Week 12, G. M. Hopkins and Walter Pater

General Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the anthology I used as a beginning student of Victorian literature (Victorian Poetry and Prose), Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling suggest that Hopkins is a late-romantic poet, a practitioner of the poetics of grand failure. They suggest that he regrets the loss of a strong Christian world view and that he is an isolated aesthete trying to reappropriate the ancient religion’s framework. But even in the so-called terrible sonnets, which, if I recall correctly, Bloom and Trilling describe as stormy Byronism, Hopkins is not necessarily a self-divided romantic. Instead, it might be better to see him as working through his isolation within the much larger theological framework available to him—he is dramatizing a spiritual problem, not complaining about it to himself. Ultimately, the differences between Hopkins and Keats or Byron or Wordsworth seem more important than the similarities.

As a nature poet with great regard for the particularity of things, Hopkins follows Keats to some extent, but the medieval author Duns Scotus provides Hopkins with the theological support for his interaction with nature. Humility in the presence of nature is important to Hopkins, but this humility is of a Christian sort and does not amount to Carlylean self-annihilation. Rather, this Christian poet aims to experience and to convey an experience of being as grounded in God. We can experience our existence in this manner when we observe the natural world, although that is only one way it can be experienced.

Hopkins may follow Keats and Tennyson, but he rejects sensuous simplicity and smooth rhetoric. His poetry is memorable but can be difficult going. It reflects a complexity of language and mental process chosen to honor the particularity of each natural thing and made appropriate to the difficulty of salvation. The act of seeing is redemptive, and redemption is not easy.

Hopkins’s journals show his concern to clarify and refine his impression-taking powers. “Cleansing the doors of perception” is a romantic formula that applies well to Hopkins—the world of objects is dynamic without being unstable, but Hopkins often dramatizes the way the human mind fails to appreciate nature’s energy. We simply do not see what is really there.

Hopkins tasks words with marking, catching, and celebrating the particularity of things, most especially the particularity of classes of things. He often speaks of nature in the plural—dappled things, brinded cows, dragonflies, and so forth. The goal is not to dominate natural things or annihilate them, not to assert our raw power over the creation. Doing that would be impious—the Bible explains that humanity long since tried to do it in the most disrespectful manner, with disastrous consequences, and we might infer the lesson that our failure to cherish the natural world is part of the pattern of our sinfulness. Hopkins apparently considers precise impressions of things respectful towards God; imprecision of speech testifies to the roughness of the eye that perceives. To see something correctly is at least partly redemptive—Hopkins does not aim to describe abstractions, and does not give us a vague sense of mystery—“a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” Rather, each thing, to borrow a phrase from Martin Heidegger, “stands into the lighting of Being.” It catches God’s energy as it goes about its business, a phenomenon Hopkins calls “selving.” The beauty of God exceeds change, but he has suited the human mind to the minute apprehension of particularities.

The Norton editors provide an excellent gloss on Hopkins’s terms inscape and instress:

Drawing on the theology of Duns Scotus, a medieval philosopher, he felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe ‘selves,’ that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize its specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. In the act of instress, therefore, the human being becomes a celebrant of the divine, at once recognizing God’s creation and enacting his or her own God-given identity within it.

Hopkins’s terminology allows him to move beyond a romantic emphasis on the isolated individual. He is a Christian nature poet who turns Romantic particularity back towards God’s language, the “syllables” of God, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge. Since Hopkins is writing from a theological perspective, it helps to include the Catholic Catechism’s statement on humanity’s relationship with nature:

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part One Chapter 1/IV.40-43

IV. HOW CAN WE SPEAK ABOUT GOD?

40. Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

41. All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures—their truth, their goodness, their beauty—all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point, “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.”

42. God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God—“the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable”—with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

43. Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”; and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.”

Hopkins’ favorable view of Duns Scotus is often mentioned, so I will include here a summation of that theologian’s differences with the even more influential Saint Thomas Aquinas. I draw from David Walhout’s fine essay “Scotism in the Poetry of Hopkins” (113-132 in Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, edited by Michael E. Allsopp and David Anthony Downes. New York and London: Garland, 1994.) Walhout identifies nine areas in which Scotus differs substantially from Aquinian thought, but here are the ones that seem the most significant, along with my paraphrases of his explanations:

1. The priority of singulars as objects of knowledge (Thomism = universals, not singulars)

Scotus says that sensory experience gives us not simply raw data but “genuine objects of cognition.” Thomism says we do indeed begin with particulars, but we need to make abstractions or general concepts to think. We cannot grasp particulars directly as objects of understanding and knowing.

