’ Renaissance: Such contrivances [i.e., non-linear figurations of time] mirror the sensation, familiar to everyone, of time folding over on itself, the doubling of the fabric of experience that creates continuity and flow; [that] creates and encourages the desire to start over, to renew, to reform, to recover. . . . At the same time [a work of art, that ‘strange kind of event whose relation to time is plural’ and ‘whose sender and destination are constantly shifting’] points forward to all its future recipients who will activate and reactivate it as a meaningful event.16

A view like this, which the authors discover in the historical sensibility of the Renaissance and with no hint that Pater has completely anticipated the core of their theory, underscores the essential ‘temporal instability’ of images, texts, and other cultural objects, as well as the capacity of works of art to become ‘an occasion for reflection on that instability’.17 But while Pater was most certainly drawn to this sensibility and to the problem of time’s inward folding, he has much more to offer besides. Following his lead, we could learn much if we reflected on what it means to receive our sensations, our experiences, and our life, before turning to the past in all its magnificently unstable amplitude, in order to prepare for a better sense of our futures—and our manifold pasts.

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Classicists are ideally situated to receive their objects, too often without knowing that this is the case. The question to ask is how one can do all this without draining classical studies of their specificity of content. Pater’s answer was, I believe, that we should imagine the past not as some historically transcendent object, present to us today just as it was on the day it was born, but as a monumentally idiosyncratic and terrifyingly difficult object that contains innumerable pasts, presents, and futures— very like our own. To approach antiquity like this is to learn how we can make sense of ourselves as beings who are situated in time. The relevance of Classics is not the relevance of the classical past, but the relevance of our capacity to situate ourselves in time today.18

Notes 1. See Charles Martindale, Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford, 2005) and ‘Introduction: Thinking Through Reception’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Malden, MA, 2006), pp. 1–13. 2. Charles Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical’, Classical Receptions Journal, 5: 2 (2013), 169–83. 3. See Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989) for this concept, esp. pp. 58–9. For a more useful set of critical terms and approaches, see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009). 4. Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism?’, p. 171. 5. Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism?’, p. 173. 6. See Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism?’ on the complex dialectical temporalities at work in The Renaissance. 7. Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism?’, p. 177; cf. Stefano Evangelista, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders et al. (Oxford, 2012), p. 322: Marius presents ‘a compendium of classical culture’. To be fair, both scholars are in these instances seeking to defend a particular way of redeeming Marius for classical reception. There are, however, other ways to do so, as will become apparent later. 8. Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism?’, p. 173. 9. Joshua Billings, ‘Hyperion’s Symposium: An Erotics of Reception’, Classical Receptions Journal, 2: 1 (2010), 4–24 (22). 10. I am speaking of lower-case decadence, not the literary movement.

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11. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1993), for example, pp. 140–1, where Latour challenges the linear and ruptural model of time that founds modernity. 12. Cf. ii. 68, ch. 19: his ‘seemingly active powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to influence’. 13. Diogenes of Oenoanda, who recorded Epicurean teachings on stone in Lycia, is an anomaly. 14. Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, Fortnightly Review, NS 22 (1877), 526–38 (536). The passage was deleted in later editions (see the textual note, Ren., 241–2). 15. Cf. Nicole Loraux, ‘Éloge de l’anachronisme en histoire’, Le Genre humain, 27 (1993), 23–39 (27): ‘L’enchantement était rompu. Commençait, je crois, la réflexion proprement historienne.’ 16. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010), p. 9. 17. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 9, 13; cf. p. 17. 18. This is a much revised and expanded version of an essay that first appeared in Classical Receptions Journal, 5: 2 (2013), 218–25.

9 Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’ The Art of Scholarly Method Caroline Vout

[T]he very existence of the imaginary portraits is an invitation to read them as imaginatively as possible. William E. Buckler1

Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’, first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1893, is the last and, to many minds, the ‘finest’ of his ‘imaginary portraits’,2 a ‘new genre’ of writing that cross-bred fiction, autobiography, and critical essay to produce a hybrid embraced by Modernism.3 It is his parting shot at an ancient Greek idol that had shadowed him, and art history, for decades. What are we to make of this ‘god in exile’? Nineteenth-century specialists home in on the story’s debt to Heinrich Heine and Matthew Arnold, its place in fin-de-siècle fiction and mythography, its coded references to Pater’s sexuality and to his rival Ruskin’s scholarship.4 They also know a classical allusion when they see one. But what about the story’s contribution to, and definition of, ‘classic-ism’, that conscious and recurring backward glance towards the ‘classical’ that insists on Graeco-Roman heritage being really (or still) more ‘ours’ than that provided by other civilizations?5 What can it teach us about what Pater thought classicism and contact with the classical world was, and about what we are doing in processing the past? This chapter begins where most scholars begin, by placing ‘Apollo in Picardy’ next to his other ‘imaginary portraits’, but with the aim of understanding how it does its

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‘glancing back’ differently. It then brings the machinery of its modus operandi into dialogue with his work on Greek sculpture to have it speak of the nineteenth century, and of the future. The inclusion of Pater’s art-historical writing is entirely appropriate here. Implicit in the word ‘portrait’ is a desire that readers respond to these stories ‘as they might do on seeing’6 a sculpted or painted likeness, with all of the complex verisimilitude that that brings with it. ‘Apollo in Picardy’ is often regarded as ‘one of the most visual or painterly of the imaginary portraits’;7 and, as Gadamer underlines, ‘a portrait desires to be understood as a portrait, even when the relation to the original is practically crushed by the actual pictorial content of the picture’.8 Pater’s northern Apollo is a million miles from the ancient Apollo at Amyclae, whose ‘throne’ is discussed by Pater in ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ (1880),9 but he is arguably still Apollo, even in the Middle Ages, in Picardy, home of the ‘Parthenon of Gothic architecture’,10 Amiens Cathedral. His appearance may have been prompted by Ruskin’s rich and rationalizing eulogy of that building,11 but is a study in epiphany, whatever the period, and epiphany is a subject that has been central to the history of ancient art and of religion since antiquity.12 Seen by scholars as ‘fierce’, ‘sinister’, ‘sadistic’, undercutting of Pater’s classicism even,13 ‘Apollo in Picardy’ might better be understood as a meditation on a question that troubled Plato, Pheidias, and the throne’s sculptor: how can transcendent godhead be made manifest to human perception? Apollo’s unstable ontology, and murder of Hyacinthus, not to mention the madness he effects in the story’s protagonist Prior Saint-Jean, are as much an admission of the anxiety of (describing) any epiphanic experience as they are of belatedness. Belatedness too is a tricky concept for Pater. In ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) he claims that Apollo ‘represents all those specially European ideas, of a reasonable, personal freedom, as understood in Greece’ (GS, 254). But that Greece is long gone, as he admits in his essay on Winckelmann (1867): ‘To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in spite of its intense outlines, its own perfect selfexpression, still remains faint and remote’ (Ren., 142). In other words, despite scholarship’s protestations to the contrary, the classicism that the Prior’s Apollo represents is no less familiar or dignified than any other kind of classicism, the power of classicism as a process lying in the gap between the theory of perfection and the realities of ancient and modern

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practice. We need only look to nineteenth-century architecture to appreciate how a panoply of classicisms couple and compete with the Gothic and Romanesque to produce forms alien (offensive even) to fifth-century 14 BC beauty. Defining these classicisms demands something more acute than simply spotting the points at which word or image enforces, or departs from, its classical heritage. It demands exposing the motion in between, the mechanics. As we are about to discover, Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’ offers us a way of seeing, or perhaps better, confronting, the legacy of Greek greatness and what it means to experience the divine that is as aware of its own cultural positioning and of its modes of remaking the past as is Lucian’s Imagines or Portraits, a text that epitomizes the selfconsciousness of the Second Sophistic.15 Just as Lucian’s Pro Imaginibus or Defence of the Portrait Study speaks to his Imagines by problematizing its remodelling of Greek literature and sculpture in praise of the emperor’s mistress, so Pater’s short story speaks to his art essays, and their use of Pausanias and sculpture, to praise Greek cultural production. If his short stories are equivalent to portrait busts, his Greek sculpture might be read as storytelling. This move does more than acknowledge that Pater’s approach to Greek art is ‘highly literary’—a charge often accompanied by criticism of his ‘derivative’ visual analysis.16 It understands how calling the maker of the Aegina pediments ‘the Chaucer of Greek sculpture’ (GS, 268) inflects his description of them and other marbles. Not only does the sculptor tell stories, but we must tell stories, for ‘Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a somewhat visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, and more or less make substitution’ (‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, GS, 205). And not only because of what does not survive. As Jaś Elsner argues in an article on art history as ecphrasis, The enormity of the descriptive act cannot be exaggerated or overstated. It constitutes a movement from art to text, from visual to verbal, that is inevitably a betrayal. Not everything in the world of the sensual autonomy of the object can be translated into words, and much that was not there is inevitably added by words.17

One can make similar statements about describing the divine, an observation that puts Apollo’s betrayal of his origins and his latter-day

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companions into a more productive framework. If read ‘as imaginatively as possible’, and alongside Pater’s art history, the fictions of antiquity ‘Apollo in Picardy’ weaves become lessons in scholarly method.

Modelling and Dismantling First, however, some observations on the relationship of ‘Apollo in Picardy’ to Pater’s other short stories. His ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, published in 1889, opens with an analogy: already by the second century AD when Pausanias visited Greece, much had perished or grown dim—of its art, of the truth of its outward history, above all of its religion as a credible or practicable thing. And yet Pausanias visits Greece under conditions as favourable for observation as those under which later travellers . . . proceed to Italy. For him the impress of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and entire than that of medieval Italy to ourselves. (GS, 152)

It is an analogy that supports Pater’s play with Ruskin, his tendency to compare classical with French and Italian artefacts,18 and his decision to set both his ‘Apollo in Picardy’ and ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (1886), an epiphany of a latter-day Dionysus, in the Middle Ages. ‘Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the antique Greek life unnoticed by him we should have peeped into, minutely systematic in our painstaking!’ (GS, 152–3). Transferring Apollo and Dionysus to more familiar territory fosters this sense of proximity.19 But it is only a sense. Back in ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, the eponymous hero assumes Pausanias’ role to find even the Athens of his own day a world of novelty (GS, 173). How does our encounter with Prior Saint-Jean’s experience of ‘Greek life’ measure up? One way of approaching this question is to think about the different ways in which ‘Apollo’ and ‘Denys’ stage their epiphanies. The legend of the golden age offered by ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ is delivered obliquely in a fragment of stained glass, itself an excerpt of a story in a tapestry that the narrator interprets with the aid of notes. Ecphrasis has long enjoyed this kind of deferment: in the third century AD the Elder Philostratus (Imagines, 2. 1) wrote about a painting of an ivory Aphrodite and its worship. But by now, the conceit and the French bric-a-brac shop in which the window is found are shot through with reminiscences of Théophile Gautier’s short stories—the dream of Egypt inspired by the

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mummy’s foot which its buyer first thinks is Lysippan bronze, and his tapestry of a woman in the guise of Omphale who comes alive and seduces its viewer.20 In the wake of the Revolution, Gautier’s Paris was flooded with artefacts previously associated with the Ancien Régime, objects suddenly swept into ‘new circuits of exchange, display and interpretation’.21 The ‘discriminate collection of real curiosities’ (‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, IP, 52) in which Pater’s window resides (an interesting use of ‘real’) destabilizes its decoration’s classicism.22 Not that it is the only artefact to facilitate Denys’s arrival. Old wine in a Roman flask inside a Greek coffin unearthed in the church fuels the bacchanalian events that follow (IP, 56–7), and reminds this reader of Charlemagne, whose remains were placed in a reused Roman sarcophagus, carved with the Persephone myth, and moved to Paris in the 1790s under Napoleon.23 In ‘Denys’, classical history ‘appears like a cascade of Chinese boxes’.24 ‘Apollo in Picardy’ prefers a different model for its engagement with the past: not archaeology but textual transmission. The work opens with what it claims is an extract of a book or article about Hyperborean Apollo by ‘a writer of Teutonic proclivities’ (MS, 142), a conceit that has us think of Pater himself and his own oeuvre, especially another of his ‘imaginary portraits’, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and its homage to a Latin poem on the subject by the German Renaissance humanist Conrad Celtes.25 Already we are asked to read what follows against his previous scholarship and its visions of Hellenism.26 This story is then ascribed to a medieval treatise on mathematics which we are told was rediscovered in a monastic library centuries later, its author, Prior Saint-Jean, having been holed up for most of his life in an ‘ivory tower’, divorced from the world and from any wider perspective. At this point in the narrative, Ovid’s poetry is evoked, poetry which the Prior has ‘never so much as touched with a finger’ (MS, 146), but which signals his ensuing departure as metamorphosis. Accompanied by an acolyte named Hyacinthus, ‘the pet of the community’ (MS, 147)—and, in mythology, the pet of Apollo27—he finally leaves the monastery, meeting the god who will inspire him to produce styles of writing and building that are explained (away) as ‘madness’. The Prior’s resulting prose, with its ‘long spaces of hieroglyph’, ‘[s]oft wintry auroras’ that ‘seemed to play behind whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and figure bending, breathing, flaming, into lovely “arrangements” that were like music made visible’ (MS, 144–5), has been

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seen as anticipatory of later scientific discoveries,28 but it is perhaps better understood as an admission of the limitations of knowledge and description, and as a glimpse of what Pater advocates in ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, and his Winckelmann essay—a requirement for imagination and sensuousness over intellectualization.29 Of Winckelmann, whose obsession with Apollo was so formative for Pater and his readers, he wrote: ‘That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual . . . is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men’ (Ren., 152). The Prior’s adventures have him live this maxim, yet push (dark though this is) past the ‘serenity’ that characterizes Pater’s Winckelmann. ‘This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality,’ explained Pater; ‘it is the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame’ (Ren., 176).30 Winckelmann’s ‘conception of art excludes that bolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil’ (Ren., 178). ‘Apollo in Picardy’ is less coy: it realizes—as Friedrich Nietzsche realized—that the ‘classical ideal’ is itself a myth in need of unpacking.31

Confronting the Classics The Apollo of ‘Apollo in Picardy’ bears more than a passing resemblance to the Apollo Belvedere, a statue discovered in the late fifteenth century and described by Jonathan Richardson in 1722 already as ‘Awful as well as Beautiful’.32 But it was Winckelmann who transformed its fate, in a dramatic account that draws on Pindar, Homer, and the Homeric hymns to animate the statue and cast himself as its Pygmalion.33 When the Prior first sees him, Apollo is sleeping, but his features appear ‘haughty’ nonetheless (MS, 149) in a description that pays an obvious debt to Winckelmann, reversing his paradigm so as to turn an apparently flesh-and-blood body into marble, as Ovid’s Phineus is turned into marble.34 The loftiness of Winckelmann’s Apollo has leaked away to leave this latter-day version resting serf-like on the floor, his rude (as opposed to winged) sandals discarded. He is an ‘Adam fresh from his Maker’s hand’ (MS, 149), a reference that, for all its Old Testament purchase, substitutes the Titan Prometheus, and his creation of man, for Pygmalion.35 Yet as the Prior’s gaze moves to take in his bosom, throat, and lips, we move closer to Latin poetry once again and to Catullus’ fragmentation of the abandoned Ariadne, ‘like a marble

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image of a Bacchant’ (Poems, 64. 61), and of the reclining pose that she adopts in Roman painting and sarcophagi; then to the beautiful young shepherd boy (or should that be king?)36 Endymion, who shares her posture in the ancient visual record. Who is the god here? The Prior, who, like Endymion’s admirer, the goddess Selene, gets to enjoy the sleeping figure by moonlight, or, like Apollo, has, for the moment at least, Hyacinthus to himself; or the sleeping surrogate, who next day will act as their servant? While the Apollo Belvedere stands as an icon of the Enlightenment, untainted by mortality or human wretchedness,37 this Apollo, despite his attributes of harp and bow, defies definition. His name, we are told, ‘is scarcely a name at all’, misconstrued as ‘Apollyon’ (MS, 152), the Book of Revelation’s destructive angel and demon of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.38 As the story picks up pace, this reborn, remystified Apollo makes his power manifest—first, by inspiring the Prior in the completion of a great monastic barn, then by healing him of his malaise (though he is also known to have brought the plague or ‘Black Death’ to Europe), then, Orpheus-like, by charming animals and streams, and finally by adopting Hyacinthus as his own plaything. ‘Was there magic’ in all of this? asks the narrator (MS, 155). It is a question that hits at the heart of nineteenthand early twentieth-century scholarship on ancient belief and cult practice, work that, from Frazer onwards, queried the category of Greek religion as an obvious, defendable category.39 Something similar can be said of Pater’s barn, and of nineteenth-century definitions of classicism, his Victorian visitor seeing in the barn ‘a sort of classical harmony’, ‘with a certain suppression of Gothic emphasis’, a probably local ‘silver-grey stone’ with ‘the fine, close-grained texture of antique marble’ and ‘a great northern gable’ that ‘is almost a classic pediment’ (MS, 152). These approximations highlight how classicism is never pure, how it had not been since at least the second half of the eighteenth century when Horace Walpole situated his admiration of the antique within the walls of a Gothic Revival.40 They also highlight how ‘the classical’ was still the dominant language for describing architecture and sculpture, something that was in particular need of emphasis then, when Leighton and Thornycroft were redefining statuary’s relationship with Polycleitan perfectionism, and Bible study was challenging the premium put on study of the antique.41 In contrast to Pater’s ‘expert’ visitor (MS, 152), a ‘careless tourist’ thinks the barn’s sculpture of Apoll(y)o(n) ‘King David, or an

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angel’ (MS, 154). The cultural change witnessed by Pater, not least the new audiences that the Victorian commercialization of culture brought with it, asks that the legacy of Greece be reaffirmed not as Arcadia but as ‘good to think with’. By the time we reach the story’s climax and Pater’s version of Ovid’s Apollo and Hyacinthus, we have already witnessed Apollyon’s cruelty. Yet neither this nor our reading of the Iliad or of the macabre Metamorphoses prepares us for the discus ‘sawing through the boy’s face . . ., crushing in the tender skull upon the brain’ (MS, 168). The shock is particularly palpable after the description of Apollo about to launch the discus, nude and beautifully pale like Myron’s Discobolus (MS, 167), a statue which Pater praises in his ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen’ (1894) for its ‘irresistible grace and contagious pleasantness’ (GS, 281), and as ‘the beau idéal . . . of athletic motion’ (GS, 284), ‘a thing to be looked at rather than to think about’ (GS, 288). Why? For such youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art is dealing with religious objects, with what in the fulness of its own nature is not really expressible at all. (GS, 282)

In other words, the Discobolus’ special purchase on the real makes it the very antithesis of an image of godhead. Pater’s ‘Prizemen’ continues: ‘Was it a portrait? . . . it may have represented some legendary quoit-player— Perseus at play with Acrisius fatally’, ‘or Apollo with Hyacinthus, as Ovid describes him’ (GS, 289–90). In reworking the story in ‘Apollo in Picardy’, Pater affirms his Ovidian role, as well as playing Pausanias, whose account of Perseus’ shame at gossip about Acrisius’ demise informs Apollyon’s ‘human fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions of himself, the boy’s death may be thought the result of intention on his part’ (‘Apollo in Picardy’, MS, 169).42 Pater also succeeds, however improbably, in pinning Apollo down. In enabling the Discobolus to possess his enigmatic god, he unleashes Apollo’s divinity in a cry of anguish (MS, 168).

Above and Beyond ‘Glancing back’ is too weak an expression for what Pater is doing in exploring the greatness of Greek culture, even in the rare cases when the

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focus in question is as well represented as Myron’s Discobolus.43 Still, a sense of melancholy is unavoidable, with Pater keen to remind his readers that the athletics with which such images are associated is first mentioned in the context of Patroclus’ funeral (‘Age of Athletic Prizemen’, GS, 296–7). What we now call ‘Romanticism’, with its premium on tragedy as Greece’s foremost genre, and its desire to reposition the classical in clarification of the modern, sighs heavily throughout Pater’s work, activated at the start of ‘Apollo in Picardy’ by the fact that the Prior’s manuscript is rescued from the monastery at the time of the French Revolution (MS, 143), the period considered to have been the ‘catalytic moment of the age’ and defining of the movement.44 Although Pater saw Romanticism as a tendency that transcended time, and one that ‘has been used much too vaguely’, just as ‘the term, classical, has been used in a too absolute, and therefore in a misleading sense’ (‘Postscript’, App., 242; first published as ‘Romanticism’ in 1876), he exploits its ‘addition of strangeness to beauty’ (App., 246) to keep the classical in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ exciting. Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’ is a product of its time. But all of us can learn from the fearless ways in which it paints modernity’s confrontation with the Classics. For Pater, the ‘imaginary portrait’ proved a productive way of articulating this confrontation, capitalizing on the nineteenth century’s proclivity for treating the novel as ‘a serious form of contemporary cultural practice’,45 and on the age-old allusiveness of artworks and their transfiguration into text. In so doing, it does more than speak about Greek gods and Greek art from a Victorian perspective. It uses ecphrasis to dramatize them and this perspective. So carefully constructed are its image-making and its ways of seeing that it can be deemed to presage ‘classical reception’. Perhaps now is the time for ‘classical reception’ to stop worrying about what it is, especially vis-à-vis ‘the classical tradition’, and to take flight, becoming more self-conscious of the ways in which its success depends not, simply, on exposing the layers that separate us from the past, but on inhabiting them, their oddity, unsavouriness, and misprision included,46 and on experimenting with new registers for bringing our engagement with their engagement with a partially represented antiquity to life. Historian of American art Alexander Nemerov blazes a trail here: Gravity is the scholar’s element—the weight of the past, the weight of bibliographic sources, the weight of the academic discipline. But I will explore

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another metaphor for what the scholar does while researching and writing: the scholar floats, even flies, free and somehow above it all. Rather, I should say that the scholar should or might be so free, or that there might be at least moments when such floating or flying happens (you see how quickly I qualify), and that these moments of ungrounded abandon—these moments of inspiration— create powerful, believable insights into the past, unattainable in any other way.47

It is a metaphor worthy of Pater. In describing Winckelmann’s early experience of the life ‘still fervent in the relics of plastic art’, he writes: On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is that more liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and round-about have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little have they really emancipated us! (Ren., 146–7)

Reading Pater’s ‘imaginary portraits’ with an eye on his essays on art gives all of this a particular resonance for those of us working on classical art history. As far as the study of Greek and Roman art is concerned, Winckelmann and the German archaeologists who followed him—men such as Johannes Overbeck, on whom so much of Pater’s knowledge of material culture relies—certainly won, consigning, until recently, Pater’s contribution to obscurity. Within the discipline, art history (informed as much of it now is by critical theory, film studies, anthropology, and so on) and dirt archaeology are often at odds, bringing subjectivity and data-driven approaches into conflict. Problems of date and ancient display context ensure that the Apollo Belvedere has fallen from grace, revelatory only of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Yet in Pater’s hands, all Greek sculpture can tell tales about antiquity as unsettling as his fiction. It is writing about art as much as it is art itself that inspires him, freeing his fancy in a way that single objects or types such as the Discobolus, on its own, with its feet of clay, cannot manage. Less is more, the detailed visual analysis demanded of Kopienkritik and of later Morellian methodologies serving only to fetter the imagination that impressionistic prose can liberate. Take the representations of Centaurs and Amazons on the Parthenon metopes or the frieze of the

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Mausoleum of Halicarnassus: structuralism’s influence on classical studies means that these are now often read as an allegory of man’s supremacy over chaos, the triumph of civilization over the barbarous other and the primitive instincts of man’s own psyche. In Athens, their defeat guaranteed and promoted the integrity of Greece and Greek masculinity. Or did it? Early in his ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, Pater’s communion with them takes a different form, realizing that they ‘represent the regret of Athenians themselves for something that could never be brought to life again, and have their pathos. Those young heroes contending with Amazons on the frieze of the Mausoleum had best make haste with their bloody work, if young people’s eyes can tell a true story’ (GS, 161). Pater’s Amazons are as interesting for what they withhold as for what they celebrate, aggressively culled by bully boys like Theseus and Hercules, their ‘heart-strings’ aching ‘where the breast had been cut away’ (GS, 162). These observations sound bizarre, yet numerous cities claimed Amazons as heroines, Athens boasted the tombs of Antiope and Molpadia and accorded the Amazons annual sacrifice, and Athenian oratory saw them as would-be empire-builders.48 They turn out perhaps to be more nuanced than those of current art history that prioritizes contemporary spectatorship over production.49 They are also, of course, further testimony of what Pater means when he claims that ‘a sort of preparation for the romantic temper is noticeable even within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which for his part Winckelmann failed to see’ (Ren., 178). Even today, when history is recognized to be more of a labyrinthine terrain than a linear narrative, ‘the Greek ideal’ is reinforced by chosen pathways. We must discard our map. For Greece’s material culture to speak honestly of ancient life, love, ‘religion’, we need to probe the limits of what we, the Greeks, and those in between, can describe in word or image, acknowledging the optimism involved in basing anything at all on such a fragmentary record, and the optimism, assurance, or fear that led to the creation of the work in the first place. What lies beyond is invaluable. At the end of ‘Apollo in Picardy’, Brother Saint-Jean, stripped of his Prior’s pretensions, dies ‘standing upright with an effort to gaze forth once more’ (MS, 171). In looking for and at what lies beyond, we stand a better chance of contemplating, not merely glancing, ‘backwards’.50

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Notes 1. Walter Pater: The Critic as Artist of Ideas (New York, 1987), pp. 186–7. 2. Robert Keefe, ‘“Apollo in Picardy”: Pater’s Monk and Ruskin’s Madness’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 29: 4 (1986), 361–70 (361). 3. On the implications of Pater’s ‘imaginary portraits’ for autobiography and for Modernist writers, see Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford, 2010), pp. 29–70. 4. See e.g. Keefe, ‘Apollo in Picardy’; Ulrich C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Arnold’s Fancy and Pater’s Imagination: Exclusion and Incorporation’, Victorian Poetry, 26: 1–2 (1988), 103–15; Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), pp. 186–92. On the ‘gods in exile’ theme in Pater, see, in addition to the items in Section 3 of the Bibliography, Keefe, ‘Apollo in Picardy’, pp. 361–70; Stefano Evangelista, ‘A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus’, Victorian Review, 34: 2 (2008), 200–18. 5. Salvatore Settis, The Future of the ‘Classical’, tr. Allan Cameron (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 15–16. 6. Pater to his editor, George Grove, 17 April 1878: Letters, pp. 29–30. See Giles Whiteley, ‘Pater’s Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits’, Victoriographies, 3: 2 (2013), 119–35, and Elisa Bizzotto, ‘The Imaginary Portrait: Pater’s Contribution to a Literary Genre’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake et al. (Greensboro, NC, 2002), p. 215. 7. Buckler, Walter Pater, p. 233. 8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (first published in 1960 as Wahrheit und Methode), tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, 1975), p. 128. 9. GS, 235. Carved in the mid-sixth century BC, the ‘throne’ functioned as a base for the cult statue and incorporated, according to ancient tradition, the remains of Hyacinthus. 10. John Ruskin, Our Fathers Have Told Us, Part I: The Bible of Amiens (1885), section 4.1, citing Viollet-le-Duc. 11. Daniel Simon, ‘Translating Ruskin: Marcel Proust’s Orient of Devotion’, Comparative Literature Studies, 38: 2 (2001), 142–68. Note Pater’s own essay on the building, ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’, first published in 1894 (MS, 109–25). 12. Jeremy Tanner, Review of Verity J. Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion. Greek Culture in the Roman World, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, http://bmcr.brynmawr. edu/2012/2012-08-04.html (accessed 2 October 2014).

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13. e.g. Keefe, ‘Apollo in Picardy’, p. 363; and Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment, tr. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge, 2010), p. 126. 14. Ian Campbell, ‘Architecture’, in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA, 2010), p. 65. 15. See Maria Cistaro, Sotto il velo di Pantea: Imagines e Pro imaginibus di Luciano (Messina, 2009). 16. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), pp. 214 and 218. Also important here is Martine Lambert-Charbonnier, Walter Pater et les ‘Portraits imaginaires’: Miroirs de la culture et images de soi (Paris, 2004). See also Elizabeth Prettejohn, Chapter 12 in this volume. 17. Jaś Elsner, ‘Art History as Ekphrasis’, Art History, 33: 1 (2010), 12. 18. e.g. ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, GS, 218, 224–7, 238; and ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen’, GS, 269–71. 19. Note that, like Winckelmann, Pater never visited Greece. 20. ‘Omphale’ was first published in 1834, and ‘Le Pied de momie’ in 1840. 21. Tom Stammers, ‘The Bric-à-brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural History in Post-Revolutionary France’, French History, 22: 3 (2008), 301. 22. Despite the high value of ‘curiosities’ at this time, ‘curiosity’ still carries something of a negative meaning: Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford, 2004). 23. The sarcophagus was returned to Aachen in 1815; see Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge, 2008), p. 3. 24. James I. Porter, ‘What is “Classical” about Classical Antiquity?’, in Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, ed. Porter (Princeton, 2006), p. 20. 25. In ancient Greece, as Pater acknowledges, there were stories about Apollo staying with the Hyperboreans, a mythical race located at the edge of the world: Alcaeus, fr. 307c V. See ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’, IP, 123 and 132, which is itself in dialogue with Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’ (IPJT, p. 44). 26. Whiteley, ‘Pater’s Parerga’, p. 128. 27. The Prior’s dreams directly before leaving the monastery anticipate Apollo, god of healing, in another way, by being suggestive of the incubations that took place in healing shrines in ancient Greece. 28. Gerald C. Monsman, Pater’s Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 187–8; Keefe, ‘Apollo in Picardy’, pp. 366–7; Joseph Hillis Miller, ‘Forward: Fractal Pater’, in Jay Fellows, Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted: Under-Textures and Afterthoughts in Walter Pater (Stanford, CA, 1991), p. xvi. 29. e.g. GS, 188–91.

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30. Cf. David Carrier, ‘Walter Pater’s “Winckelmann”’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 35: 1 (2001), 106 and John J. Conlon, Walter Pater and the French Tradition (East Brunswick, NJ, 1982), p. 28. 31. James I. Porter, ‘Reception Studies: Future Prospects’, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Malden, MA, 2008), p. 476. 32. Jonathan Richardson, Sr. and Jr., An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, France &c. With Remarks (1722), p. 276. 33. Paul Barolsky, ‘Winckelmann, Ovid and the Transformation of the Apollo Belvedere’, Notes in the History of Art, 33: 2 (2014), 2–4. 34. Katherine Harloe, ‘Allusion and Ekphrasis in Winckelmann’s Paris Description of the Apollo Belvedere’, Cambridge Classical Journal, 53 (2007), 229–52; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 5. 1–235. 35. See ‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, p. 33. 36. Greek and Latin literature describe Endymion as a king, shepherd, or hunter. 37. See Timo Günther, ‘Apollo’, in Grafton et al., Classical Tradition, p. 55. 38. See also, in antiquity already, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1080–2, who associates Apollo’s name with the verb ἀπολλύναι (‘to destroy’), and Plato, Cratylus, 405 for more extensive etymology. 39. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890). Jane Harrison is also important here (see Robert Ackermann, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York, 1991)), while the suitability of ‘religion’ as a term is still much debated (e.g. Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013)). 40. On Walpole and his ‘successors’, William Beckford and William John Bankes, see Caroline Vout, ‘Romantic Visions: Collecting, Display and Homosexual Self-Fashioning’, in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Western Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford, 2015), pp. 232–51. 41. So early travellers to India often described the temples they saw there in classical terms: Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago, 1977). On the ‘new sculpture’ of the late nineteenth century, see David Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven, 2004). 42. Pausanias, 2. 16. 3. 43. On the many versions of Myron’s famously absent Discobolus, ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen’, GS, 288–9, and this in the context (GS, 284) of claiming that that period otherwise ‘presents to us indeed only a chapter of scattered fragments, of names that are little more, with but surmise of their original significance, and mere reasonings as to the sort of art that might have occupied what are really empty spaces’.

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44. Constanze M. Güthenke, ‘Romanticism’, in Grafton et al., Classical Tradition, p. 836. 45. Ernest Fontana, Review of Kenneth Daley, The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin, Romantic Circles, 5: 3 (2002), https://www. rc.umd.edu/reviews-blog/kenneth-daley-rescue-romanticism-walter-paterand-john-ruskin (accessed 2 October 2014). 46. See e.g. Roman Error: The Reception of Ancient Rome as a Flawed Model, ed. Basil Dufallo (Oxford, forthcoming), the contributions of which are summarized in the Bollettino di studi latini, 44: 1 (2014), 195–200; and Edmund Richardson, Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity (Cambridge, 2013). 47. Alexander Nemerov, ‘Weightless History: Faulkner, Bourke-White, and Eisenstaedt’, in Fictions of Art History, ed. Mark Ledbury (Williamstown, MA, 2013), p. 3. 48. Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults (Madison, WI, 1995), p. 112. 49. For a summary of these approaches, see Jennifer Trimble, ‘Reception Theory’, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture, ed. Elise A. Friedland, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, and Elaine K. Gazda (New York, 2015). 50. I would like to thank Robin Osborne for his careful reading of a prior draft of this chapter.

PART 3

Greek Art and Culture

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/1/2017, SPi

Introduction to Part 3 As his career developed, Pater increasingly devoted himself to a direct engagement with ancient Greece. Homer is a special favourite, as is Pindar. Pater is an enthusiast for Euripides (whereas other prominent Victorian critics including Arnold favoured Sophocles). He read the most up-to-date studies of Greek religion and archaeology, and was the first person to lecture on Pausanias and ancient art in Oxford, promoting (against the view of Jowett) an extension of Literae Humaniores beyond written texts and philology (in this, as in other things, he was a progressive). He seems to have planned a comprehensive treatment of Greek sculpture from its archaic beginnings, which involved a considerable modification of his earlier views, publishing four key essays on the subject—indeed Pater is the most important British sculpture-theorist of his century. This part explores the broad range of Pater’s engagement with ancient Greece, spanning literature, mythology, archaeology, and art history. Lene Østermark-Johansen offers a close reading of ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, examining the significance of its subtitle ‘A Study from Euripides’ and its character as an imaginary portrait. Charlotte Ribeyrol investigates the reasons Pater was drawn to lecture on Pausanias, and the import of his so doing, in the context of a growing interest in this writer. Elizabeth Prettejohn shows how Pater’s writings on Greek sculpture, largely neglected by modern critics and scholars, constitute a powerful, original, and sophisticated contribution to the field as well as a subtle response to the pioneering work of Winckelmann. Robert Fowler examines Pater’s understanding of Greek religion, with its stress on its darker and more ‘romantic’ side, and explains why it had less influence than it deserved.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 5/1/2017, SPi

10 Pater’s ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ A Study from Euripides? Lene Østermark-Johansen

The reader who expects to learn much about Euripides from Walter Pater’s ‘Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides’ may experience some disorientation after perusing the piece. In spite of a prominent position in the title, Euripides never resurfaces in Pater’s text; his name is not mentioned again, yet often Pater’s omissions are at least as interesting as his inclusions. Leaving out any references to drama and the theatre the author challenges our notions of genre with a dense discourse on archaeology and topographical writing followed by a narrative about the young son of King Theseus and the Amazon Antiope. The name Hippolytus literally means ‘an unleasher of horses’, and Pater engages with the ancient story of the ardent follower of Artemis, goddess of hunting and chastity, who committed himself to a pure and sportive life. Through the intervention of Aphrodite, Hippolytus’ stepmother, Phaedra, conceives a strong passion for him. His rejection of her advances drives Phaedra to suicide, and under the misconception that his son has violated his stepmother’s bed Theseus has him banished. Hippolytus is subsequently killed in his chariot, his horses frightened by a giant bull sent from the sea. Euripides wrote two plays about Hippolytus: the first only remains in very few fragments, the second exists in full. What did Pater mean by his subtitle ‘A Study from Euripides’ for a text otherwise rich in paraphrases from Pausanias, Thucydides, and Plutarch? What resembles a compact prose essay gradually evolves into a smooth narrative; in my critical edition the reader stumbles over

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references in the first half, while the second barely requires any explanatory notes.1 Are we dealing with a reconstruction of a lost text, a free interpretation of Euripides’ extant Hippolytus play, or Pater’s own version of what he would wish Euripides had written? How, indeed, are we to understand the last half of his title? Pater would appear to have thought of his text as an imaginary portrait. Writing to Arthur Symons on 29 December 1888, he declared he was ‘at work on a new Portrait—Hippolytus Veiled’.2 Given that four of his short stories had appeared in volume form under the title Imaginary Portraits in May the previous year, Pater’s use of the term ‘portrait’ suggests that he saw his ‘Hippolytus’ as part of a longer sequence of ‘portraits’, most of them revolving around the early deaths of young men. We do not know when he introduced the subtitle ‘A Study from Euripides’—possibly in the spring of 1889 as he decided to link ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ with an essay on Euripides which had probably existed in draft form for more than a decade.3 In the summer of 1889 Macmillan’s Magazine published two pieces by Pater: ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ and ‘Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides’.4 Unlike ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, the essay on the Bacchae repeatedly refers to Euripides’ text as a play, represented on the stage, while recounting the plot of Dionysus’ destructive return to Thebes: denied cult status as a god, Dionysus casts a spell of madness upon the female population of Thebes, turning them all into frantic maenads who violently dismember the young King Pentheus. Pentheus’ mother Agave is prominent among the destroying maenads, and again we have a domestic tragedy with a parent causing the unnatural death of a young son as the instrument of an avenging deity. Pater stresses Euripides’ sense of pathos in the play and his ability to relieve the grotesque terror of the plot. References to the essay can be traced back to the late 1870s, when Pater was writing about Demeter and Dionysus. A letter to Pater’s publisher of 1 October 1878 includes a book proposal with the working title ‘The School of Giorgione, and other studies’ in which ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ appears as the second part of a chapter on ‘The Myth of Dionysus’.5 A month later the volume had changed its title to ‘Dionysus and Other Studies’, thus foregrounding the classical at the expense of the Renaissance topics.6 The central status of Dionysus as a deity engaging Pater’s interest is significant; he returned to the god of wine and revelry in his 1886 portrait ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, which in many respects revisits Euripides’ Bacchae in a medieval French

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context. The 1878 volume of essays never materialized in its proposed form; although part of it had been typeset, the type was broken up at Pater’s request in December, and most of the essays found publication elsewhere.7 A glance at the titles for Pater’s essays and collections reveals his fondness for the word ‘study’, in both the singular and the plural: Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) turned into The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry in the second (1877) and all subsequent editions. ‘The School of Giorgione, and Other Studies’ became ‘Dionysus and Other Studies’ before being shelved in 1878. The two posthumous collections compiled by Pater’s literary executor, C. L. Shadwell, paid homage to his repeated use of the term: Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (1895) and Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (1895). ‘A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’ (1876) was perhaps a variation on titles like ‘Notes on Leonardo da Vinci’ (1869), ‘A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli’ (1870), and ‘A Fragment on Measure for Measure’ (1874). Such titles raise an awareness of our partial view of the subject, that what we see is an interpretation, a subjective reading, while also questioning the notion of ‘the one Truth’. Terms such as ‘notes’ and ‘fragment’ stress the sketchy, the unfinished and disrupted. ‘Study’, however, suggests both surface and depth; in artistic terms it may be synonymous with ‘sketch’, a preliminary stage of a larger finished work. Pater juggles prepositions in his titles: ‘studies in’, ‘study of ’, ‘study from’. ‘From’ is an unusual preposition to follow ‘study’, suggesting point of departure, origin from which something new springs. Only some forty lines, compiled from a score of fragments, survive of the Hippolytos Kalyptomenos, ‘Hippolytus who covers his head’. The fragments are so scattered that it is difficult to piece together any coherent narrative from them.8 They constitute the urtext from which all other extant texts about Hippolytus and his lascivious stepmother Phaedra evolve, inspiring almost two millennia of literature. With its depiction of Phaedra’s adulterous love Euripides’ first play caused considerable scandal when first performed. A few years later Sophocles produced a tragedy, Phaedra, which may have added tragic grandeur to the protagonist while presenting her suicide as the honourable way to die.9 Euripides subsequently rewrote his first play into the successful Hippolytos Stephanephoros, ‘Hippolytus who wears a garland [for Artemis]’, performed in 428 BC. Phaedra dies halfway through the play, having been given new

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nobility in her fight against the powers of Aphrodite. Theseus and Hippolytus confront each other in the second half, the former cursing and banishing his son, before Hippolytus’ death in the chariot. Phaedra’s destructive love for her chaste stepson had a long literary afterlife: Ovid narrated the story in his Metamorphoses, 15. 479–552 and imagined the enamoured Phaedra’s address to Hippolytus in his Heroides, 4. Seneca’s Phaedra relied on both Ovid and Euripides and has been used to reconstruct the lost Hippolytus play.10 Seneca’s tragedy brought the story to the audiences of the Renaissance, and Racine’s Phèdre (1677)—originally entitled Phèdre et Hippolyte—granted it new life and remains one of the most frequently performed of his plays. In Greek drama the individual is subordinate to the rivalry between Aphrodite and Artemis. Later texts become studies of desire, remorse and sacrifice, rebuttal and victimization. Focus changes between the three principal characters—Phaedra, Theseus, Hippolytus—in the many reworkings of the story. Pater, not surprisingly, places other figures in the foreground than his classical sources, as he explores Amazon maternal feelings in the character of Antiope who is entirely his own creation, as we shall see. In the opening paragraph of ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ (quoted by Charlotte Ribeyrol, Chapter 11 in this volume), Pater evokes the fragmentary materiality of the past available to Pausanias in Greece in the second century AD and to Eustace and Addison in eighteenth-century Italy. As travellers in the aftermaths of great civilizations—whether that of Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy—they cannot recreate the relics of the past in their writings. Their travelogues leave many stones unturned, and Pater’s elegiac tone captures his awareness of having come generations too late, when the traces of Greek culture are vanishing fast. Pater’s writings about Demeter and Dionysus had explored the interconnection between religion and place, as had Pausanias, constantly linking religious shrines to topography, deity to location. Like Pater, Pausanias is a traveller in fragments, reconstructing the past on the basis of a few physical fragments and transforming them into a text which hovers somewhere between fact and fiction. Pater imagines how much better he himself would have fared, had he visited Greece at the time of Pausanias. Surely, this is a strange fantasy on Pater’s behalf; it is difficult to imagine him peeping into the ‘haunts of the antique Greek life’, ‘minutely systematic in our painstaking’, as he puts it (‘Hippolytus

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Veiled’, IPJT, 216; GS, 153). Yet perhaps this is exactly what he does, in his imagination at any rate, in ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, as he brings us into ancient domestic interiors—whether those in palatial urban architecture or in rustic squalor—in his search for the spirit of Greek life. This spirit finds its embodiment in Hippolytus, in many ways the liveliest of Pater’s protagonists. The product of an innocent and happy childhood, lovingly nursed by his Amazon mother, he is sportsman, chaste priest, and scholar. So many of the positive qualities associated with Greek culture in Pater’s Plato and Platonism—ascēsis, discipline, scholarship, physical health—converge in the figure of Hippolytus. His status as an icon of same-sex desire has been persuasively pointed out.11 The focus on the young boy in fin-de-siècle literature signified ‘the coming of age of the modern gay and lesbian sensibility: his protean nature displayed a double desire—to love a boy and to be a boy’.12 Pater’s red-and-white boy has a precursor in John Addington Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets where Euripides’ eponymous hero becomes the focus of attention. Symonds partly follows the prevailing German view of Euripides as heralding the decadence of Greek drama, propounded by the Schlegel brothers, Hegel, and Nietzsche.13 However, he also turns this decadence into something positive by making Euripides an aesthete avant la lettre. Thus he is both ‘the mouthpiece of Athenian decline’ and ‘[m]ore conscious of the laws of beauty than his predecessors’.14 Symonds’s lyrical apotheosis of Hippolytus provided Pater with a few cues: Side by side with the fever of Phædra is the pure fresh health of the hunter-hero. The scent of forest-glades, where he pursues the deer with Artemis, surrounds him; the sea-breeze from the sands, where he trains his horses, moves his curls. His piety is as untainted as his purity; it is the maiden-service of a maiden-saint.15

Yopie Prins points out how a certain sexual anarchy characterizes Symonds’s Hippolytus; as the son of an Amazon, ‘he embodies a feminized masculinity born from a masculinized femininity. He is a male Amazon, recoiling from the heterosexual eros of Aphrodite and dedicating himself in “the maiden-service of a maiden-saint” to the virginal Artemis.’16 In Pater’s text the hero is strangely connected to the earth. Pater’s Hippolytus is of Greece and must return to Greek soil after his death, mourned by his Amazon mother who joins Pater’s list of grieving mothers: the Virgin in versions of Michelangelo’s Pietà (1871), Demeter

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(1876), and Pentheus’ mother Agave in the other Euripides essay (1889). Pater returns to the juxtaposition of Greece and Italy at the end of ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, as he toys with the resurrection of Hippolytus as the Roman deity Virbius in Aricia outside Rome.17 Yet neither Asclepius nor Ovid can bring his hero back to life, and Pater concludes even more elegiacally than he began: Later legend breaks a supernatural light over that great desolation, and would fain relieve the reader by introducing the kindly Asclepius, who presently restores the youth to life, not, however, in the old form or under familiar conditions. To her [Hippolytus’ mother Antiope], surely, counting the wounds, the disfigurements, telling over the pains which had shot through that dear head now insensible to her touch among the pillows under the harsh broad daylight, that would have been no more of a solace than if, according to the fancy of Ovid, he flourished still, a little deity, but under a new name and veiled now in old age, in the haunted grove of Aricia, far from his old Attic home, in a land which had never seen him as he was. (IPJT, 237; GS, 186)

Antiope’s mourning over her dead son becomes the modern reader’s mourning over the loss of access to Greek life and religion. A resurrection of the Greek world before Pausanias would be as impossible as the resurrection of Hippolytus under another name. Like other Paterian protagonists—Sebastian van Storck and Emerald Uthwart—Hippolytus goes against the natural order by dying before his time and being survived by his mother. Euripides’ extant Hippolytus play falls into two clear parts: the first dominated by Phaedra and her nurse, the second by the conflict between Theseus and Hippolytus. Phaedra’s passion, deceit, and suicide have overshadowed the figure of Hippolytus in the play’s reception history. Pater downplays the part of Phaedra and, unusually, introduces a complex female plot. The Amazon mother, absent in Euripides, becomes a pervasive force of love and constancy. Disempowered by Heracles’ theft of the magic girdle given her by Ares and by Theseus’ subsequent abduction of her, Antiope is the tamed female warrior, softened by suffering and motherhood, herself a relic of a wild primitivism which has been colonized.18 Pater’s text contains several references to the tombs of the Amazons,19 commemorating their extinction after their fighting against the Athenians.20 As the last of her race Antiope has turned to nursing and spinning, providing her son with the grey woollen fleece which grows with him from infancy into the flashy cloak, floating in the

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air around the handsome charioteer. It becomes a protective garment snatched from his body by the voluptuous Phaedra in her attempt to rape him, a symbol of his sworn chastity which, as Pater repeatedly points out, was ‘itself a kind of death’ (IPJT, 229, 230; GS, 171, 172). Antiope’s attempt at spinning a cocoon around her son fails, and her textile activity as spinner, measurer, and weaver of the thread takes on a sinister function, suggestive of the Greek Fates. She is a distant relative of the followers of Dionysus, the nympholepti: [T]hey are weavers or spinsters, spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured threads, the foliage of the trees, the petals of flowers, the skins of the fruit, the long thin stalks on which the poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer compares to them, in their constant motion, the maids who sit spinning in the house of Alcinous. The nymphs of Naxos, where the grape-skin is darkest, weave for him a purple robe. (‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, 12)

Yet where the nympholepti are all colour and collaboration, Antiope’s thread is white or grey. She works and grieves in solitude, aware of her status as an outcast and of the necessity to veil both herself and her child. Pater’s ‘Study from Euripides’ is also a study in motherhood. No fewer than three mothers appear in his text, with the dark shadow of Demeter as an additional mother figure. Unlike Euripides, Seneca, and Racine—who all set their plays in Troezen on the Peloponnese21—Pater transfers the prime location to an unnamed village in Attica, north of Athens, a by-path on the sacred way to Eleusis, chief sanctuary of Demeter. He builds on a legend, presented by Herodotus and repeated by Pausanias, that Artemis was the daughter of Demeter.22 The goddess of chastity worshipped by Hippolytus is also goddess of childbirth and becomes an additional mother to the boy, far less dangerous than in the Greek tragedy. Her priests have abandoned her chapel and taken her statue to the neighbouring city, leaving Hippolytus as her most faithful local worshipper, singing in her honour and gathering flowers, like another Persephone. Her chapel is contrasted with that of the stepmother: Phaedra’s perfumed boudoir becomes a scene of attempted rape, a deflowering of the red-and-white boy, performed by the daughter of Pasiphaë, who memorably copulated lustfully with a bull. Yet Phaedra’s status as undisputed tragic heroine is significantly downplayed: there is no suicide, and her lust, jealousy, and deceit are quickly passed over by Pater.

