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. PR 5138 .A 35 W 5 1989 824 '. 8 —dc 20 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 Abbreviations Introduction Part One • Opening Conclusions I. "That Which Is Without" 2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling" 3. Aestheticism 4. Answerable Style 5. Iiistoricism 6. Aesthetic Iiistoricism and "Aesthetic Poetry" 7. The Poetics of Revival Part Two • Figural Strategies in The Renaissance I. Legend and Iiistoricity 2. Myths of Iiistory: The Last Supper 3. The Iiistoricity of Myth 4. Myths of Iiistory: The Mona Lisa 5. Types and Figures 6. Low and Iiigh Relief: " Luca Della Robbia" 7. The Senses of Relief • vii • ix xi I II 14 18 26 37 46 57 68 79 82 94 103 III 123 143 153 · viii · Contents Part Three · Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean l. The Transparent Hero 2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist 3. The Transcendental Induction 4. Typology as Narrative Form 5. Typological Ladders 6. Christian Historicism 7. Literary History as "Appreciation" Part Four · "Recovery as Reminiscence" : The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism l. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies 2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter 3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form 4. The History of Philosophy 5. The Anecdote of the Shell 6. Dialogue and Dialectic 7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind Afterword Index 169 172 184 193 202 213 219 224 235 238 247 249 258 266 270 277 282 285 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 final reformulation. 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, Massach usetts Abbreviations Quotations from Pater's works, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the ten-volume Library Edition (London: Macmillan, 1 9 10; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1 973), abbreviated as follows: A EG GL GS IP ME I ME II MS pp R Appreciations Essays from the "Guardian" Gaston de Latour Greek Studies Imaginary Portraits Marius the Epicurean, volume I Marius the Epicurean, volume II Miscellaneous Studies Plato and Platonism 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 ( 1 974; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1 982) . . 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 artificial or " 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 51 I take the contradiction into account by defining historicism 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 specifically literary 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. My reference to Pater's "aesthetic historicism, " then, also names his most fundamental literary form. I have borrowed the phrase "aesthetic historicism" from Erich Auer bach, who used it of Vico. ' These implied connections, with Vico before him and Auerbach after, immediately place Pater in a tradition of historicist philology. Pater read Vico in 18661 and he seems to have found there a confirmation and historical precedent for his own deeply historical view of cultural forms. 2 Today Vico's New Science seems 1. Erich Auerbach, "Vico's Aesthetic Historism, " in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1 9 5 9 ), pp. 1 8 3- 1 9 8 . On the compara tive nuances of the German-derived "historism" and the Italian-derived "historicism, " see Dwight E. Lee and Robert Beck, "The Meaning of 'Historicism, ' " American Histori cal Review 5 9 (April 1 9 5 4), 5 68. In his entry "historicism, " Wesley Morris uses the phrase "aesthetic historicism" (in a sense related to though different from mine) to name one of his "four major types " of historicism. He refers to an historicism that is "the product of the philosophy of history promoted by Croce and R. G. Collingwood" and that leads to an emphasis on the creative act of the poet "to make cultural meanings and values, not merely reflect them." See Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1 9 6 5 ; enlarged ed., 1 974), p. 9 3 8 . 2. . Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Bor rowings and Literary References, 1 8 5 8-1 873 (New York: Garland, 1 98 1 ), pp. 148- 5 7 . Introduction · 3 · uncannily prescient of Hegel and Darwin, who were certainly the more proximate sources for Pater's genetic and evolutionary views of art history. In fact, Pater's assimilation of Hegel and Darwin registers the particularly post-Victorian quality of his vision. His "aesthetic historicism" thus also refers to Pater's Hegelian (and "Darwinian" ) views of the evolution of art forms in historical time. I have turned the phrase "aesthetic historicism" to my own uses here. My largest purpose is to argue the deeply interfused relation of Pater's historicism and his aestheticism and to read that relation in specifically literary-as distinguished from philosophical-terms. One of the most important results of the current critical revival in Pater studies has been the growing sense of his pervasive historicism. It has long been recognized as the element that makes his aestheticism special and somehow stronger than any other late-nineteenth-century version of the aesthetic stance. But recently, in the work of Harold Bloom, Peter Allan Dale, Donald L. Hill, Billie Andrew Inman, Wolf gang Iser, and F. C. McGrath, we are beginning to get a clearer idea of exactly how it works. Dale, for example, argues for Pater's "complete historicism" and places it at the apex of a tradition in English criticism which is centrally concerned with the philosophy of history.3 My theoretical approach to aestheticism and historicism is devel oped in Part One. Both aestheticism and historicism are strategies of epistemological self-consciousness and representation, and as such both offer systematic programs for what to look at and how to look. Both begin in skepticism, questioning the very possibility of knowl edge, and both tum that epistemological doubt against itself in a dialectical revision of the grounds of knowledge. In this respect, Pater's aesthetic historicism is in the mainstream of the Victorian reaction against romanticism and the consequent attempt to reconstruct a sense of objectivity. But even more than by virtue of its negative reaction, aesthetic historicism is decidedly postromantic by virtue of its positive and thorough absorption of romantic techniques of self consciousness. In a fierce yet wistful embrace of necessity, Pater ac knowledges from the beginning