Pater's Letters and His Mask

15° sweet peace and quiet that must be his now" (p. 60) or again, "I found myself envying Wilfred, so safely dead and at peace, with his struggle not only behind him but . . . with his own fight won for ever" (p. 127). Most of the other people who appear in the book are either members of the Owen family, or, not surprisingly, people connected with art or with farming. Siegfried Sassoon, however, remains on the fringe of Mr. Owen's life, an enigmatic character whom at first he "did not like . . . very much" (p. 8). From all personal accounts of Sassoon after the 1914-1918 war it appears that he was indeed an odd and private man and It Is not surprising that his constant rebuffs to Harold Owen left the somewhat impetuous painter "seething with anger" (p. 177). It is not its literary associations that make this book compulsive reading, though the fact that it completes the story of Wilfred Owen's family adds to its interest. What Mr. Owen has done most successfully Is to re-create a particular aspect of post-war England which, while it has often been spoken of in vague terms, has not before been so minutely examined. At the same time he has presented in vivid terms the efforts of a creative artist to fulfill his destiny against all odds and at no matter what personal cost. University of Dundee, Scotland Hilda D. Spear 2, Pater's Letters and His Mask Lawrence Evans (ed), Letters of Walter Pater. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1970. $8.00. Walter Pater is now unquestionably a favorite of the critics, for no less than half a dozert full length studies of his work have appeared in the last five years alone. One could be cynical and say that the increased preoccupation with this shy, retiring don - half aesthete, half academic philosopher - is due more to his impact on the nineties and turn of the century celebrities than to his own certain talents. It is clear, however, that his renaissance is not generated merely by his influence, although "Pater's relative," as A. E. disparagingly observed, has "infected " all of modern literature, but also by the experimental techniques and the daring ideas he offered so quietly to Victorian England. The publication of the only complete collection ever made of Pater's letters, therefore, would lead us to seek further justification for his reputation, in spite of his influence rather than because of it, though we have been told by all of his contemporaries and his early biographers how reserved he was even with his closest acquaintances, even in his most personal correspondence . Lawrence Evans· Letters of Walter Pater is a meticulously edited and admirably researcned volume. in implementing his I96I Harvard dissertation, he has been thorough and precise: his Introduction is short yet illuminating and his notes are complete. But the !51 picture of Pater the correspondent emerges as incomplete and skeletal , a fact which Mr. Evans himself concedes with stoical resignation even though he advises us that many letters, perhaps some of importance, are missing. The fact, unfortunate though it be, is simply that Pater is not a good letter writer, like Keats, not even a prolific letter writer, like George Moore, and most certainly not a revealing letter writer, like Joyce. He tells us quite frequently (pp. 52, 80, 129) that he is not comfortable with correspondence , and his uneasiness is obvious. Most of the letters are about business or social appointments, but some, notably these to Symons, Sharp, Gosse, Wilde and Moore, do reveal how Pater often lifted what Moore called his public mask to identify himself with the apprentice efforts of his younger contemporaries, especially those who later acknowledged him as their master. Moore's Confessions (in that famous letter Moore so proudly prints in the Preface to the 1916 edition) is praised with guarded reserve but with deep insight. Frank Harris, Michael Field (whose real identity Pater soon discovered) and Lionel Johnson are encouraged. The early romances of Edmund Gosse, his study of Congreve, a collection of his poetry, are all happily received, and Gosse's congratulatory reviews of Pater's Plato and Platonlsm and...