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The nurturing female world of ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ forms a mellow counterpart to the unleashing of destructive sexual energies outlined in ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’. The emphasis on women connects Pater’s two texts in several ways. Thus he repeatedly stresses Dionysus as a ‘woman-like god’ or a ‘woman’s deity’ (‘Bacchanals’, GS, 57, 64) whose power falls on women or women-like souls. He mentions the maenads as later sisters of the Amazons (GS, 58), and the frantic followers in Dionysus’ Thiasus remind us of the once unruly warrior women, of whom, with the exception of Antiope, only the tombs remain. By returning to Thebes Dionysus is himself an adoring son, vindictive of his mother Semele, who had been cast out by her sisters, among them Agave. Pater celebrates Semele’s nurturing care for her son, who, like Hippolytus, is charismatic in his red-and-white androgynous beauty. The counterpart to Hippolytus’ white woollen cloak is Dionysus’ ‘fawn-skin, composed now so daintily over the shoulders, . . . worn with the whole coat of the animal made up, the hoofs gilded and tied together over the right shoulder, to leave the right arm disengaged to strike’ (GS, 63). Like Hippolytus, Dionysus is a hunter, the Orphic Dionysus Zagreus, yet as hunters they complement one another: where Hippolytus is the victim, Dionysus is the victimizer. Pater’s two Euripides texts frame the Greek playwright’s career, as they engage with an early and a very late play, both of which deal with the full range of femininity and problematize gender relations. In the case of the Bacchae, one of Euripides’ last plays, Pater insists on the playwright’s mature sophistication, which tames the oriental ritualistic violence displayed on the stage, turning it into an almost medieval morality play (GS, 54). The early play, however, he appropriates for his own purposes, fitting it into his long line of male portraits, while downplaying the Phaedra plot. The generational conflict between father and son, which is such a powerful feature of Euripides’ Hippolytus, never looms large over Pater’s ‘Hippolytus Veiled’. We do not see the confrontational moment when father curses son, nor Theseus’ realization that he has wrongfully brought death upon his own flesh and blood. The horrific clarity expressed by Hippolytus shortly before his death belongs to Greek tragedy and not to late Victorian fiction: ‘For your mistake I pity you more than me.’23 Pater gives no exact cause of Hippolytus’ death: an earthquake? a curse invoked and effected via Poseidon? or the rage of Aphrodite because her follower, Phaedra, has been scorned by the young

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man? Pater’s portrait is a Bildungsroman in miniature form, chronicling the growth of Hippolytus, his turning into manhood after his first visit to Eleusis, his rise to sexy Athenian sports star, the assault on his proclaimed chastity, and an ensuing illness, the cause of which, again, is uncertain. Does he fall ill from shame? from passion? or is he touched by ‘some mystery of wasting sickness’ (‘Hippolyus Veiled’, IPJT, 234; GS, 182), thus joining the company of other Paterian protagonists such as Watteau, the English poet, Sebastian van Storck, and Emerald Uthwart? Maternal love can nurse him back from his illness, but it cannot save him from the Olympian gods: what has been decreed by the gods cannot be revoked. Love and the mourning over the early loss of a bright young man dominate Pater’s portrait. The pervasive emotions of Euripidean tragedy—jealousy, vindictiveness, misogyny—never surface in his text. Pater’s protagonist would seem to move quite happily in the company of both the goddess of chastity and his Amazon mother, with none of the hatred against women which recurs in Euripides’ play where Hippolytus famously curses women and wishes them altogether absent from his world: O Zeus, why have you settled women, this bane to cheat mankind, in the light of the sun? If you wished to propagate the human race, it was not from women that you should have provided this. Rather, men should put down in the temples either bronze or iron or a mass of gold and buy offspring, each for a price appropriate to his means, and then dwell in houses free from the female sex.24

This passage, interestingly, passes into Pater’s narrative when the lusty Phaedra educates her young stepson in the mysteries of marital delights: By the way, she explains the delights of love, of marriage, the husband once out of the way; finds in him, with misgiving, a sort of forwardness, as she thinks, on this one matter, as if he understood her craft and despised it. He met her questions in truth with scarce so much as contempt, with laughing counter-queries, why people needed wedding at all? They might have found the children in the temples, or bought them, as you could flowers in Athens. (IPJT, 232; GS, 179)

Where it is difficult to find echoes of the fragments of Euripides’ first play, Pater here recycles such a memorable passage in the extant Hippolytus play, that it would probably have been noticed by some of the more learned among his readers. Hostile misogyny is now turned into naive innocence or teasing provocation, either way reflecting positively

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on the male protagonist, and the harshness of the original text is transformed into playful ambiguity. By departing from a Euripidean text Pater was engaging with generations of Romantic and mid-nineteenth-century poets who had revived Euripides in their own poetry. Goethe had recreated Euripides’ Iphigenia in his Iphigenia in Tauris (prose version 1779; verse drama 1786), and reconstructed his fragmented play Phaeton in 1823—another story of an unfortunate youth, mercilessly dashed to pieces from his chariot by the gods. Shelley had translated Euripides’ only surviving satyr play, The Cyclops, in 1819, a translation corrected meticulously by Swinburne in his 1869 ‘Notes on the Text of Shelley’.25 A couple of years previously Swinburne had explored Phaedra and her Cretan background in the verse drama ‘Phædra’, published in his Poems and Ballads (1866), and its companion poem ‘Pasiphae’, never published during his lifetime.26 While owing something to Racine, Swinburne’s Phaedra is also one of Baudelaire’s femmes damnées: as Pasiphaë’s daughter, she is tainted by her blood and driven towards an untimely death. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘Artemis Prologizes’ (1842) revolves around the conflict between Artemis and Aphrodite over the dead Hippolytus, who is being revived through the powers of Asclepius while Artemis is speaking. Browning’s poem continues where Euripides’ drama ends; decades later he translated Euripides’ Alcestis (1871) and part of the Heracles, incorporated in his long poem ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’ (1875).27 In 1881 the young A. Mary F. Robinson published her metrical translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus, done under the close supervision of her friend J. A. Symonds. She included her own poems in the volume, thus linking composition with translation, modern poetry with classics.28 Her translation was one of a score of translations of Euripides’ Hippolytus published between 1850 and 1900. When Pater published his ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ he had been Robinson’s neighbour in London for some four years and knew her quite well. By 1889, then, Pater’s involvement with Euripides had many antecedents in his own circles and amongst the Romantic poets in a complex literary field of translation, reconstruction, appropriation, and rewriting. Pater’s predecessors usually kept some element of drama in their choice of literary form: verse drama and dramatic monologue. ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ has an absence of direct speech, yet Pater finds other ways of creating drama, such as a powerful use of the dramatic present tense.

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We find it in several passages, here shortly before Hippolytus’ death: ‘Once more he wins the prize; he says good-bye to admiring friends anxious to entertain him, and by night starts off homewards, as of old, like a child, returning quickly through the solitude in which he had never lacked company, and was now to die’ (IPJT, 235–6; GS, 185). Pater’s change in verbal tense compresses Hippolytus’ brief recovery and return to life, a momentary pause in the general drift towards death, before the wheel of fortune continues its downward turn. Earlier in the text, when Phaedra’s wedding ring travels from her hand to Hippolytus’ and, with an echo of Prosper Mérimée’s ‘Vénus d’Ille’ (1837), onto the statue of Artemis, Pater’s oscillation between verbal tenses highlights the lad’s confusion and the realms of the mortal and the divine: Meantime Phædra’s young children draw from the seemingly unconscious finger the marriage-ring, set it spinning on the floor at his feet, and the staid youth places it for a moment on his own finger for safety. As it settles there, his stepmother, aware all the while, presses suddenly his hand over it. He found the ring there that night as he lay; left his bed in the darkness, and again for safety, put it on the finger of the image, wedding once for all that so kindly mystical mother. (IPJT, 233; GS, 179)

Pater speeds up and slows down his narrative by means of verb and syntax, just as he employs it to indicate different levels of awareness and agency, from the energetic immediacy of the innocent youth over the contriving seductress to the powers of the superhuman machinery which exists on another level. If we add to this the voice of the educated nineteenth-century traveller in the opening paragraphs, elegiac in his approach to Greek landscape and myth, we may get some sense of the extraordinary stylistic complexity of Pater’s text. If we see Pater’s text as a response to decades of poetic rewritings of Euripides’ dramas, it must also be contextualized against some of the other publications in Classics at the time. Robert Yelverton Tyrrell’s edition of The Bacchae of 1871 may well have inspired Pater’s interest in Euripides. The section of Tyrrell’s introduction entitled ‘The Religious and Moral Import of The Bacchae’ contained repeated comparisons between the playwright’s Hippolytus and the late play, comparing the roles of Aphrodite and Dionysus, Hippolytus and Pentheus, and discussing Euripides as a sophist.29 When the book was reissued in 1892 by Macmillan—one of the leading publishers in Classics—Pater’s essay on the Bacchae was incorporated as part of the introduction.30

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Tyrrell highlighted Pater’s awareness of the ‘aesthetic charm’ of Euripides’ play and praised his essay as being in ‘itself a poem . . . worthy of the work with which it deals’.31 As a Macmillan author Pater was at the very front of the field, alongside Tyrrell’s colleague J. P. Mahaffy, whose monograph Euripides appeared from Macmillan in 1879;32 in 1881 they published his Greek text of Hippolytus, which formed the basis of an English translation in 1888.33 From 1894 to 1898 Macmillan published A. S. Way’s translations of Euripides’ tragedies,34 and the two most influential translations of Pausanias at the time—the one by Margaret Verrall with a commentary by Jane Harrison, and J. G. Frazer’s magisterial six-volume edition. A. W. Verrall’s Euripides the Rationalist appeared in 1895, the year after Pater’s death.35 Gilbert Murray’s translations of The Bacchae and Hippolytus appeared in 1902,36 paving the way for a new Euripides craze in the early twentieth century, partly brought on by William Archer and Harley Granville Barker’s production of Hippolytus at the Lyric Theatre in London in 1904. Euripides was now likened to Ibsen and modern psychological drama.37 The appearance of Pater’s two Euripides texts in Macmillan’s Magazine in the summer of 1889 gives us some idea of the intellectual and literary timeliness of his writings; where Verrall would call for a rehabilitation of Euripides in 1895,38 Pater had been ready to do so already in 1878, but postponed the project for about a decade. Within a year two different translations of the Hippolytus had appeared, so clearly time was ripe for something other than a straightforward translation.39 Pater had inserted a prose translation of the Messenger’s description of the sleeping Maenads in the Bacchae into his first essay (GS, 71–3), thus blending Euripides’ words with his own. Some 50 per cent of the late nineteenth-century translations of the Hippolytus turned Euripides into prose, the other 50 per cent employed a range of different metres, among them blank verse and heroic couplets.40 Robinson, Way, and Murray all translated into poetry, Murray even rhymed metres, for, as he argued, Euripides has, of course, no rhyme; yet a rhymed version seems to me, after many experiments, to produce the effect of his style much more nearly than blank verse. I have often used more elaborate diction than he, because I found that, Greek being a very simple and austere language and modern English a very ornate one, a direct translation produced an effect of baldness which was quite unlike the original.41

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Murray’s Hippolytus is a very different ‘Study from Euripides’; the closed rhymes add something stately and ritualistic to the text which goes in quite other directions than Pater’s gently flowing prose. His rendering of Hippolytus’ invective against women reads: O God, why hast Thou made this gleaming snare, Woman, to dog us on the happy earth? Was it thy will to make Man, why his birth Through Love and Woman? Could we not have rolled Our store of prayer and offering, royal gold, Silver and weight of bronze before Thy feet, And bought of God new child-souls, as were meet, For each man’s sacrifice, and dwelt in homes Free, where nor Love nor Woman goes and comes?42

Murray’s creative rewriting of Euripides was an attempt to add new modernity to an ancient text. Pater had the freedom of building on a lost text, of reconstructing ancient myth to fit into his string of other male portraits, while also addressing topography, archaeology, and the profound interconnection between man and place. Yet given the timeliness and topicality of his piece, it might be perceived as a very free translation of a palimpsest of two millennia of other texts. Immediately after the First World War T. S. Eliot lumped Murray and Pater together with the Modernist’s extraordinary arrogance. In ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ (1920) he attacked Murray’s rhymed translations for their wordiness and purple passages: Professor Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language. We do not reproach him for preferring, apparently, Euripides to Æschylus. But if he does, he should at least appreciate Euripides. And it is inconceivable that anyone with a genuine feeling for the sound of Greek verse should deliberately elect the William Morris couplet, the Swinburne lyric, as a just equivalent. As a poet, Mr Murray is merely a very insignificant follower of the preRaphaelite movement. As a Hellenist, he is very much of the present day, and a very important figure in the day.43

The schism between the scholar and the poet is worth noting. Pater was sometimes criticized for his amateurish scholarship and praised for his innovative literary form. Eliot celebrated H.D. and Pound as a new generation of translators, heralding a new perception of Greek culture. ‘The Greek is no longer the awe-inspiring Apollo Belvedere of Winckelmann,

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Goethe, and Schopenhauer, the figure of which Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde offered us a slightly debased re-edition,’ he declared.44 He concluded with praise for what he called ‘the creative eye’: ‘We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as present to us as the present. This is the creative eye; and it is because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite dead.’45 Eliot would have done well to reread his Pater: ‘Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides’ is a clear testimony of the author’s creative eye, and Pater had no truck with ‘slightly debased re-editions’.

Notes 1. ‘Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides’, IPJT, pp. 215–37. 2. Letters, p. 90. 3. In his A Bibliography of the Writings of Walter H. Pater (New York, 1975), no. 25, Samuel Wright suggests a composition date of 1877 for ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’. How the essay evolved between 1877 and its publication in 1889 is unknown. 4. ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 60 (May 1889), 63–72; ‘Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 60 (August 1889), 294–306. 5. See Letters, p. 32. The volume would have been a motley one, including many of the essays on English literature which later found their way into Appreciations (1889), together with the Giorgione essay and the essays on Demeter and Dionysus. 6. Letter to Alexander Macmillan, 18 November 1878: Letters, p. 34. 7. See Laurel Brake, ‘After Studies: The Cancelled Book’, in Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 213–24. 8. The surviving fragments are published in Greek with an English translation and a critical bibliography relating to the reconstruction of the lost play in Euripides, Fragments: Aegeus-Meleager, ed. and tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 466–90. 9. Euripides, Hippolytos, ed. W. S. Barrett (Oxford, 1964), pp. 14–16. Only some twenty-six lines remain of Sophocles’ play. 10. Barrett, Hippolytos, pp. 16–17, warns strongly against this, as do the editors of Seneca’s play: Phaedra, ed. Michael Coffrey and Roland Mayer (Cambridge, 1990), p. 6. The alternative title of Hippolytus features in one of the two branches of manuscripts (E and A) through which the text of Seneca’s play

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

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is transmitted (in the A branch). Phaedra (from the E branch) is, however, by far the most commonly used title (Coffrey and Mayer, p. 30). Yopie Prins, ‘“Lady’s Greek” (With the Accents): A Metrical Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34: 2 (2006), 591–618. Martha Vicinus, ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, 1999), pp. 83–106 (83–4). See Ernst Behler, ‘A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century Damnatio of Euripides’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 27: 4 (1986), 335–67; Albert Henrichs, ‘The Last of the Detractors: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Condemnation of Euripides’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 27: 4 (1986), 369–97. J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 1st series (2nd edn., 1877), pp. 213, 219. Symonds, Studies, pp. 233–4. Prins, ‘“Lady’s Greek”’, p. 600. Ovid recounted how Virbius was another version of the resurrected Hippolytus, brought to Aricia by the goddess of chastity; Metamorphoses, 15. 479–552. In classical sources there is some disagreement about the name of Hippolytus’ mother; sometimes she is identified with Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, at other times (in Plutarch for instance), she is called Antiope, the sister of Hippolyta. Both were daughters of Ares, the god of war. IPJT, 219, 223, 224, 232; GS, 156, 161, 162, 177. The Attic War between the Amazons and the Athenians is described in Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1. 2. 1 and in Plutarch, Life of Theseus, 26–8. See also Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton, 2014), pp. 271–86. Both Theseus and Hippolytus were supposedly born in Troezen. Herodotus, Histories, 2. 156. 6 and Pausanias, 8. 37. 6. Euripides, Hippolytus, ed. and tr. David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1995), p. 257. Hippolytus, tr. Kovacs, p. 185. The essay was first published in the Fortnightly Review, 5 (May 1869), 539–61 and subsequently in Essays and Studies (1875). ‘Pasiphae’ is in the MS collection of the British Library. Catherine Maxwell transcribes and discusses the poem in Swinburne, Writers and their Work (2006), pp. 49–54, 122–5. The fragmentary Euripides play The Cretans features Pasiphaë and may have served as a source of inspiration. See Kathleen Riley, ‘Browning’s Versions: Robert Browning, Greek Tragedy and the Victorian Translation Debate’, Literature and Aesthetics, 13: 1 (2003), 51–70.

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28. The crowned Hippolytus translated from Euripides, with new poems by A. Mary F. Robinson (1881). 29. The Bacchae of Euripides with a Revision of the Text and a Commentary by Robert Yelverton Tyrrell (1871), pp. xvi–xxi. 30. The Bacchae of Euripides with a Revision of the Text and a Commentary by Robert Yelverton Tyrrell (1892), pp. lv–lxxxii. 31. Tyrrell, The Bacchae (1892), pp. liv–lv. 32. Both Tyrrell and Mahaffy taught at Trinity College Dublin, and thus became formative influences on Oscar Wilde; see Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 122–3, 184–7. 33. J. P. Mahaffy, Euripides (1879); The Hippolytus of Euripides, ed. J. P. Mahaffy and J. B. Bury (1881); The Hippolytus of Euripides, translated into English from the Text of Mahaffy and Bury (Macmillan’s Classical Series) by H. Hailstone (Cambridge, 1888). 34. The Tragedies of Euripides in English Verse, tr. A. S. Way, 3 vols (1894–8). 35. A. W. Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist: A Study in the History of Art and Religion (Cambridge, 1895). 36. Euripides, Translated into English Rhyming Verse by Gilbert Murray, M.A. (1902). 37. For an account of the theatre production, see Annabel Robinson, The Life and Works of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford, 2002), pp. 173–7. 38. Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, p. 2. 39. Hailstone’s translation based on the text by Mahaffy and Bury, cited in n. 33; Euripides’ Hippolytus, Literally Translated, with the Parsing of the Principal Words, by a Graduate, First Class Classical Honours (Cambridge, 1888). 40. Cf. The Medea, Alcestis, and Hippolytus of Euripides translated into Blank Verse, with the Choruses in Lyric and Other Metres. By the Rev. Henry Williams, B.A., formerly Scholar of Jesus College, Oxford (1871); Euripides, Translated into English Rhyming Verse by Gilbert Murray, M.A. (1902); The crowned Hippolytus translated from Euripides, with new poems by A. Mary F. Robinson (1881). 41. Euripides, tr. Murray (1902), p. x. 42. Euripides, tr. Murray, p. 34. 43. ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1997), pp. 62–3. 44. Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, pp. 63–4. 45. Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, p. 64. Murray would seem to have anticipated critics like Eliot. Cf. the introduction to his translation: ‘A strictly literal translation has the advantage that it can be definitely attacked and defended on scientific grounds. It has a possibility of being “right”. And a translation like mine cannot be “right”. Its failure, indeed, must, as I said

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above, be more profound than the reader realizes. First, because a man generally does not see his own mistakes or realize his own interrupting mannerisms; and, secondly, because a translator cannot help seeing his own work through the medium of the greater thing which he studies and loves. The light of the original shines through it, and the music of the original echoes round it’ (Euripides, tr. Murray (1902), p. x).

11 Hellenic Utopias Pater in the Footsteps of Pausanias Charlotte Ribeyrol

In 1878 Pater delivered a series of lectures at Oxford on Pausanias’ Periegesis (Description of Greece) books 1, 5, and 6 which describe the prominent religious and artistic sites of Attica and Elis, from Athens to Olympia. Pausanias’ construction of an idealized Hellas fuelled Pater’s desire to create his own private itinerary through an imaginary Hellenic topography which he further explored in his essays on Greek art. Pater was particularly drawn to Pausanias’ ecphrases of ancient Greek works of art like the throne of Apollo at Amyclae which he used for ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, in order not only to ground his own word-painting in the classical tradition, but also to scatter throughout his texts homosexual references, such as the tragic love of Apollo for Hyacinth which the statue supposedly celebrated (GS, 235–7). This chapter examines the process of subjective appropriation at work in Pater’s travelling in the fantasized footsteps of the Periegete. By doing so it also sheds light on the key role played by Pater within the complex history of the reception of Pausanias’ Description of Greece in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Winckelmann to John Addington Symonds and Jane Harrison.

Belated Longings: From Winckelmann to Pater ‘I am one of those whom the Greeks call ὀψιμαθεῖς.—I have come into the world and into Italy too late’ (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 150). Winckelmann was 38 when he arrived in Rome, his spiritual ‘native soil’ (Ren., 150),

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where he led a ‘simple, primeval, Greek’ existence, which he regretted discovering so late in life—hence the Greek epithet opsimathēs, ‘late learner’. According to Harold Bloom, such an ‘intoxication of belatedness’ is evident in both ‘Winckelmann’ and Marius the Epicurean.1 Although Bloom’s argument pertains mainly to Pater’s relation with his Romantic predecessors and Modernist heirs rather than to his complex appropriations of the classical tradition, this longing for the antique past and Hellenic ‘native soil’ is central to many of Pater’s texts, including the essays on Greek art, throughout which the fantasized topography of ancient Greece emerges as both a palimpsest of scholarly sources and a highly personal literary construct. An analogous ‘anxiety’ of Hellenic influence may be found in the poetry and Memoirs of Pater’s contemporary, John Addington Symonds.2 Symonds was an Oxonian Hellenophile and a devoted reader of Winckelmann, one who deplored the temporal chasm separating him from what he called his Greek ‘soul’s home’: ‘[m]y thoughts were lodged in Hellas; but centuries rolled between my soul’s home in Athens and the English places I was born again to live in’.3 Symonds ‘lived a stifled anachronism’, constantly longing for the ‘antenatal’ music which would lead him back to his own antique abode.4 The emphasis here is clearly on a chronological rather than geographical disjunction, as if ancient Greece were to remain a utopia—both no place (ou) and ideal place (eu)—situated in a dreamlike aestheticized ‘Arcadia’ (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 162) rather than in a specific space: an ideal one should ‘aspire’ to, but ‘never actually reach’, to paraphrase Pater’s essay on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (‘AP’, 224). Although Pater, unlike Symonds,5 never travelled to Greece, his essays on Greek art may be read as ‘local studies’,6 their rich intertextuality fostering a vivid sense of place. However fantasized, Pater’s and Symonds’s imaginary Hellas was indeed shaped by ancient sources, notably Pausanias’ Periegesis, a belated exploration of the arts and religious traditions of archaic and classical Greece, which played a key role in guiding them through this utopian land. For Tim Whitmarsh, the ‘literary-rhetorical-philosophical persona’ of certain writers of the second century AD, such as Dio Chrysostom, was ‘formed of what Harold Bloom calls “the psychology of belatedness”’,7 which may explain why such texts resonated with the scholarly and more intimate longings of both Pater and Symonds. Except for one occurrence in ‘Winckelmann’ (Ren., 162), most references to the Periegesis can be found in Pater’s

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Greek essays. Pausanias is mentioned thirty-three times, mainly in ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, which was based on his Oxford lectures of 1878.8 Pater’s reliance on the Greek author seemed so strong to Edmund Gosse that, when reviewing Plato and Platonism in 1893, he heralded Pater as ‘a new Pausanias’.9 Symonds also mentions this antique source in his Sketches and Studies as well as in one of the key poems in the collection New and Old (1880), entitled ‘Pantarkes’, which was inspired by Pausanias’ ecphrasis of the chryselephantine statue of Zeus and a winged Victory in Periegesis, book 5. Pater and Symonds were of course not the first to use Pausanias as a source for their reflections on Greek art. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) had relied on him; and several translations of the Periegesis had been published in French, German, and English in the eighteenth century, increasing Pausanias’ popularity during that period.10 For Winckelmann however, Pausanias’ journey was not only a scholarly source of information on ancient Greece; it also reflected his own personal aspirations, as noted by Jaś Elsner: In a sense the Winckelmannian project is a kind of mimetic exercise in relation to the text of Pausanias—reinvented for modern needs and concerns, but still aesthetic and historical in the ways Pausanias’ own travel book is aesthetic and historical, and continuing the commitment to some of the more profound ideological assumptions central to Pausanias’ own enterprise, such as the linkage of good art to political freedom.11

This ‘mimetic relationship’12 is also illustrated in Pater’s writings. This chapter will therefore focus on how Pater drew on this ancient source to trace his own itinerary through an imaginary gallery of Greek artefacts. Pausanias’ text performed three related functions for Pater: it enabled him, first, to demonstrate and fulfil his academic ambition to trace the historical beginnings of Greek art (scholarly function); secondly, to ground his own ecphrastic practice within the classical tradition of the Second Sophistic (aesthetic function); and thirdly, to scatter homoerotic references throughout his essays (sexual counter-discourse).

Reading Pausanias: The Search for Hellenic Traces The ancient Hellas described by the opsimathēs Pausanias, a Greek exiled in a territory dominated by Rome, was, according to James Porter,

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a world in ruins: ‘Pausanias dwells upon monuments that are in fragments. . . . The invitation to readers is that they restore the ruins in their minds.’13 Indeed, Porter adds, ‘much of Pausanias’ Description compulsively circles around such trace-objects, which are intrinsically worth mentioning and remembering, literally “handed over to memory” (8. 32. 2) as though their sole purpose were to document the “now gone” character of Greece’.14 A similar quest for ancient relics may be found in Pater’s essays on Greek art, in which the keyword ‘trace’ is repeated no fewer than thirty-seven times in both its noun and verb forms, as if to emphasize the dual process of loss and active reconstruction of the Hellenic past required from the Hellenophile. The term ‘trace’ suggests both stasis and motion, illustrating the paradox of the periegetic writer who, according to William Shuter, ‘is neither in motion nor at rest, . . . always pausing’.15 For Pater, ‘the student of origins, as French critics say, of the earliest stages of art and poetry, must be content to follow faint traces; and in what has been here said, much may seem to have been made of little, with too much completion, by a general framework or setting, of what after all are but doubtful or fragmentary indications’ (‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, GS, 111–12; original italics). As he notes in ‘Hippolytus Veiled’, such ‘fragmentary indications’ may be retrieved from Pausanias’ Periegesis: Even for Pausanias, visiting Greece before its direct part in affairs was quite played out, much had perished or grown dim—of its art, of the truth of its outward history, above all of its religion as a credible or practicable thing. And yet Pausanias visits Greece under conditions as favourable for observation as those under which later travellers, Addison or Eustace, proceed to Italy. . . . Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the antique Greek life unnoticed by him we should have peeped into, minutely systematic in our painstaking! how many a view would broaden out where he notes hardly anything at all on his map of Greece! (GS, 152–3)

Taking his readers on an alternative Hellenic Grand Tour, Pater fantasizes a more secret Greece, off the official ‘map’ delineated by the Periegesis, which was increasingly used as an antique Baedeker. But, in spite of his detailed descriptions of major antique sites, Pausanias was not considered at the time a canonical author on a par with the greater poets, historians, or philosophers of the classical age, as his prose was thought to be dull and imprecise. Pater’s quotation reflects this ambiguous attitude towards Pausanias and his account of a disappearing

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Hellenic world. This problematic reception of the Periegesis in the second half of the nineteenth century was partly due to the German scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz who argued that Pausanias was a fraud who had compiled information from other sources.16 Moreover, the debate about the reliability of Pausanias’ descriptions was further complicated by dubious ideological considerations concerning his origins, as one theory emerged that Pausanias may have been a Jew from Syria,17 a scandalous discovery in a context where Hellenism was more and more frequently pitted against Hebraism. But when the first anthropologists and archaeologists, such as Heinrich Schliemann, started using the Periegesis as a guide for their excavations, this negative perception began to change. Archaeological finds in Mycenae or Olympia proved that Pausanias’ text was a reliable historical document in spite of its stylistic shortcomings. Twenty years later, the Periegesis would even become a crucial source for many scholars interested in Greek material culture rather than in purely philological issues: James Frazer and Jane Ellen Harrison, for instance, contributed to the ‘Pausanias boom’ that took place around 1900. To a certain extent, Pater’s Greek essays illustrate this ambivalent reception, with, on the one hand, praise of Pausanias’ descriptions of artworks and, on the other, rejection of supposedly untrustworthy information: we thus find side by side such expressions as ‘we may trust his judgment’ (‘Beginnings’, GS, 226) and, a few pages later, ‘the stray notices of Pausanias, often ambiguous, always of doubtful credibility’ (GS, 229). And yet Pater frequently used key passages from the Periegesis to trace his own subjective Hellenic itinerary, intermingling aesthetic, scholarly, and sexual considerations more central to aestheticism than to such academic controversies. This particular slant could explain why his writings have attracted so little critical attention from researchers working on the reception of Pausanias. For instance, none of the contributors to the collection Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece (2001) or to the issue of the Classical Receptions Journal dedicated to the Periegesis (2010) discusses Pater (or Symonds). This neglect may, however, also be due to the ambiguous status of Pater himself as a transitional scholar, who drew both on the ‘pre-scientific’ Hellenism of Ruskin and on the findings of archaeologists and anthropologists.18 It is striking for instance that Pater (unlike Symonds) never chose to contribute to the Journal of Hellenic Studies launched in 1880 by the Hellenophile George Macmillan, who later published Harrison’s and Frazer’s books on

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Pausanias. Overlapping with the already complex issue of the reliability of Pausanias is the question of Pater’s own reliability as a scholar reflecting upon ancient art. Inspired by two conflicting conceptions of Classics—a philological approach on the one hand and a soaring interest in Greek visual culture on the other—Pater’s essays on ancient Greece were frequently disregarded both by the new generation of archaeologists and anthropologists and by conservative classicists more focused on purely linguistic and literary debates. Thus Andrew Lang’s review of Greek Studies evinces this distrust19 of the ‘scientific’ community about Pater’s writings: Now, all this may be brutally pedantic on my part, but in archaeology and mythology one does like facts. The real, and impossible, problem is to discover how and why Greece, working on the same savage fancies as the rest of the world, ‘turned all to favour and to prettiness.’ In that ‘favour’ Mr. Pater is perfectly at home. . . . Art, in fact, is his province, not this kind of science. . . . Not in Greece are we, with Mr. Pater, but in a Hellas of dreams, going delicately, as one of their own poets says, in delicate air.20

Lang’s review discards Pater’s work in highly gendered terms as he feminizes Pater’s ‘Hellas of dreams’ by quoting the line from Hamlet in which Laertes describes the madness of Ophelia who ‘turns all to favour and to prettiness’ (4. 5. 181). Conveniently brushing aside Pater’s more daring Dionysian explorations, Lang calls into question his ‘delicate’ approach to Greek studies, which he contrasts with the more masculine, scientific territory analysed by anthropologists and archaeologists. Just like Pater’s dreamlike visions of Greece, the Periegesis was read as a ‘fantasy’, ‘one of the first truly monumental Romantic texts’.21 Both Pater’s Greek Studies and Pausanias’ Description of Greece therefore appear as ‘rhetorical constructs’ reflecting the nostalgia of their authors, in search of the glory that was Greece.

Desiring Greece: The Erotics of the Gaze In Greek Studies, Pater clearly follows in the footsteps of Pausanias’ journey through the sacred relics of archaic and classical artefacts. The first part of ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, entitled ‘The Heroic Age of Greek Art’, is more oriented towards literature, as Pater uses Homer’s ecphrasis of the shield of Achilles as the prime example of the

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Greek art of the heroic age. Homer is also omnipresent in the Periegesis as well as in the writings of Pausanias’ contemporaries22 whose itineraries were often guided by the Homeric epics. By contrast, the second part of the essay, ‘The Age of Graven Images’, pursues this historical exploration of ancient art with a much more archaeological emphasis as Pater refers to precise artefacts, ‘actual work of earliest Greek art’ different from ‘those perhaps wholly mythical objects described in Homer’. Here Pausanias is presented—possibly with a tinge of irony—as a fairly reliable source: ‘so experienced an observer’ (GS, 226). In keeping with the information provided in the Periegesis, Pater mentions the materials (ivory, gold, bronze, etc.) of which certain artworks were made (such as the Chest of Cypselus described in book 523) and the iconography of the scenes depicted. Moreover Pater gives the precise names of a certain number of key artists of this period with the emergence of the ‘first true school of sculptors’ (GS, 233) around 576 BC. These include Dontas of Lacedaemon, whose figures were ‘of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold’ (GS, 234), as Pater explains, quoting this passage from Pausanias in Greek. But, alongside such precise, factual references, Pater also employs mythical comparisons, celebrating these ‘workmen’ as ‘sons of Daedalus’ (GS, 237), whereas Pausanias attempted to ‘rationalize’ Greek myths by retracing the genealogy of mythical heroes.24 However, more importantly, Pater finds in Pausanias, as well as in the works of his earlier reader Winckelmann, a catalogue of ecphrases of early Greek artefacts—‘purple passages’ that appear as important sources both for his scholarly discourse and his own ‘word painting’, in the wake of the literary tradition initiated by writers of the Second Sophistic: Lucian, Philostratus, and Dio Chrysostom, but the Periegesis could also be included in the list.25 The second century AD was indeed an important period of revival of the Greek spirit, in particular under Hadrian, who was a great admirer of Hellenic culture. For these authors, as for Pausanias, the feeling of ‘exile’ was ‘a strategy of self-representation’, a fundamental literary trope.26 This backward-looking movement took as its models Athenian writers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC and specialized in the description of artworks, in the wake of the ecphrastic tradition initiated by Homer, thus promoting a form of ‘erotics of the gaze’ analysed by Simon Goldhill.27 In Marius the Epicurean, which is also set during the second century, a particular emphasis is laid on this ecphrastic tradition in connection with a form of nostalgia for the Hellenic past.

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In the manner of Lucian or Philostratus, Pater freely selects and anthologizes key passages from Pausanias’ text, leading the reader through a gallery of long-lost Greek artworks, in order to dispel the illusion that Greek sculpture was ‘colourless’ (GS, 224). Rather than the ‘petrified language’ of Greek philology, Pater resorts to a colourful rhetoric so as to reveal the life and sensuousness of ancient Greek arts and crafts and restore its original ‘aura’28—what he calls its ‘warmth’: And at least the student must always remember that Greek art was throughout a much richer and warmer thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the illustrations of a classical dictionary might induce him to think. Some of the ancient temples of Greece were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous modern museum. (GS, 222)

Pausanias offered Pater an exciting peep into this ‘world of material splendour’ (GS, 223). He emphasizes the visual quality of Pausanias’ text with expressions of the kind: ‘as we see it very distinctly in Pausanias’ (GS, 248). Following the ecphrastic guidelines of Pausanias may also have been a way for Pater to ground in a classical tradition his own ‘aesthetic criticism’ which he described as the desire ‘to escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch’ (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 147). Through Pausanias, Pater experienced a sense of how Greek art was displayed and regarded by ancient viewers. The stress on the materiality (bronze, marble, flesh-like ivory, gold, silver, etc.) of archaic Greek art detailed by Pausanias fostered this aesthetic posture, privileging the sensual over the abstract. It must, however, be noted that Pausanias’ ecphrases, which are more often paraphrased than directly quoted, mainly serve as a foil to Pater’s own aesthetic writing, as if he chose to distance himself from the Greek author whose style had been so much criticized, so as to set off his own descriptive skills. Here is Pausanias’ description of the Amyclean Apollo (in W. H. S. Jones’s Loeb translation): The pedestal of the statue is fashioned into the shape of an altar; and they say that Hyacinthus is buried in it. . . . On the altar are also Demeter, the Maid, Pluto, next to them Fates and Seasons, and with them Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis. They are carrying to heaven Hyacinthus and Polyboea, the sister, they say of Hyacinthus who died a maid. Now this statue of Hyacinthus represents him as bearded, but Nicias, son of Nicomedes, has painted him in the very prime of youthful beauty, hinting at the love of Apollo for Hyacinthus of which the legend tells. Wrought on the altar is also Heracles; he too is being led to heaven by Athena and

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the other gods. On the altar are also the daughters of Thestius, Muses and Seasons. As for the West Wind, how Apollo unintentionally killed Hyacinthus, and the story of the flower, we must be content with the legends, although perhaps they are not true story. (3. 19. 4–6)

Rather than quoting this passage, Pater rewrites and appropriates the ecphrasis in ‘The Age of Graven Images’: The thing stood upright, as on a base, upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which, according to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved by Apollo for his beauty, and accidentally struck dead by him in play, with a quoit. From the drops of the lad’s blood had sprung up the purple flower of his name, which bears on its petals the letters of the ejaculation of woe; and in his memory the famous games of Amyclae were celebrated, beginning about the time of the longest day, when the flowers are stricken by the sun and begin to fade—a festival marked, amid all its splendour, with some real melancholy, and serious thought of the dead. (GS, 235–6)

Pater’s description has more than just a scholarly or aesthetic function and incorporates private homoerotic content. Moreover, this quotation is taken from the third book of the Periegesis, that is to say not from books 1, 5, or 6 which Pater analysed for his Oxford lectures. It is therefore as if he deliberately strayed away from his initial plan in order to indulge in the imaginary contemplation of a long-lost Spartan work which tells the story—one of Pater’s favourites, to which he will return for ‘Apollo in Picardy’29—of the love of Apollo for the beautiful Hyacinthus whom he accidently kills. As noted by Lene ØstermarkJohansen, both the Lacedaemonian context and the very name ‘Pausanias’ were at the time ‘charged with homoerotic reference’,30 as they conjured up images of male bonding, notably that of another Pausanias in Plato’s Symposium. In this excerpt Pater’s own ecphrasis replaces that of Pausanias. The style—especially the use of long winding sentences—is far more elegant than Pausanias’ dull, paratactic enumerations. In contrast to the Greek author who mentions the myth of Hyacinthus only in passing, Pater ignores all the other gods represented on the Throne and gives many details about the love of Apollo for this young boy whose blood gave birth to the eponymous flower. Hence the use of phallic imagery (‘ejaculation of woe’) and of expressions and comparisons such as ‘lad’, or ‘Adonis’, also recurrent in Symonds’s homoerotic poems. The shift from past to present at the very end of the passage suggests that Pater was

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trying to make his own description coincide with the temporality of Pausanias’ description, and thereby soothe his more personal feeling of nostalgia for a permissive Hellenic world of beauty. Symonds’s own poetic rewriting of Pausanias’ ecphrasis of Pheidias’ statue of Zeus interestingly resorts to similar strategic overlapping of scholarly, aesthetic, and sexual discourses.31 The scholarly reference is made explicit in a note in which Symonds describes his poem ‘Pantarkes’ as inspired by Pausanias: ‘The figure of one binding his own head with a ribbon is said to resemble in appearance Pantarces, a stripling of Elis said to have been the love of Pheidias’ (5. 11. 3). But here, like Pater, Symonds replaces Pausanias’ rapid description with his own, much longer ecphrasis, filling in the gaps of Pausanias’ text with his personal homoerotic considerations. The whole poem focuses at length on the beauty not of the statue but of the young boy who modelled for Pheidias: Behold, Pantarkes! I have sculptured thee Even as I saw thee first that summer-time, When thou wert chosen from the boys to be Monarch of beauty in thine April prime. Here in my statue are those lifted arms, Those bending brows, that slender form sublime! My art hath added nought. These vulgar charms Of gold and ivory obscure and shroud The sun that shining from thy forehead warms The soul of poets!32 (ll. 85–94)

Symonds’s aim is to travel through time, beyond Pausanias, in order to imagine Pheidias’ encounter with his model, and to recreate the ideal conditions for artistic creation that the Greek sculptor must have experienced. This enables Symonds to link Pausanias’ description with his own aesthetic concerns, in particular the relationship between life, same-sex love, and art. Symonds’s perspective may also appear as a means to bridge the temporal disjunction between new and old, past and present—two tenses which are constantly intertwined in the poem, as in Pater’s essays. According to Harold Bloom, Pater was the ‘best expositor’ of a version of apophrades or ‘return of the dead’, one of the main forms of poetic influence in The Anxiety of Influence.33 This could shed light on why Pater admired Symonds’s ‘Corpse of Julia’ (1878), a poem which

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metonymically describes the excavation, in fifteenth-century Rome, of the spirit of antiquity symbolized by the body of a perfectly preserved young woman, ‘a maid more fair | Than Helen lured to love in evil hour’ (ll. 74–5): Then she arose, a phoenix from the flame, To live new life, be worshipped, cease to be, Yet fade not ere the old and new became One world beneath her powerful empery.— Of this real resurrection from the tomb The tale of buried Julia is for me A parable.—Thus Hellas from the gloom, Radiant with beauty’s immortality, Shone forth and bade the soul of man be free.34 (ll. 148–56)

Although Julia is the daughter of the Roman emperor Claudius, the discovery of her beautiful corpse is associated with the survival of the Hellenic past in the modern age, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. This image resonates with the Shakespearian comparison used in ‘Winckelmann’: Winckelmann here reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is that more liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. . . . Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lost proportions of life right themselves. (Ren., 146–7)

Winckelmann’s resurrection of the ‘classical spirit’ is here compared to the coming-to-life of the ‘statue’ of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, Act 5 Scene 4, a variation on the metamorphosis of the statue in Ovid’s Pygmalion myth. Just as Pater tried to give back its original warmth and colour to ancient art, Symonds, in ‘Pantarkes’, draws on one particular description in the Periegesis, and, with a sort of Pygmalionesque impulse, gives life not only to Pheidias’ statue but also to his model, thus resuscitating Greek ‘boy love’. Rather than the artistic relics of the past ‘congealed in marble’ (l. 5), Symonds imagines the young Pantarkes ‘breathing and moving’ in the hands of his mentor. The past is no longer a spectral residue—‘Shadows, frozen shapes, | Phantoms, pale corpses from their cold abodes’ (ll. 66–7)—but a living, vividly colourful world. This recalls

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Pausanias’ description of the Chest of Cypselus, which Pater claims to be ‘quick . . . with the true human colouring’ (‘Beginnings’, GS, 225).