2. The priority of intuition in cognition (Thomism = abstraction, not intuition)

The second doctrine is that Scotus says we know singulars by intuition not abstraction. Knowing is not necessarily mediated through universals or concepts. First we know things by intuition and then we make abstractions and concepts, judge and reason about things.

3. The reality of the individual essence (haecceitas) (Thomism = general essence)

The third doctrine involves haecceitas, which refers to the idea that the individual essence is just as real as the generic essence in things. The individual essence is not one property among many in the object but rather the overall uniqueness or individuality of the thing.

6. The primacy of the will (Thomism = intellect as primary)

The primacy of the will is the sixth doctrine and it means that divine will is the supreme executive attribute in God, with reason knowing its prescriptions and being its repository of truth. The notion is that the will guides and reason assists—the same would be true for humans. Moreover, without the assistance of the will, the intellect cannot conceive the infinite. But we are made for the infinite, so the will expresses the whole man: first because it is free and secondly because its proper object is the infinite.

7. The unconditional freedom of the will (Thomism = qualified freedom)

The seventh doctrine concerns freedom of the will: St. Thomas says that when the highest good is presented clearly the will chooses and loves it necessarily. Scotus would deny this. See Hopkins’s letter to Robert Bridges of 4 January, 1883. He says that while the intellect may see necessity, the will remains free to acknowledge or apply a truth.

9. Incarnation as cosmological directing power (Thomism = … as a response to sin)

The ninth doctrine involves the incarnation of Christ. Scotus treats this cosmological doctrine as implying that Christ wasn’t just incarnated into a body but into the whole of the creation. Evidently God had meant to redeem the world even before the contingent historical event known as the Fall. For Hopkins this means there’s a “cosmic energy center” that activates other “centers of energy” impelling creatures to realize the individuality of their being.

To sum up this introduction to Hopkins as a nature poet, I should add that Hopkins’ nature poetry, in which his subjectivity is so finely attuned to the world’s particularities and so sensitive to beauty, is not so much idealist as realist—nature is there, and what the mind does is use its god-given powers to actively catch or instress the inscapes, the dynamic “thisness” of the natural world. There’s no need, in his view, to replace God or to say that the mind spins reality from itself. Hopkins’ patron saint Ignatius, the 16th-century Spanish founder of the Jesuit order or “Society of Jesus” (see his biography at http://www.luc.edu/jesuit/ignatius.bio.html), writes at the outset of his Spiritual Exercises,

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created.

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.

http://www.ccel.org/i/ignatius/exercises/exercises.html

By implication, nature is worthwhile so long as it is useful to the soul’s salvation and the greater glory of God, but otherwise it is to be dismissed. It is a means to an end, and one must dismiss it brusquely if some other means would serve the end better. This imperative is softened somewhat by Hopkins’ favorable reading of Duns Scotus, as discussed above, but the poet’s late work shows that it was not forgotten. And it is to that later work that we turn to conclude this introduction. Hopkins is among those Victorians (like John Henry Newman) who responded to Victorian doubt by affirming their belief in traditional Catholicism. Hopkins was subject to periods of deep depression and was most likely afflicted with the cyclical illness now called “manic depressive disorder” (see Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Free Press, 1996). As his depressive episodes worsened, Hopkins seems to have found that his first priority was no longer the bond with external nature but rather his own spiritual state, his inner being in its relation to God. There is no need to suppose that he felt any disappointment in the beauty of the natural world or even that he lost the ability to respond to it—though severe depression can surely have that “anhedonic” effect on a person. Neither need it be thought that Hopkins is in a state of despair that causes him to defy the universe in Byronic fashion.

Instead, in the dark depressive sonnets, what sounds to many modern readers like suicidal despair follows the well-scripted lines of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Christian meditative practice is quite familiar with depressive episodes, and knows how to embrace them and work through them. Christ’s life ends on the Cross, after all, with the scriptural echo from a Psalm of David, “why hast thou forsaken me?” One would have to presume that the expression was both genuinely human and at the same time an acting-out of human anguish for the edification of sinners who need a pattern to follow. Hopkins’ darkest poetry imitates this final utterance, at least to some extent. So it isn’t prideful isolation, mere hopelessness, or even doubt that we find in his poetry. Hopkins never seems to have doubted God’s existence or benevolence, as so many of his contemporaries did, and his career as a poet might be construed in strictly theological terms as his particular “way of the cross,” his imitatio Christi.

