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31:3 Book Reviews kind, considerate social manner. He had no inclination to punish his body or starve his affections as Pascal did, from a "perverse asceticism" (Miscellaneous Studies, Lib. Ed., 79), but he had a strong sense of social responsibility and a deep regard for the proprieties as an element in civilization. This particular kind of doubleness is not "schizoid"; it is Victorian. It was Henry James who launched the myth that Pater was enigmatic: "He is the mask without the face. . ." (200). Raffalovich's comment on this statement is appropriate: "Dear Henry James! so attractively unsophisticated in his sentiments , so literary in his rendering of them" (Blackfriars, 9:471). Seiler continues to think Pater an enigma, but the selections he has so expertly ananged and annotated can lead a certain kind of reader to a different conclusion . BiIHe Andrew Inman University of Arizona WALTER PATER William E. Buckler. Walter Pater: The Critic as Artist of Ideas. New York: New York University Press, 1987. $45.00 I suppose that no American scholar cunently writing on Victorian literature in this country possesses a greater historical right to be termed a Paterian than William E. Buckler. The reading of "Style" which prefaced his 1958 anthology of Victorian prose functioned—and still functions, for those who take the time to reread it—not only as a fine introduction to Pater and the Victorians, but as a model for reading all imaginative prose. Now, nearly three decades later, Professor Buckler has produced a full-length study of that writer he so clearly loves. His new work is thoughtful, graceful, but ultimately disappointing. Buckler has obviously read the Pater texts often and carefully throughout a long career. His explications, especially the sections on Marius and Plato and Platonism, are intelligent and very helpful. But his work suffers from a lack of the central Paterian virtues of intellectual humility and tolerance. The mental agility of the 1958 essay is still there, but it is accompanied in the new book by a disturbing sense of critical righteousness which is thoroughly foreign to Pater, however much it may typify academic writing. Buckler seems to regard his work as, among other things, a conective to the writings on Pater of Harold Bloom and his followers, and he does indeed provide a useful counter argument to that school. In Bloom's view, Ruskin is Pater's predominant model, the intellectual father against whom the younger writer waged a lifelong struggle. Ruskin is a very minor figure in Buckler's book, mentioned rarely and then usually in a disparaging tone. Buckler prefers to stress the Arnoldian side of Pater's inheritance. Nor is there any question of struggle against that powerful mentor. Buckler sees Pater's revisions of Arnold as simply "such personal advances upon his model as his temperament, 318 31:3 Book Reviews taste, and talent would sustain" (108). Both the downplaying of obvious conflict and the implied teleology are typical of the book. Pater becomes an idealized, nearly ideal figure in Buckler's delineation of his career. He is a harmonious self-creation, a figure who, having somehow managed to reconcile the conflicting impulses of a human life, has achieved Bildung, in his writings if not in his inelevant everyday existence. From beginning to end, from "Diaphaneit è" to Plato and Platonism, Buckler's Pater is aesthetic man in his most nearly complete form, a writer who "converted criticism into an art form having the most practical kind of relevance to the way man, past, present, and future, can take charge of his environment and master it" (296). There are no troubling questions as to whether aesthetic man is either possible or worth the effort, whether an environment can or should be "mastered," whether a given work confronts or simply screens the salient features of personal or social conflict. The quotation speaks in the tones of the entire book, assured, worldly, seemingly untroubled. One hears in such passages the language of Victorianism, but also the language of the American 1950s, a time when intellectual conservatism often wore a mask of Arnoldian disinterestedness. Throughout the book Buckler disparages much of what has happened in criticism in the last three...

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