Colouring the Past: Pater and the Fin-de-Siècle ‘Pausaniacs’ Although these homoerotic references have a more personal than scholarly resonance, replacing Pausanias’ dry geographical descriptions by a complex topography of the desiring self, both Pater’s and Symonds’s attempt to bring back to life the lost customs and artworks of ancient Greece shaped the theories of some of the better known ‘Pausaniacs’—as they were called at the turn of the century by the art critic Dugald Sutherland MacColl.35 At the end of the Victorian era there was a renewed interest in the writings of Pausanias as a significant source of information on ancient Greek culture. The first major work to draw critical attention to the archaeological and anthropological importance of Pausanias was Jane Harrison and Margaret Verrall’s The Mythology and Monuments of Athens (1890), known as ‘the Blue Jane’, which soon replaced the Periegesis as the perfect guide to major Greek cultural sites. This key study was published by Macmillan as a twofold work combining the translation of the first book of the Description of Greece and Harrison’s commentary on ancient ritual and the myth-making process. In contrast to Pater or Winckelmann, Harrison, who was a pioneer female figure in the maledominated world of classical studies, travelled to Greece. Her work drew extensively on archaeological evidence, and notably vase painting, which she described as her main source of scholarly information in her commentary on Pausanias. Her preference for the archaic period over the canonical classical age of Pericles also explains her emphasis on the visual rather than on the textual.36 As noted by Stefano Evangelista, Harrison proclaimed ‘the act of seeing . . . as preferable to philological expertise . . . subtly associated with the dangers of misinterpretation, petrification and intellectual stasis’.37 In this she is directly indebted to Pater, whom she recalls meeting in her autobiographical essay, ‘Reminiscences of a Student’s Life’ (1925).38 In spite of her archaeological approach, Harrison praised the Hellenic writings of her ‘pre-scientific’ aesthetic predecessors, to whom she frequently referred in her lectures.

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Harrison was also very much an aesthete herself as noted by her biographer Jessie Stewart who, in her Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (1895), jotted down the following notes about her ‘early style’: rage for art in the 80s Rossetti her favourite poet belief in beauty creation of beauty higher than research and scholarship poetry must be Swinburnian the aesthetic movement made appreciation of Greek vase painting possible Jane’s urge aesthetic not scientific . . . Verrall made Greek literature living— Jane made Greek religion living.39 Harrison’s ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘scientific’ bent certainly explains her interest in the ecphrases in the Periegesis. Pausanias’ text—which she describes as extremely ‘instructive’, even if imprecise at times40—appears as an essential source for most of her essays on ancient Greek rituals, notably for her Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Greek Religion (1903). But her ‘revisionary Hellenism’,41 exemplified by her interest in the material culture of archaic Greece and in chthonian cults related to Dionysus and Demeter, equally bears the influence of Pater’s Greek essays. This aesthetic tone contrasts with the writings of Frazer, whose own commentary on Pausanias soon eclipsed Harrison’s essay. A comparison between Harrison’s and Frazer’s introductions highlights these conflicting readings of the Description of Greece: He and he only gives us the real live picture of what the art of ancient Athens was. Even the well furnished classical scholar pictures the Acropolis as a stately hill approached by the Propylaea, crowned by the austere beauty of the Parthenon and adds to his picture perhaps the remembrance of some manner of Erechtheion, a vision of colourless marble, of awe, restraint, severe selection. Only Pausanias tells him of the colour and life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, the golden lamps, the brazen palm tree42 In the writings of Pausanias we certainly miss the warmth and animation. . . . His book is too much a mere catalogue of antiquities, the dry bones of knowledge unquickened by the breadth of imagination. Yet his very defects have their compensating advantages. If he lacked imagination he was less likely to yield to

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that temptation of distorting and discolouring the facts to which men of bright fancy are peculiarly exposed.43

Harrison’s enthusiastic and accumulative style sharply contrasts with Frazer’s drier formulations. The difference in the perception of the ‘colouring’ of Pausanias’ text is particularly striking: Frazer’s approach remains abstract as he deplores the lack of imagination of the Greek author exhibiting only ‘the dry bones of knowledge’. Harrison, on the contrary, stresses the colourful revelation of the wealth of Greek material and artistic culture, which Pausanias powerfully brought back to life, thus countering the expectations of the ‘classical scholar’, heir to a Winckelmannian ‘vision of colourless marble, of awe, restraint, severe selection’.44 This fascination for the colourful, Dionysian pole of Greek art is indebted not only to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) but also to Pater who, in ‘A Study of Dionysus’, laid a gendered emphasis on poikilia, depicting Greek maenads as ‘weavers or spinsters, spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured threads’ (GS, 12).45 If Pater indeed believed that ‘Greek sculpture could not have been precisely a cold thing . . . whatever a colour-blind school may say’ (‘Beginnings’, GS, 191; original italics), his attitude towards Greek polychromy nonetheless shifted, wavering between his praise of colourless marble (‘Winckelmann’, Ren., 178) on the one hand and the dazzling beauty of ‘Asiatic’ colours in ‘The Heroic Age of Greek Art’ (GS, 216), on the other.46 Embracing Pater’s aesthetic posture, Harrison followed in his footsteps, as well as in those of Pausanias, in order to ‘fill up empty spaces’ in Hellenic art ‘in a somewhat visionary manner’ (‘Beginnings’, GS, 205)— that is, with this ‘bright fancy’ which Frazer discarded as too unscientific, too imprecise. Perhaps due to this influence from aestheticism, Harrison’s work on ancient Greek ritual, like Pater’s, was frequently referred to in gendered terms. She was nicknamed ‘a Pausanias in Petticoats’ following the publication of Mythology and Monuments of Athens.47 Even if Frazer’s text may be better known today than Harrison’s commentary, it is nonetheless Harrison, with her intimate knowledge of the writings of both Pausanias and the aesthetes, who truly succeeded in emphasizing the richness, warmth, and colour of antique visual culture which she praised over textual sources. Her own use of vase painting and lantern slides as visual, theatrical props for her lectures on

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Greek art registered this shift away from a purely philological tradition which Pater, the ‘new Pausanias’, had started to question, introducing readers to a different aesthetic approach to the Hellenic past, shaped by his own subjective itinerary through ancient texts and artworks.

Notes 1. Harold Bloom, ‘Walter Pater: the Intoxication of Belatedness’, Yale French Studies, 50 (1974), 163–89 (171); Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1974), p. xiv. 2. On the links between the Hellenism of Pater and Symonds, see Charlotte Ribeyrol, ‘Etrangeté, passion, couleur’: L’Hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds (1865–1880) (Grenoble, 2013), and Stefano Evangelista, ‘Towards the Fin de Siècle: Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford, 2015), pp. 643–68. 3. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (Chicago, 1986), p. 106; on Winckelmann, see also The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Robert Peters and Herbert M. Schueller, 3 vols (Detroit, 1967), I, p. 335. 4. Symonds, Memoirs, p. 218. 5. See Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography (1964), pp. 158–9. 6. William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), p. 26. 7. Tim Whitmarsh, ‘“Greece is the World”: Exile and Identity in the Second Sophistic’, in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 269–305 (290). 8. According to Inman (1981), p. 129, Pater was also reading Pausanias’ Description of Greece during the long vacation of 1866 when he was working on ‘Winckelmann’. 9. Edmund Gosse, New Review, 8 (April 1893), 419–29, in Critical Heritage, p. 253. 10. See Maria Pretzler, Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece (2007), pp. 130ff. 11. Jaś Elsner’s ‘Introduction’ to the special issue on the Receptions of Pausanias: From Winckelmann to Frazer, Classical Receptions Journal, 2: 2 (2010), 158; in the same volume see also Katherine Harloe, ‘Pausanias as Historian in Winckelmann’s History’, 174–96. 12. Elsner, ‘Introduction’, p. 164n.

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13. James I. Porter, ‘Ideals and Ruins: Pausanias, Longinus and the Second Sophistic’, in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jaś Elsner (Oxford, 2001), pp. 63–92 (67). 14. Porter, ‘Ideals and Ruins’, p. 70. 15. Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater, pp. 28–9. 16. On the personal ‘vendetta’ of Wilamowitz against Pausanias in the 1870s, see Christian Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 169–72. Elsner retraces the problematic history of the reception of Pausanias in Britain and Germany in his ‘Introduction’, pp. 161–9. 17. See Elsner, ‘Introduction’, p. 164. Pater makes no reference to such origins. 18. See Linda Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with Earth’, Victorian Studies, 30: 1 (1988), 209–31 (212). 19. Dowling notes that Lang’s attitude to the ‘Aestheticist Hellenism’ propounded by Pater was rather ambivalent: ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology’, p. 228 n. 26. 20. Andrew Lang, ‘Mr. Pater’s “Greek Studies”’ (Illustrated London News, 9 March 1895, p. 299), in Critical Heritage, pp. 332–4. 21. Jaś Elsner, ‘Structuring Greece: Pausanias’ Periegesis as a Literary Construct’, in Alcock et al., Pausanias: Travel and Memory, pp. 3–20 (18). 22. This ‘complex engagement with Homer’ of writers of the Second Sophistic is described by Simon Goldhill, ‘The Erotic Eye: Visual Stimulation and Cultural Conflict’, and Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Visions and Revisions of Homer’, in Goldhill, Being Greek under Rome, pp. 154–98, 195–266. 23. This chest is also mentioned by Winckelmann; see Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity (Oxford, 2013), pp. 178–9. 24. On the various appearances of Daedalus throughout the Periegesis, see chapter 6 of Greta Hawes’s Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (Oxford, 2014), pp. 207ff.; also Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque, Kernos Suppléments, 20 (Liège, 2008). 25. So Janick Auberger in ‘Pausanias le Périégète et la Seconde Sophistique’, Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and Its Times, ed. Thomas S. Schmidt and Pascale Fleury (Toronto, 2011), pp. 133–45. 26. Whitmarsh, ‘“Greece is the World”’, p. 275. 27. Goldhill, ‘Erotic Eye’, p. 157. 28. For his analysis of the concept of ‘aura’, Walter Benjamin instances an ancient statue of Venus to explain that ‘the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by W. Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), p. 224). As suggested by Pater, this ‘unique value’ is lost as soon as the statue is reproduced or displaced to a modern museum.

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

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Pausanias, by describing Greek artefacts in their original ritual context, enables the modern reader imaginatively to retrieve this aura. See also Caroline Vout, Chapter 9 in this volume. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), pp. 219–20. Pausanias’ visit to Olympia is also mentioned in ‘The Age of Graven Images’ (GS, 225). J. A. Symonds, New and Old: A Volume of Verse (1880), pp. 72–3. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1997), p. 142. J. A. Symonds, Many Moods: A Volume of Verse (1878), pp. 29–30; on Pater’s appreciation of this poem, see Letters of John Addington Symonds, II, p. 388. Specifically in January 1891, as noted by John Henderson, ‘Farnell’s Cults: The Making and Breaking of Pausanias in Victorian Archaeology and Anthropology’, in Alcock et al., Pausanias: Travel and Memory, pp. 207–23 (213). According to Jessie Stewart, Harrison was equally drawn to ‘the primitive layer of deities [which] lay under the Olympian cult’ (Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (1959), p. 12). On Pausanias’ own interest in the archaic age, see Porter, ‘Ideals and Ruins’, pp. 70–1. Stefano Evangelista, ‘Lessons in Greek Art: Jane Harrison and Aestheticism’, Women’s Studies, 40 (2011), 512–36 (524). Jane Harrison, ‘Reminiscences of a Student’s Life’, repr. in Arion, 4: 2 (1965), 312–46 (328). MS note of Jessie Stewart, quoted in Robert Ackermann, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (1991), p. 77. Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1908), p. 68. Andrew D. Radford, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850–1930 (Amsterdam, 2007), p. 11. Margaret de G. Verrall and Jane E. Harrison, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890), pp. 11–12. James G. Frazer, Pausanias’ Description of Greece, 6 vols (1898), I, p. xlix. Winckelmann’s chromophobia is now being qualified by a number of scholars; see Oliver Primavesi, ‘Artemis, Her Shrine, and Her Smile: Winckelmann’s Discovery of Ancient Greek Polychromy’, in Circumlitio: The Polychromy of Antique and Mediaeval Sculpture: Proceedings of the Liebighaus Colloquium, ed. Vinzenz Brinkmann et al. (Frankfurt, 2010), pp. 24–77. ‘The Greeks used the term poikilia not only to refer to the effect produced by the assemblage of different colours and materials on an object, but also to express the more generic ideas of variety, versatility, intricacy, and

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complexity. Liddell-Scott-Jones offers the following translations: “marking with various colors, embroidering; being marked with various colors, striped, spotted; varied aspect, diversity; variety, intricacy, ornamentation”’; Adeline Grand-Clément, ‘Poikilia’, in A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. Pierre Destrée and Penny Murray (2015), pp. 406–21 (406). The influence of Pater’s essays on Harrison is discussed in Yopie Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, 1999), pp. 43–81 and Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 76–9. 46. As noted by Iain Ross, similar ‘shifts and inconsistencies’ may also be detected in the works of Pater’s contemporaries, esp. Oscar Wilde: Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013), p. 109. 47. ‘Ce Pausanias en jupons’: French review published in Revue d’études grecques in 1891 (quoted by Mary Beard, ‘“Pausanias in Petticoats”, or The Blue Jane’, in Alcock et al., Pausanias: Travel and Memory, pp. 224–39 (234)).

12 Pater on Sculpture Elizabeth Prettejohn

Pater’s first published essay on a subject related to classical antiquity, ‘Winckelmann’ of 1867, concerns itself centrally with sculpture. Later in his life he was again working on ancient Greek sculpture in a series of four essays for general periodicals, three published in 1880, the fourth just a few months before his death in 1894; among the papers he left behind were fragments, perhaps, of further chapters in what might have become a history of Greek sculpture, had he lived longer.1 The bare facts would seem to suggest that Greek sculpture was of both foundational and abiding importance to Pater as a writer, a fortiori as a classicist. Yet the late essays on sculpture are surely the least studied portion of his oeuvre; and while everyone acknowledges the foundational character of ‘Winckelmann’, almost any of its aspects—historicism, sexuality, Hegelianism—has been emphasized over its basic attention to Greek sculptures. Conversely, when Pater is taken seriously as sculpture critic or sculpture theorist, it is usually his obviously innovative thoughts on Renaissance sculpture that are discussed; that is true even of the best, most recent, and most thorough study, Lene Østermark-Johansen’s Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture, in which a single chapter on Greek sculpture is still dominated by Renaissance examples.2 How is it possible to account for the discrepancy between the evident centrality of Greek sculpture, in Pater’s own sense of his intellectual project, and its marginality among students of his work? Is this merely a piquant example of the neglect of Classics in Pater studies that the present volume aims to combat, or is there something about the essays on Greek sculpture that makes them unpopular? It may be that today’s

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Pater scholars are even less comfortable with Greek art than they are with ancient literature. Nonetheless, behind the neglect of the sculpture essays there are two charges that must be taken seriously: that Pater wasn’t very learned in classical archaeology, and that (perhaps as a consequence) what he had to say about Greek sculpture wasn’t very original. In the recent scholarship, both charges are supported by appeal to early commentators whose expertise appears unimpeachable—but caution is required. Pater’s contemporary opponents were committed to a positivist method that, as I shall argue, Pater criticized consistently, wittily, and often ingeniously, throughout his writings. It is anything but surprising, then, that they were in disagreement with Pater. Nonetheless, their objections deserve examination as they reveal some of the points at issue. A good example is William Mitchell Ramsay, the first to hold the newly established Chair in Classical Archaeology at Oxford in 1885, although he left it little more than a year later for a Regius Chair at Aberdeen and is perhaps better known as a New Testament critic of the Tübingen School.3 Ramsay had this to say about the four essays on sculpture when they were republished in the posthumous collection Greek Studies of 1895: In them too much is evolved from the inner consciousness, and too little comes from direct interpretation of the actual works of art. There is also a distinct absence of knowledge; Mr Pater is too much dependent on Overbeck, the least sympathetic and least suggestive of German writers on Greek art. It was a doubtful service to the author’s memory to reprint essays resting upon a stage of knowledge that was perhaps adequate at the time, but is certainly inadequate now.4

As Ramsay himself acknowledges, it is anachronistic to take Pater to task for ignorance of discoveries that postdate the essays in question. The more interesting implication, though, is that the new discipline of archaeology was moving so fast that information current in 1880, perhaps even as late as 1894, was already out of date in 1895; as we shall see, the aspect of rapid scientific progress was one thing that fascinated Pater about the discipline. Often quoted is the estimate of another eminent classicist of the generation after Pater, Lewis Richard Farnell: At some time in 1879 I made acquaintance with Walter Pater of Brasenose, in a manner that deeply influenced my life-work. He advertised a series of six lectures

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on archaic Greek art, mainly, I think, on the ‘Chest of Kupselos’ and the Aeginetan Marbles. This itself was an epoch in the history of Oxford studies; for he was the first to give this practical expression to the idea that Greek art was a fitting lecture-subject for a classical teacher. To this extent . . . we may call him the father of archaeological teaching in Oxford, though his sensitive and retiring nature would have shrunk from being called the father of anything. In these lectures, indeed, there was no archaeology or teaching, only his characteristic daintiness and charm; and all that he really had to say about the Chest of Kupselos was that ‘it must have been a very beautiful thing’. . . . And though these lectures were wholly ‘unscientific’—in the German sense—for neither in Greek nor in any other art was Pater an authority, I enjoyed the faint fragrance of them and resolved to go further afield in this line.5

Note that Farnell credits Pater with introducing the teaching of Greek art and archaeology at Oxford—that is, precisely with originality in the university context (a development that would, incidentally, create the chair that Ramsay was shortly to hold).6 Both Ramsay and Farnell allude to what was at issue: the younger scholars are adherents of the German or ‘scientific’ approach to archaeology, as opposed to Pater’s humanistic approach. Farnell’s vocabulary—‘daintiness’, ‘charm’, ‘faint fragrance’—also hints at a reservation about Pater that gathered momentum in the twentieth century and still has a familiar ring. Andrew Lang’s review of Greek Studies also complains of Pater’s repetitions of the words ‘fine’, ‘dainty’, ‘delicate’, ‘strange’, and ‘subtle’.7 The imputation would seem to be that Pater chooses descriptive words that express his own fastidious sensibility rather than hard facts about his objects of study; the homophobic tinge needs no underlining. The standard charges against Pater would seem to be poorly founded, yet also more interesting than the existing scholarship has acknowledged. As I shall argue in this chapter, Pater was neither less learned nor less original than the new generation of professional archaeologists. On the contrary, he was a great deal more thoughtful about what such learning and such originality might involve. It is for that reason that his essays on Greek sculpture are still worth reading.

‘Winckelmann’ How would it change our view of Pater if we were to regard ‘Winckelmann’, the essay in which he first wrote of the classical tradition (and perhaps even coined the phrase8), as centrally, rather than tangentially or

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incidentally, about Greek sculpture? We should see already in play some of the issues that piqued his later critics. Pater mentions only a very few sculptures, and at first thought they seem to be merely stock examples: Pheidias’ lost masterpieces in chryselephantine, the Venus de Milo, the youths on horseback from the Parthenon frieze, the bronze Adorante from the Berlin Museum, and the Laocoon. There is a slight, but not exclusive, bias towards sculptures of beautiful young men, and in the first version, published in the Westminster Review for January 1867, an extended passage on sculptured hermaphrodites added a Swinburnean frisson (excised when the essay reappeared in Pater’s collection The Renaissance).9 Yet the numerous references to paintings of the Renaissance seem more distinctive and original: Raphael’s Disputa and Parnassus to introduce the theoretical contrast between Christian and classical traditions (Ren., 157), and examples of ‘Christian Art’ by Fra Angelico (Ren., 163–4, 179), Francia (Ren., 260), an early German ‘Master of the Passion’ (Ren., 179), and Perugino (Ren., 180), together with an interesting—or eccentric—reference to a contemporary work, William Holman Hunt’s Claudio and Isabella (Ren., 262).10 All of these references are to illustrate (for purposes of contrast) romantic or modern conceptions of visual art, and beside them the classical examples seem somewhat bland or standard issue. That, though, is just the effect Pater designed: ‘To all but the highest culture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of insipidity’ (Ren., 173). The essay has long been recognized as Pater’s most extended meditation on Hegel’s philosophy of history,11 and he deserves credit for the exceptional lucidity with which he explicates the historical scheme of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, with cogent accounts of its magisterial phases—Symbolic, Classical, Romantic—in a tiny fraction of the verbiage in the original. But recent scholars have seen Pater’s engagement with Hegel too exclusively in terms of abstract philosophy. Certainly Pater is interested in the immense movement of the entire historical scheme through two millennia or more of recorded time, and in the philosophical divisions of Hegel’s dialectic. Nonetheless, in the context of ‘Winckelmann’ the historical scheme serves as background (to borrow a metaphor that Pater favours) where Greek sculpture occupies the foreground. Greek sculpture—or more precisely Winckelmann’s experience of Greek sculpture. In Pater’s account it is Winckelmann’s discovery of

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the sensuousness of Greek sculpture that makes an epoch in the classical tradition: Hitherto he had handled the words only of Greek poetry, stirred indeed and roused by them, yet divining beyond the words some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life. Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the relics of plastic art. (Ren., 146)

The sexual charge is evident, and Pater unhesitatingly links it to Winckelmann’s intense friendships with beautiful young men; the homoeroticism of the experience of Greek sculpture is clearly avowed, not (as some recent commentators would have it) ‘coded’. But there is a significant point, too, about history. Pater is never much interested in the past merely for its own sake. Greek sculpture for him (as for Winckelmann, in his account) allows direct, tactile, physical contact with the ancient world. Pater acknowledges the power of Hegel’s theoretical account of the classical art-form, but it is Winckelmann who brings it alive: ‘philosophy may give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture should be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By a happy, unperplexed dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the concrete’ (Ren., 147).12 Sculpture, then, is both the characteristic artform of antiquity and the concrete point of contact between the modern and the ancient worlds. For Pater it is not merely the middle term in a tripartite scheme, destined to give way to Christian, ‘romantic’, or modern ideas.13 It is the ‘highest’ (his word) expression of the beauty of the male human body as it is, indivisibly, of the Greek ideal. As lucid as is his explication of Hegel’s historical scheme, he does not accept its relentless progressivism. Thus he can link the primitive Diana of Ephesus to the Christian fresco of Fra Angelico, representatives respectively of the Symbolic and Romantic phases, to pit them against the achieved Greek ideal of the Venus de Milo (Ren., 164). Pater offers a critique of Hegelian historicism even as he distils it into elegant summary. At this date, however, he is committed to a purist interpretation of Hegel’s classical art-form: In proportion as the art of sculpture ceased to be merely decorative, and subordinate to architecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renounces the power of expression by lower or heightened tones. In it, no member of the human form is more significant than the rest; the eye is wide, and without pupil; the lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands, and breasts, and feet. But the

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limitation of its resources is part of its pride: it has no backgrounds, no sky or atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of feeling; a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure form—only these. (Ren., 169)

It is important, as we have already seen, that this is a fully material and concrete art, one to be experienced sensuously; nonetheless, at this point it is based on ‘pure form’ and ‘pure light’, while nuances of tone, backgrounds, sky, and atmosphere are specifically abjured. For Pater the Laocoon has already departed from the classical art-form, its expression of extreme pain breaking away from the self-containment of the Greek ideal (Ren., 173). The highest works are the Venus de Milo and the frieze of the Parthenon: But take a work of Greek art,—the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. This motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an allegory, but saturates and is identical with it. (Ren., 164) If a single product only of Hellenic art were to be saved in the wreck of all beside, one might choose perhaps from the ‘beautiful multitude’ of the Panathenaic frieze, that line of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud, patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite service. This colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the possibilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that is relative or partial. (Ren., 174)

As Pater’s essay reminds us between the lines, Hegel has learned from Winckelmann this way of seeing the Greek ideal: pure to the point of austerity, complete and whole in itself. Yet—and here is the surprise— the works which epitomize this ideal for Pater are works that Winckelmann never saw: the Venus de Milo, not unearthed until 1820, and the Parthenon sculptures, immured in Athens (which Winckelmann never visited) until Lord Elgin’s expedition at the beginning of the nineteenth century.14 It is true that Pater adds an example known to Winckelmann, the Berlin Adorante, but striking, nonetheless, that his principal examples are discoveries that postdate his death. Crucially, they are sculptures that Pater saw; he retains Winckelmann’s emphasis on direct visual experience, but updates it to relevance for his own generation. In ‘Winckelmann’ and Pater’s subsequent essays on Greek sculpture,

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indeed, new discoveries completely replace the monuments mentioned by Winckelmann, who had access only to the sculptures available in the art collections of Rome and Northern Europe—that is, sculptures regarded by subsequent scholars as late examples or Roman copies, not the great Greek originals mentioned in the ancient textual sources that both Pater and Winckelmann esteemed. Already in 1867, then, Pater is responding to the issue raised by Ramsay nearly thirty years later: how can the aesthetic critic keep up with the relentless ‘scientific’ progress of archaeology? He acknowledges the problem explicitly, in relation to Winckelmann: It is since his time that many of the most significant examples of Greek art have been submitted to criticism . . . For the most part he had to penetrate to Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself; and it is not surprising that this turbid medium has left in Winckelmann’s actual results much that a more privileged criticism can correct. (Ren., 155)

The reader should not miss the savour of irony about the phrase ‘more privileged criticism’. The same charge would be levelled much later at Pater’s own writing on Greek sculpture, so it seems uncanny that he refuted it so long in advance.

Essays on the History of Greek Sculpture, 1880–94 ‘Winckelmann’ remained important to Pater throughout the next years, when he was devoting his principal attention to the Italian Renaissance and to English literature. Many of the intellectual issues raised in the essay were developed in other contexts: the problem of how the modern artist or critic might deal with a powerful inheritance from the past, in ‘William Morris’ of 1868, and the question of progressive art-historical knowledge in ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ and other essays on Renaissance art. It was not, however, until 1880 that Pater again published on Greek sculpture, and his first essay in this new phase, ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, reads, at least at first glance, as a palinode. The essay opens with a swingeing critique of just that view of the Greek ideal, as an art of ‘pure form’, that Pater had himself advanced in the essay on Winckelmann. Now he laments the isolation of pure white sculptures from their backgrounds, from the Greek sky and atmosphere, and revels in the

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delicate gradations of tone that he had previously denied to the ‘pure form’ and ‘pure light’ of the Greek ideal. The line of youths on the Parthenon frieze and the Venus de Milo, formerly the prime examples of the whole and self-contained Greek ideal, have now become fragmentary and contingent—the frieze bereft of ‘the metal bridles on the horses, for which the holes in the marble remain’, the Venus tinged with ‘that just perceptible yellowness . . . in the ivory-like surface’ (GS, 188–9). Yet these are the same sculptures that Pater had specially valued in the previous essay, and on closer examination he has not altogether renounced his earlier views. He still approves the receptivity to the ‘sensuous’ aspect of sculpture that distinguishes Winckelmann in the earlier essay. Now, however, he shifts the emphasis away from the pure white, self-contained marble figure of the neoclassical tradition—Hegel’s god entering the temple—to revel in the variety of materials and craft techniques that characterize a much earlier Greek art world. It is as though he is starting over again at the beginning—as indeed the title announces—to rewrite Winckelmann’s History in updated form. What had happened to produce this change? While Pater was already aware in the ‘Winckelmann’ essay of the potential for archaeological discovery radically to change the data set for the study of ancient art, the pace had quickened appreciably since the 1860s as teams of archaeologists competed to open up the most exciting sites of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, formerly difficult of access. This was a fully international enterprise but (as the comments of Ramsay and Farnell hint) the Germans pursued the project with particular vigour; their vast excavations at Olympia, beginning in 1875, were the most scientifically advanced to date.15 British archaeology was also developing rapidly, and indeed Pater had already written of the excavations on Cnidus by his friend Charles Newton, the British Museum’s Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities (‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, GS, 140–51), but Oxford and Cambridge lagged behind the German universities in establishing a scholarly and academic context. Oxford was even slower than Cambridge, where the Slade Professor and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Sidney Colvin, was fostering the study of archaeology and building a collection of casts.16 It was perhaps in an attempt to spur progress in Oxford that in the Michaelmas term of 1878 Pater gave the first lecture series on a new Special Subject, ‘Greek Art, with Pausanias I, V, and VI’. The choice of those three books, on Athens and

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Olympia, suggests a connection to the recent excavations in both places, as well as a new approach: the ancient text was to be read in conjunction with the material evidence for Greek art (see also Charlotte Ribeyrol, Chapter 11 in this volume). The educational change is like that of Winckelmann’s self-education, from ‘the words only’ to ‘the relics of plastic art’, and Oxford was now beginning to develop its own cast collection.17 Pater also laid particular stress, throughout the lectures, on objects in the British Museum—many of them new discoveries, but perhaps more importantly, known to Pater through direct sensuous experience and available to his audience in the same way. For unknown reasons, Pater only gave the lecture series once, but it inspired Farnell, at least, among the younger generation (as he notes in the passage quoted earlier). The lectures were also the starting point for the three articles published in 1880. It would seem that Pater—far from being backwards in archaeological learning—was at the forefront of introducing it into the university curriculum; that, indeed, is what Farnell said in so many words. But unlike the specialist archaeologist, Pater strove to make it part of the general humanist culture: he quickly brought it to the wider readership of the general periodicals, as though to argue that those whose imaginations had been captured by the art of the Italian Renaissance should find Greek sculpture equally fascinating. That might be a political move, a protest against the incipient relegation or marginalization of Greek art to the purview of specialists. Thus the essays were written for a general readership, but they also kept pace with archaeological excavation; indeed there is no inconsistency, since the general reader in the later nineteenth century may well have been aware of new discoveries, enthusiastically reported in the press. One result is that Pater’s history of ancient sculpture, while it is still a response to Winckelmann’s pioneering work, operates, as already noted, with an entirely new set of artworks as examples. It is important to stress the radicalism of the change, since it runs counter to our usual notions of chronology (something that no doubt delighted Pater): almost none of the artefacts that constitute Pater’s up-to-date history had been known to Winckelmann. Indeed Pater calls attention to the exception, referring twice to the Berlin Adorante specifically as a favourite work of Winckelmann’s (GS, 295, 297). The other works are new to scholarship since Winckelmann’s time. By and large, too, they date from earlier periods in

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antiquity than the sculptures Winckelmann wrote about; that is, they reflect the more recent phases of archaeological excavation, which dug deeper and searched for older works. For learned readers, the result is a fascinating reverse logic: Pater’s texts work with artefacts that are systematically older in ancient origin than the ones in Winckelmann yet—just as systematically—newer in modern scholarship. Thus Pater’s history of Greek art—had he lived to complete it—would have been entirely new in its contents. In that respect it would have resembled the histories of Greek art that were beginning to proliferate alongside the vast excavation programmes of the later nineteenth century. These included the works that have been proposed as ‘sources’ for Pater’s sculpture essays: Karl Otfried Müller’s Handbuch der Archäeologie der Kunst of 1830, Heinrich Brunn’s Geschichte der griechischen Künstler of 1853 and 1859, and Johannes Adolf Overbeck’s volumes on sculptural monuments (Geschichte der griechischen Plastik) and literary sources (Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Griechen), published respectively in 1857 and 1868—many of these reissued in numerous later editions, each time substantially increased to accommodate burgeoning archaeological evidence. Pater’s history would have been one of a new genre in classical scholarship, represented by these German works, and later by works in other languages such as Maxime Collignon’s Manuel d’archéologie grecque of 1881, Pierre Paris’s La Sculpture antique of 1889, or A. S. Murray’s A History of Greek Sculpture of 1880. And yet Pater’s history would have been unlike the other examples, monuments to the most extreme phase of positivist historicism, in significant respects—among them elegance of style, an abrupt contrast to the pedantry of much of this scholarship (and not just the German examples, although the Germans were particularly notorious for their dryasdust thoroughness). Yet elegance of style in Pater is never decorative; rather, it is the formal counterpart to precision and nuance in argumentation. Take for example the word ‘dainty’, which even so learned a scholar as Lang thought affected. It is repeated often—seven times in the four essays—but not for vague approbation; in every instance the word appears in the context of the Ionic or Asiatic element in Greek sculpture, held in dialectical balance with the Dorian or European. Perhaps it is intended as a translation of habros—a word of Pindar, Sappho, or Herodotus, strongly associated with the Asiatic, and designating something graceful, pretty, delicate, or luxurious.18

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Another important feature that distinguishes Pater’s essays on sculpture from the other histories is the character of the dialogue with Winckelmann. It is a commonplace to observe that more modern accounts of Greek art, while they include much more up-to-date archaeological evidence than Winckelmann’s, tend to preserve the overall rise-and-decline structure of his historical narrative.19 Pater revises that narrative much more radically than do the classical archaeologists of his day, or indeed subsequently, to present a carefully argued case for the excellence, as well as the importance, of very early Greek art; this is evident in the title of the first two essays, collectively designated ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’. Part I, subtitled ‘The Heroic Age of Greek Art’, deals with the very earliest evidence about Greek art, the descriptions of crafted objects in Homer and Hesiod, alongside ‘the recent extraordinary discoveries at Troy and Mycenae’20—that is, the oldest objects that could be associated with the Greeks, also the latest to reappear. Part II, subtitled ‘The Age of Graven Images’, discusses at length Pausanias’ description of the Chest of Cypselus, and culminates with a bravura account of a sculptor, Canachus, known only from the briefest of mentions in Pausanias, Pliny, and Cicero.21 In passing Pater is able to mention several recently discovered objects, such as the ‘Apollos’ (now called ‘kouroi’) of Tenea, Thera, and Orchomenus (GS, 244). In the third essay, we finally reach a substantial group of extant works, ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, excavated in 1811 and the star attraction of the new Glyptothek in Munich, the pioneering example of a museum organized on historical principles.22 It was something of a feat to have written at such length before arriving at the first important monument actually available to view, but something also necessary to the historical revision Pater is proposing. In previous texts on Greek sculpture (as well as many subsequent ones), the Aegina sculptures represent an immature or underdeveloped stage, historically interesting but still too archaic to please aesthetically; this is the explicit view of Hegel, to whom Pater is surely administering a quiet rebuke.23 After Pater’s long preparation, though, the reader comes to these sculptures as the culmination of a history already centuries long, and they are unequivocally great works of art. With ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’, published after a delay in February 1894, Pater carries the history through to the middle fifth century. When he resumes the narrative, he includes a somewhat choppy

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opening section to summarize a number of recent discoveries that do not fit easily into his storyline, but which presumably he feels ought not to be omitted: the archaic Calf-bearer of the Acropolis, the grave stelai of Orchomenus and Aristocles, the British Museum’s stele of Tryphon and ‘Harpy Tomb’, and the sculptures of the Naples Museum identified in 1859 by a German scholar as the Tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton (GS, 269–79).24 Possibly the dry enumeration of this section makes it the least successful part of the sequence of essays, and yet it is also the most honest: it acknowledges the holes and gaps in the archaeological evidence that other writers attempt to gloss over through sheer voluminousness of verbiage. It is only gradually that Pater is able to weave the disparate archaeological ‘facts’ into what emerges, by the end, as a compelling narrative, and a moving one too: the self-sacrifice of Harmodius and Aristogeiton leads to a celebration of the athletes who, in the next generation, turn from warfare and violence to peaceful competition. Since Pater’s narrative is incomplete, it is impossible to say how he would have revised the arc pattern established by Winckelmann and repeated by so many subsequent writers.25 Whether by chance or design he leaves his readers with a cliffhanger, just before the chief protagonist, Pheidias, is due to appear on the scene. How would he have dealt with the traditional positioning of Pheidias at the top of the arc, something to which he alludes frequently in the earlier stages of the narrative? And how would he have treated the later phases routinely seen in terms of decline? One recalls the phrase he had used of the later phases of the Renaissance, ‘that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence’ (Ren., p. xxiii). However he would have solved those problems, it is clear from the chapters that were published that Pater was dealing seriously with the legacy of Winckelmann’s History, not simply succumbing to its overwhelming narrative power. Forward-looking as it is with respect to the data of recent archaeology, Pater’s history of Greek sculpture also looks back to the intellectual roots of the genre in Winckelmann. Pater’s later essays on Greek sculpture represent perhaps the first significant attempt to bring archaic sculpture to prominence not merely on historical grounds, but for the sake of their beauty. This differentiates his method from that of the archaeologists and helps to explain their objections; he opts decisively for the aesthetic or humanist value of Greek

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works of art, not for scientific progress. Thus he paves the way for the extraordinary revaluation of the primitive or archaic in the first ‘Modernist’ generation of the twentieth century, and also provides an intellectual rationale for that revaluation. At the time of writing, it was still the case that very few genuinely archaic sculptures were known. Pater mentions all of them, at least in passing and sometimes working them into the narrative with considerable ingenuity—in his own way, he is providing a responsible account of the archaeological evidence as it then existed. He could not have known how the evidential base would burgeon as a result of the excavations of the years to come: the stunning finds on the Acropolis in the 1880s, including the series of female figures then called ‘Maidens’, now known as ‘korai’; bronzes from the Charioteer of Delphi (discovered 1896) through the Zeus of Artemision (1926) to the Riace figures found off the Calabrian coast in 1972; and figures of youths from the ‘Kritios Boy’ (whose head and body were reunited in 1888) to the ‘New York’ Kouros, discovered in mysterious circumstances and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1932.26 Pater knew nothing of these finds—no more than Winckelmann had known of the sculptures that appeared after his death. What he did know was that powerful interpretations were needed to make these sculptures, once they appeared, comprehensible—or indeed beautiful, as they undoubtedly became in the eyes of Modernist artists and audiences. Did Pater intend to contribute to this revolution of taste, or is the special role of the archaic in his essays simply the result of the contingent fact that he died before finishing the series? We shall never be able to give a definitive answer to the question, but—whatever Pater intended—the result enabled perhaps the most far-reaching of the many affinities between Pater and Winckelmann, surely a far more important ‘source’ for the sculpture essays than Overbeck or any of the other archaeologists whom Pater so subtly criticizes, even as he imitates them. Like Winckelmann, in the words of Hegel quoted by Pater in 1867, he has ‘opened a new sense’ for humankind (Ren., 141). Now we are so familiar with archaic and primitive sculpture that we may forget the resistance of the generations up to and including Pater’s own. The Aegina marbles, respected for their early date, had nonetheless been treated with condescension, from Hegel onwards, as stiff and rigid, faintly ludicrous in the way their lips curl into the so-called ‘archaic smile’. Contrast the passage near the end of Pater’s essay on these sculptures, where he acknowledges

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the previous view, with a few even of the pedantic details beloved of the archaeological scholars, and yet accomplishes a transvaluation of which only he is capable: The seemingly stronger hand which wrought the eastern gable has shown itself strongest in the rigid expression of the truth of pain, in the mouth of the famous recumbent figure on the extreme left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer’s conventional epithet ‘tender,’ when he speaks of the flesh of his heroes. (GS, 266–7)

Pater and the Archaeologists How, then, did Pater get the reputation for lacking archaeological knowledge? It is true that he derived all of his data from other scholars’ writings; he had no desire to be a practising archaeologist himself and never attempted to publish in learned journals such as the Journal of Hellenic Studies, which began publication in the same year, 1880, as Pater’s sequence of articles. Thus Pater did not present archaeological data that had not been previously published; to that extent, his work was not ‘original’. As noted at the outset, Pater’s relationship to the classical archaeologists who were just beginning to attain high professional status has usually been seen as one of simple dependence—they published the original research, and Pater ‘copied’ it into his essays. But I should like to argue that the relationship might better be described as one of inspiration, where the reading of a text, or the discovery of an artefact, compels Pater to make a work of his own in response. Alternatively, the relationship might be called one of imitation, in the sense that term was used in the literary criticism of antiquity or the Renaissance, without pejorative force. For us, that kind of close relationship to a predecessor is acceptable for works of art, but not for works of scholarship, where it risks the charge of plagiarism. In scholarly writing, the expectation is that the new text will refer to its predecessors according to the conventions of scholarly referencing, using either quotation or paraphrase, but never confusing the two, and always providing a correct footnote. Those conventions, which we now take for granted, were being codified in

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Pater’s lifetime, with the emergence of the modern scholarly journal. Pater sometimes makes use of the scholarly footnote, but he never takes the conventions for granted, and, as we have already seen, he publishes in general periodicals with mixed subject-matter, not specialist journals for classicists. In ‘The School of Giorgione’, published in 1877 just before he began his lectures on Greek sculpture, Pater subjects a scholarly text, J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle’s History of Painting in North Italy (1871), to just such treatment: he combines elaborate deference, perhaps touched with irony (as when he calls the book the ‘new Vasari’), with just a single footnote and much unacknowledged paraphrasing (Ren., 113–14). In one sense, then, he is repeating the critical project of his work on the Renaissance when he applies the same techniques to writing about Greek sculpture. Yet the stakes are higher. To write a ‘new Vasari’ is one thing—a ‘new Winckelmann’ quite another, given the authority of the classics in the scholarly and academic worlds of the nineteenth century. Yet Pater surely aspires, not to the narrow scholarship of an Overbeck, but rather to the range and depth of Winckelmann’s learning in the humanist literature as well as the monumental evidence. At the same time he is fascinated by the latest forms of writing and interpretation. Indeed, he is constantly testing the boundaries between different possible ways of writing about Greek sculpture: scholarship or journalism, scientific or aesthetic criticism, ecphrasis or technical description, fiction or positivistic history. That is to engage in a more important debate than any of the localized disputes about archaeological data found in the scholarly journals. It is to ask to which branch of learning the study of ancient art could or should belong, something by no means settled at the time Pater was writing. Should it belong to classical philology, the supremely sophisticated reading and editing of the founding texts of Western thought and literature, in the long tradition extending back through the Middle Ages to the Byzantine and Hellenistic scholiasts and editors? Or should it belong to the new science of archaeology, with its digging and classifying, getting the hands dirty, and documenting thousands upon thousands of unprepossessing potsherds or bits of broken masonry, as a naturalist might document the innumerable species of beetle? Or should it be part of art history, with its emerging techniques of connoisseurship explored in ‘The School of Giorgione’ and other essays on Renaissance art? Or could it be a kind of creative writing, a prose

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poem like the great set-pieces in Winckelmann or the ancient authors? Pater tries out all of these possibilities, often by means of a close imitation. Thus it is often possible to identify a ‘source’ that Pater follows closely. Some passages repeat data from Overbeck’s Geschichte der griechischen Plastik, as Ramsay noticed as early as 1895, and the Pater scholar Billie Andrew Inman has demonstrated in detail.27 But it would be naive to take Pater to task for following Overbeck, rather than doing his own research to come up with new data. Had he taken the latter route, he would simply be practising the scholarly method of Overbeck (which would be derivative indeed). The close imitation serves instead to analyse the method, and we should attend to the minute changes that Pater introduces—a reviser as fastidious as Pater has a reason for each of them. Moreover, Pater does not imitate one source or type of source only, but always weaves that together with other strands of imitation. Thus when he seems to be imitating a passage from Overbeck he may also be testing that passage against another source, or another type of source. In the essays on Greek sculpture, the material from Overbeck and archaeological texts is woven together with such other strands as Heinrich Schliemann’s stirring accounts of his exploits at Troy and Mycenae; the texts of the ancient writers on art, Pliny and Pausanias; Pindar’s odes to athletes and victors; the new genre of the museum catalogue entry; recent art criticism on such areas as the Early Renaissance or the arts of Japan, as well as the emerging literature on the ‘Arts and Crafts’, particularly William Morris’s lectures on the decorative arts; and those constant presences in Pater’s writing, on any subject whatever: Homer, Plato, Hegel, and Winckelmann. In form as well as content, Pater’s essays ask us to think about whether Greek sculpture is a matter for the philosopher, for the art historian, or for the artist or poet, and how—or whether—all of these might draw upon the new knowledge of the archaeological specialist. That is why Pater, just when he seems most derivative, is at his most original. A case in point is the final passage in ‘The Age of Graven Images’ (the very title of which hints at intertextual subtlety, with its reference to the second commandment). I have already called this passage a bravura piece of writing on the archaic sculptor Canachus, of whose work (as Pater reminds the reader) no example survives. Pater uses transhistorical comparison to persuade the reader to see the charm in a style too archaic

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for the taste even of the ancient writers who are the only ones to preserve the artist’s name: In what Cicero calls ‘rigidity’ of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of an early time, in the David of Verrocchio, for instance, and in the early Flemish painters, as it is natural and becoming in youth itself. (GS, 250)