Notes on Hopkins’ Poems

“God’s Grandeur”

The poem’s first verse is perhaps the key to much of Hopkins’ nature poetry: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This poem shows nature energized, crackling with directionality from God’s primal love, or what Dante calls “il primo amore.” Nature does not need the human mind to animate it. It is already charged like a battery, and Hopkins’ sonnet sets forth images of gathering force pulsing through the world, the Holy Spirit as creative power rising with the dawn. The problem is that individual human beings in their repetitive, self-isolating actions do not perceive nature’s variety and therefore fail to celebrate God. Human beings set up a dull, self-regarding rival order that contrasts with divine particularity, with the diversity and fullness of creation. In Hopkins, spiritual error and perceptual error are closely intertwined, as are their healthy opposite states.

“The Starlight Night”

Usually, astronomy is an attempt to derive intelligibility from the stars. But there is perhaps a different motive in this poem, with its concentration on the far recesses of sky, distant points of light. The poem celebrates the power of God’s energy to excite wonder. The point doesn’t seem to be logical consistency or the reduction of things to order. Instead, it represents a person’s excited mind patterning the stars and appreciating the grandeur of God.

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

When the sun glints upon the wings of a dragonfly or a bird, the animal catches divine energy simply by acting out its “thisness.” Each animate thing as an individual follows the pattern of its species and is validated as an individual thereby. The purpose of each living thing is to be what God intended it to be, whether it knows that or not. Human beings are at the top of the hierarchy because they have been given the gift of choosing to celebrate and worship God. They do so in many ways, and the expressive act we call poetry is one of those ways. Hopkins put away his poetry writing for about seven years after he went into the priesthood, but the relative approval of the church made him go back to it, and I suppose the relation of humanity to nature alluded to in the present poem must have been sustaining as well.

“Spring”

The regenerative power of nature strikes the soul; the poem tries to capture the energy, the movement, the “juice” or overflow from Paradise to earth. In the second stanza, the implication is that nature offers us a glimpse of Paradise; children experience a brief time of innocence, and should grasp the significance of such times and scenes. Victorians generally treated children as if they were little adults. This poem cuts both ways: children are invoked and asked to understand something we might think most appropriate to adults, yet at the same time the freshness of perception evoked belongs to children in the fine tradition of Blake and Wordsworth.

“The Windhover”

The material world provides an analogy for spiritual splendor. Compare this poem to Tennyson’s “Eagle” or George Herbert’s “Affliction.” In the context of the poem, “to catch” means to instress the bird’s inscape. The bird is not turned into a direct emblem of Christ (Hopkins does not write allegorical or emblematic poetry; he is inclined to respect nature enough not to subsume it too easily into his symbolic system), but Christ is obviously in the background as the chevalier, the hero-king and sacrificial sufferer whose splendor flashes after his redemptive deed. The speaker “catches” the bird, and then it catches him up in its amazing plunge. The plunge may allude to Christ’s incarnation and consequent heroic suffering; as the next-to-last stanza suggests, Christ himself is “a billion / Times told lovelier,” like the fire that breaks from the bird during its lightning-fast approach to earth.

Christ is often depicted in terms of light, as when he sets out in his flaming chariot in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5. There is also in this poem something of John Donne’s way of describing God’s effect upon the human spirit in violent terms, as something that brings hearts “out of hiding.” How does the final sestet complete the poem’s meaning? I would suggest that the references to the well-worn plough and the ashes falling upon the ground point to the idea that a thing is most worthy of apprehension, is most itself, just when it is about to pass away or just when its fundamental task is achieved.

“Pied Beauty”

This is another poem that underscores the ability to appreciate nature’s “thisness,” and it seems important to the speaker that we not superimpose a domineering or romantic self-consciousness upon nature, saturating it with ourselves and tamping it down with our problems. Refraining from such impositions is in part an atonement for causing the fall that alienated us from nature.

Nature is not simply our expressive vehicle; instead, we should appreciate it as God’s free expression. We should appreciate nature’s sheer diversity as a kind of joyful excess. God creates because he wants to create, not because he must—the central concept here is Christian charity, generosity. Understanding nature this way turns it into a door that opens to Christ, not a mirror that reflects back to us our own self-division, alienation from others, and alienation from God. The grammar in the final line—whether it be set down as a “:” or a “;”—implies that all of the dappled things lead up to the simple statement “Praise him.” This is all the explanation that is necessary for nature’s diversity. And the term “dappled,” of course, has Impressionist overtones.

“Hurrahing in Harvest”

The line, “These things, these things were here and but the beholder / Wanting” emphasizes Hopkins’ tact: again, nature is already alive and does not need us to make it come alive. Our task is to appreciate; Hopkins would probably say that is our way of helping to complete God’s continual acts of creation, as he allows us to do.

