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BOOK REVIEHS 1. WALTER PATER John J. Conlon. Walter Pater and the French Tradition. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1982. $21.50 In this first full-scale study in English of French cultural influences on Pater (I say "in English" thinking of Beyer's incomplete and inaccurate study and of d'Hangest's much more general interest in Pater and France), Conlon highlights numerous points at which Pater's interests intersect French ideas and literature, either directly or indirectly. "France," writes Conlon , "provided Pater a model of cultural continuity that he considered indispensable to a proper understanding of the Western Tradition, an ideal that joined the Hellenic world to the Renaissance and both to Romanticism." Conlon notes that "one of Pater's objectives as a public critic was the propagation of knowledge about French thought and culture." Accordingly, the purpose of Conlon's study is to examine "Pater's role as the English interpreter of a new 'Matter of France' by tracing the development of his appreciation and knowledge of French culture as he revealed that growing knowledge over the thirty years of his literary activity" (pp. 10-11). Such a topic opens a perfect treasure chest of ideas for scholars of nineteenth-century comparative literature; Conlon, moreover, is stylistically concise, his discussions of specific figures and works often precise (good "local detail") and convincing . Since this double issue is devoted to Pater's Marius, one litmus test of Conlon's intellectual synthesis might be to assess just what his book tells us specifically about Pater's novel and the French tradition. At least one earlier reviewer has noted Conlon's neglect of Pater's incomplete second novel—Gaston de Latour, the most important instance of the French impact on Pater. However, at one point or another in Conlon's study attention is focused on Marius—Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, Gautier, and Feuillet are all cited as having an impact upon the novel. No one hitherto could have doubted the likelihood of Pater's indebtedness to these figures; however, in the process of defining and documenting their presence Conlon goes on to suggest that Marius belongs to a tradition of French romanticism that foreshadows contemporary Gallic existentialism. Marius' universe, he writes, "is filled with the limiting claims of sects and systems each offering 'the true way' and with 'the silence of those infinite spaces' that terrified Pascal and would inexplicably soothe Camus's Meursault in his prison cell. ... As surely as the many brands of 'existentialism' are logical developments and 'late flowerings' of Romanticism, Marius is in the shadows behind the characters in Saint-Exupery, Camus, even the caricatures in Ionesco and Beckett. . . . Pater as an early 'existentialist' is a novel formulation, but only the terminology is new. . . . The label existentialist has valuable applications to Pater. Although the peculiarities of his philosophical-artistic complex vary, Pater does share the more common elements of existentialism" (pp. 100, 105). This is a very bold claim but one I would be foolish to dispute since, I presume, its inception lay in Monsman and Wright's article on Pater's style (SAQ, 1972). But Monsman and Wright also found a difference, as well as a 63 64 similarity, between Pater and Camus: "Whereas Marius dies surrounded by prayer and in harmony with the new humanity, Meursault welcomes as the consummation of his martyrdom the spectators' cries of derision" (p. 121). Given the comparison, one wishes Conlon had addressed himself to whether this is a valid distinction or merely an accidental one. And since Conlon mentions the post-moderns, how, for example, might objects in their world(s) differ from those in Pater's? Does the missing sacred vessel in Marius for which the temple guards search among a host of secular cups, flagons, and diadems— neither shape nor material known, and unfortunately not inscribed with the name of its divine owner—have any equivalent in, say, Beckett's fiction? I have no idea if Camus ever had heard of Pater; but Beckett certainly had. And Proust, surely the central French novelist/autobiographer of our century, read Pater with care. I suspect Pater's impact cm French literature may be as important as French literature's...

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