Pater’s mild rebuke to Cicero is also cautionary for his readers of 1880: he reminds them that, just a generation ago, it was de rigueur to despise the works of the Early Renaissance; and indeed the next generation, as Pater seems to predict, would come to venerate archaic Greek sculpture. Thus the transhistorical comparison is not just an ornamental flourish; earlier in the essay Pater notes with characteristic precision that the temporal distance between the newly chic early Italian sculptor Mino da Fiesole and the High Renaissance master Michelangelo matches that between Canachus and Pheidias (GS, 243). And there is another scholarly point: Pater is testing the limits of what philologists and archaeologists know about the sculpture of Greek antiquity, and the boundaries between those two kinds of knowledge. Canachus is known only through texts, while the artefacts that actually survive from early periods cannot be traced to famous sculptors; there is a fundamental mismatch between the literary and the archaeological evidence, which Pater changes from a cause for regret, or annoyance, to a source of fascination—‘we seem to see’ what we can only read, or dream, about. The passage on Canachus occupies nine pages, fully one-third of ‘The Age of Graven Images’ (GS, 242–50), and it is also the final, clinching example—it plays a role like that of the Mona Lisa in the Leonardo essay, or one of Winckelmann’s set-piece descriptions. Clearly the passage is meant as a demonstration of method. But why Canachus—a sculptor whose name no one who was not a specialist would have recognized at the time of publication, or for that matter now? Yes, he appears in Overbeck and the other new histories of sculpture, but without any special emphasis and alongside dozens of other sculptors mentioned in ancient texts—Overbeck manages to write a little more than three pages on him, with all the data available at the time.28 Pater has no choice but to use the same data, yet—to the extent that he is following Overbeck or the other

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archaeological writers—he is showing us the poverty of that method, as he weaves a much more fascinating tale around the dry facts. Overbeck provides an illustration on the middle page of his account, which shows all the visual evidence that archaeological ingenuity could drum up—line drawings of a coin, a head, and a bronze statuette thought to be distant copies of a work famous in antiquity, an Apollo with a stag on its open right hand.29 Surely Pater is fascinated by the research process that links the tiny image on a coin, for example, with a celebrated lost sculpture; he demonstrates how one can put together the most fragmentary evidence, the coin, the statuette, the brief mention in Cicero, and stories from Pliny and Pausanias, to create a kind of ‘imaginary portrait’—the very obscurity of Canachus makes this more of a tour de force. But it is my conjecture that the inspirational element, for Pater, is not the dry data but rather a work of art: the statuette thought to copy the Apollo of Canachus, reduced to an unprepossessing line drawing in Overbeck, but as a bronze, just 19 centimetres high, compelling in its beauty. It entered the British Museum in 1824 from the collection of Richard Payne Knight, classicist and author of a learned work on phallic imagery in antiquity, something that may have enhanced its interest for Pater.30 The slender nude figure stands stiffly upright, with one foot just slightly advanced, as if taking the first tentative step out of archaic immobility; yet the hips and shoulders remain level, in not-yetdeveloped contrapposto, and the hair falls in three long, symmetrical curls to either side of the barely suggested sternum. The slight naivety of the sculptor’s style suits the youthful body, its musculature just hinted, and the expression is neutral, or perhaps rapt; the youthfulness of the represented figure contrasts poignantly with the great age of the artefact, evident in the delicately frayed bronze surface. Surely this is an object that calls for the epithet habros (see cover illustration). It is only my conjecture that Pater was inspired by this object, which he mentions in passing (GS, 245), to choose Canachus as the focus for his methodological demonstration. Whatever the merits of this particular example, though, it is important to recover the depth of Pater’s engagement with the visual and material world of antiquity, lost from view in the recent scholarship, which has been excessively dominated by attention to textual allusion. Pater himself tells us to attend to the work of art as a physical thing, throughout his writings from ‘Winckelmann’ onwards, but especially in the opening pages of ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, where he insists that we should dwell on the

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sensuous nuances of ancient art—not reduce it to a line drawing, so to speak, as in Overbeck’s text. Also lost from view has been Pater’s legacy among the Modernist artists and writers of the early twentieth century, for whom Greek sculpture remained an inheritance of overwhelming, albeit contentious and vexing, power. Pater’s dwelling on sculptural materials—on the fine distinctions among precious metals, ivory, or cedarwood, ‘moulded clay, beaten gold, polished stone’ (GS, 223)— must have had its impact on the artists and writers of the first Modernist generation, just as his sympathy for very early Greek art ‘opened a new sense’.31 Farnell’s account of Pater’s lectures, which has often been read as slighting, may be merely accurate. To make the reader see the longvanished ivory, gold, and cedarwood Chest of Cypselus as ‘a very beautiful thing’ might be more difficult, and more valuable, than the dryasdust writings of the archaeologists. Of course Pater’s account cannot recreate the ‘real’ Chest, the one Pausanias saw at Olympia in the second century. But unlike the positivist archaeologists and historians, Pater is not content merely to tell us the facts about the long-lost, semi-mythical object. Although we shall never see the actual Chest, we must nonetheless conceive of it as a visible thing. To do that Pater first has recourse to transhistorical comparison, again with the precise sense of the lapse of time: ‘Relatively to later Greek art, it may have seemed to [Pausanias], what the ancient bronze doors with their Scripture histories, which we may still see in the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to later Italian art’ (GS, 226; original italics). Compare his final sentence on ‘The Marbles of Aegina’: ‘In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of Greek Sculpture’ (GS, 268). In that case, the transhistorical reference encourages readers to revalue sculptures they could see, but had been unable to appreciate; in the account of the Chest, the Pisan doors help the reader, instead, to conjure up a visible image where there would otherwise be none. Pater then leads us through the incidents represented on the chest, as enumerated in Pausanias, adding plausible conjecture as to the sensuous materials—‘we can hardly help distributing in fancy gold and ivory, respectively, to their appropriate functions in the representation’ (GS, 228). Pater is teaching the students to read the Greek text. At the same time he teaches them to see a great lost work of Greek art—or perhaps, more precisely, to imagine what it could be like to see, rather than merely to know about, such a work.32

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Notes 1. As suggested by his executor, Charles Lancelot Shadwell, in the Preface to Greek Studies (GS, 3). 2. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), pp. 213–76; even here, the essays on Greek sculpture get short shrift (pp. 238–58, 266–7). 3. See Donna Kurtz, The Reception of Classical Art in Britain: An Oxford Story of Plaster Casts from the Antique (Oxford, 2000), pp. 226, 234. 4. Review in The Bookman, 8 (April 1895), 18: Critical Heritage, p. 337. 5. Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), pp. 76–7; on Pater see also pp. 113–14. 6. Cf. Kurtz, Reception, pp. 207–8. 7. Review in Illustrated London News (9 March 1895), 299: Critical Heritage, p. 332. On Lang’s review, cf. Charlotte Ribeyrol, Chapter 11 in this volume. 8. Pater’s usage ‘the classical tradition’, particularly in the two key paragraphs that introduce the central, theoretical section (Ren., 157–9), may have coined the phrase, and certainly gave it its most influential early formulation. Cf. Charles Martindale, Introduction to this volume. 9. See the textual notes to Hill’s edition (Ren., 263). 10. The reference to Francia was omitted from the second edition onwards, that to Hunt deleted after the first publication in the Westminster Review. 11. See William Shuter, ‘History as Palingenesis in Pater and Hegel’, PMLA 86 (1971), 411–21. 12. In the first version Pater referred specifically to Hegel (Ren., 250). 13. For a fuller discussion see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 2007), ch. 5. 14. In Chapter 3 in this volume, Stefano Evangelista and Katherine Harloe relate Pater’s inclusion of the Parthenon sculptures here to his critique of Romanticism in ‘Winckelmann’. On the nineteenth-century fortunes of the Venus de Milo and the Parthenon sculptures see further Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (2012), ch. 1. 15. See Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries (1908), pp. 125–34; Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996), esp. ch. 3. 16. See Mary Beard, ‘Casts and Cast-Offs: The Origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 39 (1994), 1–29. 17. Kurtz, Reception, pp. 207–10 and passim.

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18. I owe this point to Charles Martindale. On poikilia cf. Bénédicte Coste, Chapter 2 and Ribeyrol, Chapter 11 in this volume. 19. See e.g. Alex Potts, ‘Introduction’ to Johann Joseph Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, tr. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles, 2006), p. 21. 20. GS, 210; Pater is referring to the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, who is not mentioned by name but whose Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns (1878) and Troy and Its Remains: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries Made on the Site of Ilium and in the Trojan Plains (1875) Pater borrowed from the Brasenose College Library when he was preparing the lecture series: Inman (1990), pp. 409–13, 433. 21. Pausanias, 2. 10. 4, 9. 10. 2; Pliny, 34. 75; Cicero, Brutus, 70. 22. See Charles T. Newton, ‘Remarks on the Collections of Ancient Art in the Museums of Italy, the Glyptothek at Munich, and the British Museum’, Museum of Classical Antiquities, 3 (1851), 227. 23. See Prettejohn, Modernity, pp. 39–59. 24. Carl Friederichs, ‘Harmodius und Aristogeiton’, Archäologische Zeitung, 17 (1859), 65–72. 25. The manuscript notes, preserved in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, deserve examination, and it is to be hoped that they will soon be adequately edited, but Pater’s habits of composition make it treacherous to compare the finished and public works with his notes and drafts. 26. The first major work on the kouroi, Waldemar Deonna’s Les ‘Apollons archaïques’: Étude sur le type masculin de la statuaire grecque au VIe siècle avant notre ère, did not appear until 1909. 27. Inman (1990), pp. 413–30. See, however, William F. Shuter, ‘Pater, Overbeck, and Gerhard: Some Emendations and Additions to Billie Andrew Inman’s Pater and His Reading, 1874–1877’, Pater Newsletter, 45 (2002), 11–21. 28. Johannes Adolf Overbeck, Geschichte der griechischen Plastik für Künstler und Kunstfreunde, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1857–8), I, pp. 105–8. 29. On the ancient work (‘Apollo Philesios’) see Pliny, 34. 75; Pausanias, 9. 10. 2. 30. BM 1824,0405.1, now catalogued as Roman, first century BC–first century AD, ‘perhaps a copy of the Apollo Philesios by Kanachos of Sikyon’. 31. On the importance of Pater’s essays on Greek sculpture for the Modernists see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Pater and the Classics’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, V. After 1880, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford, 2017). 32. I thank Caroline Vout for her detailed, and exceptionally perceptive, comments on a draft.

13 Pater and Greek Religion Robert Fowler

Walter Pater attempted more seriously than anyone before him in England to understand the Greek gods as gods, not as long-dead divinities but as living spirits. Taking Greek gods seriously may mean that one takes them to be potent metaphors for things that really exist; or perhaps one thinks their myths convey a philosophy of life that can stand comparison with modern philosophies and religions, whether as simply superior or as at least demanding accommodation. Both of these approaches are familiar from the Romantics and their heirs.1 Pater is on the side of accommodation; but, unlike others, he sought first to imagine earnestly what it would be like to be a fifth-century BC worshipper, with a precise sense of the historical and physical environment, and then to find room for this understanding in his own mental world. This is to take matters at least two steps further. The first part of this formulation—the historicist sympathy—is visible in many passages where Pater paints vivid pictures of ordinary Greek folk in their villages and farms performing simple pieties. He attributed the prehistoric origins of religion to the conditions of humble, everyday life, on which he was quite well informed; he refers repeatedly to shrines, cults, festivals, epithets of gods, and so on. Even when he follows the development of Greek religion to the more abstract realms of poetry and art, he never loses this sense of particularity, illustrating what he means by reference to this or that specifically situated play or sculpture, and including recent archaeological discoveries such as the Demeter of Cnidus (‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone II’, GS, 140).

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At the same time, his historicism was placed at the service of aesthetic criticism, which enabled Pater to identify ancient and modern feeling without evident embarrassment. Pater assumes that the classical believer was a person like us, only with a different outlook conditioned by context. He knows the differences but places higher value on the similarities, of which religious feeling and aesthetic experience are the profoundest and most enduring. Pater did not, like Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) and his many followers, look upon the ancient believers as children, or think in terms of an age of myth superseded by an age of reason.2 He believed, to be sure, that societies developed from primitive beginnings to higher stages, but he also believed that simpler and more sophisticated views coexisted at all times, then and now; more importantly, he argued that myth itself developed higher forms as civilization progressed: the end goal of human progress was emphatically not to discard myth, but to transfigure it. Properly understood, myth encapsulates abiding human experience. This conviction of the continuity of feeling underpins the tales of reincarnated Greek gods in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ and ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, and the many passages in Greek Studies in which Pater illustrates his meaning not with an ancient artefact but with a Renaissance or modern painting (a somewhat startling habit to any dyedin-the-wool historicist). As he says, ‘the Greek fancy . . . belongs to all ages’ (‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, 17). His sensitive description of historicized moments within a transhistorical framework creates a subtle and attractive picture. Any theory of the transhistorical faces weighty difficulties; but whatever one may think of Pater’s solution to the theoretical problem,3 in practice it allowed him to do justice to the complexity of the phenomena, both of the observed and in the observer. He attempts to account for the lasting power of the stories, as he himself perceived it. This was for him no antiquarian exercise, and the self-reflective stance makes him seem remarkably modern. The resulting portrait was unique in its day, and one might have expected it to have had a substantial impact on the study of Greek religion. The 1870s were exactly the right time for such a catalyst; in Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche’s explosive The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which said many of the same things, determined the course of work for a century. One of the intriguing questions surrounding Pater’s work, then,

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is why it did not have a similar influence. I shall return to this question at the end of the chapter. Though Pater’s portrait of Greek religion was, as I said, unique, he drew heavily on others for his raw materials. Pater scholars have well documented his debts and they will be mentioned later. He was the kind of scholar who tries to devise a scheme to accommodate all ideas that seem to have value, and he was conscientious in his research. Such an approach can lead to insipid results, but in an acute observer it can produce a more faithful representation of life than that of the one-sided ideologue. In any case, alongside this desire to do right by everyone something of the bolder Pater of the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, swept along by the power of an overriding vision, shows up in Greek Studies too, and this vision, however circumspectly expressed, is the driving force of his views on Greek religion. These views were expounded principally in several essays in Greek Studies, written between 1875 and 1878.4 Near the beginning of ‘Demeter and Persephone’, Pater sets out his sovereign scheme for the history of Greek myths. There are three phases: There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase, in which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place, there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the natural world. We may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or literary, phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of the vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it with a purely literary interest, fixing its outlines, and simplifying or developing its situations. Thirdly, the myth passes into the ethical phase, in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because intensely characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions. (GS, 91)

As others have observed,5 the scheme is very similar to Ruskin’s in The Queen of the Air (1869);6 this is the first of the major borrowings. But, typically, Pater complicates matters. Whereas for Ruskin the ethical phase reduces to high-minded ideals and proto-Christian precepts, for Pater ‘ethical’ encompasses all cultivated thought and aesthetic experience, including darker emotions and earthly reality. A metaphysical and one-sided understanding of spirituality was repellent to Pater. Truly sublime representations, in High Romanticism, required the spectre of death and the depths of sorrow to reach their greatest intensity.

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Pater could not define ‘ethical’ in such a way as to deny the strong and often conflicting feelings that actually determined relations with other human beings. ‘Ethical’ here has much in common with ‘spiritual’, in a Protestant tradition where a perpetual internal struggle with doubt and sin is part of faith. Note that the subtitle of ‘Dionysus’ is ‘The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’; the phrase ‘spiritual form’ occurs repeatedly in these essays.7 It is taken from William Blake,8 a writer whose influence on Pater must have been profound, given the many affinities of their thought; though their metaphysics were quite different, Blake’s fusion of art and literature, his visionary transhistoricism, his elevation of imagination above reason, and his way of finding the ‘spiritual form’ in the visible realities of everyday life would have appealed powerfully to Pater. Pater’s strong instinct was to illustrate the ethical phase from art rather than literature,9 since the finest moral understanding attended upon direct aesthetic encounter—not recollection or contemplation in the abstract, but the immediate visual experience of great art.10 Only art engaged the whole gamut of human thought and emotion. Pater’s own ethical/spiritual life was deeply complicated; his agnosticism and homosexuality had potentially ruinous consequences in Victorian Oxford. It is easy enough to find passages of covert self-dialogue in these essays. The remarkable thing is that despite its very personal investment this outline of Greek religion was and is historically plausible, even if not every modern reader would follow Pater in his flights of transhistorical sympathy and bold cross-cultural comparisons. A good example of how scholarship, art, and life come together is afforded by the following passage: One knows not how far one may really be from the mind of the old Italian engraver [Mocetto], in gathering from his design this impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus. But modern motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and very fascinating realisation of such a motive; the god of the bitterness of wine, ‘of things too sweet’; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup. (‘Dionysus’, GS, 42)

The painter, Simeon Solomon, is not here named; he was charged with attempted sodomy in a public place in 1873, and never recovered from the disgrace. Pater’s fairly plain reference to the homoerotic character of Solomon’s Bacchus is a brave gesture of support. Pater himself came close to scandal in 1874 over his relations with undergraduate

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William Hardinge.11 The confrontation with Jowett over the matter, on Inman’s reading, angered and embittered Pater, who would henceforth have to come to terms with the sacrifices needed to participate in respectable society. In a sense, Inman argues, without this incident there would have been no Greek Studies. The passage continues: Touched by the sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in the range of Greek ideas;—had some antitype of this fascinating figure any place in Greek religion? Yes; in a certain darker side of the double god of nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of Thebes and Naxos, but never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea, really existed—the conception of Dionysus Zagreus; an image, which has left, indeed, but little effect in Greek art and poetry, which criticism has to put patiently together, out of late, scattered hints in various writers; but which is yet discernible, clearly enough to show that it really visited certain Greek minds here and there; and discernible, not as a late afterthought, but as a tradition really primitive, and harmonious with the original motive of the idea of Dionysus. In its potential, though unrealised scope, it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek religious poetry, and is, at least, part of the complete physiognomy of Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to the modern student, after a complete survey. (GS, 42–3)

The Orphic myth told how Dionysus Zagreus was torn apart by the vengeful Titans, but reborn as son of Zeus and Semele. Orphism itself was a mystery religion, requiring initiation and promising a better afterlife to its devotees. As such it belongs to the general class of chthonic cults, worshipping mainly female deities concerned with the earth, fertility, death, and rebirth, as opposed to the Olympian cults of the sky-father and his family, gods of politics, law, and war. Though the dichotomy has been much nuanced in recent years, it does have real force, and was common coin in the study of Greek religion since Karl Otfried Müller’s epoch-making commentary on Aeschylus’ Eumenides of 1833.12 Orphism was never part of the publicly sanctioned religion of the polis, with festivals, temples, and appointed priests, but it thrived on the margins and underground. It is to Pater’s credit that he realizes that, if one is to understand Dionysus in his totality, one must find room for this cult. The Orphic tradition had been painstakingly reconstructed by German scholars, whose work Pater mined assiduously. Much of his information in ‘Demeter and Persephone’ comes from Ludwig Preller’s 1837 book of that title, and in ‘Dionysus’ he draws upon the first volume

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of Preller’s Griechische Mythologie (2nd edn., 1860), at times translating nearly verbatim.13 To Preller he owes his notion of the duality of gods, whether Demeter, Apollo, or Dionysus, but he develops a much subtler picture, in which the two sides have degrees, shade into each other, and coexist in troubling, often terrifying ways (a notion vividly realized in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ and ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’). This complicated picture of symbiotic dark and light in the human soul reveals both diligent research and searching introspection. For Pater, each Greek god is a ‘complete’ representation of life, from different perspectives. As he says in ‘Dionysus’: For them the thought of Dionysus and his circle, a little Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of life, and was a complete religion, a sacred representation or interpretation of the whole human experience, modified by the special limitations, the special privileges of insight or suggestion, incident to their peculiar mode of existence. (GS, 10)

He is speaking here of vine-growers (the ‘peculiar mode of existence’), whereas the religion of Demeter ‘carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads of Greece’ (GS, 9). One should not speak of Greek religion, he says, but of Greek religions. Every community—the viticulturalists here, the agriculturalists there—focused its life upon one chief deity. As that life had its triumphs and disasters, so too the god could bring both, and feel both elation and grief alongside his worshippers. As Greek civilization developed, communities came together into larger polities. The myth of each god grew by insensible increments with contributions from many places, and the gods came together into the pantheon. These gods overlap each other, as do the multifaceted spheres of life they embody; it is possible ‘only in a limited sense’ to ‘lift, and examine by itself, one thread of the network of story and imagery’ (‘Demeter and Persephone I’, GS, 100). Again, there are clear debts. The expression ‘little Olympus outside the greater’ (repeated in ‘Dionysus’, GS, 14) comes from Müller,14 to whom he owes also the idea of regional versus national religion, and, in various places, the character of the Dorian Apollo.15 The third edition of Müller’s Handbuch was enlarged by Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, one of the heroes of classical scholarship, whose Griechische Götterlehre Pater had read.16 The notions of chthonic versus Olympian, and of the duality of gods, were reinforced by these authorities. Pater’s ‘complete survey’ which he got from them parallels

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the ‘complete representation’ that is each god, and reflects his own many-sided, sensitive mind. It is no coincidence that Pater was attracted to gods such as Dionysus, Demeter, and Persephone. To classicizing temperaments these primitive chthonic cults were happily superseded by the serene Olympians as Greek civilization moved towards its rationalistic telos. This view was deep-rooted orthodoxy in Victorian schools and universities; in Greek religion and art the trend began with Winckelmann and Heyne, and continued with such figures as George Grote and Matthew Arnold, with whom Pater conducts an unacknowledged dialogue in these essays.17 When Pater remarks at the beginning of ‘Demeter and Persephone I’ that their religion was ‘[a]lien in some respects from the genuine traditions of Greek mythology, a relic of the earlier inhabitants of Greece’ (original italics), he is nodding politely to convention (as he habitually does); but his mischievous continuation shows that the first clause was concessive: ‘it yet asserted its interest, little by little, and took a complex hold on the minds of the Greeks, becoming finally the central and most popular subject of their national worship’ (GS, 81). So far from being superseded, it became established religion. We know now from a thousand archaeological finds that Pater was right (in fact, Demeter had always been central), but here he delights in turning the received narrative on its head (and he had good German authority to boot). Pater is indebted to E. B. Tylor, whose two volumes on Primitive Culture had appeared in 1871 (see also Chapter 15). Indeed, he wholeheartedly adopted Tylor’s picture of prehistoric religion (the word ‘animism’ itself appears in inverted commas in GS, 112, as usual without giving the source), but rejected his belief, shared with Grote and Arnold, that the prehistoric stage served only as a preliminary to later developments.18 Early anthropologists like Tylor and J. G. Frazer believed unquestionably in the superiority of European civilization, and their teleological perspective was the view of the great majority; however, some of those who approached the study of Greek religion anthropologically actively preferred the primitive to the so-called civilized. Jane Harrison (on whom more later) positively revelled in the chthonic. Pater’s own sympathies with Decadent writers such as Baudelaire and Swinburne predisposed him to resist and see beyond the pretences of civilization. Though more willing than Harrison to find a proper place for the Olympians in Greek religion, like her he warmed to the Orphics. Orphism was conventionally regarded as a perversion of

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Greek religion, the product of a decadent age; until finds of the last fifty years finally put the matter beyond doubt, many scholars declined to believe that it was even a movement in classical Greece. Pater glories in the voluptuous, transgressive Dionysus, and seems almost to wish he himself were a maenad.19 He even finds a way to bring human sacrifice into the realm of the comprehensible (‘Dionysus’, GS, 47, 51). When Pater says that Euripides deployed his well-known Sophism to make Dionysus a little less savage in the Bacchae than he really was, and thus—barely— palatable to the audience (‘Bacchanals’, GS, 77–80), he is speaking partly of himself. When he says that the myth of Demeter and Persephone in its third, aesthetic phase became ‘the property of those more elevated spirits, who, in the decline of the Greek religion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect freedom of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister to their culture’ (‘Demeter and Persephone II’, GS, 137), he is also describing his own activity in Greek Studies, written when Christianity was beginning to suffer serious challenge. Even so, the expression ‘elevated spirits’ must suggest a hierarchy of values; he continues: In this way, the myths of the Greek religion become parts of an ideal, visible embodiments of the susceptibilities and intuitions of the nobler kind of souls; and it is to this latest phase of mythological development that the highest Greek sculpture allies itself. Its function is to give visible aesthetic expression to the constituent parts of that ideal. (GS, 137)

If pressed Pater would probably say that the process of elevation is an aesthetic one, ridding oneself of crude notions, but his language is redolent of standard Christian notions of purity, in the sense of ridding oneself of sin. Compare the peroration of ‘Demeter and Persephone II’: There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the earth, akin to the influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light, tranquillising voices. What is there in this phase of ancient religion for us, at the present day? The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas—of conceptions, which having no link on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler races of their

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worshippers have passed away, they may be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions. (GS, 151)

Here too we have talk of elevation and purification, and of ‘simpler races’. Nonetheless, the main stress is on man’s ‘deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life’, which must include thoughts of all kinds, not just pure white ones. They are transhistorical, and linked to ideals or experiences we all share. This emotional bedrock claims precedence over any particular historical manifestation of it. Pater wants to find the common ground between Christianity and paganism, as he found common ground between chthonic and Olympian, history and aesthetics. To be sure, his spirit of compromise does have limits. It is perhaps because he did not believe in immortal souls and the resurrection that he avoids all reference to the birth of mankind from the ashes of Dionysus in the Orphic myth, by which humanity inherited in its very being the original sin of the Titans, to be purified by devotion to the tenets of Orphism in the hope of an eternal reward. Other seekers of reconciliation were quick to exploit this obvious point of resemblance to Christianity. Pater’s idealism, however, is anti-metaphysical, grounded in the human spirit, which is given in nature but not beyond it. His common ground will not lie in views about the afterlife. For all the similarities with Blake, noted earlier in this chapter, this is the decisive difference. Pater’s view of Greek religion has many aspects that might recommend it to a modern scholar of the subject. When he speaks of the gods as an extremely complicated ‘network’ (in the passage from ‘Demeter and Persephone I’ already quoted, GS, 100), he strikingly anticipates decades of structuralist and post-structuralist work from the 1960s onwards. He thinks carefully about context, with full attention to different localities and eras. He fully appreciates the messiness of the phenomena. He speaks of both myths and cults; a passing remark about myth arising from ritual even anticipates the whole programme of the Cambridge School.20 He considers the religion of both individuals and society. He is clear that a notion of Greek divinities and their worshippers as serene rationalists is simply unhistorical. He exploits both literary and artistic evidence. In retrospect, his emphasis on chthonic deities seems to place him at the forefront of a coming revolution. Yet his influence on professional students of Greek religion was quite limited,

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and the credit is normally given to Nietzsche among philosophers, and to the pioneering anthropologists. One can certainly say that he influenced Jane Harrison. She got to know the Pater family during her time in London,21 and her first book on Greek art was criticized for its aestheticism.22 In her work on Greek religion she exalted the female, chthonic deities at the expense of the Olympians, and wrote extensively about Dionysus.23 As Charlotte Ribeyrol also shows in Chapter 11 in this volume, Harrison’s general outlook, and her use of art and archaeology in particular, surely owed much to Pater’s example; yet, so far as I can see, she never cites him. Her avowed inspiration came from the work on Israelite ritual of W. Robertson Smith, and from early anthropologists like E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, and especially Sir James Frazer; then Nietzsche, Freud, and Durkheim. These names, and others from the German tradition such as Erwin Rohde or Hermann Usener, dominated early twentiethcentury scholarship.24 Pater is nowhere to be found. L. R. Farnell, author of five learned volumes The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, 1896–1909), offers a rare early admission of influence, but even he credits Pater only with awakening his interest in art.25 Given the similarities between Nietzsche and Pater, it seems hard on Pater that he was so comprehensively sidelined. The similarities include the contrast of Apollo and Dionysus; the emphasis on Dionysus’ violence; the duality of the Thracian versus the Greek Dionysus; interpretation of the Bacchae as a palinode; and in general the whole discovery of the Greeks and the irrational. These coincidences have led people to suppose that Nietzsche was another of Pater’s unacknowledged sources. The similarities can all be traced to common sources, and Pater nowhere in any of his works or letters mentions the German.26 Even if he did know Nietzsche’s work, however (which remains possible), the aesthetic interpretation was uniquely his. Albert Henrichs, in his survey of the modern work on Dionysus, postpones his remarks on Pater from their expected chronological place in his study to consider him alongside Nietzsche, since Pater, like Nietzsche, pointed the way forward to the twentieth century’s appreciation of the god’s manifold complexities. ‘Pater’s essay on Dionysus’, writes Henrichs, ‘ . . . is one of the most impressive and probing interpretative efforts made on behalf of the god in the nineteenth century, but because of its pervasive nature symbolism, which was already out of date

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in 1876, and because of its tortured style, the essay had next to no influence on the modern study of Dionysus.’27 One need not share the odd judgement of Pater’s beautiful style, but the nature symbolism is certainly there. Pater accepted the theory of F. Max Müller that all myths were originally allegories of natural phenomena, a theory which Andrew Lang was already challenging in the 1870s and which he eventually killed for good.28 Unlike Müller, however, Pater thought that, as myth developed, it acquired new and better human meanings; while acknowledging the original nature symbolism he typically moves on quickly to the later stage of the myth, as if he mentions the allegorical stage only because he feels he must, and would really rather do without.29 In fact, he does not mention Müllerian interpretations very often, and Henrichs’s ‘pervasive’ is overstated. There are, I think, three reasons why Nietzsche eclipsed Pater. The first is surely Nietzsche’s brilliance as a writer and as a philosopher. Nietzsche’s later philosophical writings, whose enormous impact hardly needs stating, retrospectively added charge to The Birth of Tragedy, which in any case already contained some of his key ideas. If you wanted a revolutionary, Nietzsche was your man; Pater’s rapprochement with Christianity was a pallid compromise by comparison. Secondly, Pater had the bad luck to be writing just as the anthropologists were getting started. Where he stressed the similarities between the ancient Greeks and ourselves, they stressed the differences, a change in attitude whose time had come. Finally, and not unconnected with the second reason, was Pater’s aestheticism. Given that, as we have seen, many of the constituent ideas were in general circulation anyway, including those mentioned earlier that seem to anticipate modern work, his aesthetic approach would have to constitute the reason for seeking inspiration in his essays. This was a disadvantage in an age that claimed to have invented the ‘scientific’ study of religion, and the inexorable march of historicism meant that his easy juxtapositions of Euripides, Giotto, Solomon, and Plato seemed increasingly problematic. Even Harrison, for all her radicalism, may have been reluctant to cite him lest she seem unscholarly. The mounting opprobrium of aestheticism on grounds of immorality was a further hindrance. Anthropology, by contrast, offered boundless new possibilities for research, and tended to reinforce European complacency. Though Pater drew on the anthropology of Tylor, and though many of his

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individual remarks, as I have said, seem forward-looking, his overall approach was too redolent of the Romantic approach to Dionysus,30 too beholden to the spirits of Goethe and Shelley, to serve as the charter of a new age. If Harrison’s silence was guilty, it is hard to say the same of others who followed her, and within a generation Pater’s work in this area seems to have been forgotten. Nonetheless, Pater’s methods enabled him to construct a portrait of Greek religion which, despite all the changes in approach since his day, still seems historically sensible, in contrast with many other studies of the time, to say nothing of earlier centuries. He may yet have something to teach scholars of the subject. Recently there have been interesting efforts to rehabilitate the notion of belief in a Greek context, which had been declared inappropriate by the inherited paradigm, since paganism supposedly privileges doing (ritual) above thinking (myth). The early, historicizing anthropologists sought to exclude Christian notions like faith from the discussion, sometimes with an obvious anti-Christian bias. These are the scholars who at the time seemed to have left Pater behind. It is, however, patently true that the Greeks entertained beliefs about their gods; the question is how best to identify and describe them. Paradoxically, a new paradigm that makes room for belief may take us back, not exactly to Pater’s outlook, but to a similar kind of engagement. New methods offered by cognitive humanities raise exciting prospects of progress; but the reason they are exciting is that the desire imaginatively to enter the lost mental world of the Greeks has never gone away. This was Pater’s enterprise, and his self-reflective, dialectical model, urgently asking ‘what is this to me?’, seems especially apt when the subject is belief.

Notes 1. See Norman Vance, ‘Myth and Religion’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford, 2015), pp. 185–202. 2. For Heyne and this point of view see Glenn Most, ‘From Logos to Mythos’, in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford, 1999), pp. 25–50. 3. For an insightful assessment, see Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989), pp. 235–81.

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4. I shall abbreviate the main essays ‘Demeter and Persephone’, ‘Dionysus’, and ‘Bacchanals’. 5. e.g. Steven Connor, ‘Myth as Multiplicity in Walter Pater’s Greek Studies and “Denys l’Auxerrois” ’, Review of English Studies, 34 (1983), 28–42 (29). 6. The Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (1903–12), XIX (1905), p. 300 (he speaks of a root and two branches: the root lies ‘in physical existence, sun, or sky, or cloud, or sea’; then ‘the personal incarnation of that; becoming a trusted and companionable deity, with whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child with its brother or sister’; and ‘lastly, the moral significance of the image, which is in all the great myths eternally and beneficially true’). See also Works of Ruskin, XVIII. The Ethics of the Dust (1866), pp. 347–8. 7. ‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, pp. 15, 23, 27, 28, 37; ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, GS, 220; ‘The Marbles of Aegina’, GS, 254. 8. Blake painted c.1805 The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth and The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan; the debt is acknowledged in GS, 37. It was from Swinburne’s study of Blake that Pater adopted the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’; see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art, 1750–2000 (Oxford, 2005), p. 128; Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 2007), pp. 49–54. 9. Sculpture is the ‘central extant illustration’ of the Greek ethical phase, GS, 93, 137; poetry and art are, however, on equal footing at e.g. GS, 112, 114, 136 (but note how in the last passage the ethical precipitate of poetry significantly consists in an image). 10. See e.g. the peroration of ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, GS, 223: ‘Those solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a perfect embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable soul and of a spiritual world; they are also the best made things of their kind’; finely crafted art, where other nations end, was for the Greeks ‘a mere starting-ground for their imaginative presentment of man, moral and inspired’; the combination of artefact and the ‘reasonable soul entering into that, reclaiming the metal and stone and clay, till they are as full of living breath as the real warm body itself ’ gave the Greeks their ‘constant right estimate of their action and reaction’. ‘Dionysus’, GS, 30–8 is a sustained discussion of this theme: the insistence on physical apprehension is remarkable. 11. For the episode see Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett and William M. Hardinge’, in Pater in the 1990s, ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC, 1991), pp. 1–20; Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 100–3.

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12. Karl Otfried Müller, Aeschylos: Eumenides (Göttingen, 1833), pp. 138–48, 165–78. ‘Chthonian’, in GS, 44, 121, 130, 141, 149. 13. See Connor, ‘Myth as Multiplicity’; Inman (1990), pp. 132–48 and index s.v. Preller. 14. K. O. Müller, Handbuch der Archäeologie der Kunst (3rd edn. by F. G. Welcker, Breslau, 1848; Engl. tr. 1852), p. 594 = 488. 15. e.g. GS, 25, 217, and many times in ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (GS, 251–68); ‘Plato and the Doctrine of Rest’, PP, 36; K. O. Müller, Die Dorier (Breslau, 1824; Engl. tr. 1839); Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (Göttingen, 1825; Engl. tr. 1844). For Müller’s influence see the discussion in Inman (1990), pp. 169–73 and index. The idea that Euripides’ Bacchae was a palinode (‘Bacchanals’, GS, 55) probably came from Müller’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, I (1840), p. 379 (the work was first published in English). 16. 3 vols (Göttingen, 1857–62). For Welcker’s influence see Inman (1990), pp. 236–79 and index. 17. George Grote, History of Greece (1846), I–II; Matthew Arnold, ‘Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment’ (1864), in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, MI, 1962), pp. 212–31. See Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), pp. 83–94, 98–100; Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 36–42. 18. See ‘Demeter and Persephone I’, GS, 96–7, for a particularly eloquent evocation of primeval religious feeling and its vital force. Without something of this primitive fire, the later stages were lifeless. 19. Yopie Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, 1999), pp. 43–81 (52). 20. ‘Demeter and Persephone’, GS, 120: ‘There were religious usages before there were distinct religious conceptions, and these antecedent religious usages shape and determine, at many points, the ultimate religious conception, as the details of the myth interpret or explain the religious custom’. For the School see The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, ed. W. M. Calder, III (Illinois Classical Studies, suppl. 2, 1991). 21. Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925), p. 46. 22. Jane Ellen Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (1885); Prins, ‘Greek Maenads’, p. 62. 23. The main works are Prolegomena to Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1903); Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1912); and Epilegomena to Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1921). For studies see Sandra Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self (New Haven, 1988); Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA, 2000);

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford, 2002). For a different emphasis on Pater and Harrison see Charlotte Ribeyrol, Chapter 11 in this volume. A brief and masterful overview of the history of the subject may be found in Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, tr. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 1–4. See Charles Martindale, Introduction to this volume. Albert Henrichs, ‘Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88 (1984), 205–40 (238–9). Among the studies of the Romantic interpretations of Dionysus in the background to both Nietzsche and Pater mentioned by Henrichs see especially Martin Vogel, Apollinisch und Dionysisch: Geschichte eines genialen Irrtums (Regensburg, 1966) and Max L. Baeumer, ‘Nietzsche and the Tradition of the Dionysian’, in Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, ed. James C. O’Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert Meredith Helm (Chapel Hill, NC, 1976), pp. 165–89. Henrichs, ‘Loss of Self ’, p. 239. On Pater and Max Müller see Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 104–15; and Section 4 of the Bibliography. e.g. ‘Dionysus’, GS, 22–3, 32; ‘Lacedaemon’, PP, 229. Henrichs, ‘Loss of Self ’.

PART 4

Philosophy

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Introduction to Part 4 Among his publications Pater had a particular fondness for Plato and Platonism, which belongs to a genre that we now take for granted but which was a comparatively recent development—the introductory monograph on an ancient author designed for students and the educated reading public (the book started life as a series of undergraduate lectures primarily on the Republic). T. S. Eliot sneered that Pater ‘was incapable of sustained reasoning’ (in his essay first titled ‘The Place of Pater’, and subsequently ‘Arnold and Pater’), while to Richard Jenkyns in The Victorians and Ancient Greece Pater’s account of Plato is solipsistic and ‘slovenly’, telling us nothing about the ‘real’ Plato. The contributors to this part take a very different view. Pater had considerable expertise both in ancient philosophy and in German idealism (students including the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins were sent to him to help them read Hegel), though of course his way of writing was far indeed from that of a modern analytic philosopher (as indeed was Plato’s!). Chapters 14–17 of this book focus on Pater’s engagement with Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle, and contextualize Pater’s understanding of these figures within their wider Victorian reception. Pater was a close friend of Ingram Bywater, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, who published an important edition of the surviving works of Heraclitus (and who incidentally testified to the superior force of Pater’s mind in comparison to his own). Giles Whiteley examines Pater’s shifting uses of these fragments from the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, through Marius, to Plato and Platonism. Lee Behlman and Kurt Lampe argue that Pater has a highly distinctive understanding of Plato’s ‘Theory of Forms’, one that philosophers today can still profitably engage with, and which also affected in complex ways Pater’s fictional writings. Daniel Orrells explores the links between Plato’s and Pater’s views on education, the issue of how the particular relates to the general, and the implication of that for the

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character of scholarly writing and the task of the educator. Pater lectured on the Ethics throughout his life, though he seldom mentions Aristotle by name in his own works. Adam Lee in his chapter shows how Aristotle nonetheless is a significant presence, notably in the ‘Conclusion’ and in the essay ‘On Wordsworth’, and how he may be seen as one of the contributors to Pater’s conception of art for art’s sake. To quote from Stephen Bann’s ‘Afterword’, collectively these chapters put ‘beyond any doubt the seriousness of Pater’s engagement with the philosophy of ancient Greece’.

