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169 ELIOT AND PATER: CRITICISM IN TRANSITION By John J. Conion. (University of Massachusetts at Boston) Ian Fletcher once wrote, "We read Pater not because we expect to be dominated by him, but because we enjoy being surprised by him. And like many unmethodical writers, who depend on disconnected intuition, he has a gift of chiming through in his intuitions with the more organized perceptions of some writers who have succeeded him: much of the highly methodized aesthetics of Yeats exist in a kind of evasive or tangential state in Pater."1 The high regard Yeats and his contemporaries had for Pater is both well known and little cause for surprise. What is genuinely surprising is not the low estimate'another of Yeats's near contemporaries, T. S.Eliot, had of Pater (and the Victorians generally) but the extent to which Pater's intuitions, principally in Appreciations, "chime through" in Eliot's criticism. Eliot was one of the chief contributors to the decline of Pater's critical reputation, a decline that began about the time "Hamlet and His Problems" appeared (1919) and persisted for the next thirty years until Graham Hough, then Maurice Bowra, Frank Kermode and Rene Wellek began the work of rehabilitating Pater and Ian Fletcher asked, "Why not take Pater seriously?" Eliot's numerous references to Pater constitute a war of attrition against him and range from slight, and slighting, remarks to an extended discussion of Marius the Epicurean in which he notes, "I have spoken of the book as of some importance. I do not mean that its importance is due to any influence it mayhave exerted. I do not believe that Pater, in this book, has influenced a single first-rate mind of a later generation."3 Yet "this book" and The Renaissance are identified early in his discussion as Pater's two significant productions. In "Pater and Eliot," University of Toronto Quarterly, XXIII:3 (April I953). William Blissett rightly asserts that Eliot gives the common reader little encouragement "to read widely or sympathetically" in Pater's works and that Eliot holds Pater up "as a horrible example of what Arnold's views of culture and religion could and did degenerate into" (p. 261). Blissett then nicely understates and more than adequately defends a notion that is truly astonishing in light of Eliot's apodictic remark about Marius: "It comes, therefore, as something of a surprise to find pervasive in Marius the Epicurean and scattered throughout Pater's other works explorations of areas of thought and concern later assumed to be the private domain of Eliot. Not only do they share an interest in an unus, ally large number of the same writers, but in the more personal realm of expression and imagery there are resemblances even more striking" (p. 261). Blissett's conjecture, as he applies it to Eliot's poetry, is right on the mark when he writes that Eliot, "very probably early in his career, was attracted to Pater's works, so strongly indeed that some of the tastes they display, the images they use, the preoccupations they evince, have appeared and reappeared in Eliot's work, though combined with other and deeper influences, and given an emphasis and 170 meaning beyond Pater's" (pp. 267-68). In quite another context, David BeLaura finds a similarly close connection between Eliot's thought and Pater's. In "Pater and Eliot; the Origin of the Objective Correlative," Modern Language Quarterly. XXVI (Summer 1965). he writes that "Eliot's essay, 'Hamlet,' in which he defines the Objective correlative,· is curiously preoccupied with Pater" (p. 427). Clearly, the evidence he adduces from Pater's "Sandro Botticelli" makes the point that the phrase, "conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them explains" is very close to Eliot's renowned formulation of "an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear" (SE, p. 125). As far as he goes, DeLaura is, I believe, correct in stating that "the psychological mechanism involved in the production of art which fails of an objective correlative is most completely foreshadowed in the work of Walter Pater" (p. 427). Mowbray Allan...

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