Walter Pater and the Ruskinian Gentleman

Walter Pater and the Ruskinian Gentleman Joseph Bizup Indiana University IN THE INTRODUCTION to The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, Robin Gilmour comments that "the idea of the gentleman is manifestly important in the Victorian novel; one cannot read very far in Thackeray, Dickens, or Trollope, without realising that they were fascinated by the image of the gentleman and its relation to the actual and ideal possibilities for the moral life in society."1 Yet this concern with the gentleman as a moral and social being surfaces in less obvious places as well. In fact, Gilmour's remark could be applied, with only slight modification, to Walter Pater. If Pater is not as "manifestly'' captivated by the image of the gentleman as his mid-Victorian predecessors , his work nevertheless registers what Gilmour calls "the subtle and shifting balance between social and moral attributes that give gentlemanliness its fascination. . . Γ2, In Marius the Epicurean particularly, Pater manipulates this shifting balance to explore a subject of crucial importance to his thought: the moral implications of his aestheticism. While thoughtful readers of Pater have long acknowledged the association between aesthetics and morality in his work, it is important to recognize this conjunction as a historically specific product of and response to mid-nineteenth-century anxieties about norms of masculinity . During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the category of the gentleman expanded to include members of the professional middle class. "It is no accident that most of the famous Victorian definitions of the gentleman occur in the 1850s and early 1860s," writes Gilmour, "for this is the period when the spirit of middle-class reform was making its challenge felt within the aristocratic framework of English institutions."3 Not surprisingly, gentlemanliness came to be 51 ELT 38 :1 1995 characterized in ways that established it as an attainable condition for those who were not members of the traditional aristocracy or gentry. While "gentleman" originally indicated high birth—the word derives from the Old French "gentil horn" (highborn or noble man) and first entered English in the thirteenth century as "gentile man"—this meaning faded in the nineteenth century as gentleness rather than gentility became the mark of a gentleman.4 Two essays by John Ruskin—"Of King's Treasuries" in Sesame and Lilies (1865) and the chapter "Of Vulgarity" in Modem Painters V (1860)—offer a representative model of this emerging notion of manliness .5 For Ruskin, the defining feature of the gentleman is not so much his robust physical vitality as his finely tuned sensitivity to the suffering of others and corresponding willingness to act to alleviate this suffering. The conjunction of these qualities, in turn, provides a firm moral foundation for society. Marius the Epicurean, first published in 1885, elucidates Pater's supposedly subversive philosophy through a series of characters who recall, in various degrees, Ruskin's gentleman. This is not to say that the novel's characters descend in any direct way from Ruskin's ideal gentleman. Rather, Ruskin's model serves here as an exemplary instance of a particular conception of masculinity which Pater manipulates and complicates. In Marius, Pater exploits the conjunction between physical and moral sensibility that grounds Ruskin's model to suggest the logical associations between his aestheticism and one conception of the "Christian gentleman." Yet the novel also challenges the stability of this ideal and the notion that it can serve as society's moral base. I In both "Of King's Treasuries* and "Of Vulgarity," Ruskin initially distinguishes the gentleman from ordinary men by his capacity to experience delicate sensation.6 Ruskin attributes this distinction to biological inheritance and allows it to assume a moral significance as the difference between "gentlemanliness" and "vulgarity." In "OfKUIg1S Treasuries" Ruskin writes, The ennobling difference between one man and another,—between one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.... we are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our passion."7 In Of Vulgarity," he initiates a similar argument with an etymological meditation on the word "gentleman," which in its "primal, literal, and perpetual meaning" denotes *"a man...