“Binsey Poplars”

The failure of those who have cut the trees down to “instress” the stand of trees denies God’s creative power, his stamping of a thing with its own living individuality. The final stanza sets forth contrasting repetitions—the strokes of the saw and the speaker’s own laments over what has been done. The felling of trees in this manner is yet another effect of the Fall, and something has been permanently taken away even from the speaker who actually appreciates nature as he should.

“Duns Scotus’ Oxford”

The ugly buildings put up around Oxford seem to have instilled in Hopkins much the same agony as the Italians’ treatment of their cultural heritage created in John Ruskin. Once upon a time, the natural environment and the college town made up a unit of mutually reinforcing or complementary inscapes. But modernity confounds our ability to instress this land-and-cityscape, and, by implication, it keeps us from understanding Duns Scotus’ insight into the individual vitality of natural things as a kind of energy that praises and returns to God. Hopkins casts Duns Scotus as a bygone hero. To a limited extent, this gesture links Hopkins to Thomas Carlyle, the greatest Victorian proponent of hero-worship. As for architecture, Hopkins’ notion is similar to that of John Ruskin—buildings express the spiritual state and aspirations of an entire people.

“Felix Randal”

This poem is a meditation on the brevity of life and the need to “look to end things”—not something that would have been easy to do for an active man like Felix Randal the blacksmith. The priest-speaker reflects on his relation to this former parishioner, now that he is gone and there is time to do so. One seldom thinks in this way when in the thick of life.

“Spring and Fall”

Hopkins wrote this poem when he was in Liverpool; the observations probably express his own feeling that the place was “museless.” The speaker addresses Margaret’s eventual fall into adulthood, when she will experience the dark side of symbolic meaning. As Margaret will see herself in the decay of nature, the speaker expresses grief at his own mortality. We will come to correlate death in the natural cycle with our own demise.

“Carrion Comfort”

This is a sonnet of desolation because of its near assent to spiritual death. The poem flows from Hopkins’ propensity to blame himself for his depressive states—we have far less control over our “affective will” than our “sheer will,” but still bear some responsibility in both cases. Here, the speaker seems to have just emerged from a severe depression, and begins to will his assent to God’s plan for him, however feebly. He has at least taken on the burden of ceasing to struggle against Christ—the blame gives way to bleak affirmation in hopes of regaining his energy, that “primal love” sent by God.

“No Worst, There Is None”

The speaker is in a hell of his own making, and his grief brings on still intenser grief, with no catharsis in sight. What serves as comfort “in a whirlwind”? Only the statement that “all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” This “comfort” is as grim as the comfort King Lear derives while exposed to the storm, or Swinburne’s pagan speaker derives from the sentiment that “There is no god found stronger than death, / And death is a sleep.” But this isn’t a view to which Hopkins could subscribe. The point seems to be that there really is no ordinary comfort in the face of death—nothing in nature, anyway; only Christ will serve that end, and at present the speaker isn’t able to feel the connection to him that he should.

“I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”

This poem works from the traditional exploration of “The Dark Night of the Soul,” as in Saint John of the Cross. Hopkins certainly understood the psychology of profound depression. The speaker addresses his own emotions, which have a life all their own and which therefore generate inner discord. He is in a hellish state of his own making, or at least that’s the way he interprets the problem. The third stanza implies a threat that the speaker’s body has become worse than nothing—it has become a “sign” leading nowhere, and the same might be said of his words, which only turn back in upon his anguish and do not help him reconnect with Christ. In the final stanza, the speaker compares his state to a Dantean Inferno, wherein God’s primal love is experienced in ever-more perfect degree as pain and anguish appropriate to the sinner. The speaker experiences this energy as profound alienation, and suffers the intensification of his “self-taste,” the taste of his own unhappy inner self. This is not mere apathy he’s describing; it is suicidal near-despair. To experience despair is perhaps not to lose the desire for salvation, but rather to lose all hope of it and to believe that relief will never come. In this situation, the spirit turns back upon itself, isolating itself from God in destructive fury. The speaker apparently feels trapped in himself, and since suicide is against God’s will, he may be angry with God, too. It isn’t possible for him to say, as I recall Cesare Pavese wrote just before he died, “No more words—an act.” What is the point of writing a poem like this? Does it bring relief? Clarity?