14 Pater’s Heraclitus Irony and the Historical Method Giles Whiteley

The ‘Conclusion’ to Pater’s Renaissance was prefaced by an epigraph from Heraclitus: πάντα χωρεῖ και οὐδὲν μένει (‘All things give way: nothing remaineth’) (Ren., 186; Pater’s translation, PP, 14).1 But while the ‘Conclusion’ ‘may be, and has been, read as a modern translation or reading of Heraclitus’ philosophy of motion’ (in readings that also tend to turn upon a consideration of Pater’s later Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism), we should remember that this conclusion had its first life as the final part of Pater’s earlier essay ‘Poems by William Morris’ (1868), and that the epigraph from Heraclitus was a later addition. Thus the interest in Heraclitus here seems to be ‘something of an afterthought’, as William Shuter puts it, rather than indicative of a premeditated project of classicism.2 Of course, such problematics are unsurprising when we consider Pater’s career, which has been characterized as a series of readings and rereadings of itself. But they become more interesting in light of Pater’s later comments on the ‘historic method’ of criticism (PP, 9). These comments appear in the chapter of Plato and Platonism devoted to Heraclitus, as its own kind of parergon.3 There, Pater begins by pointing out that ‘in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings’. ‘Fix where we may the origin’ of ideas such as that ‘of “the perpetual flux”’, ‘the specialist will still be able to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine’ (PP, 5). To understand Plato, Pater contends, we must understand the extent to which his contemporary modernity is itself

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built upon his own classical past, ‘like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very stone he builds with’ (PP, 7). This method of criticism Pater terms ‘historic’ and distinguishes from the ‘dogmatic’ and ‘eclectic’. If dogmatic criticism accepts or rejects the past on the basis of preconceived dogma, eclectic criticism is ‘more generous’, aiming to select ‘the various grains of truth dispersed’ within the ‘contending schools’ (PP, 9). So Pater in The Renaissance: he first formulates his aesthetic philosophy and then only as an ‘afterthought’ selects as authority a philosophy of flux from Heraclitus. But if the younger Pater was no doubt aware of some of the limitations of eclecticism, the later Pater came to feel these limitations all the more keenly. The ‘natural defect’ of eclecticism is its ‘tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it professes to explain, that it may harmonize thus the better with the other elements of a pre-conceived system’ (PP, 9), as the later Pater remarks. In The Renaissance, he had alluded to only one aspect of Heraclitus, a popular image of the philosopher, which he perhaps did not intend to speak for either Heraclitus or himself, or for their possible correspondences, but one which nevertheless had damned them both through conjunction. Pater came to the conclusion that what was needed was a more comprehensive appreciation of Heraclitus’ philosophy. Pater, as is well known, came to regret the partial interpretation of his ‘Conclusion’, later referring his readers to Marius (1885), in which he ‘dealt more fully’ with the thoughts suggested by it (Ren., 186n.). If Heraclitus was an ‘afterthought’ in his first appearance in the Paterian corpus, he is dealt with more comprehensively in Marius. This engagement must be framed within Pater’s later interest in ‘historic’ criticism: Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing ‘Timespirit’ or Zeit-geist, given way to . . . the historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system, we are busy with, . . . as far as possible in the group of conditions, intellectual, social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if we would really understand it. (PP, 9)4

How did Pater cultivate this historicism in his rereading of Heraclitus? First, he engaged with scholarly work to come to a more rounded vision of his philosophy. During the period of the composition of Marius, he read voraciously, armed, no doubt, with the then-standard edition, Heinrich Ritter and Ludwig Preller’s Historia Philosophiae Graecae

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(1838). Pater engaged with Heraclitus not only through classical texts, and particularly Diogenes Laertius’ Lives, but also from a number of other sources, most significantly Ingram Bywater’s edition, Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae (1877).5 Pater and Bywater were friends, ‘inseparable companions’ while the former was an undergraduate, both members of the Old Mortality Club, and, when Pater published The Renaissance, Bywater would come under suspicion by association.6 In a letter to Hermann Diels, later responsible for the (still) standard edition of Heraclitus’ fragments (1903), and in response to Diels’s apparent interest in Pater (itself noteworthy), Bywater recalls that ‘his mind was much more mature than mine and he completely subjugated me by his verve, and originality of view’.7 Unsurprisingly, in this light, Bywater’s Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae was a very different work of classicism from the ones that Pater produced. Unlike Pater’s, Bywater’s work resisted the desire to interpret. As he writes at the beginning of his edition, his role was to put in place the fragments without excessive critical discussion (‘loco fragmenta posui absque mole disputationum’).8 This is in keeping with his aims: Bywater was a philologist rather than someone with an overt interest in hermeneutics. Pater’s path, however, is different. To this end, Pater, as Bywater before him, but for differing reasons and with differing results, consulted the burgeoning German literature on Heraclitus. This is itself significant: Pater approaches Heraclitus through the prism of German philosophy, and so his contribution to contemporary English classicism must be understood as always double: a contribution guided both by a scrupulous engagement with the original sources and by a broad and sympathetic appreciation of German philosophy. Pater probably read Ferdinand Lassalle’s Die Philosophie Herakleitos (1858), Jakob Bernays’s Die Heraklitischen Briefe (1869), and Paul Robert Schuster’s Heraklit von Ephesus (1873), all of which Bywater had consulted. From Schuster, he would meet an empiricist Heraclitus, from Lassalle an idealist one; in British scholarship, from Georges Henry Lewes’s Biographical History of Philosophy (1846), he would meet a positivist one. He may also have encountered the work of Gustav Teichmüller on Heraclitean ‘perspectivism’, so influential on Nietzsche, and the genealogies of his thought from Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (1810–36), for whom Heraclitus linked oriental elementalism with occidental rationalism, and whose work was clearly influential on Pater’s approach to the

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study of Dionysus. As to Pater’s own position, he is more circumspect, but he seems to be moving from the more popular interpretation of Heraclitus’ doctrine (one which would be either empiricist or positivist in tenor, focused on the sensory data itself in its modality of flux) to an ‘idealist’ one, as he makes clear in Marius (ME, i. 133, ch. 8). For Pater, there is a sense in which his turn towards an idealist reading of Heraclitus is driven by a recognition of the partial nature of the ‘eclectic’ approach to philosophy. A more nuanced approach was needed, and it was one he discovered in a tradition of the reading of Heraclitus emblematized by Hegel. A key text here was Eduard Zeller’s Die Philosophie der Griechen (1844–52), borrowed by Pater from the Queen’s College Library in 1863.9 Although critical on occasion of Hegel’s ideas, resisting the temptation to synthesize dialectically the history of Presocratic philosophy as Hegel would do, Zeller, who is cited as an authority in Plato and Platonism (PP, 58), was broadly Hegelian in his historicism. He was reliant on Hegel’s account in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (1825–6), also cited as authoritative by Pater (PP, 91–2), another major source for his own treatment of Heraclitus. Hegel, for his part, relied on the fragments collected, incomplete, in Heinrich Stephanus’ Poesis philosophica (1575) and—more significantly—in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Herakleitos der Dunkle (1807). Close lexical borrowings suggest that Pater consulted this text. Certainly, Schleiermacher’s later work on hermeneutics was influential on Pater, who would take out Geschichte der Philosophie (1839) from Queen’s College Library in 1861, and demonstrate a general appreciation of Der Christliche Glaube (1830–1) in the unpublished manuscript on ‘Art and Religion’.10 Known as the father of modern theology, Schleiermacher’s influence on the British reception of Higher Criticism is well documented, but to see Pater approaching the study of the history of philosophy through Schleiermacher is highly significant. It is from Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, as much as from Hegel’s dialectics, that Pater’s ‘historic method’ finds its philosophical underpinning. While the vast majority of Schleiermacher’s work on hermeneutics was published posthumously, Herakleitos dates from the period of his intensive work on Greek philosophy, including his multivolume translation of Plato, Platons Werke (1804–9), a work that again it seems likely Pater was acquainted with, owing both to its adoption of a hermeneutic historical approach to Plato and to the way in which it

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treats Plato as ‘philosophischen Künstler’, a philosophical artist.11 The key point that Pater takes from Schleiermacher’s Herakleitos is the emphasis on ‘die göttliche Vernunft’ (the divine reason) as a unifying idea for the fragments, and Hegel follows Schleiermacher in this: Der λόγος, die Vernunft ist der einzige Richter der Wahrheit, aber nicht der nächste beste Logos, sondern nur der göttliche, allgemeine λόγος. Dieser Prozeß, diese Bestimmtheit der Bewegung, die durch das All hindurchgeht, dieser Rhythmus, dieses Maß, ein aetherisches Sein, welches der Samen ist zur Erzeugung des Ganzen—dieses Eine ist der Logos. (Λόγος or reason is the sole judge of truth—not, however, the Logos that is ready to hand, but only the divine, universal λόγος. This process, this determinateness of movement that permeates the all, this rhythm or measure, an ethereal being that is the seed for the generation of the whole—this One is the Logos.)12

Hegel, as Schleiermacher before him, focuses less on the flux—or what Hegel would term the negatively rational moment of the dialectic—than on the divine, universal Logos, operating as rational ‘rhythm’ or ‘measure’ beneath the modalities of this flux: a kind of positively rational whole. The emphasis in both, in other words, is to shift away from a philosophy of flux and from the Heraclitus of Pater’s ‘Conclusion’, a shift also marked in Pater’s later engagements with the fragments. Pater’s contribution in Marius comes in presenting a more historically nuanced portrait of Heraclitus, derived both from this extensive reading and from his own scrupulous engagements with the original fragments. It is this scholarly nuance that constitutes his more rounded vision of classicism. As such, Pater serves to make more widely known, if not exactly to popularize, a far more complexly inflected image of Heraclitus. After the death of Flavian, Marius ‘set himself—Sich im Denken zu orientiren—to determine his bearings, as by compass, in the world of thought—to get that precise acquaintance with the creative intelligence itself ’ (ME, i. 126, ch. 8). The passing allusion is to Kant’s essay ‘Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientiren?’ (1786), once again approaching Heraclitus from an idealist philosophical angle. Marius turns from Epicurus and Lucretius to the ‘difficult book “Concerning Nature”’ (ME, i. 128, ch. 8), Περί φύσεως. This ‘difficulty’—Heraclitus’ infamous ‘obscurity’, ὁ Σκοτεινός—marks his philosophy as ‘superior’, Pater remarks, before quoting a series of the fragments in conjunction: ‘“The many,” . . . are “like people heavy with wine”, “led by children”, “knowing

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not whither they go;” and yet, “much learning doth not make wise”; and again, “the ass, after all, would have his thistles rather than fine gold”’ (ME, i. 128, ch. 8). Pater thus begins his discussion of Heraclitus by quoting a series of less familiar fragments (DK40, B16; DK117, B72; and DK9, B51), ones which serve both to assert his difficulty and to announce his significance precisely on account of his resistance to any reductive popularism. According to the narrator, Heraclitus ‘had not under-rated the difficulty for “the many” of the paradox with which his doctrine begins’ (ME, i. 128, ch. 8), referring to fragment DK2, B92: τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν (‘Although the Logos is common, the many live as though they have a wisdom of their own’). ‘[T]he uncorrected sense’, the narrator remarks, gives ‘a false impression of permanence’, ‘[i]maging forth from those fluid impressions’ (with phrasing here that is more reminiscent of Lucretius than Heraclitus) ‘a world of firmly outlined objects’ (ME, i. 129, ch. 8).13 It constitutes merely a ‘preliminary scepticism . . . , according to which the universal movement of all things is but one particular stage . . . of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists’ (ME, i. 129, ch. 8).14 The phrasing is striking, translating Schleiermacher’s ‘die göttliche Vernunft’. This kind of theologically inflected vocabulary was also utilized in Pater’s unpublished manuscript on ‘Moral Philosophy’. Written during the early 1880s, in preparation for Marius, this material found its way into the body of the novel as the substance of Marius’ ‘reconsideration’, one which explains ‘more fully’ Pater’s own reconsideration of his aestheticism, and where ‘die göttliche Vernunft’ reappears as an element of Pater’s theory of the ‘greater reason’: Among the obscure fragments of H[eraclitus] one of the conc[er]ns wh[ich] shines . . . out clearly enough, is the conc[ep]t of this greater reason, under the term common reason, or common sense as we say, κοινος λογος. The movement or impulse of this κ[οινος] λ[ογος] he identifies . . . with fire, rhythm, life and its evolutions, the continuity of through their incessant change and it is connected in him also with a quasi-ethical notion of living in the whole in Goethe’s sense, for alone all the κ[οινος] λ[ογος] is a common intelligence to remove . . . is insanity and death.15

Pater refers here to a number of separate fragments: the idea of a ‘common reason’ surfaces in fragment DK2, B92, quoted earlier, and is

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linked to νόμος and divinity—θείου—in DK114, B91 (perhaps the closest Heraclitus’ Greek comes to the idea of ‘die göttliche Vernunft’);16 the focus on fire occurs in fragments DK30, B20; DK31, B21; DK 65, B24; DK66, B26; DK76, B25; and DK90, B22. But most significantly, the passage turns on the question of λόγος, introduced in fragment DK50, B1, with which Heraclitus begins Περί φύσεως: τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι. (DK1, B2) (Although this Logos is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem as if they had no experience of them.)

From Schleiermacher to Hegel, then, Pater’s interpretation of Heraclitus focuses on permanence: ‘[t]he one true being’ (ME, i. 129, ch. 8), ‘dieses Eine ist der Logos’. According to Marius, the flux ‘was but the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion—the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason itself, proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic’ (ME, i. 130–1, ch. 8). This emphasis on rhythm becomes (perhaps somewhat anachronistically)17 a musical question for Pater: In this ‘perpetual flux’ of things and of souls, there was . . . a continuance . . . of orderly intelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought out in and through the series of their mutations—ordinances of the divine reason, maintained throughout the changes of the phenomenal world (ME, i. 131, ch. 8)

Pater’s reference here is to a key term from the fragments: ἁρμονίη, harmony. Here, Pater picks up on the ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς (‘unseen harmony’) of fragment DK54, B47, and more generally on the question of musicality in fragment DK10, B59: συλλάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον· ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα (‘Things taken together are both whole and not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and the discordant. The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one’). A similar, but slightly diffracted, emphasis is also present in Plato and Platonism, which also focuses on another side to the doctrine of Heraclitus; an attempt on his part . . . to reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by

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the search for and the notation . . . of an antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those contending, infinitely diverse impulses. (PP, 17–18)

Pater’s ‘eclecticism’ here silently quotes O Sapientia: ‘It was an act of recognition, . . . of that Wisdom which, “reacheth from end to end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things”’ (PP, 18).18 One of the O Antiphons (hence: ‘antiphonal rhythm’), traditionally sung during the final week of Advent at Vespers, the O Sapientia of 17 December alludes to Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming of the Messiah (Isaiah 11: 2–3).19 The eclectic quotation, with attribution of the source typically silenced, again implies a theological resonance. If Heraclitus had been, on the one hand, ‘the first of the pessimists’, with Pater here alluding to his characterization as ‘the “weeping philosopher”’, sufferer of μελαγχολία, this melancholy was rooted less in the doctrine of the flux than in the inability of the popular consciousness to hear the spiritual ἁρμονίη underwriting it (PP, 18).20 But, in a narrative less about the reading of Heraclitus (by Marius, or by Plato) than his rereading, Heraclitus figures less as a ‘historical’ than as a posthumous figure. Rediscovered in ‘[t]he entire modern theory of “development”’, Heraclitus augurs both Hegel, for whom all moments of history ‘are but so many conscious movements in the secular process of the eternal mind’, and Darwin, for whom ‘“type” itself properly is not but is only always becoming’ (PP, 19). In Plato and Platonism, Pater foregrounds an aspect not touched upon in Marius: politics. Alluding to the famous claim of Sir James Mackintosh, politician and historian, that political constitutions ‘are “not made” . . . but “grow”’,21 Pater compares the Greek spirit with its prehistory, ‘the lifeless background of an unprogressive world . . . in which the unconscious social aggregate had been everything, the conscious individual, his capacity and rights, almost nothing’ (PP, 21). Again, the spectre of Schleiermacher looms large here: like the theological Heraclitus of Marius, so too the political one of Plato and Platonism is drawn from Herakleitos. Heraclitus’ own political affiliations are ambivalent according to the evidence of the extant fragments: he was clearly deeply scarred by the banishment from Ephesus of his friend Hermadorus (see DK121, B114), who fell afoul of the kind of ochlocracy Mill would have termed the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and

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which Pater himself had criticized in his early essay ‘Diaphaneitè’ (see MS, 252–3), but he was also a believer in a kind of community structured by the Logos (see DK114, B91). For Pater, it is the latter aspect of Heraclitus which is most appealing. Directing his readers to the influential history of George Grote, responsible for the monumental twelvevolume A History of Greece (1846–56), Pater associates the idea of a koinos logos, germinated in Heraclitus, with the key unifying factors of Panhellenism as Grote describes them: ‘common blood, common language, a common religious centre, the great games in which all alike communicated’ (PP, 23). Grote adds that such ‘commonality’ ultimately ‘failed to make the Greeks one people’, something only achieved ‘but imperfectly’ at a later date by Alexander.22 What was at stake, according to Pater, was the ‘centrifugal tendency’ that ‘had ever been too much for them’ (PP, 23). Heraclitus’ thinking, then, may have sought to synthesize these two competing tendencies, the koinos logos an attempted ‘combination of opposites, Attic ἄλειφα [oil] with the Doric ὄξος [vinegar]’ (PP, 24). But ultimately, the ‘boundless impatience’ of the early Greek spirit, ‘that passion for novelty noted in them by Saint Paul’ (not the only ‘Greek’ quality he remarks upon), ‘had been a matter of radical character’ (PP, 23).23 If Heraclitus himself was a figure interested in contemporary political constitutions, Pater’s interest is rather in how Heraclitus became political for Plato; his interest is in the way in which Plato needed to reject the philosophy of flux both insofar as ‘the inward polity of the individual’ might become ‘the theatre of a similar dissolution’ (recall here Pater’s ‘Conclusion’: ‘that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’ (Ren., 188)) and insofar as the ‘ideal city’ too might resist such dissolutions. The idea of flux had ‘become the synonym . . . of what is evil’ (PP, 25). This political framing is emblematic of Pater’s reading of Heraclitus which proceeds through a rereading of the earlier (mis)readings of Heraclitus. His thought is approached, but only ever from askance. While the ‘negative doctrine . . . had been, as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a large positive system of almost religious philosophy’ (ME, i. 130, ch. 8), δόξα had maintained but ‘the first, merely sceptical or negative step’, which ‘had alone remained in general memory’ (ME, i. 131, ch. 8). Heraclitus had been misconstrued in his popularized image, his philosophy becoming ‘almost identical with the famous doctrine of the sophist Protagoras, that the momentary, sensible

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apprehension of the individual was the only standard of what is or is not, and each one the measure of all things to himself ’ (ME, i. 131–2, ch. 8). The reference here is to Plato’s Theaetetus (152a), which had made a similar equation. But as an apologia for Heraclitus, one senses that there is more than a hint of the autobiographical here, an attempted reconsideration of Pater’s own ‘doctrine of motion’ of that infamous ‘Conclusion’ which had ‘seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make all fixed knowledge impossible’ (ME, i. 131, ch. 8). Part of Pater’s genius in Marius and Plato and Platonism lies in making the classical heritage accessible to a wider reading public, a ‘generosity’ in his classicism that later reviewers would pick up on. But Pater’s historicism—vital, important, and rigorous as it is—is also at the same time a displacement. In Plato and Platonism, we engage with Heraclitus to elucidate the proper contextual frame for a ‘historic’ reading of Plato; which is to say, a reading necessarily selective, since it approaches Heraclitus only in so far as he elucidates Plato. But even more interesting are the parergonal frames in Marius where we have a later student encountering Heraclitus. The narrative proceeds through at least three historical displacements: it offers us an imagined Roman reading of Heraclitus, which approaches his thought from an ‘idealist’ position, but discovered through two materialist philosophers (Epicurus and Lucretius). If Marius’ response to Heraclitus is to gain ‘a kind of irony’ (ME, i. 133, ch. 8), Pater’s entire ‘historic’ method of classicism is likewise somewhat ironic, always necessarily displaced.

Notes 1. Plato, Cratylus, 402a. Further references to Heraclitus’ fragments are given to both Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz’s Die Fragmente der Versokratiker (Berlin, 1934) (DK), the standard edition, and to Ingram Bywater’s Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae (1877) (B), an edition that Pater would have used from the time of the composition of Marius onwards. Translations are taken from John Burnett’s Early Greek Philosophy (1892), modified as necessary. 2. William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 8, 62. This is not to say that Pater was unaware of Heraclitus before 1873; the claim here regards the relationship between the ‘Conclusion’ and the Morris essay. Indeed, Pater’s tutor William Wolfe Capes, who, as clergyman, would later damn Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ from the pulpit, had lectured on Heraclitus to the

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

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young Pater as early as 1858. For rereadings of the ‘Conclusion’ through Heraclitus, Shuter draws our attention to Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 12, and Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida and de Man (Princeton, 1991), pp. 11–41. On the stakes of the parergonal in Pater, see Giles Whiteley, ‘Pater’s Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits’, Victoriographies, 3: 2 (2013), 119–35. That Hegel is cited here is not unimportant: the ‘historic’ critical method operates as the Aufhebung of the ‘dogmatic’ and ‘eclectic’. On Pater’s voracious reading habits during the period, see Inman (1990). The sources I will discuss, however, have not been engaged with in Inman’s study. William W. Jackson, Ingram Bywater: The Memoir of an Oxford Scholar, 1840–1914 (Oxford, 1917), p. 11, and see pp. 77–8. Quoted in Jackson, Ingram Bywater, p. 79. Ingram Bywater, Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae (Oxford, 1877), p. v. See Inman (1981), pp. 64–5. See Inman (1981), pp. 23–5, and ‘Art and Religion’, Harvard University, Houghton Library, bMS Eng 1150 (17), 6. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Über die Philosophie Platons, ed. Peter M. Steiner (Hamburg, 1996), p. 28. On the place of hermeneutics in the study of Plato, germane to Pater’s ideas regarding the ‘historic’ method in Plato and Platonism, see Schleiermacher’s statement that his aims are ‘to adduce something relative to the scientific condition of the Hellenes at the time when Plato entered upon his career, to the advances of language in reference to the expression of philosophical thoughts, to the works of this class at that time in existence, and the probable extent of their circulation’. The text would have been available to Pater in English, translated by William Dobson in 1836 as Schleiermacher’s Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, from which I take the translation (p. 2). G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Pierre Garnison and Walter Jeschke, 4 vols (Hamburg, 1989), II, p. 79; Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–1826, tr. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart, 3 vols (Oxford, 2006), II, p. 81; and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Herakleitos, ed. Dirk Schmid, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I: Schriften und Entwürfe, 15 vols (Berlin, 1998), VI, pp. 101–241 (231), commenting on fragment DK107, B4. Compare the fluid gestures (mollia mobiliter) of the simulacra described by Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, 4. 790. For the significance of this idea in the genesis of Wilde’s aestheticism see Giles Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum: The Truth of Masks (Oxford, 2015), pp. 66–8.

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14. Scepticism is the topic of Pater’s unpublished manuscript on the ‘History of Philosophy’, Harvard University, Houghton Library, bMS Eng 1150 (3), but perhaps unsurprisingly, while he discusses Hegel extensively here, he does not mention Heraclitus. 15. ‘Moral Philosophy’, Harvard University, Houghton Library, bMS Eng 1150 (17), 17r. On Pater’s theory of the ‘great reason’, see Giles Whiteley, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (Oxford, 2010), pp. 31–6, 40–4. 16. ξὺν νόῳ λέγοντας ἰσχυρίζεσθαι χρὴ τῷ ξυνῷ πάντων, ὅκωσπερ νόμῳ πόλις καὶ πολὺ ἰσχυροτέρως·στρέφονται γὰρ πάντες οἱ ἀνθρώπειοι νόμοι ὑπὸ ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου (‘Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds fast to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law’) (DK114, B91; see also DK78, B96). The fragment is translated suggestively by Schleiermacher: ‘die mit Vernunft reden müssen beharren auf dem gemeinschaftlichen Aller, wie eine Stadt auf dem Gesez und noch weit fester. Denn alle menschlichen Geseze werden genährt von dem einen göttlichen. Denn dieses herrscht so weit es will, und genüget allem und überwindet alles’ (Schleiermacher, Herakleitos, p. 131). Commenting on the fragment, Schleiermacher makes the point of critically associating ‘das politische und theologische verfloß’ (‘the interconnection of politics and theology’) (p. 130), and this question of Heraclitus’ politics, if not developed in Marius, will become significant in Pater’s reading in Plato and Platonism. 17. Potentially anachronistic since ἁρμονίη may not have gained musical significance by Heraclitus’ time; see G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 224–5. 18. Compare ‘O Sapientia . . . attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter disponensque omnia’ (Breviarium Romanum (Lyons, 1823), p. 205). 19. Pater may be thinking here of fragments DK32, B65, and DK41, B19, which both use the Greek word σοφία, wisdom. Perhaps also worth noting is an association avoided by Pater: the text of O Sapientia also alludes to the image of the Messiah ‘coming out of the mouth of the Most High’ (Sirach 24: 3)— we recall that Coleridge would assert a correspondence between the λόγος of Heraclitus and that of St John (the λόγος as the Word of God embodied in Christ), one which modern scholarship would dispute; see ‘The Statesman’s Manual’ (1816), in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (1972), p. 97. 20. For Heraclitus as the ‘weeping philosopher’, see Lucian, Vitarum auctio, 14; and for μελαγχολία, see Theophrastus’ diagnosis, recorded in Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 9. 6. 21. See James Mackintosh, Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations (1799), pp. 85–6. This silent quotation of Mackintosh comes at the

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end of a paragraph dealing with Heraclitus’ Darwinian parallels, and it is worth noting in this context that the same phrase was influentially quoted by Herbert Spencer at the opening of his essay on ‘The Social Organism’, first published in the Westminster Review (1860): ‘Sir James Mackintosh got great credit for saying “constitutions are not made, but grow”. In our day, the most significant thing about this saying is, that it was ever thought so significant’ (Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, 3 vols (1891), I, pp. 265–307 (265)). 22. Pater is referring to George Grote, A History of Greece, 12 vols (1846–56; rev. edn., 1869), II, p. 239, discussing Herodotus, Histories, 8. 144; for Grote on the relative failure of panhellenic union see II, p. 259: ‘Political disunion— sovereign authority within the city walls thus formed a settled maxim in the Greek mind. The relation between one city and another was an international relation, not a relation subsisting between members of a common political aggregate.’ 23. See Romans 1: 22–3, where Paul also attacks the Greek culture of homosexuality as παρά φύσιν, against nature, an aspect of the epistle that Pater passes over in silence.

15 Animism and Metaphysics in Pater’s Platonism Lee Behlman and Kurt Lampe

Introduction Although Pater’s Plato and Platonism received a glowing review from the classicist Lewis Campbell in 1893,1 it has since disappeared in the turbulent vortices and pelagic expanses of modern Plato studies. A number of scholars have situated the volume against the Victorian reception of Plato, which draws together contexts as diverse as the histories of philosophy, religion, politics, and gender and sexuality.2 To our knowledge, however, no one has argued that Pater’s reading could contribute to today’s debates about Plato’s philosophical significance— debates which, given Plato’s ongoing influence, extend well beyond the specialist literature on ancient philosophy. This is the primary agenda for this chapter. Just as Pater’s reading of Cyrenaicism genuinely enriches the meaning of that ancient school of thought,3 so here we propose that Pater’s detailed and creative reading of Platonism infuses it with new meaningfulness. One modern development we have particularly in mind is renewed interest in philosophy as a way of life, which has drawn much of its inspiration from Greek and Roman models.4 In the formulation of Pierre Hadot, who is the most well-known exponent of this approach, each ancient philosophical school is characterized by a coherent network of fundamental experiences, attitudes, styles of speaking, educational relationships, and exercises of self-cultivation. This network must be chosen as an existential project, around which doctrines and arguments ramify.5

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For example, Hadot proposes that the ‘choice of life’ that characterized Plato’s Academy in the fourth century BC was ‘adhering to the ethics of dialogue’: that is, cooperative submission to the logos, which presumed the good as its aspirational horizon.6 By the time of Plotinus in the third century AD, the Platonic ‘choice of life’ centred on self-purification, which aimed to prepare the soul for communion with higher realities.7 (The Prometheus Trust continues to advocate a similar version of the Platonic life today.8) One of the strengths of the Platonic corpus is its capacity to inspire such diverse ways of life. Pater’s Platonism obviously shares features with these predecessors, but it also offers something significantly new. On our reading, the core of Pater’s novelty is his introduction of not only sensuality, which has often been noted, but also ‘animistic’ spirituality into Platonic idealism. This has far-reaching consequences for the rest of his version of the Platonic system, including the place within it of cooperative enquiry and spiritual communion. Pater’s peculiar claim that Platonic Ideas are like persons, whom we know through feelings (sensations and emotions), is the focal point for his idiosyncratic reading of Platonism, which encompasses not just metaphysics, but also a Platonic way of life. This way of life emerges from an existential choice, which discloses the world as a set of possibilities for perceiving, thinking, emoting, and acting. Pater constructs his interpretation through a careful, erudite, and systematic reading of Plato’s texts, as we will show in the sections ‘Ideas and Persons’ and ‘Ideas and “Animism”’. He also actualizes the promises and mysteries of this life-world in a variety of critical and fictional essays he composed before Plato and Platonism. In the section ‘Romanticism, Statuary, and the “Gods in Exile”’, we will explore how Pater deploys and tests the limits of his animistic version of Platonism in his discussions of poetic, sculptural, and intellectual creation.

Ideas and Persons The heart of Platonism is often taken to be the theory of eidē, which Pater translates as ‘ideas’ and scholars today generally capitalize and translate as ‘Forms’ (PP, 150–73). The theory of Ideas proposes that eternal Beings (e.g. Beauty Itself ) make material instances what they are (e.g. this beautiful thing) and establish norms for understanding. Like some of his contemporaries and most scholars today,9 Pater asserts that the terms

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‘doctrine or theory’ are misleading (PP, 150). Nowhere does any Platonic character systematize the family of claims and arguments about the Ideas that appear across the dialogues.10 Moreover, the Philebus, Timaeus, and Parmenides introduce serious challenges for those claims and arguments. But while today’s commentators generally focus on working through these challenges,11 Pater concentrates on capturing how the claims express ‘a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way’ (PP, 150).12 In Hadotian terminology, we could say that he focuses on the ‘choice of Platonism’. This ‘tendency’ is comprised of various sub-tendencies, two of which we will address in this section. First, because she is troubled by the ‘wasting torrent’ of experiences and events, the Platonist intuits unchanging Beings—the Ideas—in order to organize and unify them (PP, 25, 27, 35–6, 46, 60, etc.).13 This part of Pater’s reading is unsurprising. The second part, which is displayed in the following quotation, is more unusual: The lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, and therefore, literally, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses . . . into the world of intellectual abstractions; seeing and hearing there too, . . . filling that ‘hollow land’ with delightful colour and form, as if now at last the mind were veritably dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us through the affinities, the repulsion and attraction, of persons towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human friendship or love:— There, is the formula of Plato’s genius, the essential condition of the specifically Platonic temper, of Platonism. (PP, 139–40, original italics; cf. 53, 78, 82–3, 84, 119, 129–32, 134–40, 141, 143, 146, 153, 155, 158–72, 184, 187, 241, 267–8)

This is odd. On what basis can Pater maintain that ‘the essential condition . . . of Platonism’ is the sensual, loving apprehension of ‘invisible . . . intellectual abstractions’ as if they were persons? Granted, love features prominently in a cluster of Platonic dialogues, including two to which Pater constantly alludes: the Symposium and the Phaedrus. But contrast Gregory Vlastos’s argument that Platonic love is never for persons, except inasmuch as they ‘participate in’ Ideas.14 In other words, Vlastos argues that Platonists only love persons as imperfect reminders of Beauty, Justice, and so on, while Pater argues that Platonists only love Ideas as persons. This is a fascinating shift in perspective, but how does Pater achieve it? Some passages in Plato and Platonism suggest a rather disappointing answer, such as the following:

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Now Plato . . . is by nature and before all things, from first to last, unalterably a lover. . . . and, as love must of necessity deal above all with visible persons, this discipline involved an exquisite culture of the senses. . . . If in the later development of his philosophy the highest sort of knowledge comes to seem like the knowledge of a person, . . . this is partly because, for a lover, the entire visible world, its hues and outline, its attractiveness, its power and bloom, must have associated themselves pre-eminently with the power and bloom of visible living persons. (PP, 134–5)

Pater prioritizes expressive richness over analytical rigour, so we should be wary of formalizing his arguments. But we might reconstruct the sequence of thought here as follows. First, Platonists are lovers by temperament. Second, love entails ‘an exquisite culture of the senses’. Third, lovers associate whatever their exquisitely cultured senses perceive with beloved living persons. The fourth and fifth premises are not expressed here, but we can supply them from the preceding quotation. Fourth, when a Platonist turns her attention to invisible Ideas, she ‘carr[ies] an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses . . . into the world of intellectual abstractions’. Fifth and last, because she is accustomed to associate all senses with beloved persons, she posits Ideal ‘persons’ with whom to associate the sensuality she brings to abstractions. This reconstruction of Pater’s thinking would put an awfully heavy strain on his aestheticist psychology of love. Fortunately, other passages suggest a complementary sequence of thought. For example: The sensuous lover becomes a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern, carrying into the world of intellectual vision, of θεωρία, all the associations of the actual world of sight. Some of its invisible realities he can all but see with the bodily eye: the absolute Temperance, in the person of the youthful Charmides; the absolute Righteousness, in the person of the dying Socrates. (PP, 146; cf. 130, 136–8, 166–7)

Whereas before Pater appeared to assert that Platonic lovers see Ideas sensually and therefore personally, here he argues that they see this Idea (Temperance) in this sensible, lovable person (Charmides), and that Idea (Justice) in that sensible, lovable person (Socrates). We can reformulate this in terms of the Platonic theory of ‘recollection’ (Meno 81a–86c; Phaedo 72e–77a): just as the lover recalls her beloved in perceiving ‘the entire visible world, its hues and outline, its attractiveness’, so now the Platonist recollects Ideas in perceiving beloved people. In other words, lovable Ideal persons are not simply a by-product of sensualizing the

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abstract realm, they are the metaphysical Beyond expressed in lovable sensible persons. These two tendencies reinforce one another, and cooperatively lay the groundwork for the ‘choice of Platonism’: on the one hand, Platonists ‘carry over’ a sensory-erotic structure from material to intelligible reality; on the other, they directly connect particular lovable people with particular Ideas. Still, some readers will find this rather thin. We could thicken it by historicizing it in Victorian Oxford, but that path is well trodden.15 Moreover, it limits Platonism’s accessibility for us today. In this chapter we will instead pursue an aspect of Pater’s reading that has never (to our knowledge) received any commentary.

Ideas and ‘Animism’ Throughout his works, Pater implicitly and explicitly invokes the theory of ‘animism’ (PP, 168–9, 172, 231–2; ME, ii. 80–91, ch. 20; App., 75–6, 90, 97–8; GS, 13–38 (esp. 13–15, 25–9), 47, 96–100, 112, 137). In this section we will explain the theory and argue that it gives Pater’s reading of Platonism an existential depth hitherto unappreciated. The theory derives from Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom.16 Tylor aims to provide a comprehensive anthropological explanation for religiosity, from ‘savage’ tribes to ‘higher’ civilizations (I. 1–22; II. 386, 100–1, 322–3). He argues that the belief in ‘spiritual beings’, which he denotes with the term ‘animism’, is religion’s common core. Animism encompasses two key sub-beliefs: first, that ‘souls’ (animae) underlie human vitality and consciousness; second, that many such vital, conscious agencies exist independently from humans—in objects of all kinds, natural phenomena like trees and rivers, or simply on their own (I. 383–7). Every spirit derives from this belief matrix, ‘from the tiniest elf that sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit’ (II. 101). As Tylor unfolds the development of animism, he regularly identifies its apparently non-religious ‘survivals’. Noteworthy for us is his commentary on the ‘doctrine of Ideas’, whose origin he finds in Democritus (I. 449–51). Democritus teaches that perception and knowledge occur through the shadowy ‘images’ (eidōla) ceaselessly shed by all bodies. For Tylor, this is not so much a speculative innovation as a survival from

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animism: the theory of images is really nothing other than ‘the savage doctrine of object-souls, turned to a new purpose as a method of explaining the phenomena of thought’ (I. 449–50).17 Although Tylor does not mention Plato among this doctrine’s exponents, in a later chapter he compares ‘the Platonic archetypal ideas’ with such Native American concepts as the ‘elder brother’ of the beavers, who is as big as a cabin, the ‘manitu of all oxen’, or the ‘protecting spirits’ of ‘oak, hemlock, maple, whortleberry, raspberry, spearmint, tobacco’ (II. 221–2). Tylor’s comments about Platonism are made in passing. Pater develops a more detailed reading of the Ideas as ensouled agencies, as the following passage encapsulates: It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love, Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern anthropologist . . . would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls ‘animism.’ Animism, that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every object, almost in every circumstance, . . . Such ‘animistic’ instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato’s mental constitution,—the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind. (PP, 168–9)

Again, at first sight this is odd. It should not be ‘Love, Fear, Confidence, and the like’ which the Platonist ensouls, since Pater surely knows that no Platonic dialogue posits an Idea for any of these. But our perplexity is easily resolved: Pater probably has in mind the Idea of Beauty, which is the object of love, and the Idea of Courage, which is the virtue that establishes norms for fear and confidence. Both of these make any shortlist of Platonic Ideas. (See Symposium, 210a–212a; Phaedrus, 245c–251a; Republic, 475e–484b, 429a–430c, 442b–c; Laches, 189e– 201c.) In fact, Pater’s conflation of Beauty and Courage with their associated emotions illuminates his anthropology of Ideas, which parallels that of the Homeric gods mentioned in the same passage. Elsewhere he writes that the religious imagination of the Greeks [is], precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things naturally asunder . . . welding into something like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man’s experiences of a given object, or series of objects—all their outward qualities, and the visible facts regarding them—all the hidden ordinances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places. (‘A Study of Dionysus’, GS, 29; cf. 13–15, 96–100)

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For example, the god Dionysus ‘weld[s] into something like the identity of a human personality’ all the experiences of people working in viticulture. Thus different elements of Dionysiac myth represent the suffering of the maternal earth under the summer’s fructifying heat, the protection of the vines by ‘the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father the sky’ (GS, 27), and so on (GS, 23–49). In a similar way, Pater implies that the Idea of Beauty unifies the ‘whole range of experiences’ involving love, and Courage the experiences involving fear and confidence (principally, for Plato, those of the battlefield). Although Tylor’s analysis of religion is deflationary, Pater’s analysis arguably enriches Platonism. Admittedly, when Pater says Platonism is a ‘mode of conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man’ (‘Coleridge’, App., 75), this sounds rather crude. In the light of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, to which Pater alludes (PP, 52),18 it looks like a failure to distinguish between the categories of human experience and the properties of things-in-themselves. Moreover, since the ‘linguistic turn’ of the late twentieth century, we might say that it disregards how language structures our understanding of reality. Either way, it opens Plato to the cogent feminist accusation that this ‘intelligence of man’ is far from gender-neutral: the experiential and linguistic categories thus elevated to Eternal Verities, which every generation is obliged to ‘love’ and impose on ‘disorderly’ material reality, are masculinist ones.19 The specifics of Pater’s animistic Platonism do not eliminate these criticisms, but they certainly mitigate them. First, it should be noted that his Platonist approaches the Ideas as and with other persons: Yet, in spite of . . . the demand [Plato] makes for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real knowledge, he does think . . . that truth, precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be, in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent (PP, 187)

In other words, far from naively projecting her own intelligence onto nature, where it becomes a norm to impose on others, the Platonist’s pursuit of Ideas brings her face to face with both her own subjectivity and the ‘elusive’ subjectivity of others. Here the otherness of personified Ideas blends into the otherness of interlocutors, since Pater emphasizes how Plato’s dialogical texts and scenarios imply ‘the utmost possible inexactness, or contingency’ in the communication of truth (PP, 188).

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Second, the Ideas are far from echoing back to us in clear and reassuring tones our own prejudices about the world. Relations with the Ideas are epistemically and emotionally complex. Ideas make themselves felt everywhere, as the Platonist Apuleius exemplifies in Marius:20 Apuleius was a Platonist: only, for him, the Ideas of Plato were no creatures of logical abstraction, but in very truth informing souls, in every type and variety of sensible things. Those noises in the house all supper-time, sounding through the tables and along the walls:—were they only startings in the old rafters, at the impact of the music and laughter; or rather importunities of the secondary selves, the true unseen selves, of the persons, nay! of the very things around, essaying to break through their frivolous, merely transitory surfaces, to remind one of the abiding essentials beyond them, which might have their say, their judgment to give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and drinks at life’s table would be over? (ME, ii. 87–8, ch. 20; cf. ‘Coleridge’, App., 97–8)

On the one hand, these ‘informing souls’ ‘filling the air about him, thick as motes in the sunbeam’ can be a source of consolation, joy, or wonder (ME, ii. 88, ch. 20; cf. ME, ii. 90; App., 102; GS, 33). But they can also be uncanny. Apuleius’ ‘importun[ate] . . . secondary selves’ are ‘essaying to break through their frivolous, merely transitory surfaces’; ‘the suspicion of a mind latent in nature, struggling for release’ ‘haunts’ Platonists (‘Coleridge’, App., 76). Pater also reminds us that the portrait of erotic ‘madness’ in Plato’s Phaedrus (244a–257b) belongs to the animistic belief in spirit ‘possession’ as the primary cause of changes in bodily or mental condition: [The Platonist] is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another will . . . His enthusiasm of knowledge . . . has about it that character of possession . . . by which those ‘animistic’ old Greeks explained natural madness. (PP, 172; cf. Tylor, II. 112–31)

In all of these ways Pater’s animistic reading carries the comparison between Ideas and spirits further than we might expect. This comparison culminates with Apuleius’ confusion of the Ideas with ‘certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us’ (ME, ii. 89, ch. 20). This speech is adapted from a demonological passage in one of Apuleius’ works (On the God of Socrates, 4–6).21 Though Pater excises the word ‘daemons’ from his adaptation, nevertheless he accentuates the passage’s uncanny effect. Most notably, he adds the concluding aposiopesis, ‘They go to and fro without fixed habitation: or dwell in

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men’s houses—’ (ME, ii. 89, ch. 20). In place of the lovable sensuality we saw earlier, here the Ideas’ personification is expressed by their lurking in the timbers of this very house, ‘essaying to break through’, waiting to ‘have their say, their judgment to give, by and by, when the shifting of the meats and drinks at life’s table would be over’ (ME, ii. 87–8, ch. 20). Such watching, judging spirits are as likely to excite fear as love. Before leaving this section, we should note that Pater’s association of the Ideas with daemons also casts light on his creative modification of Platonic ‘realism’. Realism is the doctrine that a generalization like Justice is ‘a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pass out of it’ (PP, 151). In Pater’s reworking of Platonic realism, ‘common or general names’ like ‘Animal, Justice, Equality’ mediate between individual experiences and the realm of culturally shared thought and feeling (PP, 152). These general names acquire their content as ‘one’s individual experience, little by little, drop by drop’ fills them with life. Thus they become Ideas, which, as we have seen, bind together series of associated sensations and emotions. Collectively they populate ‘an “intellectual world,” as Plato calls it, a true νοητὸς τόπος’ (PP, 152, alluding to Rep. 517b). It is our shared acquaintance with this ‘intellectual world’ that makes communicable thinking and reasoning possible. It is not implausible to think of these other-worldly denizens as spirits, especially since, like the daemons of Plato’s Symposium (188c–d, 202d–203a), among their key functions is mediation—both between individual experience and logical universals, and among human minds. By way of interim conclusion, we wish to make three points about Pater’s Platonism. First, it obviously amounts to what Hadot calls an ‘existential option’, which situates rational enquiry (dialectical investigation of the Ideas as truths and values) in a systematic way of disclosing the world (as organized and permeated by Ideas as spirits, who elicit a variety of emotions). Second, Pater’s final word on this disclosure is distanced, but respectful and even admiring: [T]he very boldness of such theory bore witness, at least, to a variety of human disposition and a consequent variety of mental view, which might—who can tell?—be correspondent to, be defined by and define, varieties of facts, of truths . . . regarding the world all alike had actually before them as their original premiss or starting-point (ME, ii. 91, ch. 20)

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Third and last, in this way Pater makes Plato accessible and attractive for a different kind of reader than most analytical scholarship. The theologian Rudolf Otto argues that the core of religiosity is not any kind of belief in spirits, but the experience of ‘the holy’: a category irreducible either to concepts or to any other experience.22 The historian of religion Mircea Eliade interprets this as ‘being opened to the universal’ by mythical and ritual connection to ‘sacred time and space’, a kind of ‘redemption’ from individuality that secular modernity is in danger of losing.23 It remains the case that many readers wish to use Plato to experience the world in this way. We suggest that the philosophical significance of Pater’s view of Platonism can be highlighted by juxtaposition with this tradition.

Romanticism, Statuary, and ‘the Gods in Exile’ In our elaboration of Pater’s animistic treatment of Plato’s Ideas in Plato and Platonism, we have made recourse to passages from Greek Studies and Marius the Epicurean. This is because a broader animistic Platonism was in formation as a belief matrix much earlier in Pater’s career, in the 1870s and 1880s, not in direct treatment of Plato, as in Plato and Platonism, but in Pater’s aesthetic theory and practice. In this section, we will turn our attention to how Pater’s animistic Platonism comes into formation in artistic minds and objects in three contexts from earlier in Pater’s career. First, in a pair of related temporal transpositions, Pater locates an animistic Platonist sensibility in Romantic poetry in ‘On Wordsworth’ (1874, revised and reprinted in Appreciations (1889) as ‘Wordsworth’), and then describes a distinctly Romantic version of that same animistic Platonism in pre-classical Greek religion in ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’ (1876). Second, he presents ancient Greek statues as aesthetic objects that function very much like Platonic Ideas in two essays later collected in Greek Studies (1895), ‘A Study of Dionysus’ (1876) and ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ (1894). And third, in his ‘gods in exile’ story ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), he plots out the creation of new art through the patronage of a god who himself assumes the pose of a famous statue. Across these three examples, we will reveal how Pater explores the world-disclosing power of animistic Platonism as a key component of his aesthetic thought and practice.

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In his essay on Wordsworth, Pater presents an ‘intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things’ as an indispensable and defining capacity for the modern poet (App., 43). Pater’s Romantic prototype, Wordsworth himself, has the ‘power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in inanimate things’, and this capacity is ‘like a “survival”’ of the pantheistic sensibility of the earliest ancients, ‘that primitive condition . . . wherein all outward objects alike, including even the works of men’s hands, were believed to be endowed with animation, and the world was “full of souls”’ (App., 47–8).24 Wordsworth’s preternatural ‘sense of a life in natural objects’ (App., 46)—his special attentiveness to the rocks and stones and trees—is markedly similar to Plato’s sensitivity in Plato and Platonism to the accumulated sensory data of the material world. Tylor’s ‘protecting spirits’ of ‘oak, hemlock, maple’ are then recast into potent lines of accentual syllabic verse wherein the dead letter of abstraction is enlivened by the material spirit. In presenting Wordsworth as a pantheistical artist, Pater of course recapitulates Wordsworth’s own selfpresentation in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and his other early poetry; but in doing so Pater emphasizes the specifically animistic potential that lies in poetic language, which can be communicated directly to the reader and may be reproduced in her.25 Pater’s historical vision is, as Carolyn Williams and other critics have shown, broadly Hegelian; but his version of Hegelian progress involves not only startling reappearances of that which came before, but also reflections of the future far back in the ancient past. What seems to reappear most often, both in artistic individuals and in the cultural movements that they inspire, is this sensual receptiveness, which produces not just an animistic belief matrix but animistic practice—in art objects or in religious ritual. Thus, for Pater, the archaic religious analogue to modern Romantic poetry is a receptivity to nature that is translated into ritual. As Pater writes in ‘Demeter and Persephone’, this process begins with a ‘feeling’: [A]n older and more spiritual, Platonic, philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy more of instinct than of the understanding, the mental startingpoint of which is not an observed sequence of outward phenomena, but some such feeling as most of us have on the first warmer days in spring, when we seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at work (GS, 96)

The Platonic animistic spirit that appears in the distant past exists in an unsystematized form that Pater directly compares to the non-programmatic

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poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley. It begins as a similar ‘feeling’ for nature, but it comes into formation in rituals and artefacts, including primitive altars and fetishes. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that while Romantic poetry is Pater’s modern prototype for unsystematized animistic Platonism, it is not poetry but hewn objects—statuary—that for him are its quintessential ancient art form. In ‘A Study of Dionysus’, Pater dwells on the animistic origins of statuary: The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculpture, in its handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of natural things into human form; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. (GS, 32–3)

Sculpture is archaic Greek religious belief ‘condensed’ into concrete aesthetic form, divine personalities impressed into the shapes of human bodies, including that of the god Dionysus himself. If animism is at base the assignment of an eternal spirit to inanimate materials then sculpture is its fullest realization, and its concentration of natural ‘impressions’ into a single abstracted object is Platonism in marble and bronze. Elsewhere, in a plangent phrase, Pater observes that even a poetic work like the ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’ has its ‘sculptural motives’, as if literary form, too, inclines toward this three-dimensional visual expression for its fullest realization (‘Demeter and Persephone’, GS, 145). Pater presents his fullest claim for sculpture as an ancient animistic realization of Platonic form in his discussion of Myron’s Discobolus in one of his last published works, ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’. He marvels at its Keatsian stillness that nevertheless suggests incipient movement, as ‘it moves or rests just there for a moment, between the animal and spiritual worlds’ (GS, 288). It is in a medial state not just between the beginning and end of the discus thrower’s arc but also between potential energy and its kinetic unleashing, and between being a single example of athletic male beauty and serving as its Idea(l). As if standing before the Discobolus, Pater interrogates it, asking, ‘Was it the portrait of one much-admired youth, or rather the type, the rectified essence, of many such, at the most pregnant, the essential, moment, of the exercise of their natural powers, of what they really were?’ (GS, 289–90).

