Pater's Tightrope

Book Reviews Pater's Tightrope Carolyn Williams. Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. xi + 289 pp. $35.00 IN DEMONSTRATING the implications of "aesthetic historicism" in Walter Pater's work, Carolyn Williams's Transfigured World reveals that recent scholarship has not examined several of the most famous passages in Pater with the sort of detailed attention that they deserve. The results of her close reading of the famous (or infamous) Conclusion to Pater's Renaissance absolutely justify her method. A number of collateral strengths are her excellent sense of the multiple meanings of words, which she uses to tease out nuances of figuration that become genuinely important when set against other related images in Pater; her attention to chronology, without simply working through Pater's books in a merely chronological, non-essential way; and her attention to the problems of autobiographical narrative and typology. What her study principally demonstrates is how Pater rejects nineteenth-century transcendentalism without falling into nihilism, solipsism, or any similarly untenable psycho-spiritual cul-de-sac. This, of course, had been the great challenge of the modernists that followed Pater, how to justify such a stance intellectually. One thinks of Yeats's crazed failure in A Vision (as well as several brilliant poetic successes) and his blaming Pater for teaching his companions "to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm." Yeats and his friends were, of course, more impressionistic readers of Pater than Carolyn Williams. Williams's study is certainly one of the most deeply thought out explanations of Pater's accomplishments vis-à -vis the Victorian frame of mind; and I think her thesis will be extensively remarked upon and consulted in years to come. The Pater that Williams gives us is a historical thinker no less massively theoretical than Wilhelm Dilthey and, perhaps, even more 71 ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 original by virtue of Pater's connecting the definitions of beauty to the theories of value premised on history. Though such system-building is probably more often encountered in the quiet tones and dispassionate terms of the syllogism and its ponderous tomes, Pater's tones and tomes have much of Plato's living color and imaginative power; Pater emerges here in Williams's study as one of the great intellectual figures of his age. Pattern and meaning in beauty and history come together, particularly , in Pater's own fictionalized autobiographical writings and in those "portraits" in The Renaissance and elsewhere of aesthetic heroes whose sensibility mirrors Pater's own. Using the concept of "aesthetic historicism," Williams works to describe Pater's definition of the relation of art to life, of individual consciousness to general history. Interestingly, when discussing Pater's response to such femmes fatales as Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Williams has no comment on Pater's personal (i.e., historical, biographical) attitudes towards women or on his own sexuality. Implicit in this omission is the justifiable assumption, one supposes, that Pater's turbid lineaments of ungratified desire and his implicit sexual orientation merely veil the surface of a far more significant set of interests or personal engagements; namely, his consuming impulse to explain the place of self in a world of not-self, the critical analysis of which is Williams's chief aim. Just how does the self transcend, on the one hand, its solipsism or, on the other, its "broadcast" elements "driven in many currents"? And just how does consciousness identify the external world— beauty and death—not as accidental to it but as essential, as that in which its life consists? Precisely when the Paterian enterprise can be seen to go beyond the rebellions and falterings of a troublesome private anxiety, though not beyond passion and intellectual power, do his writings become theoretically central to Victorian cultural discourse. The problematics of Paterian selfhood are posed as early as 1868 in what later became the Conclusion to The Renaissance. There the self is defined as a nexus efforces crossing and recrossing; yet ironically this expanded identity, prostituted indiscriminately across the whole spectrum of space and time, drives the self...