“That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”

Light and shadow, earth, air, fire, and water, are all in play here. The Resurrection of the Dead will put an end to natural history and human history, swallowing up everything that is suffering and mortal in one grand “wildfire” that will “leave but ash” of materiality’s dead clay. The energy flowing through nature in the poem’s first half is thereafter described as flowing through the soul, and the speaker’s aim seems to be to align his desires with this “being-towards-destruction” of fallen nature. He can do so because he trusts that God’s will is being done. The pressure of suffering, the constant “imitation of Christ,” will at last turn the soul to “immortal diamond,” just as carbon turns to this gem under great pressure over vast stretches of time. This is a very Augustinian poem—there’s no point here in trying to salvage nature or anything earthly; it must all be burned in the end time to make way for the grand spiritual consummation. That this should be the case with “manshape” seems contradictory to the speaker, but he knows he must embrace contradictions in order to transcend them.

“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”

This poem was written in Ireland, where Hopkins felt out of sorts. This isn’t so much pure lyric expression as performance, a dramatized expression that lends the speaker some perspective on his state of mind. The quotation from the Latin or Vulgate bible suggests as much, as I’ve found in the criticism on Hopkins’ poetry—the speaker in Jeremiah’s prophetic book is foolish to question God, and by implication so is the speaker in Hopkins’ poem. But the final triplet seems intimate and in its way legitimate—I don’t read it as merely the acting-out of a wrong-headed speaker.

“The Wreck of the Deutschland”

What lesson is the speaker trying to learn from the tragedy he recounts? The first part of the poem concerns the manner in which he was called to the Catholic faith, while the second part deals with the shipwreck itself. Five Franciscan nuns were among the passengers aboard the Deutschland; they were leaving the persecution of Catholics in Germany and heading to America, but the ship sank in the Thames River during an awful storm.

In the midst of his reflection on such a disaster, the speaker turns to an imaginative projection of one who suffered and died in it to answer his own question, “How do we know God—or do we know him at all?” See Stanza 24, where the Nun invites Christ to “come quickly.” She heroically sees the shipwreck as hastening her union with God. Imitatio Christi is the traditional pattern: life as preparatory suffering. The speaker, too, is trying to come to grips with the event and unite in sentiment with the nuns against the storm’s terrible destructive power. Hopkins hadn’t written any poetry for seven years, thinking it not right considering his vocation as a Jesuit priest. But a superior told him he should write it after he heard about the wreck from a newspaper account. Traditional Christian theology describes nature as a hostile, alien element, though Hopkins usually doesn’t treat it that way. In this poem, nature is full of fury and confusion that might make it seem pre-eminent, but at the center of the storm is the wonderful clarity of the Nun who sees it for what it is.

Page-by-Page Notes on Walter Pater

“Preface” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1507. “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative . . . .” Pater embraces the relative and scientific spirit rather than trying vainly to oppose it in the name of humanist inquiry. This doesn’t mean that he banishes emotion-based responses from criticism—the rejection is an initial conciliatory gesture, a rhetorical maneuver on the way to a fully impressionistic definition of criticism. In the following passage, Pater appropriates Matthew Arnold’s widely accepted mid-Victorian standard of criticism: “To see the object as in itself it really is,’ has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and 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 . . . .” The critic’s goal is no longer to register the qualities of an external object or to point to a literary “touchstone” (a favorite Arnoldian term), but rather to obtain a clear impression from whatever he or she regards (an art object, a personality, whatever), and to fix it, discerning its qualities distinctly and then conveying our findings to others. “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?” asks Pater. The object, therefore, is our own impression of an external object or artistic phenomenon of whatever sort, and that impression is not thereafter to be brought into line with some abstract definition of beauty or literary value. How does Pater describe the external objects that facilitate our impressions? He describes them as follows: “The aesthetic critic . . . regards all objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. . . .” Objects, then, seem to emanate a kind of aesthetic energy; they put out “forces” that must be registered clearly and steadily.

1508. “Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to those impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure . . . . His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others . . . .” In this description of the purpose for engaging with aesthetic objects, Pater employs the language of scientific methodology: things are to be broken down into their elements, separated out so that they may be understood clearly. Of course, the virtues to be disengaged have to do with beauty and the passions; Pater’s perceptual terminology is almost always suffused with emotive quality. He portrays critics as “chemists of the emotions,” so to speak. The special virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry, as Pater characterizes it on page 837, is “that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man’s life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences . . . .” That is the “active principle” always at work, suggests Pater, in Wordsworth’s poetry, however different many of the poems may be from one another. One last point about Pater’s scientific terminology: he openly rejects the notion that the critic should rank aesthetic objects or experiences and thereby set up a well-delineated hierarchy for others to memorize and accept. That would strip not only the critic, but anyone interested in experiencing art and living life as a work of art, of all individuality: it would be a prohibition against immediate experience and close, genuine attention to each object of experience. Scientism aside, Pater is not interested in categorizing art works in the traditional way, and it’s easy to see from the disparate objects he describes that in his view, aesthetic perception is by no means limited to the things we would ordinarily classify as art. To suggest that “a fair personality” is as good an object as a landscape painting is un-Kantian (and un-Arnoldian) in its rejection of disinterestedness. In a forthright way, his Conclusion to The Renaissance encourages readers to apply what they have reflected upon to life itself.

