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313 PATER AND THE SUPPRESSED "CONCLUSION" TO THE RENAISSANCE : COMMENT AND REPLY 1. Ian Small Comments In a recent article ("The Suppressed 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance and Pater's Modern Image," ELT, XVII:4 [1974], 251-58), Lawrence Schuetz discussed the circumstances of Pater's decision to omit the "Conclusion" in the second edition of The Renaissance in 1877. He concluded that "established criticism" has attributed the decision to Pater's "sensitivity to adverse criticism" (in particular to W. H. Mallock's The New Republic) and to Pater's concern for his reputation at Oxford. He argued that "neither view afforded a very favorable image of Pater, and neither accords proper significance to his stated motive for withdrawing the piece." Schuetz discounted the effect of Mallock's work on Pater, arguing that the work was published too late in I876 to affect Pater's decision; he went on to assert that Pater's decision , influenced by the unfavourable reaction of John Wordsworth to parts of the first edition of The Renaissance, and Pater's failure to obtain the Junior Proctorship at Oxford in I874, was one motivated above all by "genuine ethical concerns." However, when Pater's action is seen in the light of other contemporary evidence - principally when considered against his reputation among undergraduates at Oxford - it appears much less laudable, but perhaps more understandable; and Schuetz's interpretation of that action much less plausible. We have good evidence that Pater planned to meet Edmund Gosse in the early months of 1877^ - the time of the serialisation of The New Republic; and we know that Gosse in Critical Kit Kats (I896) remembered that Pater had been "ruffled" by the publication of The New Republic, but also by certain "newspaper articles ." It is those newspaper articles that finally provide the key to the real reasons for Pater's omission of the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance, but Gosse*s collocation is revealing. Mallock started work on The New Republic while he was at Oxford and, he claimed, rewrote the work up to seven times:2 one can perhaps, then, safely conclude that there were early manuscript drafts of the work available in Oxford in 1875. the year of the Oscar Browning scandal (Pater had known Browning since 1868 and was associated with him by, among others, Mark Pattison).3 The date is significant, because the charge that Mallock made publicly in The New Republic was that Mr. Rose's (i.e. Pater's) aestheticism was connected with, or another aspect of, unnatural sexual proclivities and an interest in the erotic generally. These, obviously, weren't light charges, and some reviewers accused Mallock of publishing a portrait of Pater that was malevolent.^· But really all Mallock had done was to familiarise a wide public with charges that were then being made at Oxford, charges that, indeed, had been made for some time. Now the reputation of Pater at Oxford between the years 1873 and 1877 was closely involved with that of John Addington Symonds. 314 Their work was reviewed together and they were represented (unfairly and inaccurately, as it turned out) as upholding and propounding the same aesthetic principles; that aesthetic creed, it was asserted, involved "effeminacy" and (though, of course, matters were never described so bluntly) homosexuality. For example, The Quarterly Review in I876 made the crude accusation that Pater was the "most thoroughly representative" contemporary proponent of an "emasculated" Romantic tradition.5 The frequent allegation of "effeminacy" gives a context to otherwise cryptic accounts of the reception of The Renaissance in Oxford in 1873· Mrs. Humphry Ward claimed somewhat mysteriously in 1918 there had been "various attempts at persecution."" Ingram Bywater, one of Pater's closest friends at Oxford, was to write to a Dr. H. Diels in Berlin claiming that in Pater's work there was "a certain sympathy with a certain aspect of Greek life [which] was not confined to him." Little wonder that W. W. Jackson, Bywater's biographer, was to assert that there was "a storm of criticism at Oxford": Dr. Mackarness, then Bishop of Oxford, in his "Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese" shortly afterwards delivered in Cathedral of Christ Church, not unnaturally fastened...

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