Delphic Criticism of Pater

161 1. Delphic Criticism of Pater Gerald Monsman. Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography (New Haven and Londt Yale UP, I98O). $12.50. Gerald Monsman·s eminence among those who have written on Pater is undoubted. His Pater's Portraits (1967), gave new interest to the various "imaginary portraits" - including Marius the Epicurean and the unfinished Gaston de Latour. His Walter Pater for the Twayne Series is a sound and solid combination of biography and intelligent critical commentary. I assume that both his familiarity with Pater and his critical tact suggested to Professor Monsman that these two studies left larger issues to be addressed. Those of us who think Pater an important and interesting writer nevertheless tend to be troubled by his "portraits," that curious form to which he devoted so much of his energy. Discontented with a certain lack of vigor or pressure in the portraits, we are likely to feel that there are hidden significances to which we do not have the key. What Professor Monsman has done in Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography is interpret both Pater's criticism and his fictional portraits in terms of Pater's psychological needs and his personal vision of the meaning of art and literature. Recognizing that not only in his criticism but in his portraits Pater is pursuing the question announced so prominently in the preface to The Renaissance - "What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?" - Professor Monsman explores the autobiographical bases of his responses. Reminding us that both "The Child in the House" and Marius were intended as the first portions of uncompleted trilogies, he goes on to explore the way Pater was able to resolve "psychological urgencies" through his writing. If in his criticism Pater pursued a "reflection of himself in other men's work," selfexploration through an imaginary portrait set against a historical background was a freer exercise in the same mode. The Oedipal situation could thus be played out in a controlled form. However, Professor Monsman finds, "by the later eighties the public drama could not exercise the private guilt but could only compound it" - the pressure from "decadent disciples on the one hand and hostile critics on the other" was paralyzing. Gaston de Latour therefore remained unfinished - like the prior in "Apollo in Picardy," Pater finds that his "hand collapses." "To escape his perilous paternity , Pater undertook a more impersonal work": Plato and Platonism . Professor Monsman's overview of Pater's relationship to all he wrote is valuable not only in itself but for many an insight offered along the way. Nevertheless, I find the book both unnecessarily difficult to read and less clearly focused and crisply argued than it ought to be. The fact is that the critical argument is conducted very largely in terms of what I can only call the tatters and tag-ends of the fashionable critical vocabulary strewn across the current critical landscape by structuralism, post-structuralism, and Bloom^·influenceism . Two necessarily longish quotations will suggest what the book wishes to establish andviiat is awry with the mode of discussion. l62 The origin of this crisis lay in the childhood loss of both Pater's father and mother, a dreaded yet desired separation from parental dominance that left an indelible sense of guilt and remorse for having somehow caused or willed their deaths. Pater dealt with this guilt by a textual sublimation or displacement, exorcising his conflicting emotions through the act of autobiography. There, in the text, the paternal figure, reembodied as any preexisting work or critically conservative dogma, is slain so that the younger, as the autobiographical author of his life, might endow himself with that paternity for which as a child he had insatiably yearned. But when in I887 the death of his elder brother William had summoned that old sense of triumph and remorse for the third time in Pater's life, the public autobiographical assumption of paternity could no longer appease the private guilt. Owing to the hostility of critics who irrevocably linked him with those errant sons, his decadent disciples, Pater balked at taking upon himself the role of father. (6) Now what...