that the simplest act of perception is an aesthetic act. He turns to history-and in particular to the history 3 . Harold Bloom, introduction to Selected Writings of Walter Pater; Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (Cambridge, Mass . : Harvard University Press, 1 97 7 ); Donald L. Hill, textual and explanatory notes to The Ren aissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, The I 89 3 Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 980); Inman, Walter Pater's Reading; Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 98 7 ), esp. pp. 7 1- 1 04; and F. C. McGrath, The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm (Tampa, Fla . : University of South Florida Press, 1 98 6 ) . · 4 · Introduction of art-to recover the sense of a world of objects external to the mind, though he realizes at the same time that history itself is in part the result of an aesthetic reconstruction. "Aesthetic historicism, 11 then, names the complex interaction through which Pater's aestheticism and historicism stabilize, support, supplement, and correct each other. As methods of knowledge or strategies of representation, both aes theticism and historicism begin with strict attention to the unique particularity of each object-the specific, unrepeatable nature of each event-and both finally press beyond that intense concentration in particularity toward an apprehension of form in general. On one end of this methodological spectrum we find Keatsian and Pre-Raphaelite detail, the epiphanic moment, and the Heraclitean flux; on the other end we find mythic repetition, the Yeatsian Vision, and a developmen tal continuity projected to organize and transcend the atomism of epiphanic moments. Once again, then, Pater's aesthetic historicism may be seen as post-Victorian as well as postromantic, for it prefigures the bridge between science and mythopoeia that early-twentieth-cen tury modernism was concerned to construct. There has been an invidious tendency in Pater studies to treat Pater's historicism separately from-and in many cases as the opposite of or at odds with-his aestheticism. This book argues against that tendency and for the notion that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism repre sent homologous and absolutely interdependent procedures in a com plex and coherent method. Either term is radically incomplete as a de scription of Pater's critical method without the other, for they are not simply two "themes" in his work, but two sides of the same epistemo logical and representational coin. This thorough implication of aesthet icism and historicism in his work is the precondition for-or the defini tion of-his own emergent literary modernism. An extremely rich texture is generated by the mutual implication of aestheticism and historicism in Pater's essays. My readings in Parts Two, Three, and Four are designed to explore this territory. The book's entitling notion of a "transfigured world" comes from the review essay on William Morris, where Pater sets forth many of the strategies of his aesthetic historicism. There he defines the category he calls " aesthetic poetry, 11 by which he means the modern poetry of his contemporary moment, and-as I claim-his own "poetics of revival" as well. I have chosen as my epigraph a passage from that essay. All poetry projects its vision " above the realities of its time, " Pater argues, but "aesthetic poetry" seizes upon that already-transfigured world and re-creatively " sublimates beyond it, " generating a second-order transfiguration: the transfigured world transfigured again. This formal Introduction • s · feature of "aesthetic poetry" is also a symptom of its historicism, for the double movement of transfiguration marks a poetry that specifi cally incorporates and transforms the poetry of an earlier historical period. Several implications of my epigraph, each of them discussed much more expansively in the argument to follow, should be noted here : first, that the act of redoubling the distance from the "realities of the time" revives a sense of those realities; second, that aesthetic value is gener ated in the second of these transfigurative moments; and third, that the word "transfiguration" itself focuses not only on the production of a figure from a previous figure but also on the transferential movement that such figures recall in their forms. The first act of transfiguration moves the figure "across from" or "beyond" or "above" the forms of "realities" or "things " believed to have been directly accessible, origi nal, and present, things irrevocably lost even at the moment they are represented. But the second act of transfiguration establishes a distance not in relation to "realities" or "things " but in relation to other figures. "Aesthetic poetry" is "literally . . . artificial" not only because its form avowedly responds to art of the past, but also because that very form reveals the irreducibly poetic function involved in historical imagina tion at the same time that it reveals the absolute impossibility of an "actual" return, re-creation, or revival. Against this background, I have chosen to focus on several central Paterian figures and groups of figures. Each of these figures plays its part in Pater's historical sense of aesthetics as well as in his aesthetic re-creation of history. In my book, a "figure" is first a rhetorical figure. In this sense, I have employed the word along the whole range between its narrowest and broadest constructions to refer to an individual instance of a figure, such as a particular metaphor, and to the general use of a group of figures. I suggest several ways of understanding Pater's fundamental strategies of figuration in this latter, broader sense. For example, Pater's sense of time passing in the flux of present conscious ness works both within and against his conservative desire to recon tain fragments of time in some imaginary place, and throughout the book I pursue a basic distinction between figures that attempt to represent temporality and figures of spatial enclosure. Another exam ple is Pater's habit of constructing dialectical genealogies in order to represent a sense of time's passage. Aesthetic value is figuratively generated through the self-divisions, doublings, and reunifications that compose these genealogies, and thus they serve to imitate the shape of development as well as to demonstrate Pater's fundamental premise that aesthetic value evolves in historical time.