Variations on the Oxford Temper: Swinburne, Pater and Botticelli

Variations on the Oxford Temper: Swinburne, Pater and Botticelli John Coates University of Hull You had not yet been able to acquire the "Oxford temper" in intellectual matters, never, I mean been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely. —Wilde, De Profundis THE OBJECT OF THIS PAPER is to explore certain aspects of the relationship between Swinburne's "Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence" and Pater's "A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli." There is no doubt that Swinburne's essay, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1868 and Pater's, probably begun in the autumn of 1869, published in the same periodical in 1870 and reprinted in Studies in the History of the Renaissance as "Sandro Botticelli" in 1873, are related in some way. For art critics either or both essays are crucially significant documents in the Victorian "discovery" of Botticelli. In Michael Levey's view, "Swinburne is probably the first English person to set down at length an appreciation of Botticelli."1 Swinburne himself records what seems to have been a session of mutual flattery in which Pater declared that his "first papers in The Fortnightly" owed "their inspiration to the example" of Swinburne's "work in the same line."2 However, Pater, in a letter to a journalist, while implicitly refuting Ruskin's claim that he alone had discovered Botticelli 's "excellency and supremacy," seems also to minimise Swinburne's claim to Botticelli. "A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli" "I believe to be the first notice in English of that old painter. It preceded Mr Ruskin's lectures on the subject by I believe two years."3 260 COATES : SWINBURNE & PATER Pater's essay is clearly seminal in art criticism. His interest in a poignant interfusion of pagan and Christian culture in Botticelli bore little resemblance to stray hints of opinion about the painter, such as those of Browning4 or Mrs. Oliphant,5 which had hitherto existed. By 1903, the author of a text-book in a popular series was claiming that Pater had "penetrated more deeply than any other critic into the spirit of Botticelli's art."6 E. H. Gombrich and other critics later explored Pater's insights in great scholarly detail and provided the basis of the most influential current views of the painter. A literary critic could hardly ignore the general cultural significance of Pater's piece and the innovative line it took about a then neglected, little-known artist. However, such a critic would have another, more specific interest in this essay on Botticelli. "A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli" comes very early in Pater's career. It is preceded by only four pieces of generally accepted significance, and by very little other published material. It is different in tone and origin from what preceded it. Seen from the vantage point of Pater's later career "Diaphaneitè" (1864), "Coleridge's Writings" (1865), and "Wincklemann" (1867) look like attempts to establish the premises of an argument. These early essays try to define the distinct territory of aesthetic as opposed to political, theological or moral experience and perception. Suggestions for a programme of living, Pater's first pieces operate within the mode of guarded self-revelation, of special pleading for a particular, marginalised temperament. It is hard not to see "Diaphaneitè's" rejection of notions of life as a gaining of advantage or a using of others and its advocacy of a colourless, unclassified purity, a repose and simplicity at one with itself or the plea in "Coleridge's Writings" for the relative spirit and contentment with the here and now, as against fixed principles and efforts to apprehend the absolute, as other than Pater's self-revelation and self-justification, whatever his essays' other purposes and effects. "Wincklemann" carries self-identification and implied, but obvious, selfdisclosure even further. The piece dwells sympathetically on Wincklemann 's native tendency to escape from abstract theory into intuition, his rejection of theology, his irritation at the oppressive attitude of older academics, his renunciation of personal ambition and choice of plain, though not niggardly, lifestyle. The essay sympathises, too, with Wincklemann 's admiration for male beauty and with his assertion...