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Several features of Plato’s Ideas apply to statuary here. A statue is a single example of beauty that, like the Idea of the Beautiful, is endlessly iterable in ancient casts, modern engravings, and other media. Thus, it points towards an eternal subject—the beautiful (usually male) body— while existing in history as a beautiful male body from a specific time and place. It is material and also abstract. It is an everlasting mimesis extrapolated from at least one fragile human model. And unlike most other mimetic art forms, it can be touched and handled like a body (unless a museum guard is nearby).26 It is no accident, then, that in Plato and Platonism Pater comes to describe Platonic truth as ‘something to look at’ (PP, 146; original italics), for appreciating this truth seems very much like looking at a statue. This is in part because the ‘legacy of Greek sculpture’ is for Pater the ‘perfect visible equivalent’ of Pythagorean harmony (PP, 72), which itself is a major constitutive element in Plato’s theory of Ideas (PP, 51–4). The third and final topos in Pater’s aesthetic elaboration of animistic Platonism is his second ‘gods-in-exile’ story, ‘Apollo in Picardy’, published in the same year as Plato and Platonism. Pater had been exploring this theme, inspired by Heinrich Heine’s mordantly funny 1853 story ‘Les Dieux en exil’, since the early 1870s, later fusing it with his ‘imaginary portrait’ fictional technique in ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy’.27 In the latter story, the character Apollyon is a medieval human avatar of Apollo, a figure who for Pater combines aspects of the ‘Dorian’ solar god and an earlier, less familiar chthonic version (GS, 255). Apollyon, like Pater’s Dionysus avatar, Denys, is both a son of the French peasantry and, consciously or (more likely) not, a god in disguise. To look at him is to recall the uncannily elegant posture of a statue: as the narrator observes, Apollyon is ‘A serf! But what unserflike ease, how lordly, or godlike rather, in the posture! Could one fancy a single curve bettered in the rich, warm, white limbs; in the haughty features of the face . . . ?’ (MS, 149). As John Smith Harrison once observed, Pater ‘associates Apollyon with sculptural monuments’, and this association reappears near the end of the story, when Apollyon accidentally kills a youth in a quoit-throwing scene that is essentially death by Discobolus.28 The beautiful Apollyon is doubly aestheticized here, for he is an ancient artistic form come to life within a creative and critical form—the imaginary portrait—that Pater himself invented. To live within this story’s fictional environment and to be in close company with this statuesque

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god-man Apollyon is to experience the thought-world of Pater’s animism in a distinctive way. But as Pater showed earlier in Marius with those uncanny ‘secondary selves’, gods and spirits can also have disorientating and even destructive effects on even the most receptive human follower. We would like to observe in closing that in such fictional Paterian contexts, the often vexed, vindictive personalities of the gods work against any new insights that human observers might attain with an animistic belief matrix. In Pater’s fictional worlds, animated Ideas are not merely like divine persons; those divine persons really exist and act, bearing the full weight of their mythic histories to confound human understanding as much as to advance it. It is as if Tylor’s primitive spirits return to haunt Pater’s characters, conspiring against their philosophic progress. Thus, in ‘Apollo in Picardy’, while Apollyon manifests the eternal, abstract form of divinity in his mortal form and promotes artistic innovation in his community, the most detailed description of his artistic ‘influence’—on Prior Saint-Jean—shows it to be far from propitious. It starts promisingly enough. Apollyon inspires in Prior Saint-Jean a radical mental and spiritual transformation that is reflected in the prior’s expansive manuscript on music, mathematics, and astronomy. The Prior comes to lose his abstract ‘intellectual baggage’ by means of some ‘river or rivulet of Lethe’ (MS, 163), and what replaces it is a new artistic language—namely, a set of obscure, untranslatable symbols: The hard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the stars, of mechanical structure, in hard and abstract formulae, adding to the abstract austerity of the man, seemed to have deserted him; to be revived in him again however, at the contact of this extraordinary pupil or fellow-inquirer, though in a very different guise or attitude towards himself, as matters no longer to be reasoned upon and understood, but to be seen rather, to be looked at and heard. (MS, 163–4)

Apollyon’s ‘contact’ temporarily drives two negative Paterian forces— empty abstraction and stale mechanical thinking—both from the Prior’s mind and from his treatise, until they return transformed by means of a comprehension drawn from sense perceptions—namely, looking and hearing. To put it another way, Apollyon’s ‘daemonic’ mediation enables the Prior to connect logical universals with sensory experience.

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But Saint-Jean is not in this way enabled to communicate his learning with others. In Pater’s more optimistic adaptation of Platonism, we saw that the ‘intellectual world’ of Ideas connects individuals with shared language. The opposite is the case with Prior Saint-Jean. Rather than compose new works with this new understanding, the Prior produces an incoherent pictorial language that no one can read. He may have attained to vivid and profound insights, which he is able to translate into symbols. However, no one else can read these symbols. There is no ‘final transference to others, on the written or printed page’ (MS, 164). Apollyon has indeed acted as intermediary between the Prior’s sensory experience and a system of universals, but the effect has been alienation and isolation rather than deeper existential rooting in the shared human world. With Prior Saint-Jean, Pater presents a version of a Platonic thinker whose ‘choice of life’ has turned out poorly, seduced by chthonic divinity into incoherence. He is like a Romantic poet struck by genius but with no adequate language to express himself, and, like the victims of ‘The Great God Pan’ in Arthur Machen’s own ‘gods-in-exile’ story a few years later, he achieves a higher consciousness that is indistinguishable from madness.29

Conclusion How does Pater represent the choice of Platonism? We have tried to communicate both the complexity of this question and the diversity of the answers. Plato and Platonism presents its readers with a paradox: it portrays the universal, incorporeal Ideas—the core of Platonic metaphysics, as it is usually conceived—as lovable, sensible, and personal. In order to appreciate the significance of this paradox, we have combined Pater’s well-known aesthetics and erotics with his largely neglected anthropology of religion. The Platonic lifeworld that emerges is not only invigorated by sensation and emotion, but also deepened by sacred meaning. At the same time, the ensoulment of the Ideas casts an entirely new light on the epistemological diffidence many have inferred from Plato’s dialogical style. Pater’s writings in various genres display the resourcefulness of his own Platonic paradigm. In Plato and Platonism and in the Apuleius of Marius, we see how dogmatic Platonists realize their choice by philosophizing. In Appreciations and Greek Studies, the focus shifts to creative artistry: daemonic Ideas mediate among the mind of the artist, the world,

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and the poetry or sculpture that represents the world. Finally, in ‘Apollo in Picardy’, the uncanniness of the daemons, which we only glimpse in the other works, comes to the fore: mediation breaks down, and with it the possibility of productive philosophy disappears.30

Notes 1. ‘Pater’s Plato and Platonism’, Classical Review, 7 (1893), 263–6. 2. See, for example, Section 6 of the Bibliography; Stefano Evangelista, ‘“Lovers and Philosophers at Once”: Aesthetic Platonism in the Victorian Fin de Siècle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 36: 2 (2006), 230–44. 3. Kurt Lampe, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life (Princeton, 2015), pp. 168–92. 4. The most renowned example is Michel Foucault in his final three seminars, especially The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, tr. Graham Burchell (New York, 2005). More recently, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1996) and Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life! On Anthropotechnics, tr. Wieland Hoben (Cambridge, 2013). 5. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Oxford, 1995); Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, tr. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA, 2002). 6. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, pp. 64–6. 7. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, pp. 157–63. 8. www.prometheustrust.co.uk. 9. e.g. Benjamin Jowett, ‘Preface to Meno’, in The Dialogues of Plato, 4 vols (Oxford, 4th edn., 1953), I, p. 258; Julia Annas, Plato: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), p. 83; Richard Kraut, How to Read Plato (2008), p. 41; Allan Silverman, ‘Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/plato-metaphysics/#2. 10. But representative passages include Phaedo, 72e–77a, 96a–107a; Symposium, 210a–212a; Phaedrus, 245c–251a; Republic, 475e–484b, 508e–511e, 596a– 602b. 11. An excellent example is Julius Moravcsik, Plato and Platonism: Plato’s Conception of Appearance and Reality in Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics, and Its Modern Echoes (Oxford, 1992). 12. In this he may be developing a suggestion by George Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3 vols (1867), I, pp. 272–3.

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13. On the tension between sensory plurality and intellectual monism in Pater’s Platonism, see Anne Varty, ‘Flux, Rest and Number: Pater’s Plato’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 257–68. 14. ‘The Individual as Object of Love in Plato’, in Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford, 2008), pp. 160–1. 15. See nn. 2 and 13. 16. (2 vols, Cambridge, 1871). Further references are to volume and page from this edition and will be given in the text. Given his death in 1894, it is not surprising that Pater’s work shows no influence from Tylor’s great successor, James Frazer (The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Cambridge, 1890)). Frazer’s ideas would inspire Jane Harrison’s seminal works on Greek religion (starting with Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1901)). 17. Since Tylor presents this as an inference, he is presumably unaware of the evidence that Democritus himself identifies these images with gods, daemons, and the ‘principles of intelligence’ in the universe (Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1901), 55A74, 55A78, 55B166). 18. For an excellent analysis of Plato and Platonism as Pater’s synthesis of Kantian and Hegelian traditions in Oxford at the time, see Kit Andrews, ‘Walter Pater as Oxford Hegelian: Plato and Platonism and T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 72: 3 (2011), 47–59. 19. See esp. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 243–364. 20. On Apuleius’ Platonism, see John M. Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 BC to AD 220 (Ithaca, NY, 1977), pp. 306–36; Richard Fletcher, Apuleius’ Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014). 21. This source has been independently identified by Roland G. Frean, ‘Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean: Notes and Commentary Preliminary to a Critical Edition’, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1961, pp. 423–5. 22. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, tr. John W. Harvey (Harmondsworth, 1959). 23. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard R. Trask (Orlando, 1987). 24. Peter Brown captures a sense of the potency of this pantheistic world-vision: ‘Let us first look up to the heavens. We must remember that it is not easy to do so. Living as we do in a bleakly submonotheistic age, we tend to look up into the sky and find it empty. We no longer see there a mundus, a physical universe as heavy as a swollen cloud (for good or ill) with the presence of invisible beings’ (Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

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the Roman World (Cambridge, 1995), p. 8). For a divergent reading of pantheism in late antiquity, see Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (2001), pp. 7–45. On Romantic and post-Romantic pantheism as a discourse of resistance to traditional Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, see Margot K. Louis, ‘Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, 47: 3 (2005), 329–61. For some recent critical work on Pater and Greek statuary see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, and Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 26–36; Section 5 of the Bibliography; and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Chapter 12 in this volume. On the ‘gods in exile’ theme in Pater, see Caroline Vout, Chapter 9 in this volume; John Smith Harrison, ‘Pater, Heine, and the Gods of Old Greece’, PMLA, 39: 3 (1924), 655–86; Robert Keefe, ‘“Apollo in Picardy”: Pater’s Monk and Ruskin’s Madness’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 29: 4 (1986), 361–70; Stefano Evangelista, ‘A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus’, Victorian Review, 34: 2 (2008), 200–18; and Section 3 of the Bibliography. See Harrison, ‘Pater, Heine’, p. 683; also Vout, Chapter 9 in this volume. Arthur Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, in The Great God Pan and the Hill of Dreams (Lexington, KY, 2009), pp. 5–48. The two authors have collaborated throughout this chapter, but Lampe is principally responsible for the sections ‘Ideas and Persons’ and ‘Ideas and “Animism”’, and Behlman for ‘Romanticism, Statuary, and the “Gods in Exile”’.

16 Pater and Nettleship A Platonic Education and the Politics of Disciplinarity Daniel Orrells

University education was a significant focus of national debate in the last third of the nineteenth century. Oxford and Cambridge were no longer solely the domain of Anglican Christianity. As at the London colleges and the institutes of learning in the industrial cities, non-Anglicans, colonial subjects, and women were also participating in higher education. What ancient Greece might teach its students in this complicated new age which comprised both mass education and specialized research was a question of real interest to late Victorian classicists.1 Plato’s theories about education offered Hellenists an opportunity to confront this issue. In the Republic, Plato put the issue of education at the centre of his ideal city state, so that university classicists, particularly at Oxford, could hardly have avoided the issue when they turned to teach Plato, who, under Benjamin Jowett, had become a key author on the Oxford classical reading lists. Jowett himself came to be seen as a venerated Socratic figure. The Oxford tutorial system, which brought young men to the studies of older dons, further encouraged the comparison and has been the subject of much recent study.2 And the connection between a Platonic education and the state was a significant aspect of Jowett’s activity as Regius Professor. He directly intervened in his ex-students’ career prospects. By working hard to garner support for reforms to the Indian Civil Service, he ensured that Oxford students did well in the civil

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service exams. An education with Jowett’s Plato meant a position serving the modern British imperial state.3 This chapter looks at Pater’s response to these debates about a Platonic education. The last book he published in his lifetime, Plato and Platonism, reflects on the politics of education in the late Victorian period. The topics of teaching, learning, and education are central issues in Pater’s book. Back in 1867, his portrait of Winckelmann had depicted a young man frustrated by the education he received as a university student at Halle: ‘Of his professional education he always speaks with scorn’. As ‘master of a school at Seehausen’ he ‘found the work of teaching very depressing’ (Ren., 143–4). This image of the aesthete constrained by the classroom came to be associated with Pater himself. Twentieth-century memoirs looking back to lost Victorian worlds, such as that of the archaeologist L. R. Farnell, depicted an ‘unscientific’ Pater who was hardly cut out for teaching.4 But as both William Shuter and Isobel Hurst (Chapter 1 in this volume) show, Pater was a hard-working, diligent, and sensitive teacher.5 Rather than the image of the diffident intellectual, who like Winckelmann supposedly found the classroom depressing, Pater’s last book reflects an intense and searching study of teaching and learning in an age of growing academic specialization, and professional and vocational education. If we want to think about ‘Pater the classicist’—Pater as a classicist—then we need to examine what Pater has to say about education. In doing so, we will see that the Victorian debates about the general worth of ancient Greece and a Platonic education on the one hand, and the late nineteenth-century compartmentalization of academic disciplines into specialized knowledge on the other, provoked Pater to think very hard about Plato’s ideas on the relationship between the particular and the general in his Theory of Forms.

The Nettleship of State In order to understand what was at stake in Pater’s fin-de-siècle Plato, it helps to examine how a contemporary of Pater’s at Oxford, Richard Nettleship, theorized a Platonic education. The Plato taught in Oxford reflected Jowett’s intervention in nineteenth-century debates about the interpretation of Platonic philosophy. Frank Turner has explored the nineteenth-century reception of Plato in Britain. Some utilized Plato ‘as a

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vehicle for upholding vestiges of Christianity or transcendental doctrines in the wake of utilitarian morality, positivist epistemology, and scientific naturalism’. Others, including the politician and ancient historian George Grote, argued that Plato was no dogmatist, and that his aporetic dialogues, especially, espoused a sceptical understanding of knowledge. This interpretation fuelled Grote’s interest in democratic politics: Plato, although no modern democrat himself, provided Grote with ideas for radical reform which questioned traditional notions of hierarchy and authority. Another strand of interpretation emerged out of Jowett’s Balliol, in reaction to the other two in its use of ‘Plato’s moral and political philosophy to provide a more or less idealist surrogate for Christian social and political values’: ‘They hoped Plato might provide a counterbalance to individualistic liberalism and the egoistic ethics of utilitarianism.’6 In the Preface to his monumental Dialogues of Plato Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions (which first appeared in 1871), Jowett made his critique of Grote’s reading clear: If Mr Grote should do me the honour to read any portion of this work he will probably remark that I have endeavoured to approach Plato from a point of view which is opposed to his own. The aim of the Introduction in these volumes has been to represent Plato as the father of Idealism, who is not to be measured by the standard of utilitarianism or any other modern philosophical system. He is the poet or maker of ideas, satisfying the wants of his own age, providing the instruments of thought for future generations. He is no dreamer, but a great philosophical genius struggling with the unequal conditions of light and knowledge under which he is living. . . . We are not concerned to determine what is the residuum of truth which remains for ourselves. His truth may not be our truth, and nevertheless may have an extraordinary value and interest for us.7

Despite Jowett’s hope to find philosophical value in Plato’s works, there is clearly a tension in Jowett’s writing about the applicability of Plato to the nineteenth century. Jowett’s Plato is one who is to be historically contextualized (‘satisfying the wants of his own age’), in a manner that reflects the influence of Hegel. At the same time, however, Plato might also provide ‘the instruments of thought for future generations’. ‘His truth may not be our truth’, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, Plato could ‘have an extraordinary value’ for the Victorian present. This anxiousness about Plato’s relevance for Victorian Britain is reflected still more clearly in an essay by an ex-pupil of Jowett at Balliol.

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Richard Nettleship’s ‘The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic’ first appeared in 1880 in Hellenica: A Collection of Essays on Greek Poetry, Philosophy, History, and Religion, edited by Evelyn Abbott, another Balliol man and Jowett’s first biographer (along with Lewis Campbell).8 The Balliol idealism was a hopeful appeal to a transcendent, absolute standard in an age when different academic disciplines were staking claims for epistemological authority. Nettleship’s essay combined this assertion of timeless, classical values—which reflected his Balliol education—with a realization that Plato’s theory of education in the Republic might have its limitations in the late nineteenth century. Indeed the issue of academic specialization loomed large in his analysis: the greater specialization of modern life makes it difficult for us to keep our hold on universal elementary truths, which to the Greeks seemed neither old nor simple. Modern education inevitably divides itself under many heads; it is primary or higher, technical or liberal, scientific or religious; the distinctions are real and cannot be ignored; but in the controversies to which they sometimes give rise it is well, just because it is hard, to remember, that the ultimate subject of all education is a living organism, whose vital power though divisible in thought, is really one and undivided; that its vital wants are equally such, whether they be for fresh air, or useful knowledge, or for religious truth (Theory, 8)

Nettleship sought to show, then, that Plato could still offer some generally applicable thoughts which respond to the nineteenth-century academic compartmentalizations that have cast suspicions over generalizable ideals. Nettleship’s advocacy of Plato appears, at first, to assert a traditional call for a liberal, gentlemanly education which focused on ‘the formation of a “constitutional character”’: ‘To Plato, with the restlessness and instability of Greek political life before his eyes, the one thing needful seemed to be to establish in society a permanent “ethos”, a traditional character.’ Nettleship turns to his own day: ‘Our great schools and universities are typical instances of the way in which prejudice and tradition may uphold methods of teaching and social habits which have ceased to have a reason for existence’ (Theory, 79). Plato’s theory of education sounds very much like a High Victorian, allboys public-school curriculum, which balanced ‘gymnastic’ and ‘music’. A boy’s education should comprise ‘literary and aesthetic culture’, but not to the extent that the boy’s ‘gentleness will turn into effeminacy’, along with physical exercises which ‘will discipline the wild impulses of violence and pugnacity’ (Theory, 30–1).

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Nettleship frames his analysis with a discourse on the nation state: If the Duke of Wellington could say that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, we need not be surprised at Plato when he speaks of children ‘receiving the spirit of law through their music’, or when he says that ‘one of the greatest tests of a man’s character is the show which he makes in his gymnastics’. The distrust in ‘technical’ education for the higher spheres of public life, and the belief in the efficacy of a ‘liberal culture’, which glories in having nothing directly to do with a profession, are both strong, sometimes perhaps too strong, in the English mind. (Theory, 79–80)

Nettleship nostalgically recalls a previous generation, that of the Duke of Wellington and the ‘great schools’, a time before the introduction of mass education which prepared its learners with technical expertise and professional status, a time before the expansion of the middle classes.9 Like Jowett before him, Nettleship also ‘combined a Coleridgean concern for restraining commercialism with a Hegelian and Carlylean concept of statesmen-heroes larger than ordinary bourgeois life’.10 And yet there is also a hint of doubt in Nettleship’s assertion of ancient Greek’s exemplary status in a modern English education. The distrust in technical education and the belief in a liberal culture are ‘sometimes perhaps too strong’. Nettleship could not ignore almost a century of historical criticism and scientific enquiry which had forcefully questioned the truthfulness of the Bible. Looking for an ideal in the 1880s was not as easy as turning back the clock. Nettleship concedes that there is now no going back to a past before historicism and the natural sciences. But it seems, Nettleship contends, that Plato could still help. Nettleship spends much of the essay discussing Plato’s censorship of poetry, which translates into the modern question of the utility of the biblical stories for a late nineteenth-century school education: ‘To us, as to Plato, the problem of early religious education is, How to express the highest truth in the most appropriate and the least inadequate forms’ (Theory, 52). In other words: should children still be taught the stories from the Bible at the end of the nineteenth century? What might Plato have done with the Bible in his Republic, ponders Nettleship: We may, however, conjecture, that he would have made the moral worth of those stories the final test . . . he would have retained them, trusting to the child’s mind to assimilate what was valuable, and to later education to preserve or to rectify its sense of historical truth. (Theory, 38)

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Plato, whose Socrates argued for the banning of Homer from the ideal polis, would have ‘retained’ the biblical tales had he lived in the nineteenth century. ‘Moral worth’ is not to be subordinated to ‘historical truth’. In fact, quite the opposite, Nettleship argues: ‘The importance of an historical fact must depend in the last resort, upon its moral or ideal significance, or in other words, upon what it tells us of our own nature’ (Theory, 38).11 Side-stepping what appeared to commentators such as Grote Plato’s political repressiveness, Nettleship laments ‘our want of a national mythology’, made up partially by a ‘crowd of classical and Christian figures’ (Theory, 50); far from being redundant, these seem like a much-needed component in a modern nation-state’s education. Plato actually teaches us, Nettleship argues, the usefulness of ancient poetry and myths and biblical stories, whether one believes (in) them or not. The modern apparatus of educational policy forgets tradition at its peril, warns Nettleship, citing Milton’s pamphlet Areopagitica. Milton had famously argued for the expression of free speech and the freedom of the press: ‘to leave education to school board and ministers, they should remember that the “immortal garland” of poetry must be “run for, not without dust and heat”’ (Theory, 55). Nettleship’s essay appears indeed quite a concerned and concerted plea for a traditional liberal English education in the face of what seemed like state interference.

Pater’s Platonic Lesson Christopher Stray has shown how nineteenth-century classicists between 1870 and 1918 moved from a rhetoric which asserted the exemplarity of Classics to a position which was more accommodating to the rise of the new disciplines, in order to find a place for Classics in this new age of mass education.12 Nettleship can be positioned at a critical moment in this history, when the general worth of Classics was still being extolled but with an increasingly anxious self-awareness. Pater’s Plato and Platonism may be read against this intellectual context, when Balliol idealism still posed an attractive position for certain Oxford Hellenists, who were resistant to the politics of academic specialization.13 Pater, on the other hand, refuses to take straightforward sides in the debate about how to read Plato: rather he presents Plato as anticipating these nineteenthcentury debates. For Pater, Plato’s philosophical writings seem already

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torn between these two positions, and so it is hardly surprising that two traditions of Platonism should have emerged (PP, 192–6): Socrates was already a two-sided thinker, ‘a twofold power, an embodied paradox’ (PP, 87). But just as Plato can be seen as the ancient originator of the history of philosophy, he was also, for Pater, a modern receiver of an ancient history of ideas: his writings combined Heraclitus’ enthusiasm for a world of relativist flux with Parmenides’ zeal for absolute monism. Pythagoras’ ideas about number and music brought together these two threads of philosophy, ‘a unity in variety’ (PP, 52). Plato is pictured as both a ‘rich, young man’ of ‘twenty-eight years old’ (PP, 97), a figure of youth at the beginning of the history of philosophy, and one who lives in a world ‘weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools’ (PP, 6). Pater’s Plato is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, a male youthful figure, a figure that is no longer ignorant but also not yet fully educated. Plato, for Pater, then, perfectly reflected his own fin-de-siècle moment, a time which idealistically and youthfully looked forward to a continuously improving future and yet also felt worn out after a century of debates.14 The history of philosophy itself is also repeatedly presented by Pater as continually youthful and about to start. Heraclitus emerged, in Pater’s first chapter, during an ‘era of unrestrained youthfulness’ and his ‘reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself ’ (PP, 13). In chapter 2, ‘[t]hough forty years old, the reputation this Zeno now enjoyed seems to have been very much the achievement of his youth, and came of a mastery of the sort of paradox youth always delights in’ (PP, 28). The theories of Xenophanes are ‘[v]ain puerilities’ (PP, 35). Plato’s Pythagorean predecessors, looking up at the stars, practised ‘an astronomy of infant minds’ (PP, 69). Pater cites the Phaedo where Socrates looks back to his turn away from ‘natural science’ to philosophy in his ‘youth’ (PP, 80; Phaedo 96b). Socrates, at his death, was surrounded by ‘very young men’, and he ‘listened to their so youthfully sanguine discussion on the immortality of the soul’ (PP, 94). The Sophists are teachers of ‘young students’ (PP, 100). Pater’s Sparta, the state on which Plato models his own ideal state in the Republic, is a place full of beautiful youths trying to remain as youthful for as long as possible, for no other reason than to be ‘a perfect work of art’, a perpetual endless youth, art for art’s sake as it were (PP, 232). Spartan youths worshipped the brothers Castor and Polydeuces, who always ‘remained’ youths, ‘those

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enstarred types . . . arrested thus at that moment of miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the clean, youthful friendship’ (PP, 231). And Plato’s Republic is to be inhabited by ‘the temperance of the youthful Charmides’, beautiful youthful males, examples of which may be seen amongst the ‘Greek marble, as you walk through the British Museum’ (PP, 281, 283). For Pater, philosophy has been continuously growing up, no longer a boy but not yet a man, stuck somewhere in between. The youth is explicitly presented as the figure which is positioned between infantile innocence and mature knowledge. Pater cites the scene in the Meno in which we learn from Socrates that ‘in his peculiar function there have been in very deed neither teacher nor learners’ (PP, 88). Socrates asks one of Meno’s slave-boys a series of questions on geometry, a subject about which the boy has never been formally taught anything. Socrates also does not teach the boy anything, but, through a series of questions, elicits the correct answers, bringing him to the conclusion that the boy was ‘remembering’, and therefore already knew the answers. As Pater puts it, during the questioning the boy made ‘the right sort of mistakes, such as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors’ (PP, 64). And just as the boy is on the verge of knowing and also already knows everything, so the irony and the humour of Pater’s Socrates mark the philosopher’s evasion of pedagogic ‘responsibility, convenient for one who has scruples about the fitness of his own thoughts for the reception of another’ (PP, 88). The history of philosophy as Pater presents it, then, is not a series of scenes of an older man teaching a younger male learner, who in turn teaches the next generation. Pater does not offer a narrative of intellectual progress and development. Socrates knew he could not control the reception of his teaching, and indeed some of his students ‘had really become very insolent questioners of others’ and ‘had but passed from bad to worse’ (PP, 91). Rather, Pater represents Plato’s thought as suspended within a youthful mode, both technical and philosophical, and an everyday concern troubling any young man. Plato’s interest in the relationship between the empirical world and the ideal reality of the Forms—between the particular and the general—is presented, by Pater, as a youthful way of thinking. In the chapter which examines Plato’s ‘Theory of Ideas’, the Forms, Pater cites a section from the Philebus (15d–e) where Socrates says (in Pater’s translation):

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And whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy; he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in motion—κινεῖ—every definition—λόγος—every conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particularities out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an Interpreter. (PP, 153–4)

Socrates, as Pater cites him, pictures the beginning of philosophical thought (when ‘a young man gets his first taste of this’) as an oscillation between an interest in general terms and particular entities. And this scene of the origins of philosophical thought happens not between an older and a younger man, but within the youth himself, and then it is repeated with whomsoever the young man meets (be it mother or father, man or beast, Greek or barbarian). True philosophical thought knows no boundaries. Real philosophical dialogue is not simply a technical language but a discourse which the young man would want to conduct with anyone. For Pater, we still live with the question of the relationship between the general and the particular at the end of the nineteenth century: We may contrast generally the mental world we actually live in, where classification, the reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a class, with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement to which Plato and his master so largely contributed—a world we might describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a continuous surprise, and every object unique, where all knowledge was still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully. (PP, 156)

Pater contrasts a pre-scientific, Homeric world, where every object delighted in its uniqueness, with the modern, scientific, Platonic world where everything ‘is known only as the member of a class’. But he goes on to argue that we have not actually got any further than that ancient youth who had embarked two thousand years ago on thinking philosophically

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in the Philebus. Pater questions the relationship between amateurish questioning and technical, professional knowledge: Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental attitude, between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the layman (so to call him) in picking up a shell on the sea-shore; what it is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really does for the furnishing of the mind of the former. The layman, though we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain impressions, is in fact still but a child; and the shell, its colours and convolution, no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him. Let him become a schoolboy about it, so to speak. The toy he puts aside; his mind is drilled perforce, to learn about it . . . and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the ‘vanity’ of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete, the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract product of the mind. But when he comes out of school, and on the sea-shore again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it, he may see what the service of that converse with the general has really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees—in regard to the particular thing he actually sees. . . . [T]his concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it. (PP, 157–8)

Carolyn Williams explains Pater’s point in this passage: ‘The particular instance gains in value through classification. . . . What seems at first to be a reduction of concrete experience turns out to be its enhancement. The general term has a power to focus the intense particularity of a concrete form.’15 But there is more at stake. Pater interrogates the accepted telos of expert knowledge, by arguing that a specialist education actually allows the naturalist not so much an improved scientific knowledge as an enhanced aesthetic experience. We can now grasp more clearly how Pater emerges out of the Oxford context. Nettleship, as we have seen, felt a tension between the rise of scientific specialization and more traditional forms of cultural authority and religious knowledge. For Pater, on the other hand, both Balliol idealism and modern science have generalized and abstracted the particularities of the world away. Pater questions, then, the possibility of generalizable knowledge espoused by modern systems of specialist, disciplinary, scientific enquiry. And he also questions the liberal education of Balliol idealism: the beautiful youths in Sparta seek to remain youths (that is, beautiful works of art), rather than maturing into administrators

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in a civil service. Finally, Pater also questions whether Plato really did seriously argue for and formulate political reform: Only, he for one would not be surprised if no eyes actually see it. Like his master Socrates, as you know, he is something of a humorist; and if he sometimes surprises us with paradox or hazardous theory, will sometimes also give us to understand that he is after all not quite serious. (PP, 266)

Even if Grote had not agreed with Plato’s anti-democratic politics, he believed that Socrates’ endless questioning offered a good model for undermining widely held opinions, an exercise which might lead to a better political—democratic—future. Pater’s Plato, however, is one who ‘journey[s] alone’ (PP, 266).16 Pater’s Plato emerges as a figure profoundly torn between general truths and the particular beauty of multifarious reality: ‘Abstract ideas themselves become animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes’ (PP, 170). Plato himself exemplifies the difficulty in attaining a technical, abstract understanding which is beyond the empirical, everyday experience of the world. Pater, then, completely reorientates the late Victorian debates about the relationship between an education that offered general truths for the whole of society and particularized, disciplinary knowledges, which competed for authority in late nineteenth-century Britain. Plato, for Pater, is generally interesting precisely because he himself embodied the debate about what sort of knowledge one should have, a knowledge of the general or that of the particular. Pater locates Plato as the historical cause for that history of modern debates about the politics of disciplinarity. And Pater depicts this as a history which was continually being replayed—a debate which one cannot get beyond. The history of thought remains stuck like the youth in the Philebus oscillating between his interest in the general and the particular. The development of the specialist knowledge of the naturalist leads one back to consider the individual shell, which in turn, as Pater puts it, has ‘been enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent world’. A general, scientific knowledge leads one back to the individual, unique, unclassifiable particular, which could not be fully appreciated without obtaining that general, technical knowledge. The knowledge of the general and that of the particular, for Pater, cannot exist without one another, and this is the bind from which Plato himself could not escape.

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For Pater, the oscillation between the general and the particular—the history of the competing interpretations of Platonism—is the history of thought. ‘Nowhere else in his works’, Williams writes, ‘do we find such a crisp and summary statement of Pater’s understanding of the problematic relation between representative terms and particular instances.’17 Rather than providing a truth for the modern age, Plato should be generally interesting, Pater contends, precisely because of the debate about the general and the particular which has been triggered by his dialogues. If one wants to understand the nature of the late Victorian arguments about education, Pater suggests, one should read Plato. As the introductory note to Plato and Platonism says, this book comes out of lectures ‘written for delivery to some young students of philosophy’, but is ‘now printed with the hope of interesting a larger number of them’ (PP, 1): as we have already seen, for Pater one never ceases being a youthful student. But if Plato and Platonism is concerned with how the history of philosophy is to be generally understood as the history of debating Platonism, then Pater’s book is also interested in Plato the unique individual. If ‘[f]or him, truly’, Pater argues, ‘all knowledge was like knowing a person’ (PP, 129; original italics), then what does it mean to know the person Plato? The history of philosophy is one which shows little interest in the individuals behind their writings: ‘It is not merely that we know little of their lives . . . but that we know nothing of their temperaments; of which, that one leading abstract or scientific force in them was in fact strictly exclusive. Little more than intellectual abstractions themselves’ (PP, 125). Pater’s contention is that the ‘author of this philosophy of the unseen was one, for whom . . . “the visible world really existed” . . . Yes, the visible world so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed for him: exists still—there’s the point!—is active still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to invisible things’ (PP, 126; original italics). Plato himself was far from an abstraction, but a living human being who could not escape ‘the visible world’. Pater’s book itself, then, seeks to balance its interests between a general history of philosophy and an account of the unique individual philosopher.18 As Pater notes, modern historiography and the modern natural and social sciences have argued that the individual is to be understood and therefore contextualized through an ‘estimate of general conditions’ of a society and once ‘the fatal, irresistible, mechanic play of

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circumstance’ has been taken into account (PP, 124). And yet, we must also seek to excavate ‘what is unique in the individual genius which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful way with that environment. . . . [T]he philosophic student . . . must also, so far as he may, reproduce the portrait of a person’ (PP, 124–5; original italics). To understand the late Victorian debates about the relationship between a general education and academic specialization, one needs, according to Pater, to understand the historical emergence of those debates out of the ‘individual genius’ of Plato.

Plato the Classicist? We have seen how Balliol men like Jowett and Nettleship had argued that a Platonic education had general value and relevance for the modern state in the face of the competition from other academic disciplines jostling for their own status and political authority. Pater was suspicious about claims of scientific, disciplinary truth, but he was, at the same time, interested in how such modern research might enhance one’s own aesthetic appreciation of an individual object or person. Plato and Platonism located Plato the individual at the origins of these debates. Whereas Pater’s contemporaries argued for the general veracity and ‘scientific’ character of their intellectual claims, Pater himself depicted a figure who could not decide between general truths and individual instances. This chapter has explored the complexity involved in calling Pater a classicist. Pater argued that Plato had a general significance for understanding contemporary debates, but at the same time he was an individual, and therefore an object of study for a particular, academic discipline. Histories of the discipline of Classics in the nineteenth century have provided valuable accounts of the development of academic disciplinarity.19 Stray, in particular, has shown how late Victorian classicists developed a rhetoric of accommodation towards academic specialization, by advocating the value of antiquity in a landscape of competing intellectual disciplines. We saw how keenly Nettleship pleaded for the worth of a classical education in this modern academic climate. But by reinserting Pater into this history, we see that the study of the ancient world in Victorian Britain was not simply one in which Hellenists repositioned and accommodated themselves to the loss of their exemplary status in

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the education system, to become one academic specialism amongst several others. If we include Pater, a different story starts to emerge. Neither an apologist for the transcendent value of antiquity for a modern education nor a specialist in any discipline, Pater provides an important, pivotal figure in the history of the arguments about education in the late Victorian period. His reading of Plato shows how intractable and perhaps irresolvable the debates about the general and the particular in education were at the time and continue to be, as higher education still oscillates between disciplinary compartmentalization and interdisciplinary research structures. By putting Pater back into the history of Classics, we can begin to think of an alternative account, which complicates the teleological narrative of a journey to twentieth-century specialization and professionalism.

Notes 1. On the history of Classics and Altertumswissenschaft at this time, see Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996), and Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford, 1998), esp. pp. 117–232. 2. On Jowett and Plato, see Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 122; on Jowett as a Socratic figure, see Stefano Evangelista, ‘Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, in Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 203–36; Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 68–71; Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford, 2011), pp. 97–100. 3. See Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford, 2013), pp. 193, 194–5, 203–9, 211–12, 216. 4. Lewis R. Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), pp. 76–7. 5. On Pater and education, see Section 2 of the Bibliography. 6. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), pp. 374–5. On Grote, see also Kyriakos Demetriou, Studies on the Reception of Plato and Greek Political Thought in Victorian Britain (Farnham, 2011); Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition, ed. Kyriakos Demetriou (Leiden, 2014). 7. Benjamin Jowett, Dialogues of Plato Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions (Oxford, 1892), I, p. xi.

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8. References to Nettleship’s essay are to the following edition: Richard Nettleship, The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic (Oxford, 1935). Further references will appear in the text. On Nettleship, see Ingram Bywater, rev. C. A. Creffield, ‘Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) (accessed 11 November 2015) and Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 432–9. 9. On Victorian education and mass education, see Walter H. G. Armytage, ‘The 1870 Education Act’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 18: 2 (1970), 121–33; J. P. C. Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England 1800–1879 (1986), and Secondary Education in England 1870–1902: Public Activity and Private Enterprise (1991). On mid-to-late Victorian anxieties about the expansion of the mercantile middle classes and the impact on masculinity, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY, 1995). 10. Turner, Greek Heritage, p. 430. 11. On the importance of historicism and biblical criticism to Victorian scholars of antiquity, see Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, 2011), and James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, 2014). 12. Stray, Classics Transformed, pp. 202–32. 13. Also on Pater’s Plato within this context, see William Shuter, ‘Pater on Plato: “Subjective” or “Sound”?’, Prose Studies, 5 (1982), 215–28; Lesley Higgins, ‘Jowett and Pater: Trafficking in Platonic Wares’, Victorian Studies, 37: 1 (1993), 43–72; Orrells, Classical Culture, pp. 129–40. 14. On the fin de siècle as a time of transition and relativism, see Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge, 1995), and The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge, 2007). 15. Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 268. 16. See also Turner, Greek Heritage, p. 413. 17. Williams, Transfigured World, p. 264. 18. On this tension in Pater’s thinking, see also Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2013). On Pater’s ‘visible world’, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 2007), p. 85 and ch. 9. 19. See Stray, Classics Transformed, and Turner, Philology.

17 The Ethics of Contemplation Pater’s Reading of Aristotle Adam Lee

Any thorough study of Classics at Oxford in the nineteenth century must take Aristotle into account. Featuring alongside his Politics and Rhetoric, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was the most important text in Literae Humaniores throughout the century. In The Idea of a University (1852), John Henry Newman calls Aristotle the ‘great Master’ and ‘the oracle of nature and truth’.1 ‘To think correctly, is to think like Aristotle’, claims Newman, arguing that we are all disciples whether we know it or not.2 Accounts by students and student guides from the period emphasize over and over again the necessity of knowing the Ethics for those wanting to succeed in examinations.3 And yet studies of the influence of Greats upon Pater, and of his role within the course, have given little attention to Aristotle. Perhaps the reason for this lies in the fact that there are not many direct references to Aristotle in Pater’s works, whereas, among the important authors then taught in Oxford, Plato’s is the name that appears most frequently there; and it is Plato’s ideas that are treated in greatest depth, particularly in Pater’s last book, Plato and Platonism. There have been several studies of Plato’s role in Pater’s work, usually with an emphasis on sexuality.4 But when one is familiar with the character of Literae Humaniores, the importance of Aristotle, which at first sight might seem negligible, grows significantly. Pater’s teaching reflects the texts most essential for success in Greats. His fellowship at Brasenose College in 1864 is thought to have been owed

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to his proficiency in both Greek and German philosophy, as a promising student of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, who was reforming the curriculum of Literae Humaniores with an increasing emphasis on Plato and the history of philosophy. Besides his own Brasenose students, Pater tutored Balliol students, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Greek philosophy.5 We know that from the early 1870s Pater offered courses to the University mainly on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics; William Shuter cites the Oxford University Gazette to show that Pater taught the Ethics fairly consistently throughout the 1870s.6 There has been a mistaken tendency to believe that, with the surge of interest in Plato during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Aristotle somehow faded away, as if the two philosophers were incompatible; but several scholars have laid that error to rest. For example, Mark Pattison in 1876 and, recently, Jonathan Barnes (under the alias M. R. Stopper) have established the enduring importance of Aristotle at Oxford alongside the rise of Plato.7 ‘Plato did not oust Aristotle from the Greats course,’ writes David Newsome; ‘It would be more accurate to say that the course was widened to include him.’8 Pater’s teaching record validates this claim: from 1872 to 1892 (with a hiatus between 1884 and 1890) he offered eleven courses on the Ethics and sixteen on the Republic.9 Although Plato did not displace Aristotle, he changed the way Aristotle was interpreted. And Pater’s writing exemplifies this change. From around 1830 students read the Ethics alongside Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736). But by the early 1860s, although Butler’s Analogy was still recommended, it was no longer mandatory, and thus came to be much less read.10 Pater was the recipient of the first non-clerical fellowship at Brasenose, and his tenure coincided with growing secularism and liberalism at Oxford. Plato’s Republic came to work in tandem with the Ethics on the course for several reasons. The history of philosophy had become increasingly important to Jowett and Oxonian teachers, and, in historical terms, Plato and Aristotle (as teacher and student) were often held to contribute to the same system, allies against the common enemy of materialism.11 Charles Britain has shown how the late Platonists in the Academy saw knowledge of Aristotle as integral to Platonism.12 Within the tradition of Platonism during both the Alexandrian period and the Italian Renaissance, scholars viewed Aristotle as Plato’s ally: this was particularly true

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of Pico della Mirandola, to whom Pater devotes a chapter in The Renaissance.13 In practice it was generally accepted at Oxford that Aristotle explicated Plato’s ideas and fixed some of his terminology. When Jowett reportedly said in 1847 that ‘Aristotle is dead, Plato is alive’, besides trying to overcome a strong bias in favour of the former he implied that what was found complete in Aristotle could be found in germ in Plato.14 Jowett after all translated and published an edition of Aristotle’s Politics in 1885 for the sake of the insights it provides into Plato’s Laws.15 Like Jowett in his introductions to the Dialogues (1871), Pater often relies on Aristotle to explain aspects of Plato’s thought in Plato and Platonism. And the differences between the two philosophers are downplayed. Pater addresses their major metaphysical disagreement about Forms being ‘separate’ from instances, in ‘Plato’s Theory of Ideas’, mainly in relation to Socrates, without developing the implications for Aristotle (PP, 163). Plato’s separation of the Forms is set aside as merely a result of his peculiar poetic temper, which was turned into dogma only by later followers (PP, 164). When Pater depicts Plato’s Academy as very similar to Oxford—that ‘first college, with something of a common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library’ (PP, 148)—the presence of Aristotle is central. Plato thus informed the study of Aristotle, while Aristotle complemented knowledge of Plato. Besides, the Republic in particular was able to fulfil several course requirements. It contributed to the study of both moral and political philosophy, possessing the added advantage of a fine Greek style in a course that took philosophy as an appendage to literary and philological training. Plato also carried a vague religious mysticism, at a time when the course was leaning towards secularism. Pater was on the cusp of this change in curriculum and, through his writing, contributed to a shift in how Aristotle was generally interpreted at Oxford. For Pater, the turning point occurs in ‘On Wordsworth’ (1874). Before this essay, his references to Aristotle are largely disparaging. In ‘Pico della Mirandola’ (1871) Pater cites Ernest Renan’s claim in Averroès et l’averroïsme (1852) that Florence ‘had always had an affinity for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and other cities of the north’ (Ren., 27–8). In The Renaissance, which includes the essay on

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Pico, it is also possible to see Aristotle’s philosophy behind Pater’s proscription of ‘habit’ in the ‘Conclusion’ (first published in Pater’s review essay of 1868, ‘Poems by William Morris’). Those who had studied Literae Humaniores at Oxford would have identified the reference to ‘habit’ there as Aristotle’s practical moral teaching. Oscar Wilde made the connection explicit to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, in the letter of 1897 now known as De Profundis. Wilde writes that, when Pater wrote of habit in the ‘Conclusion’, ‘the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. . . . Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically’.16 The fact that the mention of one of the book’s main themes implies the whole book shows just how widely read the Ethics was at Oxford at this date. As one of the standard texts for how to be a gentleman in the nineteenth century, the Ethics concerns itself mainly with forming character, with terms like sophrosyne, or what Matthew Arnold called ‘soberness’, as well as the idea of ‘hitting the mean’ when deliberating on behavioural choices, and discovering the means to arrive at desired ends. The ‘good life’, eudaimonia or happiness, depends upon forming good ‘habits’ and having a good disposition, or hexis, in order to be virtuous. Although the ‘life of Contemplation’ in book 1 is elevated above more practical lives, such as a life in politics, the underlying principle of habit, dealt with mainly in books 2 and 7, is that character is determined by what you do and that therefore you are what you do. The importance of ‘habit’ in the Ethics was reinforced by Bishop Butler’s Analogy. Notes to Aristotle’s Ethics, for example, by William Edward Jelf, a student and later teacher at Christ Church, is typical in referring students to Butler precisely in regard to ‘habit’.17 Montagu Burrows, a successful graduate of the course in 1856, declares in Pass and Class: An Oxford Guidebook that in ‘the famous analysis of “Habit,” contained in Chap. v. of the Analogy, may be easily traced all the teaching of the Ethics’.18 In the most popular chapters of Analogy, 4 and 5, Butler discusses our present life as a ‘state of probation’ for the next life, through which our behaviour is guided by habit.19 The necessity of forming good habits therefore arises from a low estimation of man, as nature alone leaves us ‘utterly deficient and unqualified’ for ‘that mature state of life’.20 In the ‘Conclusion’, where Pater encourages