1509. In keeping with the general aim described above, Pater’s book aims to fix and convey what was most valuable and distinctive about the Renaissance—a term he treats with the broadness of an impressionist rather than the categorical exactness of the historian. He finds the active virtue of the Renaissance at work as far back as the middle ages and as late as the work of German Hellenist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He characterizes the Renaissance as “an outbreak of the human spirit” that encompasses “the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination” (837). And on 838, he ascribes to this lengthened period as a time in which those who partake of culture “breathe a common air.” Winckelmann in particular, he believes, showed in his life and in his 1764 masterpiece Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Ancient Art) a Renaissance-worthy “enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake” (838). So it is not so much a definable period Pater is writing about in his most famous volume as a set of interrelated tendencies. His view of intellectual history is inclined to credit the recurrence of certain qualities and circumstances, so that we might apply terms such as romantic and classical to particular authors and works at any point in literary history.

“Leonardo da Vinci” (including “La Gioconda”) from Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1510-11. I will refer to the broader selection from the chapter, “Leonardo da Vinci,” though these comments apply also to the passage on La Gioconda in the Norton Anthology.

Pater refers to Leonardo’s illegitimate birth in a positive light, saying that he had “the keen puissant nature such children often have.” The boy was from the first a free spirit, a Renaissance man in the making. We are told also that his father, Piero Antonio, “took him to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, then the most famous artist in Florence.” The young man soon began to show abilities his master lacked, something that first became apparent, as Pater recounts, when Leonardo was allowed to paint an angel in Verrocchio’s painting The Baptism of Christ: “the pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one stunned.” The youth’s angel is animated, realistic, engaged, detailed, while Verrocchio’s is conventional. (See http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/baptism.html for an interesting discussion of The Baptism of Christ.)

But Pater suggests also that Leonardo learned something from Verrocchio. In particular, he was taken with “the perfection of the older Florentine style of miniature painting,” which “awoke in Leonardo some seed of discontent” and spurred him to realize his insight that the world “must be weighted with more of the meaning of nature and purpose of humanity.” What Pater calls “a series of disgusts” with the limitations of what had gone before would lead Leonardo to throw himself into an intense study of the natural world and living creatures, a study that made it appear to those around him “as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” His understanding of nature posits that it is full of “hidden virtues” and “correspondences.” For this study there was a cost and a great reward; we are told that Leonardo “learned here the art of going deep, of tracking the sources of expression to their subtlest retreats, the power of intimate presence in the things he handled.” The cost was that he had to abandon the old “cheerful objective” style of painting, and once committed to the new enterprise, he came under the sway of “the extremes of beauty and terror” in nature and humanity. The beauty he pursued through Florentine avenues was of a “curious” sort, not the kind that would lend itself to conventional representation; and his concentration on nature’s grotesque dimension began to take hold. Pater’s reference to Leonardo’s fascination with “the smiling of women and the motion of great waters” I take to be a way of alluding to his need for mystery, ultimate knowledge, and dynamism.

Leonardo’s interest in the grotesque, says Pater, shows most compellingly in the Medusa of the Uffizii. It has since been disputed whether or not this painting is, as the Renaissance art critic Giorgio Vasari claims in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), actually Leonardo’s work, but we might as well leave that controversy aside in the interest of exploring Pater’s commentary. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa_(Leonardo_da_Vinci) as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasari.) In Pater’s view, Leonardo’s interpretation of the ancient myth is perfection itself: “The subject has been treated in various ways; Leonardo alone cuts to its centre; he alone realises it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death.” In this representation, says Pater, we find a deep understanding of the “fascination with corruption,” with the death and decay of mortal flesh and the strange horror it provokes in us.

