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Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism Transfigured World · CAROLYN WILLIAMS · Transfigured World · WALTER PATER'S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM · Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Carolyn, 1950– Transfigured world: Walter Pater’s aesthetic historicism / Carolyn Williams p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8014-2151-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0724-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Aesthetics. 2. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894— Knowledge—History. 3. Historicism. I. Title. PR5138.A35W5 1989 824'.8—dc20 89-42883 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Cecil Lang Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction I Part One • Opening Conclusions II I. "That Which Is Without" 14 2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling" 18 3. Aestheticism 26 4. Answerable Style 37 5. Iiistoricism 46 6. Aesthetic Iiistoricism and "Aesthetic Poetry" 57 7. The Poetics of Revival 68 Part Two • Figural Strategies in Th e Renaissance 79 I. Legend and Iiistoricity 82 2. Myths of Iiistory: Th e Last Supper 94 3. The Iiistoricity of Myth 103 4. Myths of Iiistory: The Mona Lisa III 5. Types and Figures 123 6. Low and Iiigh Relief: "Luca Della Robbia" 143 7. The Senses of Relief 153 • vii • · viii · Contents Part Three · Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean 169 l. The Transparent Hero 172 2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist 184 3. The Transcendental Induction 193 4. Typology as Narrative Form 202 5. Typological Ladders 213 6. Christian Historicism 219 7. Literary History as "Appreciation" 224 Part Four · "Recovery as Reminiscence": The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism 235 l. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies 238 2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter 247 3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form 249 4. The History of Philosophy 258 5. The Anecdote of the Shell 266 6. Dialogue and Dialectic 270 7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind 277 Afterword 282 Index 285 Acknowledgments Sections 4, 5, and 6 of Part Three appeared under the title "Typology as Narrative Form" in English Literature in Transition 2TI (1984), n-33. I am grateful to the editor, Robert Langenfeld, for permission to reprint. Two institutions have materially supported this work. The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College provided a year's fel­ lowship, during which the manuscript was begun, and the community extending from that institution has been lastingly valuable to me. The Humanities Foundation of Boston University then freed me from teaching duties for a semester, when the argument was ready for a finalreformulation. I particularly thank William Carroll, who directed the Humanities Foundation and its Society of Fellows toward the model of a truly interdisciplinary conversation. Other colleagues and friends at Boston University sustained the work over the years of its production: Laurence Breiner, Patricia B. Craddock, Albert Gilman, Eugene Goodheart, Misia Landau, John T. Matthews, Katherine O'Connor, and David Wagenknecht. I am grateful to them for their advice, their support, their responses to chapters in progress, and their good company. My dedication celebrates a long-standing intellectual and personal debt to Cecil Lang. Walter Pater's prose is only one of the many gustatory pleasures I owe to his great generosity. His guidance repaired the work as often as his wit repaired me. Rachel Jacoff's reading of Dante is more present in these pages than their nineteenth-century focus would make evident. I thank her as well for many other gifts of a compendious intelligence, now invisibly at work in this book. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick strengthened and enabled the work throughout, . ix • · x · Acknowledgments in part by inspiring a vision of future work to be done-for which I am especially grateful. Nancy Waring, too, contributed important generative questions and continuing help in answering them. Other friends have steadfastly made it possible for me to imagine an audience by being one: Joyce Van Dyke, Barbara Harman, Lin Reicher, and Eleanor Ringel. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, and Mary Poovey have repeatedly aided my thinking and writing. I owe a special debt to the members of the ID 450 Collective, who-both collectively and individually-encouraged the practice of form and voice. Writing has become a different sort of pleasure with Mary B. Campbell, Susan Carlisle, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Anne Janowitz, Nancy Munger, Beth O'Sullivan, Helaine Ross, Eve Sedg­ wick, Deborah Swedberg, Martha Sweezy, Nancy Waring, and Patricia Yaeger in mind. And Bernhard Kendler of Cornell University Press contributed to the completion of this project in many invaluable ways. I thank him for the acuity of his insight, for deft intervention at crucial moments, and for suggestions of remarkable background reading. I am grateful to my parents, Mary and James Williams, and my sister, Nancy Williams: their support has been both incalculable and essential. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my husband and colleague, Michael McKeon. I am happy that my debts to him will continue to appreciate as time passes. CAROLYN WILLIAMS Boston, Massachusetts Abbreviations Quotations from Pater's works, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the ten-volume Library Edition (London: Macmillan, 1910; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1973), abbreviated as follows: A Appreciations EG Essays from the "Guardian" GL Gaston de Latour GS Greek Studies IP Imaginary Portraits ME I Marius the Epicurean, volume I ME II Marius the Epicurean, volume II MS Miscellaneous Studies pp Plato and Platonism R The Renaissance In addition, I have quoted extensively from "Aesthetic Poetry," which was originally part of "Poems by William Morris" (Westminster Review, 1868). The essay is now most conveniently seen in Harold Bloom's edition of Pater, abbreviated here as follows: B Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (1974; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) . xi Transfigured World Poetry projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificialor "earthly paradise." -WALTERPATER Introduction • I want to begin with a few words about the subtitle of this book: "Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism." The problematic and seem­ ingly contradictory usage of the term "historicism" first alerted me to its great formal and conceptual potential. On the one hand, the term is often used to signal an attempt to know an object (a literary work, for example) by placing it within its contemporary historical context, and in this sense historicism seeks to define the specific historicity of the object. But on the other hand, the term often signals skepticism (whether mild or radical) about the possibility of such historical knowledge, and in this sense "historicism" is taken to be the equivalent of "relativism." These two senses represent contradic­ tory but related positions-both of them reductive-and in Part One, section 5 I take the contradiction into account by defining historicism 1 in a more complex and flexible way, as a double dialectic. Other senses of the term are also relevant to this study. In recent years the "new historicism" has succeeded "new literary history" as the dominant model in a continuing and intensifying effort to place literary and historical study in a fruitful mutual relation. Beginning with a consideration of the problematic involvement of text and con­ text, one might regard the new historicism (in broad terms) as a re­ newed approach to contextual study which is informed by the analyti­ cal finesse of recent psychoanalytic, feminist, and poststructuralist theory. This book instead aims to consider one episode in the literary history of historicism itself. It is an especially interesting episode because Pater's historicism accompanies the aestheticism that has • I • • 2 • Introduction been taken to grant the work of art a supposed "autonomy." However, Pater's notion of aesthetic autonomy is strictly limited, for though he does argue that the work of art should be free from utilitarian appropria­ tion, he does not propose to appreciate it apart from its historical con­ text. The interrelation of aestheticism and historicism in Pater's work is my subject throughout, especially in the theoretical discussions of Part One. "Aesthetic historicism" names that interrelation. In specificallyliterary studies, "historicism" often refers to a certain literary form familiar to readers of early-twentieth-century ("high") modernism. The examples of Eliot's Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's Orlando will serve to indicate the variety within this form of historical or literary-historical pastiche. A critique and revision of these strategies of composition-and the totalizing perspective they establish-is now being conducted under the aegis of the "postmodern," and though they must be distinguished from one another, this critique reminds me of Pater's own, late-nineteenth­ century assertion of the re-collective and conservative impulses in­ volved in any modernism. For Pater saliently argues that modernism is a recurrent phenomenon in history. His "appreciation" of composite art forms is one way he recognizes the particular sort of aesthetic value that accrues only through the repetitions and displacements of historical time. The critical voice that we in tum recognize as Paterian is just such a composite re-creation.
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