Pater's Synthesizing Vision

178 REVIEW: PATER'S SYNTHESIZING VISION Richmond Crlnkley. Walter Pater: Humanist. Lexington: The University of Kentucky P, 1970~ ψ?.7Y. By now, the revival of critical interest in Pater is a fact. But in spite of the many recent efforts to make Pater more fathomable ,he remains the most enigmatic of the great Victorian prosaists. Thanks to Lawrence Evans, his letters are now accessible, but even they are annoylngly guarded, impersonal, and thus disappointing, a point noted recently in these pages by Robert M. Scotto [XIV: 2 (1971), 150-52]. The problem in working with the disconcertingly reserved Pater rests, one suspects, with the inability to find the central nerve. And,so, like a surgeon with a patient who flinches every time the knife drops, one cuts, only to conclude that the operation was again less than successful. The mistake may well be the initial desire to cut at all. Perhaps, the most pressing need In Pater scholarship is for an uncomplicated, "introductory" study that will provide a sound perspective on the "whole" man and his works, a task that runs the risk, in these days of formalistic analysis , of being tagged "superficial." But the absence after all these years of even a satisfactory critical biography seems to emphasize that very need. What have appeared recently are specialized studies of Pater as mythologist, critic, aesthete, decadent, historicist, Hellenist, Romantic, Hegelian, et al. Although he is all of these, how much longer must critical treatment be limited to such isolated extensions of his many faceted world? Richmond Crlnkley's Walter Pater: Humanist, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, is a move toward the comprehension of Pater's totality. The encompassing nature of the book can be viewed, however , as both its major strength and its major weakness. What Crlnkley says of Pater in his "Preface," that to "New Critics who demand precision. . .Pater seemed most unsatisfactory" (p. ix), applies equally to his own work. The term "Humanist," for instance, is so over-extended these days as to be meaningless. But Crlnkley does, at least, attempt a definition at various points in the book. He refers to it as a "modern Idea" suggesting "a combination of classical and Christian motifs." The Humanist, he adds, like the Renaissance artists that Pater admired, is "forced to look beyond his Christian heritage to an idealized time in which the soul lived In perfect harmony with the body" (p. 59)· Pater is therefore a Humanist because he reveals a "comprehensive sympathy," a "historical catholicity" that looks beyond any given period toward a synthesis of the Christian and the classical that includes in it the preservation of the best that has ever inspired mankind. With this description of Pater's "Humanistic" objective, Crlnkley establishes a plateau from which he explores Pater's works from The Renaissance (I873) to Marlus the Epicurean (1885), concluding in the final chapter that the two books reveal a "circular" movement: The Renaissance begins in a medieval-Christian France with overtones 179 of paganism and ends with Winckelmann who goes to Rome to see the pagan artifacts; Marlus begins in a pagan world with Christian overtones and ends with a quasi-Christian death heavy with pagan suggestion . The circular journey is Pater's; he flirted equally throughout his life with the pagan-Christian synthesis. To critics who view Marlus as Pater's final affirmation of Christianity, Crlnkley replies that Marlus is better viewed as Pater's continuing effort to elucidate his "comprehensive sympathy" with both Christianity and paganism. Marlus. accordingly, redefines his position in more understandable terms, *n objective that was prompted in lieu of the initial misreading of The Renaissance. The philosophical argument of The Renaissance, in other words, is continued and made fictionally explicit in Marlus. Crlnkley implies that his conclusion is new, but at the same time he points out that Pater made public his intention to make Marlus an illumination of a position first attempted in The Renaissance. Consequently, if Crinkley's study depended for its merit on explaining Pater's consistent efforts at synthesizing the pagan and the Christian, it would be of minimal value. But this is not the case. The essential value of the book rests less...