Pater writes of Leonardo as well that the painter “was smitten with a love of the impossible” and, later, that his work is consonant with the spirit of Renaissance scientific inquiry: “The science of that age was all divination, clairvoyance, unsubjected to our exact modern formulas, seeking in an instant of vision to concentrate a thousand experiences.” There is always a link to alchemy in such science, he implies, and that quality is to be found in Leonardo’s works of art. Leonardo, explains Pater, was a seeker of “short cuts and odd byways to knowledge,” and a visionary who sought “the sources of springs beneath the earth or of expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things . . . .” It is in this context that we may see the famous “Mona Lisa” (http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/mona.html; a good copy is available at http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/op76.jpg) portrait as the perfect expression of Leonardo’s gifts, and the perfect object for Pater’s impressionist mode of criticism: the painting itself is pure, concentrated suggestiveness. Pater suggests that the smile on La Gioconda’s face had been long in the making and that it was no doubt a product of Leonardo’s childhood; the resulting portrait, he writes, is “expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire.” She is a summation or embodiment of female beauty, goes the idea, that loses none of its power for its being a “sweeping together” of many experiences over a long period of time.

Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa is fanciful, most of us would say, in that strange allusions abound: the lady in the portrait is called a “vampire,” a deep-sea diver, a seeker after “strange webs” (woven fabrics), as well as Leda (Helen of Sparta’s mother) and Saint Anne (the mother of Mary, Jesus’ mother), and in her face is etched “All the thoughts and experience of the world . . .,” thoughts expressive of “the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.” La Gioconda’s beauty is nonetheless distinctly modern; it is imbued with a soulfulness, Pater suggests, not known to the artists who made those calm classical statues of maidens and goddesses. What are we to make of all these allusions and grand claims about a portrait of a woman with a puzzling smile? Well, certainly Pater isn’t claiming that any of what he says represents Leonardo’s conscious intentions: perhaps the artist simply concentrated on his task of painting an excellent portrait. Pater’s aim is instead to register accurately the thoughts and sensations that the suggestive portrait has provoked in him: what we are reading is Pater’s own impression of the painting, his attempt to render the portrait’s strong effects on his own consciousness. In effect, we are encouraged to see Mona Lisa as Pater sees her, just as we are encouraged to see parts of Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) beautiful gardens at Giverny as that French impressionist painter saw them at a particular moment. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet.)

But this is not to say that Pater’s word-portraiture is merely self-absorbed or solipsistic. His chapter on Leonardo casts the Florentine as a man alive to influences of all kinds but reducible to none of them. His impressionist model of the individual strives for that kind of strong, dynamic openness to aesthetic and other kinds of experience. Leonardo’s enigmatic “Lady Lisa” is the best possible expression of the painter’s finest qualities. Leonardo has endowed her with the influences of many ages and many styles, but somehow they don’t define her, any more than characterizing Leonardo da Vinci as a “Florentine Renaissance painter” would render for us his remarkable spirit and abilities. Pater’s allusive prose pays tribute to that remarkable quality in Leonardo rather than trying to convey “the painter’s intention” or trying to reproduce a sense of the painting’s appearance, as a descriptive critic would. Pater characterizes Mona Lisa instead as a symbol that only Leonardo could paint so compellingly: “The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.” She embodies an idea of human beauty and perfection, but retains an aura of mystery and undefinability. The “modern thought” seems to be an allusion to Hegel’s philosophy, in which past developments are said to be “sublated” into the present reality, at once canceled and preserved without being simply negated. So in this sense la Gioconda is the modern ideal of beauty and humanity, subsuming and yet subtly preserving what went before.

“Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1511-12. “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.” Today’s scientific tendency is only a variation of a thought available to the ancients—Heraclitus, for example, one of whose fragmentary sayings Pater quotes as a prefix to his Conclusion to The Renaissance. And there is a way to deal with this tendency towards relativism: as Oscar Wilde, Pater’s onetime student at Oxford, might say, the only way to conquer a temptation is to give in to it. That is what Pater’s rhetoric in the Conclusion to The Renaissance does. Pater embraces the modern sense of impermanence, and tries to turn it into a healthy force rather than an excuse for paralysis or apathy. Pater’s impressionism has some affinity with the quick eye and hand of Baudelaire’s Constantine Guys, whose goal is to capture what is truly beautiful from the passing shows of things. As for Pater’s analysis of the “inward world of thought and feeling” (1511) until we can hardly resist his claim that each person’s thoughts and feelings are permanently walled off from those of all others (absolute solipsism), this isn’t necessarily a call to egotism or selfishness.

Instead, Pater grinds down our sense of personal identity until what remains is a process, which he describes as “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (1512). In thus promoting a kind of modernity that begins to sound like praise for the Heraclitean flux, the aim isn’t intellectual or emotional comfort. Neither is there an injunction to collective solidarity and enterprise (no Carlylean moral blathering here, and no capitalist paeans to material progress) nor to Matthew Arnold’s quest for calm and repose.

