Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts ed. by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (review)

Walter Pater’s writings are elusive and difficult, posing the kind of challenge that can bring out the best in literary critics by honing their interpretive acuity. Perhaps because his criticism serves as an implicit model for what they aspire to do themselves, Pater has held a longstanding attraction for intelligent critics willing to meet this challenge. A recently published collection of essays, Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, edited by Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins, is a case in point.

Victorian Aesthetic Conditions is comprised of thirteen essays that address Pater’s writings in a variety of primarily aesthetic contexts. Its diverse topics include Pater’s relationships to key individual figures such as Simeon Solomon, Oscar Wilde, and Friedrich Schiller; to specific art forms such as the novel, theater, music, sculpture, painting, the tableau, melodrama, and various technologies of moving pictures; to the classical ekphrastic tradition; to the nineteenth-century museum; to Victorian painting and to specific artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, James Whistler, Solomon, and Alphonse Legros; and (in a particularly fine close reading by Matthew Potolsky) to various conceptions of politics and community.

As indicated by the volume’s subtitle, one thread connecting many of the essays is Pater’s idea (as formulated most famously in his 1877 essay “The School of Giorgione”) that different art forms may reference, provoke, and interpenetrate one another, thereby creating new and different aesthetic forms and prompting new aesthetic sensations. Pater claims to find in this interplay the potential transformation and reinvigoration of conventional art forms and also of conventional art criticism. The essays comprising Victorian Aesthetic Conditions approach his writings in much the same spirit, paying particular attention to their inter-artistic and interdisciplinary themes and forms. And as per Pater’s prescription, many of them do thereby realize a more vital, nuanced appreciation of the vitality and nuance of Pater’s texts.

In one essay, for instance, Colin Cruise convincingly demonstrates the way in which the “synthetic technique” of Solomon’s paintings is modeled on the compositional style of Pater’s criticism (80), while in another, Clements considers the centrality of sound and aurality in Pater’s aesthetics, examining the ways in which Pater’s spatial descriptions take the form of acoustic experiences and his descriptions of music, conversely, take spatial forms. In a particularly remarkable contribution, Lene Østermark-Johansen links Pater’s interest in the sculptural genre of the relief with his conception of background and foreground in literary texts. And Carolyn Williams argues that Pater’s preoccupation with epiphanic moments, melodramatic tableaux, and genre painting anticipates cinematic narrative forms.

As these cursory summaries are intended to suggest, many of the articles in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions perform sophisticated formalist readings of Pater’s texts in order to attain a more nuanced, complex understanding of those texts and of Pater’s aesthetics in general. The volume is thus a highly significant contribution to Pater studies and is indispensable to any scholar working on Pater specifically and Victorian aestheticism more generally. But its impact and relevance extend further. The essays by Cruise, Jonah Siegel, J. B. Bullen, and Higgins, grouped under the awkward sounding rubric “Pater and Contemporary Visualities,” not only establish Pater’s interest in contemporary art, but together provide an impressively detailed, well researched cultural history of the Victorian art world from 1860 to 1900, including its institutions (galleries, art academies, museums, exhibitions, and review publications) and major episodes (such as the 1868 Royal Academy Exhibition, the Simeon Solomon scandal, the opening of the Grosvenor gallery, and the trial of John Ruskin). Their juxtaposition by the book’s editors is a welcome example of the essay anthology genre at its best, when individual contributions constructively build on and complement one another.

Like the group of four essays mentioned above, several of the contributions to Victorian Aesthetic Conditions focus on material contexts and...