-
Brasenose Revisited: Pater in the 80s
- English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920
- ELT Press
- Volume 32, Number 1, 1989
- pp. 27-32
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Brasenose Revisited: Pater in the 80s JOHN J. CONLON University of Massachusetts at Boston A wealth of new material on Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, continues to emerge world-wide; some of it was presented at the second international conference, "New Work on Pater," held at Queen's College, Oxford, 5-7 July 1988. Nearly three dozen scholars from England, Wales, Italy, Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States gathered to share their research, comment on works in progress, and discuss the new edition-in-progress of Pater's work proposed at the first Pater conference (Oxford, 1980) and now in various stages of completion. What follows is a series of partial portraits, neither exhaustive nor complete. They are a "group of impressions," as Pater would have it, "ringed round ... by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us" that I must claim as my own. It may be that I have strongly misheard others' words, but I use as my disclaimer Pater's honeyed phrase that I have aimed first at knowing my own impressions as they really were. The papers touched upon many elements in a vast spectrum of concerns about Pater, the man and his work, from his first known essay, "Diaphaneite," (1864), to "the last thing Walter wrote," "Pascal" (1894), the majority of the work between them, including the manuscripts , some quite fragmentary, at Harvard University's Houghton Library, and some hot correspondence that concerned Pater in 1874. Others focused on the sources behind Pater's prose, on his method of composition which amounted to a reshuffling of his texts on the one hand and multiple instances of self-quotation on the other, and on his influence upon Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herbert Home, James Joyce, and Henry James. In "The Diaphanous Man" session, Anne Varty opened the conference with a paper on "Diaphaneite" in which she explored the title's meaning as a Greek verb (a matter about which she and I and maybe some others agree) and the essay's content relative to the title. In a carefully constructed argument she both described Pater's knowledge and use of Goethe and connected the Old Mortality essay to "Winckelmann " and to "Duke Carl of Rosenmold" in light of Pater's exploration of Goethe and the notion of the ideal as crystallization. As she dealt 27 Cordon: Brasenose Revisited: Pater in the 80s deftly with Pater's alpha, so Hayden Ward probed his literary omega, "Pascal." On the track of Pater's knowledge of Pascal's works and of Gosse's edition of Pater's essay in the Contemporary Review (MS now in the Bodleian Library), Ward examined Arnold's notion of imaginative reason and the dialectic that produced it in view of Pater's treatment of Pascal. Noting that Pater's conception of Pascal was limited (and longsince proven so), Ward proceeded to examine that conception as, in some respects, a final statement about Pater's own self. Hiroko Hagiwara rounded out the treatment of the Diaphanous Man with an instructive comparison of the lives of Pater and Gosse, the common elements in their literary concerns and careers, and an examination of their treatment of fathers in fiction, notably in Pater's semi-autobiographical "The Child in the House" and Marius the Epicurean and Gosse's Father and Son. "Aesthetic Criticism and Victorian Poetry" featured three stunning papers. Lesley Higgins explored Pater's role as tutor to Hopkins using the Hopkins notebooks in Campion Hall (Oxford) and traced the circumstances under which Jowett recommended that Hopkins work with Pater at Brasenose to counter the Puseyism then prevalent at Baliol. (Jowett would later learn that he had more to fear from Pater than Puseyism.) Hopkins's essays for Pater, themselves somewhat Paterian in tone and vocabulary, prefigure some of the poetics he would later develop as "inscape" and "instress." Much of Higgins's research came from heroically wading through the uncatalogued and unclassified morass of material in Baliol. Stephen Regan discoursed brilliantly on Pater and Aesthetic Poetry, connecting Pater's critical stance with the methodologies of such critics as Harold Bloom, Roland Barthes, and J. Hillis...