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21 PATER AND THE SUBJECT OF DUALITY By Franklin E. Court (Northern Illinois University) For years, critics of Walter Pater's works have been aware of his interest in dual characters. As early as I906, A. C. Benson called attention to Marius* feeling, in Marius the Epicurean, "that behind all the complexity of life. . . there moves a guide, a heavenly friend ever at his side, to whom he is perhaps dearer than even to himself, a Father of Men."l Here Benson refers specifically to a type of "I-Thou" relationship between Marius and his God, but the reference can be extended to include most of the characters in Pater's historical and imaginary portraits who also feel, at one time or another , the need for a companion who functions in their lives as a "guide." Over the years, critical interest in Pater's use of dual characters has continued. As recently as I969, for example, David DeLaura pointed to a "crisis of 'sympathy'" in Marius that exemplifies Pater's developing "realization that self-cultivation is incomplete in Isolation from others."2 Marius is, perhaps, the most obvious example of Pater's treatment of the idea that man cannot realize his potential without the aid of others. Consider, for instance, the many friends and teachers who guide Marius in his search for the "Ideal." But most of the portraits in The Renaissance also embody the idea that some particular type of aid Is transmitted through a companion. Generally, that aid comes in the form of knowledge. In "The School of Giorgione," he states the idea explicitly. Knowledge as "'imaginative reason,*" he maintains, is "the complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twinborn with its sensible analogue or symbol."3 He touches upon two important points here: the first is the contention that all knowledge is "twin-born"; the second is the subsequent idea that somewhere there exists a "sensible analogue" of this knowledge. The "sensible analogue " is, in one obvious form, the companion figure. Later, in Plato and Platonlsm. he affirms the idea: "true knowledge," he writes, "will be like the knowledge of a person" (p. 146). Here the transfer of knowledge is equated specifically with the idea of knowing another, an assertion to which he adds the supporting thought that In fact "human persons and their acts" are visible representations "of the eternal qualities of 'the eternal·" (p. 268). One may safely assume therefore that from the publication of The Renaissance in I873 to Plato and Platonlsm in 1893 Pater is developing and refining his belief that knowledge is transmitted through the ages in the form of companion figures or visible representations of "'the eternal.·" As unusual as the idea may at first appear, it is actually a familiar characteristic of Victorian culture. The age abounds in countless "guides to living" that consistently offer the advice that basic assistance in the development of character comes from following good models who symbolize and, in a manner of speaking, teach moral lessons. Samuel Smiles, for instance, in Self-Help, the phenomenally bast-selling handbook of Victorian "respectability," insists that 22 "good rule may do much, but good models far more: for in the latter we have instruction in action - wisdom at work."4 The companion figure, devoid of intrusive overtones of "respectability," also is the impetus behind Catherine's famous "I am Heathcliff" admission in Wutherlng Heights; and later it becomes an essential aspect of character development in Wilde's Dorian Gray and Stevenson's tale of Jekyll and Hyde. Growing interest in the idea during the century finally culminates in the intense psychological probings of the relationship between dual figures in the novels of Conrad; and later, Joyce and Mann. Although less obvious, Pater also reveals a considerable interest in the idea. He utilizes at least four distinct types of dual relationships in his imaginary and historical portraits. In all instances, the hero of the portrait has some knowledge essential to his development passed on to him by a companion, thus, acting out the idea of "instruction in action - wisdom at work" but without the overt moral implications suggested by Smiles and other Victorian moralists. The four dualities...

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