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readers towards a life devoted to artistic beauty, he writes against habit, which in the Analogy is recommended to anaesthetize one in order to carry through fearful or difficult acts of virtue.21 Pater, by contrast, exalts consciousness and wants to increase our responsiveness to ‘impressions’. ‘Our failure is to form habits’, because habit leads to ‘the roughness of the eye’ that makes things appear alike (Ren., 189), denying us the sense of individual life. The distinction between the practical Aristotle and the ‘dreamy’ Plato is not very deeply embedded in Pater, for he will return to it only once more, in Gaston de Latour (1896), when describing Giordano Bruno’s dispute with the University of Paris. Although it was originally written for the novel, the material on Bruno was initially published as a standalone essay in the Fortnightly Review in 1889. Bruno’s complaint there appears as an exaggerated form of Pater’s own famous proscription of ‘habit’ two decades earlier. The narrator voices Bruno’s disgust with Aristotle: ‘“Habit”—the last word of his practical philosophy—indolent habit! what would this mean, in the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which, because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them, are most opposed to the essential quickness and freedom of the spirit?’ (Gast., 158). This ‘essential freedom and quickness of the spirit’ is a characteristic of the aesthetic life Pater encouraged in the ‘Conclusion’. The historical Bruno declares in La Cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584) that he was involved in conflict about the university curriculum at Oxford; when he came to lecture there in 1583 and became embroiled in theological debate, he was banned from the University. Although later studies suggest that Bruno was dismissed over charges of plagiarism, Frances Yates believes that the dispute revolved around Aristotle, the teaching of whom became entrenched at the University after the Reformation: it seems that Bruno longed to return to the metaphysics of medieval Oxford.22 Medieval Oxford, Étienne Gilson remarks, actually exhibited a Platonic tendency with its devotion to the abstract thought of mathematics and metaphysics.23 But after the Reformation Aristotelianism amounted to an orthodoxy from which any vagrancy could lead to accusations of popery.24 Bruno faced a similar orthodoxy at Paris in 1586, where Gaston’s narrator describes ‘those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter’: ‘In truth, Aristotle, the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending, as Bruno

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conceived, to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of things from the eyes of men’ (Gast., 158). This view of Aristotle, as committed to habit, might be compared with that in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), a book Pater taught in Trinity Term 1874, which disparages Aristotle’s methods in natural philosophy. But Pater has a strictly literary purpose here: Bruno’s complaint against Aristotle provides motivation for Gaston’s intellectual and spiritual growth, which for a time finds sympathy with the Platonism of Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas). Aristotle without Plato was too dry. Alongside Bruno’s dissatisfaction with the scholastic reading of Aristotle, Pater was also inserting his own distrust of ‘habit’ into Gaston’s narrative, as ‘relative to a stereotyped world’ (Ren., 189). After all, Bruno’s dispute in the Cena revolves around astronomy. Pater shared with Bruno the struggle to overcome institutional orthodoxy in philosophy, which for Pater arose when the Ethics was made to correspond to Butler’s Analogy. But while Butler’s influence declined, another interpretation of Aristotle was taking hold in the wake of Benjamin Jowett and the renewed study of Plato. Alexander Grant, a Balliol student of Jowett’s, produced one of the most influential accounts of ancient philosophy of the day, The Ethics of Aristotle (1857). It quickly became the authoritative complement to Aristotle at Oxford. The volume evinces an underlying devotion to Plato, and argues that knowledge of Plato is necessary for understanding Aristotle. Grant writes: Especially in relation to any part of the system of Aristotle, a knowledge of Plato is of overpowering importance. To explain the relation of any one of Aristotle’s treatises to Plato is almost a sufficient account of all that it contains. If one were asked what books will throw most light upon the Ethics of Aristotle, the answer must be undoubtedly, ‘the dialogues of Plato’.25

Grant dismisses the separation of the Forms as a misunderstanding on the part of Aristotle the student, whose ‘great mind’ on this point ‘seems to have descended to a sort of smallness’.26 Grant also declares that ‘habit’ is only one part and not the spirit of Aristotle’s teaching.27 Of Aristotle’s key term energeia, whose influence on aestheticism will be considered later, Grant writes: ‘It is not only life, but the sense of life; not only waking, but the feeling of the powers; not only perception or thought, but a consciousness of one’s own faculties as well as of the external object’28—a definition that reads almost as a paraphrase of the

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‘Conclusion’. As Pater shrugs off the traditional impress of habit found in Aristotle, he simultaneously espouses Grant’s greater focus on consciousness. And the influence runs both ways: arguing against the utilitarians, Grant quotes a passage from Pater’s recently published The Renaissance in the third edition of his Ethics (1874).29 Published the year after The Renaissance, Pater’s essay ‘On Wordsworth’ (retitled simply ‘Wordsworth’ when republished in a revised form in Appreciations) explores similar themes, particularly the exaltation of consciousness. ‘Wordsworth’ might even be a response to some of the suspicion the ‘Conclusion’ aroused. John Wordsworth (1843–1911), great-nephew of the poet, a fellow of Pater’s own college Brasenose and eventually Bishop of Salisbury, preached against the philosophy he believed he had found in the ‘Conclusion’; and it is conceivable that Pater responded by using his critic’s own great-uncle to exemplify the English aesthetic life he had expounded in The Renaissance, with scholarly support from the Ethics. But beyond these personal concerns, Pater’s professional intent was to establish Wordsworth’s distinctive ‘virtue’.30 The essay begins with a concern that Wordsworth’s talent was diluted within a corpus that is too broad and disorganized. Pater finds fault with Wordsworth’s inconsistent inspiration, arguing that sometimes his art suffered because he seemed to work with ‘an unwilling pen’, as if ‘by rule’ (App., 40); and he calls upon critics to undertake the necessary work and collect a volume of his best verse. Perhaps it is Pater’s most practical piece of criticism. Later editions include a footnote stating that the job had been admirably done ‘with excellent taste, by Matthew Arnold and Professor Knight’ (App., 43). Like the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, the Wordsworth essay offers guidance for aesthetic criticism, returning to the necessity of an intense artistic perception. Pater declares that reading Wordsworth can actually initiate a critic in patience like a disciplina arcani (App., 42), a term associated with the Platonism of the Alexandrian Fathers of the thirdand fourth-century Church. Although Pater discusses the importance of nature in Wordsworth’s poetry, he credits him with ‘raising nature to the level of human thought’ to give it ‘power and expression’ (App., 49). Quoting Shelley’s appraisal, he argues that Wordsworth ‘awakened “a sort of thought in sense”’ (App., 48). The rhetorical sweep of the essay involves a refinement of reality from nature to mind. Wordsworth’s

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poetic perception is turned inward, as he ‘ponder[s] much over the philosophy of his poetry, and [reads] deeply in the history of his own mind’ (App., 53). He is a meditative and religious poet, with ‘perfect fidelity to [his] own inward presentations’ (App., 51). Pater then draws a line between interpretations of Aristotle, having Wordsworth side with the ‘idealist’ Aristotle rather than the practical Aristotle. Grant had declared that there were two different sides to Aristotle’s philosophy: ‘the one speculative and profoundly penetrating and philosophic’, the other ‘content with a shallow system of classification’.31 Pater writes of Wordsworth: Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness, upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of religious sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered down to a world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad outlook, a world protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas. But he is at times also something very different from this, and something much bolder. (App., 54)

This boldness of Wordsworth’s is exercised in speculative philosophy. He is a poet ‘for those who feel the fascination of bold speculative ideas’ (App., 56), as he set himself on ‘bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point, into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time to time, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits’ (App., 54). Wordsworth experiences a kind of living metempsychosis, ‘the fancy of the Platonists’, ‘the old heresy of Origen’ (App., 55), transcending boundaries through the audacity of thought. In ‘Wordsworth’, Pater decries the mechanical living of ‘habit’ by ‘that old Greek moralist who has fixed for succeeding generations the outline of the theory of right living’. However, ‘[a]gainst this predominance of machinery in our existence, Wordsworth’s poetry, like all great art and poetry, is a continual protest’ (App., 61). The machinery he refers to is the life of action in the Ethics that must deliberate on means to ends. So Pater separates Wordsworth from the practical life. ‘His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt incidents’, he writes: ‘its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces’ (App., 44). Wordsworth’s life is not removed from human interaction: it is just that these types of actions are not useful, they do not serve an ulterior end. They are rather like the beautiful moments Pater recommends in the ‘Conclusion’: the ‘“efficacious spirit” . . . resides in these “particular

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spots” of time’ (App., 46). Pater does not argue that, instead of aiming for an ethical life, one must devote time to contemplation—his argument is much bolder: he declares that contemplation is in fact ethical. Arnold strongly campaigned for the contemplative life in England; but whereas Arnold declares in Literature and Dogma (1873) that conduct is threefourths of life, while ‘our aesthetic and intellectual disciplines’ make up the remaining fourth,32 Pater insists on ‘the supreme importance of contemplation in the conduct of life’ (App., 59). In transforming contemplation into conduct Pater rhetorically turns the outside world inwards; in doing so he follows the teaching of Aristotle. ‘That the end of life is not action but contemplation—being as distinct from doing—a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality’ (App., 62). Although involving himself in ethics, Pater removes the discussion from the practical realm of action where one might locate habit. Implying that practical ethics are the ‘lower morality’ allows him not merely to define an aesthetic life that is moral, but also to invest the contemplative life—as being above action—with higher moral value. The distinction between being and doing can be found in the Ethics, and rests on different kinds of ‘activity’, or energeia, to use Aristotle’s word, which is defined as the active exercise of the soul’s faculties in conformity with the rational principle (Ethics, 1. 7. 14). Grant translates energeia as ‘activity’, explaining that we get a greater feeling for its meaning when opposing it to ‘potential’. Along the scale of existence, there lies matter on one end as potential, and God on the other end as pure activity.33 When man is engaged in energeia, therefore, it follows that he is acting like God. This activity is not continuous but occurs sporadically. ‘Oftenest it is like a thrill of joy, a momentary intuition’, writes Grant;34 in order for this to afford the greatest pleasure perpetually, man would require a simple nature like God’s. Although critics, notably Frank Turner, have discussed Pater’s appropriation of Aristotle’s energeia,35 it is helpful to note the distinction between different kinds of energeia in order to identify the kind Pater endorses. Aristotle defines man’s happiness as an ‘activity of soul’ rather than of body (Ethics, 1. 8. 1), and he therefore distinguishes between activity of motion and immobile activity: ‘For there is not only an activity [ἐνέργεια (energeia)] of motion [κινήσεώς (kineseos)], but also an activity of immobility [ἀκινησίας (akinesias)], and there is essentially a truer

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pleasure in rest than in motion’ (Ethics 7. 14. 8, Rackham’s Loeb translation).36 As Grant translates the passage: ‘God is the fruition of one pure pleasure everlastingly. For deep consciousness is possible, not only of motion, but also of repose.’37 Although ‘consciousness’ is not Aristotle’s word, it comes to represent Aristotle’s idea of energeia akinesias, an activity performed in stillness. This is the energeia Pater holds dear, exalting ‘being’ above ‘doing’. The metaphor of the flame in the ‘Conclusion’ conveys existence as a focal point, without external action or locomotion. Thus Pater uses the word ‘activity’ throughout his oeuvre almost invariably within the context of mind.38 The ‘quickened sense of life’ in the ‘Conclusion’ is an ‘enthusiastic activity’, the ‘fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness’ (Ren., 190). The ‘activity’ he praises in ‘On Wordsworth’ is contemplation or, in Greek, theoria—a kind of mental vision. But a vision of what Pater never makes clear, and in this he differs from the German idealists Hegel and Fichte. He seeks to clear a space for the sake of mystery, or the contact of strange souls, not in order to realize ideas towards a greater goal. The poet of nature becomes the poet of mind, paradoxically perhaps, through the philosophy of Aristotle. But Pater had come to hold Aristotle’s Ethics as idealist: not idealist in the sense that only the mind is real, but idealist in the Platonic sense that also the mind is real. After ‘On Wordsworth’, when Pater refers to Aristotle it is as an idealist, in support of Platonism,39 with two exceptions. The first occurs in the chapter on Bruno, for the narrative reasons discussed earlier. The other ostensible exception is in ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ (1894); when describing Myron’s statues of young athletes in action Pater states Aristotle’s definition of pleasure as ‘“the unhindered exercise of one’s natural force”’, explaining, however, that Myron is not concerned with producing a reasonable person, in whom the greatest force would be mind, but rather with the form of athletes merely as young animals (GS, 286). In Marius the Epicurean, for instance, during the protagonist’s hour of revelation, when his ‘sensations and ideas’ fall into perfect focus in reference to Plato’s ‘World of Ideas’, Aristotle is present as ‘something of a mystic after all’ with regard to the ‘“creative, incorruptible, informing mind”’ (ME, ii. 69, ch. 19). In Plato and Platonism, Pater includes Aristotle among the Ideal Platonists, alongside the schoolmen, Hegel, Spinoza, and the Neoplatonist visionaries of all ages (PP, 193). But, although

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Aristotle is not named there, the first time his philosophy appears as idealist in Pater’s work is in ‘On Wordsworth’. Pater customarily taught books 1, 6, and 10 of the Ethics, and it is in the last of these that Aristotle’s treatise turns most idealist. ‘For contemplation’, Aristotle says: is at once the highest form of activity [energeia] (since the intellect [nous] is the highest thing in us, and the objects with which the intellect deals are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, for we can reflect more continuously than we can carry on any form of action [prattein]. And again we suppose that happiness must contain an element of pleasure; now activity [energeia] in accordance with wisdom is admittedly the most pleasant of the activities in accordance with virtue: at all events it is held that philosophy or the pursuit of wisdom contains pleasures of marvellous purity and permanence . . . Also the activity of contemplation will be found to possess in the highest degree the quality that is termed self-sufficiency. (Ethics, 10. 7. 2–4)

Pater similarly elevates self-sufficiency in Wordsworth’s contemplation by calling it an ‘end-in-itself, the perfect end’ (App., 60), as it exists to serve no other purpose but its own activity. Aristotle says, ‘the activity of contemplation may be held to be the only activity that is loved for its own sake: it produces no result beyond the actual act of contemplation, whereas from practical pursuits we look to secure some advantage, greater or smaller, beyond the action itself ’ (Ethics, 10. 7. 5). This passage might be seen as a source for several values in aestheticism, including the importance of artistic autonomy. Indeed many of the ideals of late nineteenth-century aestheticism can be found in the Ethics as interpreted by Pater and attached to Wordsworth: disinterestedness, autonomy, repose, rarity or selectiveness, purity, and simplicity. Associated with the philosophical authority of Aristotle, the essay on Wordsworth helps Pater mould the figure of the aesthete with which he himself continues to be associated. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford notebooks, for example, which call both Plato and Aristotle idealists, quote the key passage on contemplation from Pater’s essay.40 Stefano Evangelista has traced the influence of the Ethics upon Wilde who writes in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891): ‘the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming—that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: . . . brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us.’41 As

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a student of Greats in the 1870s, Wilde is drawn to idealism by both Aristotle and Pater: To us, at any rate, the ΒΙΟΣ ΘΕΩΡΗΤΙΚΟΣ [Life of Contemplation] is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered how to live.42

In the aesthetic life withdrawal from political contingency is motivated by the search for the autonomy required for contemplation. Intellectual freedom is desirable not merely for its fruits, but also as a mode of living. In the aesthetic life such withdrawal is necessary for the perspective required for observing life and beauty, for intellectual freedom and individuality. Wilde’s affinity with Pater appears even stronger when one considers their embracing of Aristotle’s contemplative ideal. Pater teaches that knowledge, particularly the way in which one thinks, changes character. The ‘new organ’ laid open (Ren., 141)—a phrase Pater borrowed from Hegel in ‘Winckelmann’—was a change of perspective on the old teaching, with the return of Plato. Of the practical life, which Aristotle’s Ethics also guides, Pater writes in ‘Wordsworth’: It covers the meanness of men’s daily lives, and much of the dexterity and the vigour with which they pursue what may seem to them the good of themselves or of others; but not the intangible perfection of those whose ideal is rather in being than in doing—not those manners which are, in the deepest as in the simplest sense, morals, and without which one cannot so much as offer a cup of water to a poor man without offence—not the part of ‘antique Rachel,’ sitting in the company of Beatrice; and the moralist might well endeavour rather to withdraw men from the too exclusive consideration of means and ends, in life. (App., 61)

Rachel is contrasted with her sister Leah (like the scriptural sisters Mary and Martha) in Dante’s Purgatory (27. 100–8), where Rachel gazes contemplatively all day in a looking glass, while her sister Leah busies her hands gathering flowers. Platonic theology keeps beauty close to the good; and thus one who contemplates like Rachel is in the company of Beatrice, who epitomizes beauty. The ‘intangible perfection’ belongs to the contemplative life that honours ‘being’ over ‘doing’—means above ends—the building of character through thought rather than by action.

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Edward Thomas, an early biographer, tells the ‘well-invented’ story that Pater was once asked by an undergraduate after two terms of Aristotle’s Ethics: ‘Why should we be good?’ To which Pater responded, ‘Because it is so beautiful.’43 Perhaps it is only an accident of language that the question comes down to us with the emphasis on ‘being good’ rather than ‘doing good’. But this emphasis on being, both good and beautiful in the act of contemplation, is precisely how Pater himself posed the question of ethics.

Notes 1. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated (1873), p. 109. 2. Newman, Idea, p. 110. 3. Two important examples are Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class: An Oxford Guidebook (Oxford, 1860), pp. 96–7, and James E. Thorold Rogers, Education in Oxford: Its Method, Its Aids, and Its Awards (1861), p. 38. 4. See Sections 2 and 6 of the Bibliography; Richard Dellamora, Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994); Patricia Cruzalegui Sotelo, The Platonic Experience in NineteenthCentury England (Lima, 2006). 5. See Lesley Higgins, ‘Essaying “W.H. Pater Esq.”: New Perspectives on the Tutor/Student Relationship between Pater and Hopkins’, in Pater in the 1990s, ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC, 1991), pp. 77–94. 6. William F. Shuter, ‘Pater as Don’, Prose Studies, 11: 1 (1988), 41–60. 7. Mark Pattison, ‘Philosophy at Oxford’, Mind, 1: 1 (1876), 82–97; M. R. Stopper, ‘Greek Philosophy and the Victorians’, Phronesis, 26: 3 (1981), 267–85. 8. David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (1974), p. 77. 9. Shuter, ‘Pater as Don’, pp. 43–4. 10. M. G. Brock states that the Analogy ceased to be mandatory as early as 1854; see ‘A Plastic Structure’, in The History of the University of Oxford, VII. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford, 2002), pp. 3–66 (25). 11. See Lloyd Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Gerson, From Plato to Platonism (Oxford, 2013). 12. Charles Britain, ‘Plato and Platonism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Plato, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford, 2008), pp. 526–52 (541).

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13. Pico’s De Ente et Uno (Being and the One) reconciles Platonism and Aristotelianism. 14. Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A.: Master of Balliol College Oxford, 2 vols (1897), I, p. 261. 15. Abbott and Campbell, Jowett, I, p. 422. 16. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (2000), p. 690. 17. William Edward Jelf, Notes to Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford, 1856), p. 33. 18. Burrows, Pass and Class, p. 280. 19. Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion (1857), pp. 105–34. 20. Butler, Analogy, pp. 111–12. 21. Butler, Analogy, p. 108. 22. Frances Yates, ‘Giordano Bruno’s Conflict with Oxford’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2: 3 (1939), 227–42. 23. Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Âge, II. De Saint Thomas d’Aquin à Guillaume d’Occam (Paris, 1922), p. 46. 24. Angelo M. Pellegrini, ‘Giordano Bruno and Oxford’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 5: 3 (1942), 303–16. 25. Alexander Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle (1857), p. 135. 26. Grant, Ethics, p. 158. 27. Grant, Ethics, pp. 190–2. 28. Grant, Ethics, p. 193. 29. ‘It might suffice to say in the words of a recent writer, “nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality—no language they have spoken, no oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal”’ (Grant, Ethics (3rd edn, 1874), pp. 388–9). The quoted passage is from Pater’s ‘Pico della Mirandola’ (Ren., 38). 30. See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998), p. 99. 31. Grant, Ethics, p. 163. 32. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, in The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, IV. Dissent and Dogma, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1968), p. 297. 33. Grant, Ethics, p. 185. 34. Grant, Ethics, p. 194. 35. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), p. 354. 36. As Gerson argues in From Plato to Platonism (pp. 213 and 217), Aristotle invented the term energeia in order to express a kind of activity in which the agent is not in motion, specifically God as the first principle. 37. Grant, Ethics, p. 246.

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38. In the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance Pater uses the phrase ‘intellectual activity’ (Ren., p. xxiii); in ‘Pico della Mirandola’ he speaks of ‘the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the human mind itself ’ (Ren., 26); cf. ‘the activity of the Greek mind’ in ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (GS, 252), and ‘that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists’ (ME, i. 129, ch. 8). 39. Throughout his Oxford notebooks, for instance, Wilde calls Plato and Aristotle ‘both idealists’. ‘So in Aristotle the philosopher’s life is the contemplative life . . . It is good says Aristotle for it’s [sic] own sake because it is an “αρετη of the soul”: the fact of it’s [sic] existence is the reason for its existence. Bacon’s scornful words are it’s [sic] glory—Like a virgin consecrated to God it bears no fruit. [I]ts duty is to comprehend the world not to make it better’ (Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (New York, 1989), p. 145). 40. ‘The end of life is not action but contemplation, not doing but being: to treat life in the spirit of art is to treat it as a thing in which means and end are identified—To witness the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions[.] To withdraw the thoughts from the machinery of life to fix them with appropriate emotions on the great facts of human life wh[ich] machinery does not affect’ (Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, pp. 141–2). 41. Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 148; ‘The Critic as Artist’, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, IV. Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford, 2007), pp. 123–206 (178). 42. Wilde, ‘Critic as Artist’, p. 179. 43. Edward Thomas, Walter Pater: A Critical Study (1913), pp. 30–1.

Afterword Stephen Bann

Shortly after Pater’s death in July 1894, the magazine of his old school, King’s Canterbury, published an obituary not exempt from obfuscation, though acknowledging that the loss was deplored by ‘almost every journal in the kingdom’.1 Pater had not made his mark heroically like a winner of the Victoria Cross, or ‘a sailor who goes down with his ship’. ‘Mr Pater’s excellence lay in a region of which boys know and can know but little, and was of a kind which it is impossible for them to appreciate or understand . . . Mr Pater was a critic, a student of literature, a lover of books.’ It was forty years since Pater had attended King’s as a day boy, wending his way each morning from the little Georgian terraced house on Summer Hill by the old footpath leading from Harbledown to Canterbury (as indicated by his meticulous biographer, Thomas Wright).2 He had made little impact on the school community, though his five-shilling subscription for participating in cricket, and a similar sum for football, remains on record.3 In his final year, 1858, he had shared the prize for ecclesiastical history with his friend John McQueen, whose tally of prizes was more impressive. However, he left King’s with a scholarship to the Queen’s College, Oxford. As noted in this obituary, Pater revisited his old school only three years before his death. He attended the Speech Day in 1891 at which his friend and fellow alumnus, Revd Robert Ottley, preached to the school on ‘Faith and Consecration’. Now Principal of Pusey House, Oxford, Ottley inspired his audience with the sentiment that ‘there are tasks laid upon us calling for more than material or mental strength. An English boy can never be sure in what distant scene he may end his days.’4

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Pater had an opportunity to refresh his memory of the Cathedral Close where the school was situated, and possibly acquired his second, up-todate, and pristine edition of Revd William Gostling’s A Walk in and about the City of Canterbury, which served in the compilation of his own sobering account of the destiny of an English boy, ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (published in 1892).5 In 1893, Pater decided to endow the Library of the King’s School with a set of his books: Marius the Epicurean, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Imaginary Portraits, and The Renaissance (the last marked ‘to follow’, not, one assumes, because of any inhibition in presenting the text that had caused so much aggravation at Oxford on its first publication, but because he was awaiting delivery of the fourth edition published that year). However, the aforementioned obituary was equivocal in its acknowledgement of the gift: ‘The books he wrote are few: he sent them to us recently, and they occupy a narrow space upon our shelves. If we cannot all understand them, we can at least remember that there is not a sentence in them which the most fastidious critic could improve.’ I will return to this final period of Pater’s life, and his Canterbury connections, which may provide a clue to the enigma of an ‘imaginary portrait’ figuring prominently in this collection. But my first duty is to underline the extraordinary contrast between this vision of a hermetic belletrist and the overall impression of a many-sided, inspirational figure, with a message for our times, which is communicated here: a figure, moreover, whose achievement may have been to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the very basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century. In the words of one of the editors of this collection, he has a claim to have revived the ‘classical tradition in its broadest sense’. Furthermore, Charles Martindale is justified in underlining the point that Pater’s contribution to the study of classical antiquity is an aspect of his legacy that has been conspicuously neglected, by comparison with his contribution to literary studies (and possibly to the development of art history). This may not always have been the case beyond these shores. If one takes as an index of his influence the translation of his major works into European languages, the Germanspeaking lands offer an exception: the first German translations of Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism were published in 1904, only two years after The Renaissance. Wolfgang Iser has carefully dissected the links between Pater and a number of German writers who placed Marius and these two essay collections at the centre of their interest.6 There is also

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the more recent phenomenon in France of Jean-Baptiste Picy, author of the new French translation of Plato and Platonism appearing in 1998, who maintains that Pater’s work is of value to current students of Greek philosophy, and not simply ‘a dusty historical document from Queen Victoria’s last decades’.7 But neither of these examples disproves the major contention that is implied in the Introduction, and echoed throughout this collection, not least in James Porter’s eloquent discussion of Marius in Chapter 8: that Pater’s classical works constitute a call for a ‘renewed humanism’, and so provide a template for the vital and needful renewal of the study of classical literature in the contemporary world. Beyond doubt, the essential location of Pater’s teaching, and the main focus of his adult life, was Oxford. It was the prospect of reactions from that quarter that concerned Thomas Wright when he warned the publisher of his imminent biography: ‘I hear that Oxford is all of a boil over the book. All the better for us. Let it boil.’8 Wright had no cause for worry, as Charles Shadwell, Provost of Oriel and Pater’s literary executor, responded to the announcement of publication in ‘very pleasant’ terms. (He had already assured the Canterbury connection by letting McQueen read the first volume, and by dedicating the whole work to the Headmaster of the King’s School.) Yet assessments of the impact of Pater’s teaching at Oxford, and his general contribution to the development of Classics in the university, had surely been irretrievably contaminated by the disputes over the morality of his ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance. As Martindale demonstrates in his Introduction, the tendency to minimize his significance in the development of the Oxford curriculum has persisted until recently. It is a merit of the present volume that it puts beyond any doubt the seriousness of Pater’s engagement with the philosophy of ancient Greece, from the Presocratics to Plato and Aristotle. In emphasizing the degree to which Pater pioneered the incorporation of recent archaeological material into the curriculum, it also provides the context for his major contribution to the understanding of Greek sculpture as an exemplary form of plastic art. The wider question of Pater’s ‘humanism’, and its present significance, stands somewhat apart from this issue, and should indeed be viewed historically, by following the reception of his writings over the years. The copy of The Renaissance preserved in the Florentine villa of Bernard Berenson, I Tatti, bears the annotations of its owner and his wife, including the dates of their reading. Mary Berenson (herself a noted art historian

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and sister to the American writer Logan Pearsall Smith) inserts her firm corrections, such as the point that the ‘face of doubtful sex’ placed as a frontispiece is ‘Not by Leonardo’. At the beginning of ‘The School of Giorgione’, she writes sarcastically: ‘What an Oxford man can find to say about a Painter of whom he knows little’. More telling, however, than these abrasive comments is the note of the period at which their readings took place; for Bernard: ‘Read again first time since 1885 March 28’; for Mary: ‘Read again March 30 1942’. Is it conceivable that Berenson would not have been struck by the difference between the circumstances of his initial reading, when he was a young Bostonian setting out on his career as an art historian and connoisseur, and those of their second reading, immured at Settignano for the duration of the Second World War? Another mid-century theatre of war had encouraged the translation of The Renaissance into a new language just a few years previously. Manent i Cisa began his translation into Catalan in February 1938, while the Spanish Civil War raged around him, in sympathy with the philosophy of new ‘humanism’ that inspired the Catalan resistance.9 One does not have to go so far into the twentieth century to observe how the issue of Pater’s ‘humanism’ concerned readers from widely differing constituencies. Isobel Hurst hints in Chapter 1 at Pater’s appeal to ‘feminine counter-culture’. My own copy of the 1899 reprint of Marius contains testimony from a female reader who is all the more interesting for being untypical. Florence Montgomery (of 56 Cadogan Place) has inscribed her name in large characters in both volumes, acknowledging that the book was a gift from ‘Mamma’, dated 17 January 1900. Yet Florence was no young bluestocking from Belgravia. Her ‘Mamma’ was Charlotte Montgomery (née Campbell), the wife of a military baronet and first cousin once removed of Lord Alfred Douglas. Florence herself, born in 1843 and unmarried, was in her own right an author of note; she published in 1869 the acclaimed novel Misunderstood, whose plot, involving the tragic childhood of two boys (one of them named Miles), elicited the strong interest of Henry James. For the flyleaf of volume II, she selects a quotation from the Quarterly Review (April 1901) to sum up Pater’s contemporary message: Pater will always be caviare to the multitude but a source of delight to all those who can appreciate conscientious and exquisite literary workmanship . . . He

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faithfully reflects the humanistic movement, and is its accredited representative. This modern humanism differs from the humanism of the Renaissance, while bearing in the most important features, a strong resemblance to it.

This ready-made assessment, however, belies all the evidence of personal work that has accompanied Florence Montgomery’s reading. The text is replete with underlinings and cross-references in pencil. Annotations in ink supply information about Greek philosophers such as Protagoras and Heraclitus. Crosses against the publisher’s listing of works ‘by the same author’ predict perhaps her order of reading: ‘1st The Renaissance’ (which she has presumably read); ‘2nd Marius’ (in which she is engaged); and ‘3rd Plato and Platonism’ (a future commitment?). In short, the reflexive material added to the two volumes suggests an intensive selfcultivation on the part of this mature woman, who has had none of the educational advantages of her public-school educated brother (whose third Christian name happens to be Gaston). I can find no evidence to prove that the Montgomerys were personally acquainted with Pater. But Miss Montgomery relies on a woman critic who knew him well to provide an extensive summary of his merits.10 Six blank sheets of volume II, including the obverse of the back cover, are covered with the conclusions of Vernon Lee’s Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Indeed who can tell whether the teachings of Walter Pater’s maturity—the insistance [sic] on scrupulously disciplined activity, on cleaness [sic] and clearness of thought and feeling, on the harmony attainable only through moderation, the intensity attainable only through effort—who can tell whether this abstract part of his doctrine would affect, as it does, all kindred spirits if the mood had not been prepared by some of those descriptions of visible scenes—the spring mornings above the Catacombs, the Valley of Sparta, the paternal house of Marius; and that Temple of Aesculapius with its shining rhythmical waters— which attune our whole being?11

Nowadays our instinct is to pass over this evolutionary view of Pater’s development, which seems too moralistic in underlining a supposed achievement of ‘maturity’. Instead we locate his ‘humanism’ in what Martindale qualifies as his ‘transhistoricality’, and Porter as the ‘vigorous and repeated juxtaposition of discrepant times’. How seductive, assuredly, is Pater’s insistence (apropos Plato) that ‘the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before’ (PP, 8)! Pater’s brusque interjections of ‘discrepant’ chronology may occasionally be a stumbling block: witness the statement, ‘Victor Hugo’s odious

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dream of L’Homme qui rit, must have had something of a prototype among those old Roman gladiators’ (PP, 219). Surely it is onerous to have to assess—from that passing reference to Hugo’s tale of England under Queen Anne—the relevance to Rome of the plight of the boy actor Gwynplaine, hideously disfigured as a child so as to appear all smiles to boorish spectators? Much more often than not, however, Pater’s ‘discrepancies’ are muted by the movement of his sentences—and absorbed within the musical rise and fall of his cadences. Such is the passage from ‘Lacedaemon’, where the chanting of Spartan youths offers a thread that connects not only to the English choral music that Pater knew well, but also to the psalm singing of their charmingly qualified ‘cousins’ in the Temple at Jerusalem: ‘youthful beauty and strength in perfect service—a manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian’s cousins at Sion, singing there the law and its praises’ (PP, 224). This Afterword began with Pater’s return to his old school for the Speech Day of 1891. The relevance of this visit to the writing of ‘Emerald Uthwart’ has already been noted. ‘Lacedaemon’, the essay from which the last quotation is taken, was also published in the Contemporary Review in June 1891, so that the reference to ‘old English schools’ is by no means inconsequential. ‘Lacedaemon’ was duly included in the collection Plato and Platonism in 1893, which also saw the first publication, in Harper’s Magazine (November 1893), of Pater’s final ‘imaginary portrait’, ‘Apollo in Picardy’. This haunting essay has been amply discussed in the present volume, but merits a further footnote, on two counts. Caroline Vout, in Chapter 9, remarks perceptively that it is ‘one of the most visual or painterly of the imaginary portraits’. Perhaps this judgement might lead us back to the biography of Pater by Thomas Wright, to which I have referred earlier. Wright was assuredly a close reader of Pater. He spotted that the current edition of Imaginary Portraits featured an uproarious misprint—‘nasty footsteps’ of Watteau on the stairs, as opposed to ‘hasty’! (see IP (4th edn.), p. 43). But he was overwhelmed, as his letters testify, by the prodigal offers of biographical material volunteered by Pater’s friend Richard Jackson, who obtrudes indiscreetly throughout in the second volume of the biography. Still, Jackson’s suggestions might not all be fantasy, especially when he offers illustrations of the items in his possession that (he claims) were shown to Pater.

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Beneath Wright’s full-page photographic illustration of Domenico Cunego’s print after Domenichino’s Apollo and Hyacinthus, there is the caption: ‘It was this engraving that suggested to Pater his “Apollo in Picardy”.’ Pater would hardly have seen Domenichino’s original painting on a visit to Rome, since this was (and is still) enshrined in the Loggia of the Palazzo Farnese (French Embassy). But the engraving is sufficiently striking, featuring the two figures in lustrous, almost sculptural plenitude against a dark valley landscape. Apollo’s head is encircled with a halo of that ‘pure light’ so often noted as Apollo’s attribute in this volume, and Hyacinthus droops in perfect contrapposto. Another question emerges with ‘Apollo in Picardy’: why Picardy? Vout rightly notes that Pater’s essay on Amiens Cathedral, published in 1894, indicates his interest in the province. But another text might also be relevant. In November 1891, following Pater’s Speech Day visit, The Cantuarian published an unattributed article entitled ‘Soule’.12 Following an editorial which focuses on ‘[t]he prospects of the football team’, this text describes an obsolete ball game once played in the northwestern provinces of France, including Picardy, which condoned excessive violence by teams from competing parishes, sometimes resulting in severe injury and even death. The possibility that this text was connected with Pater’s visit was raised by a previous King’s archivist, Paul Pollak. But it was agreed that, though finely written, it was not in Pater’s style. It was not realized that a clue in the text indicated it to be, in effect, a translation. The name ‘M. Lonvestre’, interpolated in the text, masked the authorship of Émile Souvestre, from whose book, Les Derniers Bretons (1836), the extract is taken. This work gained international celebrity, with passages on ‘Soule’ being first translated, rather mechanically, in the Westminster Review in 1838. A revised edition of 1866 entered the Bodleian Library. Is it conceivable that Pater, who (as Bénédicte Coste argues in Chapter 2) showed great interest in translation, attempted a better translation of ‘Soule’, in his youth—and that he later passed the manuscript informally to The Cantuarian, not proofing it subsequently (a process which might have involved handwritten annotations, and so accounts for the corruption of the name ‘Souvestre’ and other Breton place-names)? At the very least, he could have seen this fine new translation, when it was published. In truth, the ‘raging frenzy’ with which the ‘countryman’ François ‘batters’ the skull of his rival ball-player cannot equate directly with the fatal wind that causes Apollyon’s discus

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to wound Hyacinth, ‘crushing in the tender skull upon the brain’ (MS, 167). The victim of ‘Soule’ is left ‘ever maimed and witless’,13 but Pater’s Prior Saint-Jean ends up ‘in a region of the atmosphere likely to restore lost wits, whence indeed he can still see the country—vallis monachorum’ (MS, 170).

Notes 1. The Cantuarian (December 1894), p. 2. 2. Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols (New York, 1907), I, p. 34. 3. I am grateful to the Archivist of the King’s School, Peter Henderson, for making available the documents cited here. 4. Sermons preached in the Cathedral at the Commemoration of Founders of the King’s School, Canterbury on Speech Day from 1887 to 1896 (New York, 1897), p. 48. 5. Lene Østermark-Johansen (IPJT) has noted the borrowings from Gostling in the composition of ‘Emerald Uthwart’. The King’s School Archive holds an early edition of Gostling’s guide that belonged to Pater. My own finely bound copy, from the illustrated edition of 1825, also bears his signature. 6. See The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, ed. Stephen Bann (2004), pp. 145–7. 7. Bann, Reception, p. 138. 8. Letter of Thomas Wright, 28 August 1906, Manuscript collection, MS 3185: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 9. See Jacqueline A. Hurtley, in Bann, Reception, pp. 235ff. 10. For the evolution of Lee’s ideas on Pater, see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 55–92. 11. The quotation is taken from the ‘Valedictory’ section (pp. 235–60) of Vernon Lee, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1896). Florence Montgomery transcribes a continuous section from pp. 255–8 (though omitting the mention of what Lee refers to as Pater’s Studies on Plato), a paragraph from p. 259, and a closing sentence from p. 260. In the passage quoted here, ‘insistance’ is spelled as in Lee’s text, but Montgomery has misspelled ‘cleanness’. 12. The Cantuarian (November 1891), pp. 156–60. 13. The Cantuarian (November 1891), p. 160.

Bibliography on Pater and the Classics Compiled by Charles Martindale

NB: where London is the place of publication only the publication date is given. The Pater Newsletter (now renamed Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism) keeps track of publications.

1. General Bann, Stephen, ed., The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe (2004). Carrier, David, ‘Walter Pater’s “Winckelmann” ’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 35: 1 (2001), 99–109 (considers the relationship of literature and philosophy in Pater). Cattan, Lucien, Essai sur Walter Pater (Paris, 1936), ch. 2, ‘Les Images Grecs’, pp. 20–62. Conlon, John J., Walter Pater and the French Tradition (Lewisburg, PA, 1982) (contains material on French versions of Hellenism). DeLaura, David J., Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin, TX, 1970). Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990). Donoghue, Denis, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York, 1995) (one of the best and most sophisticated general introductions to Pater’s writings as a whole). Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Walter Pater’s Romantic Hellenism’, DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2003 (the only monograph-length study of the subject). Evangelista, Stefano, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke, 2009) (contains extensive discussion of Pater’s Hellenism). Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Greek Studies and Pater’s Delayed Meaning’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 57: 2 (2014), 170–83.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Towards the Fin de Siècle: Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford, 2015), pp. 643–68 (introduction to Pater’s writings on classical antiquity up to 1880). Gregory, Eileen, H. D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge, 1997), esp. ch. 3, ‘Pagan Mysteries: Walter Pater and Romantic Hellenism’, pp. 75–107 (includes a discussion of unpublished essays which deal with Pater at length). Hangest, Germain d’, Walter Pater: L’Homme et l’œuvre, 2 vols (Paris, 1961). Inman, Billie Andrew, Walter Pater’s Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References, 1858–1873 (New York, 1981) (an essential research tool). Inman, Billie Andrew, Walter Pater and His Reading: 1874–1877: With a Bibliography of His Library Borrowings, 1878–1894 (New York, 1990). Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980) (a landmark study, containing extensive discussions of Pater including Marius and Plato and Platonism (use index), sometimes of an unsympathetic kind). Law, Helen H., ‘Pater’s Use of Greek Quotations’, MLN 58: 8 (1943), 575–85. Martindale, Charles, Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford, 2005) (Kant and Pater are protagonist and deuteragonist of this study (use index)). Martindale, Charles, ‘Reception—A New Humanism?: Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical’, Classical Receptions Journal, 5: 2 (2013), 169–83 (argues that Pater is a model for the student of classical reception). Picy, Jean-Baptiste, ‘Pater’s Poikilia: Auto-références, métaphores et impressions dans Platon et le platonisme (1893)’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 68 (2008), 135–54. Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 2007), ch. 5 ‘The Classicism of Frederic Leighton’, pp. 129–61 (on Leighton, Pater, and Hegel’s classical art-form). Prettejohn, Elizabeth, ‘Pater and the Classics’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, V. After 1880, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford, 2017) (introduction to Pater’s writings on classical antiquity from 1880 onwards). Ribeyrol, Charlotte, ‘Étrangeté, passion, couleur’: L’Hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds (1865–1880) (Grenoble, 2013). Ross, Iain, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013) (the kind of comprehensive study still needed for Pater). Seiler, R. M., ed., Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (1980) (receptions of Pater’s writings before 1914). Shuter, William F., Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997) (reads early Pater through the later work, with a special emphasis on Plato and Platonism). Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Vance, Norman, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1997). Vance, Norman, and Jennifer Wallace, eds, The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880 (Oxford, 2015) (the overall context for Pater and the Classics).

2. Pater and Classics at Oxford Bowen, James, ‘Education, Ideology, and the Ruling Class: Hellenism and English Public Schools in the Nineteenth Century’, in Rediscovering Hellenism, ed. G. W. Clarke (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 161–86. Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994) (the standard work on the subject). Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, in Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, ed. George Rousseau (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 206–36. Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Walter Pater’s Teaching in Oxford: Classics and Aestheticism’, in Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000, ed. Christopher Stray (2007), pp. 64–77. Richards, Bernard, ‘Walter Pater at Oxford’, in Brasenose College: The Pater Society, ed. Gregory McGrath (Pater Society, 1988), pp. 1–14. Shuter, William F., ‘Pater as Don’, Prose Studies, 11: 1 (1988), 41–60. Shuter, William F., ‘Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of “Greats” ’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 46: 3 (2003), 250–78. Shuter, William F., ‘The Dubious Academic’, ch. 4, in Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 78–91. Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford, 1998) (standard work on the educational context, but with few references to Pater).

3. Fiction Connected with Antiquity Behlman, Lee, ‘Stoics, Epicureans, and Christians in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 31: 1 (2004), 133–69. Bizzotto, Elisa, ‘The Legend of the Returning Gods in Pater and Wilde’, in Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Franco Marucci and Emma Sdegno (Milan, 2000), pp. 161–74. Bizzotto, Elisa, ‘The Imaginary Portrait: Pater’s Contribution to a Literary Genre’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC, 2002), pp. 213–23.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brzenk, E. J., ‘Pater and Apuleius’, Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 55–60. Brzenk, E. J., ‘Apuleius, Pater and the Bildungsroman’, in Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, ed. B. L. Hijmans and R. T. Van der Paardt (Groningen, 1978), pp. 231–7. Court, Franklin E., ‘The Critical Reception of Pater’s Marius’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 27: 2 (1984), 124–39. Dahl, Curtis, ‘Pater’s Marius and Historical Novels on Early Christian Times’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28: 1 (1973), 1–24. Evangelista, Stefano, ‘Rome and the Romantic Heritage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, in Romans and Romantics, ed. Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (Oxford, 2012), pp. 305–26. Frean, Roland G., ‘Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean: Notes and Commentary Preliminary to a Critical Edition’, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1961 (a massive and rich research resource on Pater’s sources, underused because of its relative inaccessibility). Harrison, John Smith, ‘Pater, Heine, and the Gods of Old Greece’, PMLA, 39: 3 (1924), 655–86. Harrison, S. J., ‘Two Victorian Versions of the Roman Novel’, in Metamorphic Reflections: Essays presented to Ben Hijmans at his 75th Birthday, ed. M. Zimmerman and R. Van der Paardt (Leuven, 2004), pp. 265–78 (on Bulwer Lytton and Pater). Keefe, Robert, ‘ “Apollo in Picardy”: Pater’s Monk and Ruskin’s Madness’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 29: 4 (1986), 361–70. Lyons, Sara, ‘The Disenchantment/Reenchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater’, Modern Language Review, 109: 4 (2014), 873–95. Maxwell, Catherine, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”: Vernon Lee’s Portraits’, Word and Image, 13: 3 (1997), 253–69 (compares Pater and Lee on the gods-in-exile). Monsman, Gerald C., Pater’s Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore, 1967). Østermark-Johansen, Lene, ed., Walter Pater: Imaginary Portraits, MHRA Jewelled Tortoise Volume I (2014) (all Pater’s short fictions, with helpful introduction and notes). Porter, James I., ‘Learning from Pater’, Classical Receptions Journal, 5: 2 (2013), 218–25 (on Marius and models of reception). Rosenblatt, Louise M., ‘The Genesis of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean’, Comparative Literature, 14 (1962), 242–60. Saunders, Max, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford, 2010), ch. 1 ‘Im/personality: The Imaginary Portraits of Walter Pater’. Shuter, William F., ‘Pater’s “Grudge against Apollo”: Mythology and Pathology in “Apollo in Picardy” ’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 44: 2 (2001), 181–98.

