An Important Collection on Pater

186 3· An Important Collection on Pater Philip Dodd, ed. Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact (Lond: Frank Cass, 198I). f-9.95. $17750 The essays in Philip Dodd's collection deserve a wider audience than the international conference on Pater (Brasenose College, I98O) and the special issue of Prose Studies (vol. 4) in which they were featured may have afforded them. Each presents a view of Pater's work that is indicative of the greater industry in the study of Pater during the past two decades; and each does so with a lucidly cogent particularity of focus on one aspect of Pater's non-fictional prose. Each essay is an excellent piece of work that Paterians will greatly profit from and in which Victorianists who have neglected him should find compelling reasons to take up Pater. Billie Andrew Inman's work on the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance is part of the long-awaited product of the thorough research into Pater's own reading and the sources of his thought Professor Inman has been occupied with for several years. The wealth of information gleaned from records of Pater's library borrowings and from a thoughtful reading of those texts provides us with necessary contexts of Pater's ideas, arguments, and varied perceptions of human life in his Victorian manifesto. Both this essay and Professor Inman's volume on Pater 's reading (I98I) simply must be read by anyone who would read the "Conclusion" and The Renaissance with an eye to both facts and an imaginative sense of them. It is always a pleasure to read Ian Small on Pater and on aesthetics: his brief essay on Pater's criticism (objective and subjective genitive ) in relation to "radically opposed models of man" that inform some of Pater's statements will, I think, lead to a much wider range of speculations about Pater's criticism involving personality theory and social theory. We are back on historicist ground, as Small defines it, in J. B. Bullen's thorough work "Pater and Ruskin on Michelangelo ," which partially complements the earlier work on Pater's Leonardo (MLR, 1979). and in Laurel Brake's "Judas and the Widow," a lively and revealing study of A. C. Benson's biography of Pater as a "widow" text (Gosse's phrase). Dr. Brake's extensive and important use of Benson's diary reveals a great deal about his motives for covering up what amounts to Jowett's blackmail of Pater in the context of the contemporary debate about the biographer's proper role. Barrie Bullen's reconstruction of Michelangelo's reputation in England prior to Ruskin's denunciation and his account of Pater's presentation of a refurbished Michelangelo immediately after Ruskin's attack is a model of scholarship that goes far towards illuminating both Pater's own scholarship and role in reversing Ruskin's influence. The remainder of the volume contains an exchange of views on the difficulties of preparing a scholarly edition of Pater's works, a bibliographical survey (I97O-8O) by Robert Seiler, and a brilliant introduction , "On Reading Pater," by Gerald Monsman. The differences of opinion about a collected edition have, I gather, since been partially resolved in a grant proposal to NEH to help support such a needed venture. R. M. Seller's bibliography is a fair, sometimes 187 trenchant, and fairly complete record of scholarship in the last decade that complements Lawrence Evans' work in Victorian Prose (e.d. David DeLaura) and Franklin Court's volume in the ASB Series and takes account of an admittedly select though large number of works. We should all give thanks that Seiler omits many studies representing views of those who do not see the object as in itself it really is, although he has also winnowed out some wheat: readers are rightly directed to the Pater Newsletter for an extensive semi-annual annotated bibliography. Gerald Monsman's introduction is, as always in his writing, superb. His reading of Pater, extensively elaborated in Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography (I98O), provides an interesting and provacative analysis of part of "Hippolytus Veiled" for consideration . The analysis proceeds from a linguistic/poetics base to a deconstructive explication that...