1512-13. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.” We need not worry about the past or the future because the fleeting present-becoming-past is all we have. (I recall reading a while back that our sense of “now” lasts about five seconds, and then whatever we are or were experiencing slips into the past. That sounds about right to me.) The aim is to distill the purity of the moment in the moment and to experience that purity as intensely as possible. This intensity is perfection; it is what makes us come alive, and Pater might even say nothing else really matters. Solidity and permanence are the vain delusions of most individuals and of mankind generally. To use a Baconian phrase, they are the “idols” of the entire species. Pater writes that “our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike” (1512). Denaturalization (as in Romantic theory that would have us “cleanse the doors of perception” and “strip away the film of familiarity”) and concentration (as in Zen meditation) are Pater’s watchwords: he counsels an emptying of the self until the mind’s “narrow chamber” can register a multitude of impressions without the barriers erected by personal habit and cultural conventionality, thereby achieving maximum intensity of experience. Paterian hedonism isn’t so much about pleasure in the vulgar sense as about purity, clarity of perception, intensity, aliveness. His use of the term hedonism is genuinely Greek, not Utilitarian (as in Bentham’s famous remark about “pushpin being as good as poetry”). Pater says that art is the best thing to engage with, but he also says that any register of experience may serve the purpose. He advocates a certain temperament and orientation towards life.

On 1513, Pater’s invocation of Rousseau’s Confessions (with its call to “intellectual excitement”) rejects morality of either the Utilitarian or the religious strain, replacing it with a passionate regard for pure art: “Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.” It isn’t difficult to understand why some Victorians found the Conclusion subversive: how could a great many young people fail to translate Pater’s suggestions into their own less refined program of active experience? Is it possible for a modern person to follow Pater’s Greek prescription for “success in life”? That is what Dorian Gray tries to do, and those of us who have read Wilde’s novel know how badly that experiment turns out. This is not to condemn Pater in the manner of a Victorian moralist; it is to point out that the Paterian doctrine is dependent upon its audience’s capacities for refined perception and sensibilities and that such qualities are not always to be found in the cultural environment within which Pater is writing his books.

From “Style” in Appreciations (Note in Norton 8 th Edition but included in 7 th Edition)

1645-48. Pater’s argument regarding the prosaic excellence of some poetry and the poetic qualities in fine prose, as well as his remarks about historiography, partially anticipate very modern notions. With the advent of structuralism and so-called post-structuralism from the 1960’s onward, it has become difficult for critics simply to assert that this or that literary genre should be rigidly defined and that individual works should then be judged on how well (or badly) they adhere to generic conventions. Neither would most 21 st-century historians claim too boldly that they are “simply telling us how things actually happened.” That sort of objectivism has gone out of style, and has come to seem presumptuous: history, as Pater suggests with his mention of Livy, Tacitus, Gibbon, and Michelet, is as least as much a “story” or narrative as it is a recounting of actual events. In this sense, the historian’s task resembles that of a fiction-writer—he or she must arrange a set of incidents and thereby tell a credible and compelling story about certain events and characters. Hayden White makes that point very well in his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

Pater’s point, however, is hardly what some take to be the lesson of postmodern literary theory— he isn’t offering us an almost nihilistic pronouncement on the impossibility of making judgments about literary works or historical events. (That view of contemporary literary theory is not very perceptive since, after all, the best work in the field doesn’t so much celebrate “indeterminacy” as explore the potential for harm by those who boast of a premature and unearned self-certainty in matters of literature, historical discourse, or politics. Humans have been destroying themselves and others for millennia, it might be argued, in part because they have a perpetual and almost infinite capacity to dupe themselves and then to act upon their false suppositions.) Instead, Pater offers us a sophisticated model of the impressionist critic—his critic is someone whose temperament and sensibilities are finely attuned to making relevant distinctions and discovering the various excellences in any medium of art, or in any kind of non-fiction work, for that matter. The “aesthetic critic” he favors is sometimes considered rather an elitist and rarefied purveyor of literary comments—a person who sees art as something far removed from ordinary life. Pater himself was, of course, a quiet Oxford Don whose secluded and relatively uneventful life exemplified that quintessential British quality, “reserve.” Even so, we might make a case for a kinder reading of Pater’s critical emphasis—his insistence that prose and verse, fiction and real life, are not so far apart as some would make them can be read as a call to extend a sensitive, yet critical glance across the full spectrum of human experience. The sharp perceptual abilities and refined powers of discernment of the art critic, that is, might serve us well in matters extending beyond art.