BIBLIOGRAPHY



Small, Ian, ‘The “Fictional” and the “Real” in Marius’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 27: 2 (1984), 140–8. Small, Ian, ‘Marius the Epicurean and the Historia Augusta’, Notes and Queries, 34 (1987), 48–50. Turner, Paul, ‘Pater and Apuleius’, Victorian Studies, 3 (1960), 290–6. Williams, Carolyn, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 1989) (argues that in Marius Pater employs a system of typology).

4. Greek Culture: Literature, Myth, Religion Connor, Steve, ‘Myth and Meta-Myth in Max Müller and Walter Pater’, in The Sun is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford, 1989), pp. 199–222. Coste, Bénédicte, ‘La Mythologie patérienne’, in Walter Pater, Essais sur la mythologie et l’art grec, tr. Bénédicte Coste (Paris, 2010), pp. 5–26 (this volume also contains an essay on the use of myth in Pater and Freud). Evangelista, Stefano, ‘ “Outward Nature and the Moods of Men”: Romantic Mythology in Pater’s Essays on Dionysus and Demeter’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC, 2002), pp. 107–18. Evangelista, Stefano, ‘A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus’, Victorian Review, 34: 2 (2008), 200–18. Keefe, Robert, and Janice A. Keefe, Walter Pater and the Gods of Disorder (Athens, OH, 1988). Malley, Shawn, ‘Disturbing Hellenism: Walter Pater, Charles Newton, and the Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC, 2002), pp. 90–106. Østermark-Johansen, Lene, ‘Apollo in the North: Transmutations of the Sun God in Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 80 (2014), 2–10. Prins, Yopie, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago, 1999), pp. 43–81 (on the influence of Pater’s Dionysus).

5. Ancient Art Dowling, Linda, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with Earth’, Victorian Studies, 31: 2 (1988), 209–31. Dowling, Linda, ‘Ruskin’s Pied Beauty and the Constitution of a “Homosexual” Code’, Victorian Newsletter, 75 (1989), 1–8 (contains material on poikilia in Pater).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jenkyns, Richard, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (Cambridge, MA, 1992), esp. ‘The Idea of Sculpture’, pp. 87–142 (a rather old-fashioned study, operating with a Modernist paradigm, largely unaffected by the revaluation of Victorian art within British art history). Østermark-Johansen, Lene, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, 2011), esp. ch. 6 ‘Pater and Greek Sculpture’, pp. 213–76 (a landmark study). Prettejohn, Elizabeth, ‘The Modernism of Frederic Leighton’, in English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity, ed. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester, 2000), pp. 31–48 (material on Pater and Greek sculpture). Prettejohn, Elizabeth, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (2012) (esp. ch. 2; use index). Shuter, William F., ‘Pater, Overbeck, and Gerhard: Some Emendations and Additions to Billie Andrew Inman’s Pater and His Reading, 1874–1877’, Pater Newsletter, 45 (2002), 11–21. Siegel, Jonah, ‘Art and the Museum’, in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, ed. Elicia Clements and Lesley Higgins (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 13–32. Siegel, Jonah, ‘Art, Aesthetics, and Archaeological Poetics’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, IV. 1790–1880, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford, 2015), pp. 203–41. Thomas, Jane, ‘Icons of Desire: The Classical Statue in Later Victorian Literature’, Yearbook of English Studies, 40: 1–2 (2010), 246–72.

6. Ancient Philosophy Andrews, Kit, ‘Walter Pater as Oxford Hegelian: Plato and Platonism and T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 72: 3 (2011), 437–59. Campbell, Lewis, ‘Pater’s Plato and Platonism’, Classical Review, 7 (1893), 263–6. Deutsch, David, ‘To “Ennoble and Fortify”: Pater’s Oxonian Musical Ideal’, Pater Newsletter, 65 (2014), 5–25 (on Platonic elements in Pater’s thinking about music). Evangelista, Stefano, ‘ “Lovers and Philosophers at Once”: Aesthetic Platonism in the Victorian Fin de Siècle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 36: 2 (2006), 230–44. Fletcher, Richard, Apuleius’ Platonism: The Impersonation of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2014), esp. ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (sees Pater as an instructive model for a more nuanced reading of Apuleius as a Platonist). Higgins, Lesley, ‘Jowett and Pater: Trafficking in Platonic Wares’, Victorian Studies, 37: 1 (1993), 43–72.

BIBLIOGRAPHY



Knoepflmacher, U. C., ‘Pater’s Religion of Sanity: Plato and Platonism as a Document of Victorian Unbelief ’, Victorian Studies, 6: 2 (1962), 152–68. Lampe, Kurt, The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life (Princeton, 2014), esp. ch. 9, pp. 168–92 (on Marius and the New Cyrenaicism, a landmark study). Lee, Adam, ‘The Platonism of Walter Pater’, DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2012. Lee, Adam, ‘Platonic Communion in Pater’s “Unfinished Romance” ’, Pater Newsletter, 63 (2013), 25–43. Lee, Adam, ‘The Authority of Affinity in Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 23 (2014), 61–79. Monsman, Gerald, ‘The Platonic Eros of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: “Love’s Reflected Image” in the 1890s’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 45: 1 (2002), 26–45. Orrells, Daniel, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford, 2011), esp. ch. 2 ‘Translating the Love of Philosophy: Jowett and Pater on Plato’, pp. 97–145. Østermark-Johansen, Lene, ‘On The Motion of Great Waters: Walter Pater, Leonardo and Heraclitus’, in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, ed. John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 87–103 (on the influence of Heraclitus in the period). Shuter, William F., ‘Pater on Plato: “Subjective” or “Sound”?’, Prose Studies, 5: 2 (1982), 215–28. Shuter, William F., ‘Heraclitus, Hegel, and Plato’, ch. 3 in Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 61–77.

Index Abbott, Evelyn 296 ‘Abhandlung’ (Winckelmann) 75, 80n.21 abstract theory 71, 208 Academy, Plato’s 8, 276, 310, 311 Acta Arvalia 108 ‘activity’ 266, 317–19, 319 Adorante (Berlin) (sculpture) 224, 227 Adorno, Theodor W. 81, 82–3 Aeneid (Virgil) 34, 124, 142 Aesculapius 125 aesthetic criticism 64–6, 71, 76, 208, 242, 315 aesthetic historicism 150 ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (‘AP’) 14, 48–9, 202 Agamemnon (translation by FitzGerald) 39 ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen, The’ (GS) 90, 229–30, 319 and Discobolus 170, 286 on homoerotic/pederastic content in Greek art 90 Patroclus’ funeral 171 and Platonic Ideas 284 ‘Age of Graven Images, The’ (GS) 207, 209, 217n.31, 229, 234–5 agnosticism 244 Albinius, Lucius 136, 138, 140, 145 Albius, in Horace’s Epistles 7, 113–15 Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence 19, 143 Ambarvalia 6, 105–10, 115–16, 118 Amiens Cathedral 164, 331 Amores (Ovid) 104, 113, 120n.14 anachronism 10, 17, 19, 154, 159, 160 Analogy of Religion (Butler) 310, 312–13 animism 247, 275–90 anticipation: in ME 126, 153, 155 in Ren. 157 and repeal 82 Antiope (Amazon) 173, 183, 186, 188, 189, 190 Aphrodite, Melian, see Venus de Milo

Apollo 84 of Canachus (statue) 236 Apollo at Amyclae 164, 201, 208–9 Apollo Belvedere (statue) 168–9 ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (MS) 163–73, 290, 330–1 and ‘gods in exile’ story 284, 287–9 and Greek religion 242 ‘Apollos’ (‘kouroi’) 229 Apollyon 169–70, 287–9, 331–2 apologists, Christian 128 apophrades 210 Appreciations (App.) 5–6, 196n.5, 290 see also ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ see also ‘On Wordsworth’ Apuleius 17, 135, 140, 282 in ME 152, 156, 282, 289 On the God of Socrates 130, 282 archaeology 5, 38, 220–1 and Pater’s essays 206, 225–37 archaic sculpture 229, 230–2, 235 Archer, William 194 Areopagitica (Milton) 298 Aristippus 7, 125 Aristotle 309–21 and ‘habit’ 312–16 Nicomachean Ethics 309, 310, 312, 314, 317–18, 319, 320 Politics 42 Aristoxenus 92 Arnold, Matthew 2, 3, 51, 312 debate with Newman 48 Literature and Dogma 317 ‘Literature and Science’ 41 on Marcus Aurelius 15, 124 Arnold, Thomas 104 ‘art for art’s sake’ 253n.8, 260, 299 Artemis 183, 185, 186, 187, 189, 192 ‘Art and Religion’ (unpublished manuscript) 264 Arval Brothers 107–8, 109 Ash Wednesday Supper, The (Bruno) 313–14 Ästhetik (Hegel) 73



INDEX

‘aura’ 208 Aurelius, Marcus: in ME 116–17, 121–31 Meditations 122, 127, 129–31 mourning his son 144 Palatine home of 136, 137, 141, 142–3 Averroès et l’averoïsme (Renan) 311 Bacchae (Euripides) 184, 190, 193–4, 248, 250, 254n.15 ‘Bacchanals of Euripides, The’ (GS) 39, 60n.12, 184, 190, 248 Bacchus (Solomon) 244 Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum 314 Baehrens, Emil 104 Bal, Mieke, Quoting Caravaggio 23 Barnes, Jonathan (M. R. Stopper) 310 barns, monastic 169–70 Barrow, Rosemary 2–3 ‘beatific vision’ 18, 158 Beauty 65, 90 Idea of 280–1 Winckelmann on 75, 80n.21 ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’ (GS) 48, 120n.17, 165, 168, 225, 237–8, 253n.10 ‘Age of Graven Images, The’ (GS) 207, 209, 217n.31, 229, 234–5 Apollo at Amyclae 164, 201 ‘Heroic Age of Greek Art, The’ (GS) 206, 214, 229 Pausanias in 203, 205 poikilia 56 Behlman, Lee 259 being and doing 317–18, 321 Beings, eternal 277 belatedness 11, 64, 164–5, 201–3 Benjamin, Walter 82, 216n.28 Benson, A. C. 36 Benson, E. F. 42 Berendis, Hieronymus Dieterich, Winckelmann letters to 68–70 Berenson, Bernard and Mary 327–8 Berg, Friedrich Reinhold von 75, 76 Berkeley, George 23, 24 Bible, and religious education 297–8 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 214, 251 Blake, William 244 Bloom, Harold 202, 210 ‘the Blue Jane’ 212 Bradley, Katharine 41

Brasenose College, Pater’s fellowship 34, 36–8, 40, 309–10 Britain, Charles 310 Browning, Robert 192 Bruno, Giordano De Umbris Idearum 314 La Cena de le ceneri 313–14 Buckler, William E. 163 Bunting, Percy William 38 Burrows, Montagu, Pass and Class 312 Butler, Bishop Joseph, Analogy of Religion 310, 312–13 Butler, Shane 20 Bywater, Ingram 33, 259 Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae 263, 270n.1 Cambridge School 249 Cambridge University 41 Campbell, Lewis 38, 275 Canachus 229, 234–5, 236 Capes, W. W. 33 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 82, 90–1, 94 Catullus 168–9 Cavalcaselle, G. B., History of Painting in North Italy, A 233 Cecilia (in ME) 113, 116, 142 home 135, 136, 140, 141–2, 144 Cena de le ceneri, La (The Ash Wednesday Supper) (Bruno) 313–14 Chest of Cypselus 207, 229, 237 ‘Child in the House, The’ 137, 138 children: becoming as 14 dead 142, 144 in ME 111–13 and prisoner at triumph 141 ‘choice of life’ 276, 289 Christians and Christianity: apologists 128 and houses 144 in ME 16, 18, 125, 127, 153 in Meditations 128–9 persecution of 123–4, 126 and Plato 295 references 56 and Stoicism 123 and study of religion 248, 252 Winckelmann conversion 73, 75 chthonic cults 245, 247, 249 Churton Collins, John 42

INDEX

Cicero 120n.13, 235 Tusculan house 136, 143 class, social 74–5 classical ideal 81–95, 168 ‘classical tradition’ 2–3, 12, 84, 171, 221, 238n.8 Classical Tradition, The: (Grafton, Most, Settis) 3 (Silk, Gildenhard, Barrow) 2–3 classic (term) 5–6, 171 Collier, Jeremy 123 Collingwood, R. G. 83 colour: and Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine 53 and ‘white light’ 88 and ‘Winckelmann’ 70–1, 72 Colvin, Sidney 226 combined or university lectures system 37–8 Commodus 126 ‘Conclusion’ (Ren.) 11, 12, 14, 71, 327 flame metaphor 318 ‘habit’ 312–13 and Heraclitus 261, 262, 265 contemplation 244, 317, 319–21 Contemporary Review 38, 47, 330 Cornelius (in ME) 125 Cornutus 105 ‘Corpse of Julia’ (Symonds) 210–11 Coste, Bénédicte 31 counter-culture, feminine 328 Courage, Idea of 280–1 Cranstoun, James 104 Creighton, Mrs. Mandell 39 ‘Critic as Artist, The’ (Wilde) 319–20 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 281 Crombie, Ian, Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, An 9 Crowe, J. A., History of Painting in North Italy, A 233 Cults of the Greek States, The (Farnell) 250 Cyrenaicism 7, 125, 275 ‘daemons’/daemonic Ideas 282–3, 288–90 ‘dainty’, use of 228 Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio (translation by Shadwell) 47, 50–1 Purgatory 320



‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, translation in 47 Davis, Whitney 31 death, attitudes to 141–2 Decadent writers 247 ‘decisive moments’ 82, 90–1 deconstructionists 2, 26n.22 Deep Classics 20 degrees, Oxford Classics 33–6 delicate pause 85–8 Demeter 189 see also ‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone, The’ Democritus 279–80 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (IP) 48, 166–7, 242, 287 De Profundis (Wilde) 312 Derniers Bretons, Les (Souvestre) 331 Description of Greece (Pausanias) see Periegesis (Description of Greece) (Pausanias) De Umbris Idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas) (Bruno) 314 D’hulst, Lieven 57 Dialogues, Plato’s 9, 23, 277, 295, 304, 314 Dialogues of Plato (Jowett) 42, 295 ‘Diaphaneitè’ (MS) 269 Diels, Hermann 263 ‘Dieux en exil, Les’ (Heine) 287 ‘digressions’ 10 Dio Cassius 121, 128 Dio Chrysostom 202, 207 Diogenes Laertius, Lives 263 Dionysus 190 see also ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (IP) see also ‘Study of Dionysus, A’ ‘Dionysus and Other Studies’ 184, 185 Dionysus Zagreus 245 disciplina arcani 315 Discobolus (Myron) (sculpture) 93, 170, 171, 286 discrepancies 157, 329, 330 Dissen, Ludolph 103 ‘divine reason’ (‘die göttliche Vernunft’) 265, 266, 267, 323n.38 ‘doctrine of Ideas’ 279–80 doing and being 317–18, 321 Donoghue, Denis 23–4 Dontas of Lacedaemon 207 Dorians, The (Müller) 8, 9



INDEX

Douglas, Lord Alfred 312, 328 dramatic present tense 192–3 ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (IP) 71, 167 eclecticism 262, 268 ecphrasis 16, 73, 139–40, 141 Elder Philostratus 166 Elsner on 165 of Greek artefacts 207 and Pausanias 201, 207, 208–9 education Platonic theory of 293–306 religious 297–8 ‘elevated spirits’ 248–9 Elgin Marbles 72–3, 224 Eliade, Mircea 284 Eliot, T. S.: ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ 195–6 ‘Place of Pater, The’ 259 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 13–14 Elsner, Jaś 165, 203 ‘Emerald Uthwart’ 188, 191, 330, 332n.5 Endymion 169 energeia 314, 317–18, 319 English literature 42–3 Epicureans, in ME 114, 153, 158–9 Epistles (Horace) 104, 114–15 epithets 54, 55, 202, 232, 236, 241 eroticism 104, 117 see also homoeroticism erotic madness 282 ‘erotics of the gaze’ 206–12 ‘Essay on the Capacity of the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art’ (Winckelmann) 75 Eternal Verities 281 Ethics of Aristotle, The (Grant) 314–15, 316, 317–18 Euphuism 104, 118 Euripides: Bacchae 190, 254n.15 Hippolytos Stephanephoros 185–6, 188, 190 Hippolytus Kalyptomenos 22 and ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ 183–4, 187, 190 Iphigenia 192 and mid-nineteenth-century poets 192

‘Euripides and Professor Murray’ (Eliot) 195–6 Euripides the Rationalist (Verrall) 194 Eusebius 126 Evander 142 Evangelista, Stefano 17, 18, 38, 101, 145, 238n.14, 319 Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, An (Crombie) 9 Faithfull, L. M. 40 Farnell, Lewis Richard 5, 220–1, 227, 237, 294 Cults of the Greek States, The 250 Fasti (Ovid) 53 Faustina 126, 133n.21 Fiske, Shanyn 41 FitzGerald, Edward 39 flame, metaphor 318 Flaubert, Gustave 21 Florian, in ‘Child in the House, The’ 137, 138, 140 flow 92, 93 Forms/form 157, 276, 300–1, 302, 311, 314 Foucault, Michel 290n.3 Fowler, Robert 181 Frazer, Sir James G. 169, 194, 205, 206, 213–14 free speech 298 Fronto, Cornelius 122–3, 130 Fuseli, Henry 82 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 164 Gaston de Latour (Gast.) 313–14 Gataker, Thomas 123, 124 Gautier, Théophile 166–7 general and particular 300–5 ‘Genius of Plato’ (PP) 9, 38 Gerhard, Eduard 67 Germany: archaeology 226 philhellenism 65, 66 philosophy 264 translations of Pater’s works 326 Geschichte der griechischen Plastik (Overbeck) 234, 235–6 Gibbon, Edward 123 Gildenhard, Ingo 2–3 Gilson, Étienne 313 Giorgione see ‘School of Giorgione, The’ (Ren.)

INDEX

‘gods in exile’ story (‘Apollo in Picardy’) (MS) 284, 287–9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 65, 67–9, 72 Iphigenia in Tauris 192 Roman Elegies 73 and Tibullus 103 Winckelmann’s letters to Berendis 68, 74–5 Winkelmann 67, 73–5, 76–7 Goldberg, Jonathan 19–20 Goldhill, Simon 16, 18 Gosse, Edmund 34, 36, 45n.30, 203 Gostling, William 332n.5 Walk in and about the City of Canterbury, A 326 ‘göttliche Vernunft, die’ (‘the divine reason’) 265, 266, 267, 323n.38 Grant, Alexander, Ethics of Aristotle, The 314–15, 316, 317–18 Granville Barker, Harley 194 ‘Great God Pan, The’ (Machen) 289 Greats course 38, 310 Greek, use in translations 56 Greek art 37, 165 see also Greek sculpture ‘Greek Art, with Pausanias I, V, and VI’ (lecture series) 226–7 Greek ideal 5, 78, 173, 223–4, 225–6 ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’ (Prins) 41 Greek religion 169, 241–52 Greek sculpture 5, 58, 172–3, 214, 219–37 and animism 284, 286–7 archaic 229, 230–2, 235 and colour 72 essays 5 and Nachahmung 87 and standstill-moments 92 and types 53 in ‘Winckelmann’ 71–3, 221–5 see also Myron; Parthenon sculptures; Pheidias; Polycleitus Greek Studies (GS) 39, 245 Lang review 206 see also ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen, The’; ‘Age of Graven Images, The’; ‘Bacchanals of Euripides, The’; ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’; ‘Marbles of Aegina, The’;



‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone, The’; ‘Study of Dionysus, A’ Green, Mrs. T. H. 39 Grote, George 53, 290n.12, 295, 303 History of Greece, A 269 ‘habit’ 312–17 habros 228, 236 Hadot, Pierre 275–6, 283 Halcyon (Lucian) 130 Hales, Shelley 101 Halicarnassus 52, 173 Hardinge, William 45n.30, 245 and Pater 245 Harloe, Katherine 31, 238n.14 Harper’s Magazine 163, 330 Harrison, Jane Ellen 41, 92, 194, 205, 212–14, 247 and citation of Pater 250, 251, 252 Introductory Studies in Greek Art 41 Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens 41, 212, 214 Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Greek Religion 213 Harrison, John Smith 287 Hebraism 205 hedonism 7, 65, 114 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 12, 82, 87 Lectures on Aesthetics (Ästhetik) 73, 85, 222 Pater on 223–4, 229 ‘Religion in the Form of Art’ 84 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie 264 and Winckelmann 224 Heidegger, Martin 58 Heine, Heinrich, ‘Dieux en exil, Les’ 287 Henrichs, Albert 250 Henzen, Wilhelm 108 Heraclitanism 89 Heracliti Ephesii Reliquiae (Bywater) 263 Heraclitus, Pater on 259, 261–70, 299 Herakleitos der Dunkle (Schleiermacher) 264–5, 268 Herder, J. W. 82 Herodotus 34, 70, 189, 228 ‘Heroic Age of Greek Art, The’ (GS) 206, 214, 229 Heroides (Ovid) 186 Heyne, Christian Gottlob 108, 113, 242



INDEX

Hierophantes 55, 57–8 Higgins, Lesley 36, 38 Hill, Donald L. 97n.18 Hippolytus Kalyptomenos (Euripides) 22, 185 ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ (GS) 22, 166, 173, 183–96, 204 Historia Augusta (SHA) 121 Historia Philosophiae Graecae (Ritter and Preller) 262–3 historicism 12–13, 16, 241–2, 270 aesthetic 150 and Heraclitus 262–3 unhistoricism 19–20 historic method of criticism 261–70 History of Ancient Art (Winckelmann) 203 History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae (Newton) 52 History of Greece, A (Grote) 269 History of Painting in North Italy, A (Crowe and Cavalcaselle) 233 history of philosophy 299–301, 304 and Jowett 310 ‘History of Philosophy’ (unpublished) 272n.14 History of the University of Oxford, The (Brock and Curthoys) 4 ‘hitting the mean’ 312 Hodge, Elizabeth 40 Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (Jebb) 22 Homer in ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’ 206–7 Pater on 11 in Periegesis 207 ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter’ 52, 53–4 homoeroticism 203 ‘Age of Athletic Prizemen, The’ 90 ‘Age of Graven Images, The’ (GS) 209 ‘Pantarkes’ (Symonds) 211–12 and the ‘Pausaniacs’ 212–15 and Winckelmann 73, 76, 87, 223 homosexuality 20, 90, 244 and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ 163 and ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’ 201 and Hippolytus 187 in Plato 38 Winckelmann 73, 75 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 36, 310

Horace 34, 104 Epistles 7, 104, 114–15 Odes 113–14 houses: Cecilia’s in ME 135, 136, 140, 141–2, 144 cosy cottages 145 interiors 187 Housman, A. E. 35 Howarth, Jane 39 humanism 149–50, 157–8, 327, 328–9 human sacrifice 248 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 76–7 Hurst, Isobel 294 huts, German 145 Hyacinthus 140, 164, 174n.9, 331–2, 332 ‘Age of Graven Images, The’ 209 and the Amyclean Apollo 208–9 ‘Apollo in Picardy’ 164, 167, 169, 170 homosexual references 201, 209 Hyperboreans 175n.25 ‘ideal instants’ 150–1 Idealism, Plato’s 276, 295 Ideas and animism 279–84 and persons 276–9 Iliad 14, 23, 48 imagery 249 colour 70–1 dialectical 82 phallic 209, 236 tracing paper 51 windows 137, 139 images (eidōla) 279 ‘imaginary portraits’ 6, 22, 71, 101–2, 137, 171–2, 236, 326 ‘Child in the House, The’ 137, 138 see also ‘Apollo in Picardy’; ‘Hippolytus Veiled’; Imaginary Portraits (IP) Imaginary Portraits (IP) 184, 330 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ 48 ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ 71, 167 ‘Prince of Court Painters, A’ 22 Imagines (Portraits) (Lucian) 165 impressionism, literary 70 impressions 13, 21, 58, 313 individual, the 304–5 Inman, Billie Andrew 124–5, 234, 245 instances 276, 283, 304, 305, 311 ‘intangible perfection’ 320 ‘intellectual worlds’ 283, 289

INDEX

‘interludes’ 10 Interpreter 55, 57–8 intertextuality 14, 58 ‘Conclusion’ 12 and ME 16, 17, 19, 152 and writings of Marcus Aurelius 19 introductory monograph 259 Introductory Studies in Greek Art (Harrison) 41 invisibility of the translator 48 Iphigenia (Euripides) 192 Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe) 192 irony 11 and Heraclitus 270 in ‘Lacedaemon’ 8, 10 and Pausanias 207 in Winckelmann 225 Iser, Wolfgang 326 Israel, Kali 39 italics 54–5 Jackson, Richard 330 Jahn, Otto 67 James, William 82 Jane Ellen Harrison (Stewart) 213 Jebb, Richard 42 Homer 22 Jelf, William Edward, Notes to Aristotle’s Ethics 312 Jenkyns, Richard on Pater 4, 5, 8, 11 Victorians and Ancient Greece, The 259 Johnson, Mrs. Arthur 39 Journal of Hellenic Studies 21, 205, 232 journals 21 Jowett, Benjamin 4, 42, 45n.30, 245, 293–4 and Aristotle 42, 311 as coach for Pater 35, 36 Dialogues of Plato 42, 295 on Grote 295 translation of Thucydides 42 Justi, Carl 67 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason 281 Keats, John 73 Kennedy, Duncan 7, 101 King’s School, Canterbury 325–6 Speech Day visit 325, 330, 331 Knight, Richard Payne 236 knowledge 320



and learning 7–8 positive 13, 15 koinos logos 269 ‘korai’ 231 ‘kouroi’ 229 ‘Lacedaemon’ (PP) 8–9, 330 Lachmann, Karl 103 ‘Lady Lisa’ 59 Lampe, Kurt 7, 259 Lanciani, Rodolfo 146 Lang, Andrew 206, 228, 250, 251 Laocoon (sculpture) 224 Lares 105, 110, 111–12 Latour, Bruno 20, 162n.11 Law, Helen 35, 47, 53 learning, Pater on 8 Le Brun, Charles 69 Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel) 73, 85, 222 Lee, Adam 260 Lee, Vernon 101 Euphorion 8 Renaissance Fancies 329 Leighton, Sir Frederic 169 Lessing, G. E. 82, 85, 88 letters: Marcus Aurelius/Fronto 122–3 Winckelmann 68–70 Levey, Michael 130 life as the end of life 158, 160 Literature and Dogma (Arnold) 317 ‘Literature and Science’ (Arnold) 41 Lives of the Artists (Vasari) 66 Lives (Diogenes Laertius) 263 Livy 34, 49, 138 Lodge, G. H. 67 Logos 265, 266, 267, 269, 276, 301 love, Platonic 277–8 Lucian 207 Halcyon 130 Imagines (Portraits) 165 Pro Imaginibus (Defence of the Portrait Study) 165 MacColl, Dugald Sutherland 212 McGann, Jerome 4 Machen, Arthur, ‘Great God Pan, The’ 289 Mackintosh, Sir James 268 McQueen, John 325, 327 Mahaffy, J. P. 194 Mai, Cardinal Angelo 122 ‘Maidens’ (‘korai’) 231



INDEX

Maleuvre, Didier 143 Manent i Cisa, Marià 328 Manson, Edward 10–11 Mantegna, Andrea 141 ‘Marbles of Aegina, The’ (GS) 84, 89, 90, 92, 164, 229, 237 Marius the Epicurean (ME) 6–7, 11, 15, 16–19, 101 on Apuleius 282 and Aristotle 318 domesticity in 135–46 Heraclitus in 265–6, 270 and reception 151–2 reception/receptivity/ anachronism 149–61 and Tibullus in 103–18 and translation 17 marriage 116, 191 Martindale, Charles 149, 151–2, 326 martyrdom 129 materiality 5, 63, 73, 143, 186, 208 Mausoleum of Halicarnassus 173 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) 122, 127, 129–31 Meisel, Martin 82 Memoirs (Symonds) 202 Menon, Madhavi 19–20 Mérimée, Prosper 193 Messalla Corvinus, Marcus Valerius 108 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 186, 197n.17 metaphysics 9, 34, 117, 244, 249 in PP 276, 279, 289, 311 Mill, John Stuart 123 Miller Gray, John 135 Milton, John, Areopagitica 298 Minucius Felix, Octavius 128 Miscellaneous Studies (MS) ‘Apollo in Picardy’ 163–73 ‘Diaphaneitè’ 269 misogyny 22 misprint, in Imaginary Portraits 330 Misunderstood (Montgomery) 328 Modernism 163, 231, 237 modernity 64 in ME 152, 154–5, 159–60 monographs 22 Montgomery, Charlotte 328 Montgomery, Florence 328–9, 332n.11 Misunderstood 328 ‘Moral Philosophy’ (unpublished) 266 ‘moral worth’ 298

Morley, John 54–5 Morris, William 195, 234 see also ‘Poems by William Morris’ mothers/motherhood 189, 191 grieving 187–8 motion, philosophy of 261 mourning culture, Victorian 141 Müller, F. Max 251 Müller, Karl Otfried 8, 9, 245, 246 murder, of Winckelmann 67, 73, 87 Murray, Gilbert 4, 194–5 Place of Greek in Education, The 42 music 16, 49, 64, 89, 150 in education 296, 297, 299 and Prior Saint-Jean 288 musicality 56, 91–3, 167, 267, 267–8, 330 music theory 92 Myers, F. W. H. 42 Myron 92, 93, 94, 318 Discobolus 93, 170, 171, 286 ‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone, The’ (GS) 47, 48, 52–3, 54–9 animism in 284, 285 and Greek religion 243, 247, 248–9 Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (Harrison and Verrall) 41, 212, 214 Naber, S. A. 122 Nachahmung 83–8, 94 Nagel, Alexander 160 narrator, of ME 104–11, 115, 117–18 nation state 297 nature: and animism 285–6 in ‘On Wordsworth’ 285, 315 Nemerov, Alexander 171–2 Nettleship, Henry 35, 36, 40 Nettleship, Richard 296–8, 302, 305 ‘Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, The’ (Nettleship) 296–8 Newman, Francis 48, 51 Newman, John Henry, Idea of a University, The 309 ‘new organ’ 15, 87, 320 Newsome, David 310 Newton, Charles 37, 55, 226 History of Discoveries 52, 57, 58 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 309, 312, 314, 317–18, 320 Pater’s teaching of 310, 319, 321

INDEX

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 3–4, 6, 35n.8, 168, 250 Birth of Tragedy 214, 242, 251 Notes to Aristotle’s Ethics (Jelf) 312 Novum Organum (Bacon) 314 Numa, religion of 19, 105, 109, 125–6 obituary 325, 326 Octavius (Minucius Felix) 128 Odes (Horace) 113–14 Olverson, T. D. 39 Olympia 226, 227 On the God of Socrates (Apuleius) 130, 282 On the Shadows of Ideas (Bruno) 314 ‘On Wordsworth’ (App.) 120n.20, 284, 285, 315–16 and Aristotle 311, 319 contemplation 318 practical life 320 opsimathēs 70, 201–2, 203 Orphism 245–6, 247–9 Orrells, Daniel 31, 259 stermark-Johansen, Lene 38, 88, 102, 181, 209, 332n.5 Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture 219 Otto, Rudolf 284 Overbeck, Johannes 91, 172 Geschichte der griechischen Plastik 234, 235–6 Ovid: Amores 104, 113, 120n.15 Apollo and Hyacinthus 170 in ‘Apollo in Picardy’ 167 Fasti 53, 57 Heroides 186 Metamorphoses 186, 197n.17 Phineas 168 Statius on 120n.18 Oxford Notebooks (Wilde) 319–20, 323n.39 Oxford University Classics degree 33–7, 293, 327 compared to Plato’s Academy 311 paganism see religion of Numa paintings, Renaissance 222 ‘Pantarkes’ (Symonds) 203, 210, 211–12 Parthenon sculptures 91, 172 and Elgin 224 frieze 72–3, 89, 91, 222, 224, 226



particular and general 300–5 Pass and Class (Burrows) 312 pastoral poetry, Latin 105 Pater, Clara 39–41 Pater, Hester 39 Pater, Walter: family 39–40 honorary doctorate 46n.56 obituary 325 Oxford Classics degree 34–6 and poetry 22 as professional classicist 33–43 as translator 47–59 tutor at Brasenose College 34, 36–8, 40, 294, 309–10 Patroclus 20, 171 Pattison, Emilia (Mrs. Mark) (later Lady Dilke) 39–40 Pattison, Mark 310 ‘Pausaniacs’ 212–15 Pausanias 5, 52, 203–6 in ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’ 203 on the Chest of Cypselus 229 ecphrasis of Pheidias’ Zeus 210 in ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ (GS) 22, 166, 204 lectures on 44n.25 see also Periegesis (Description of Greece) pause 85–8, 93–5, 156, 204 pederasty 90 Penrose, Emily 40–1 Periegesis (Description of Greece) (Pausanias) 201, 202, 203, 204–5, 206, 209, 213–14 in ‘Hippolytus Veiled’ 204 Homer in 207 Persephone see ‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone, The’ (GS) Petersen, Eugen 91, 92, 93 Phaedra 183, 185–6, 188–9, 190–1, 193 Phaedra (Seneca) 186 Phaedra (Sophocles) 185 Phaedrus (Plato) 282 phallic imagery 209 Phèdre (Racine) 186 Pheidias 210, 211, 222, 230, 235 Philebus (Plato) 300–1, 303 philhellenism, in Germany 65 Philosophie der Griechen, Die (Zeller) 264



INDEX

philosophy: German 263 and Heraclitus 261, 262, 299 history of 299–300 Philostratus, Elder 166, 207 ‘Pico della Mirandola’ (Ren.) 311–12 Picy, Jean-Baptiste 54, 327 Place of Greek in Education, The (Murray) 42 ‘Place of Pater, The’ (‘Arnold and Pater’) (Eliot) 259 Plato: on art 89 and Oxford’s Greats syllabus 38, 310 Phaedrus 282 Philebus 300–1, 303 Republic 9, 12, 38, 293, 310 Symposium 277, 283 Theaetetus 270 ‘Theory of Ideas’ 300–1 and translation 50 see also ‘Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, The’; Plato and Platonism Platonic Ideas 276, 280 Platons Werke (Schleiermacher) 264–5 Plato and Platonism (PP) 8–12, 22, 38, 259, 294, 309 animism 275–90 and Aristotle 311, 318 on education 293–4, 298–306 ‘Genius of Plato’ (PP) 9, 38 on Heraclitus 261, 267–9, 270, 299 Jenkyns on 8 style 23–4 temporality 157 translation by Picy 327 see also ‘Lacedaemon’ pleasure, Aristotle definition of 318 Pliny the Elder 93 Pliny the Younger 52, 53, 127, 129, 139 ‘Poems by William Morris’ (review essay) 3,14, 63–4, 72, 73, 225, 261, 270n.2, 312 Poesis philosophica (Stephanus) 264 poetry, and Pater 22 poikilia 56, 214, 239n.18 politics 268–9, 303 Politics (Aristotle) 42, 269, 311 Pollak, Paul 331

Pollitt, J. J. 91–2, 93 polychromy 72, 214 see also colour Polycleitus 87, 94 Pope, Alexander Iliad translation 23 Porter, James I. 31, 101, 203–4, 327, 329 positive knowledge 13, 15 possession, spirit 282 practical life 316, 320 ‘Preface’ (Ren.) 65, 71, 323n.38 pregnant moments/pauses/types 82, 85, 88–95, 286 Preller, Ludwig 245–6 Historia Philosophiae Graecae 262–3 prepositions in titles 185 Presocratic philosophy 11 Prettejohn, Elizabeth 72, 118n.4, 181 Primitive Culture (Tylor) 247, 279–80, 281 ‘Prince of Court Painters, A’ 22 Prins, Yopie 187 ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’ 41 Pro Imaginibus (Defence of the Portrait Study) (Lucian) 165 Prolegomena to the Study of Ancient Greek Religion (Harrison) 213 Prometheus Trust 276 prose 22, 36 Protagoras 269 Purgatorio (Dante) (translation by Shadwell) 47, 50–1 Purgatory (Dante Alighieri) 320 Pythagoras 299 Queen of the Air, The (Ruskin) 243 queer theory 2, 19 Quintilian 104 Quoting Caravaggio (Bal) 23 Racine, Jean, Phèdre 186 Rain Miracle 128 Ramsay, William Mitchell 220, 234 Rape of Proserpine (Claudian) 53 realism, Platonic 283 reception theory 13, 73, 154, 158 receptivity, in ME 158 ‘recollection’ 244, 278–9 red-and-white boy 187, 189, 190

INDEX

‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture’ (Winckelmann) 87 relativism 35 religion: Greek 41–52, 169 scientific study of 251 see also Christians and Christianity ‘Religion in the Form of Art’ (Hegel) 84 ‘religion of Numa’ 19, 105, 109, 125–6 religiosity 279, 284 Renaissance 2, 14–15, 151 and anachronism 160 in ME 156–7 term used by Pater 20, 64 Renaissance Fancies (Lee) 329 Renaissance in Italy (Symonds) 2–3 Renaissance, The (Ren.): and Heraclitus 262 ‘Pico della Mirandola’ 311–12 ‘Preface’ 65, 71, 323n.38 ‘School of Giorgione, The’ 49, 64, 150, 156 translation in 47, 49 translations of 326, 328 ‘Two Early French Stories’ 64 see also ‘Conclusion’ (Ren.) Renan, Ernest, Averroès et l’averoïsme 311 Republic (Plato) 9, 12, 38, 293, 310 resurrection 49, 55, 59, 188, 210, 211 reticence, of Pater 4–5 ‘return of the dead’ 210 rhythm 267 rhythmos 88–95 Ribeyrol, Charlotte 181, 250 Richardson, Jonathan 168 Ritter, Heinrich, Historia Philosophiae Graecae 262–3 ritual 105, 107, 285–6 Robert, Carl 92 Robinson, A. Mary F. 192 Roman Elegies (Goethe) 73 ‘romantic’ 5–6 Romanticism 5–6, 78, 171, 192, 284–6 Ross, Iain 44n.26 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 49, 55 Ruskin, John 10, 163, 166 and Amiens Cathedral 164



Queen of the Air, The 243 Stones of Venice 2 Rutherford, Richard 101 ‘sacred dance’ 92 Saint-Jean, Prior (in ‘Apollo in Picardy’) 164, 166, 167–9, 173, 288–9, 332 Saintsbury, George 24 scepticism 266, 272n.14 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 264, 272n.16 Herakleitos der Dunkle 264–5, 268 Platons Werke 264–5 Schliemann, Heinrich 205, 239n.20 School of English Literature 42–3 ‘School of Giorgione, The’ (Ren.) 49, 64, 150, 156 Berenson on 328 and History of Painting in North Italy, A (Crowe and Cavalcaselle) 233 science 84, 206, 233, 302, 304, 305 sculpture see Greek sculpture secondary selves 282, 288 ‘Second Sophistic’ 101 self-sufficiency 319 Seneca, Phaedra 186 ‘sense of fact’ 13, 17, 51 ‘severe composition everywhere’ 90 Shadwell, Charles 185, 327 Purgatorio (Dante) (translation) 47, 50–1 Shakespeare, and ‘Winckelmann’ comparison (Ren.) 211 SHA see Historia Augusta (SHA) Shelley, Percy Bysshe 192 shrines, domestic 105, 111, 136, 141 Shuter, William 36, 37, 54, 96n.13, 97n.18, 204, 261, 294, 310 sight 71, 208, 278, 304 Silk, Michael 2–3 Sketches and Studies (Symonds) 203 Skoie, Mathilde 118n.2 sleep, myth of 123 Smith, Kirby Flower 103 Smith, W. Robertson 250 ‘soberness’ 312 Socrates 90, 299, 300–1 Solomon, Simeon 244 Somerville Hall (later Somerville College) 40 Sophocles, Phaedra 185



INDEX

‘Soule’ 331–2 Souvestre, Émile, Derniers Bretons, Les 331 Sparta 299–300, 302–3 specialization, academic 296, 302, 305–6 speculative philosophy 316 Speech Day visit 325, 330, 331 spells (dirae) 55 ‘spiritual’ 244 Stanley, Dean 104 Statius 120n.18 Stephanus, Heinrich, Poesis philosophica 264 Stewart, Andrew F. 93 Stewart, Jessie, Jane Ellen Harrison 213 Stillstandsmoment 92 Stoicism 122, 123, 125, 126, 131 Stones of Venice (Ruskin) 2 Stopper, M. R. 310 Stray, Christopher 33, 36, 298, 305 structuralism 173, 249 studies, Pater’s use of term 185 Studies of the Greek Poets (Symonds) 187 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, The 52 see also Renaissance, The ‘Study of Dionysus, A’ (GS) 58, 214, 244, 246, 248, 250–1, 286 and Platonic Ideas 284 style, analysis of Pater’s 23–4 ‘Style’ (App.) 12, 13, 24 and impressions 21 on prose 22–3 and translation 23, 47, 49 ‘surplusage’ 12, 21 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 22, 42, 192, 195, 247 Symonds, John Addington 20, 81, 192, 209–10 ‘Corpse of Julia’ 210–11 Memoirs 202 ‘Pantarkes’ 203, 210, 211–12 Renaissance in Italy 2–3 Sketches and Studies 203 Studies of the Greek Poets 187 Symons, Arthur 58, 184 Symposium (Plato) 277, 283 syntax 193 ‘temperance’ 90 temporality 15–16, 155–8 and the classical ideal 81–95

Theocritus 85 theoria 318 ‘Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic, The’ (Nettleship) 296–8 ‘Theory of Ideas’ (Plato) 300–1 Theseus 173, 183, 186, 188, 190 temple of 253n.10 Thomas, Edward 321 ‘throne’ of Apollo at Amyclae 164 Tibullus 6–7 in ME 103–18 in paintings 118n.4 ‘Tintern Abbey’ (Wordsworth) 285 tombs 142, 144 touch 71 toys 143, 144, 145 ‘trace’ 204 tracing paper image 23, 51 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (Eliot) 13–14 transcription 49–50 transhistoricism 3, 15, 19, 154, 329 and Greek religion 249 and sculpture 237 and translation 51 translation 23, 42, 47–59 and art 49 in ME 17, 19 and Oxford Classics degree 34 in Renaissance 47 theory 48 triumphs 140–1, 142, 143, 145 Triumphs of Caesar, The (paintings) (Mantegna) 141 truth 185, 305 in Aristotle 309 historical 58, 298 Platonic 281, 282, 283, 287, 295, 296, 297, 303, 304 in ‘Style’ 23 Turner, Frank 34–5, 41–2, 294–5, 317 Tusculan houses Cicero’s 136, 143 in ME 135, 137, 140, 142, 143 ‘Two Early French Stories’ 64 Tylor, Edward Burnett 251–2 Primitive Culture 247, 279–80, 281 type 53, 268 pregnant 88–95 typology 118 Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton 193–4

INDEX

unhistoricism 19–20 Uthwart, Emerald see ‘Emerald Uthwart’ Vasari, Georgio, Lives of the Artists 66 Venus de Milo (sculpture) 85, 224, 226 Venuti, Lawrence 48, 59n.2 verb use 193 Verrall, A. W., Euripides the Rationalist 194 Verrall, Margaret 194, 212 Victorians and Ancient Greece, The (Jenkyns) 259 Virgil, Aeneid 142 vision, beatific 18, 158 Vlasto, Gregory 277 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (Hegel) 264 Voss, J. H. 118n.2 Vout, Caroline 102, 330, 331 Walk in and about the City of Canterbury, A (Gostling) 326 Walpole, Horace 169 Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (stermarkJohansen) 219 Ward, Humphry 37 Ward, Mary (Mrs. Humphry) 39, 40 Watteau, Antoine 22 Way, A. S. 194 Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb 246 Whiteley, Giles 259 ‘white light’ 88 White-nights, in ME 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144 Whitmarsh, Tim 202 Wilde, Oscar 37, 101, 196, 312 ‘Critic as Artist, The’ 319–20 Oxford Notebooks 319–20, 323n.39 Pater advice to 22 Williams, Carolyn 82, 83, 84, 88, 285, 302, 304 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 67, 73–4 ‘Abhandlung’ 75, 80n.21 on Apollo 168 Chest of Cypselus 216n.23



correspondence 68–70, 74, 75, 76 ‘Essay on the Capacity of the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art’ 75 History of Ancient Art 203 and Nachahmung 86–7 ‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture’ 87 in Rome 201–2 ‘Winckelmann’ (Ren.) 3, 5, 63–78, 294 and the classical ideal 81, 83–4, 85, 86–8, 90–4 on classicism 164 on Greek sculpture 221–5 and Hegel 84 and Shakespeare comparison 211 see also Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Winckelmannsrede 66–7 windows 137, 139 Winkelmann (Goethe) 73–4 Wölfflin, Heinrich 86 women: in ‘Bacchanals of Euripides, The’ (GS) 190 in Euripides 191 feminine counter-culture 328 mothers 187–8, 189, 191 scholars 39–41 Wood, Christopher 160 Woolf, Virginia 41, 46n.49 Wordsworth, John 315 Wordsworth, William ‘Tintern Abbey’ 285 see also ‘On Wordsworth’ Wright, Samuel 196n.3 Wright, Thomas 35, 36, 39, 325, 327, 330–1 Xenophon, on Socrates 90 Yates, Frances 313 Yeats, W. B. 22 Zeller, Eduard, Die Philosophie der Griechen 264