Pater Among the Early Critics

213 REVIEWS 1. Pater Among the Early Critics Franklin E. Court. Pater and his Early Critics (Victoria, Canada: English Literary Studies Monograph Series, University of Victoria, 1980). If Franklin Court's study contains no important innovating insights, it usefully directs attention to the problem of Pater's reputation. We've never had such an extended discussion of Pater's early critics, and Court pulls together a number of useful sources that help to clarify the factual record. After the First World War it became increasingly difficult to take Pater seriously - and something of the almost willful intent with which Pater has even recently been misunderstood is related in Court's study to the ambiguous reviews he received as his career unfolded. Among the critics discussed, overt vindictiveness plays less of a role than a simple incapacity, even on the part of friends, to grasp the novel or challenging implications of truly original work. Much of what we are told here is not strictly necessary to any specific understanding of Pater's early reputation, but Court's witty and graceful prose, his grasp of details and his vivid portraits of the early critics,all enrich the reader's insight into this formative period of Pater's reputation. If literary scholars often bear an uncanny resemblance to their subjects , then Court reminds me of certain of the critics he discusses - at their perceptive best, perhaps. But I must make two important qualifications of my endorsement: first, Court's study does not contain any really "original" material - no forgotten diaries, no unpublished texts, no new letters - and most of what he does bring together I had already seen elsewhere or had known of in a general manner. This material is generally easy of access and fairly well appreciated already. My second qualification is concerned with the way in which he has delimited the scope of his study. "I have limited the choice of critics, first, to those who had some literary prominence at the time; and, second,to those who, in my estimation, best represent the spirit of the Victorian age as it continued to manifest itself in its criticism during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. I have intentionally not carried the study to the critics, with the exception of Edmund Gosse, who were associated with the development of the 'aesthetic movement.' . . . I have attempted, instead, to provide some impression of Pater 's reputation during the years before he became inseparably linked with aestheticism." But why exclude the aesthetic critics, especially in light of the fact that from very early on they were and, probably , still remain for us the most important and surely the most interesting of Pater's early commentators? We pretty much know what Lionel Johnson, George Moore, or Oscar Wilde said of Pater; but what, for example, constitutes the Paterian thread in Johnson's criticism generally, and how did this in turn alter or confirm current perceptions of Pater? These remain interesting questions. Possibly Court's monograph should have aspired to be taken less as a contriubtion to the particular history of Pater's reputation and more as a study of the climate of nineteenth-century critical thought - a topic viewed through the perspective of a major critic's impact 214 (Pater's) upon a number of the lesser critics (Oliphant, Mallock, E. F. S. Pattison, Symonds, Saintsbury, Gosse, Morley). In the final analysis, it falls short of being an interdisciplinary foray into the cultural-philosophical pronouncements and principles of the period ; this is what its charmingly discursive summations might have become given the analytic rigor of book form. But let me conclude on a positive note. The temptation in any treatment of this topic would be to pad out the discussion with great blocks of quoted material from the reviewers. Court limits his direct quotations wisely and skillfully and, not afraid to draw conclusions, allows himself to expand instead toward comprehensive assessments of each critic under discussion. These evaluations will be of use, certainly, in my lectures . Gerald Monsman Puke University 2. On P. H. Lawrence Ponald Gutierrez. Lapsing Out. Embodiments of Death and Rebirth in the Last Writings of D1 H1 Lawrence (Rutherford. Madison...