The Reader as Artist
The Reader as Artist: Aestheticism and the Imaginative Work of Studying Literature
I was not always a reader of literature. Since childhood I had enjoyed reading, of course, mostly because I loved stories. I didn’t have to think twice about whether, and why, I liked a book or not: my criteria were utterly subjective and unexamined.
But reading literature in college English classes was a different experience, and one that I learned to approach warily. That stack of books I purchased for a literary survey course or a 1B class I regarded with a mixture of reverence, of intimidation, and, because I was an independent-minded teenager, with more than a little skepticism. The books represented a substantial commitment; I’d spent a good chunk of my student loan checks on these books because, presumably, they were important, in some yet unrevealed way. They held something of value. Their presence on the course’s reading list suggested as much. Their somber, not-flashy covers implied it. History itself – the “canon” – said as much. Buying the books and taking the class meant that I’d accepted a challenge. Would I, in the 15 weeks or so allotted me, be able to find that hidden value that lie, I was promised, somewhere within these pages?
It was a problematic way of approaching literature, and one that put an awful lot of pressure on both myself and the books I held before me (not to mention the poor professors). Under this approach, literature was at best a mystery to be solved: reading meant looking for clues as to the secret that, if I was lucky and perspicacious, and the author was generous, would be revealed to me in some way. And further complicating things was the ever-present suspicion nagging at me, that the whole thing might be a con; that the secret an author was promising wasn’t there at all, or was something I’d already known anyway. In fact, the whole process made me pretty insecure: watching my fellow students eagerly engage with a text, or a professor unweave some cool idea from the dense fabric of an old poem, I wondered if I was alone in this fraught, anxious relationship I had with the books I was assigned to read in college.
But I wasn’t. That feeling that oppressed me so – the notion that greatness in literature was tied to the presence of some important idea that had been, for some unknown reason, hidden away in the text – has a long and glorious history. For centuries, of course, the foundation of school curricula throughout Europe and later,America revolved around the unquestioning study of Greek and Latin classical authors. The 19th century saw the development of an entire professional class of writers and cultural critics whose chief employment was to instruct the general public as well as students as to what great literature meant, what it could teach you, how it could help you get on in life, and why it was important. I’m certainly sympathetic to the work of the Victorian Sage Writers, as they came to be known. It’s very appealing to imagine that a great book is great because it has a distinct, helpful lesson to impart to me, one that if I’m smart enough I can discover for myself, and if I’m not, can be shown to me by an expert. This attitude towards literature certainly lingers to the present day, when a work might be considered great, in part, because of the political or social value of the lesson it teaches. And such lessons are certainly to be found in great books, and they can be wise and useful, and I can appreciate a book because it imparts them to me, and a critic for showing them to me.
But still. If that was, in fact, the primary basis for greatness in literature – reading for the lesson that a book might impart – I can safely say I’d never have chosen to study literature. I probably would’ve gone into philosophy, or history, or political economics, or gender studies, where I could’ve grappled with such ideas directly, I imagined, head-on, without all the ambiguity and filler.
But somewhere in my sophomore year, as pressure to declare a major mounted, I ran across the work of a somewhat obscure Victorian writer, a fellow named Walter Pater. A couple of his essays were included in an anthology of poetry written by what the rather garish cover proclaimed were “Aesthetes and Decadents.” I’d been attracted by that word “decadence,” of course, and imagined all the depravities that these poets indulged in (most of which I found out later were true). But though I quickly realized that the poetry itself was a little overblown, there were two of Pater’s essays included in the appendix that really caught my attention. Called the preface and the conclusion to a longer book entitled Studies in the Art and History of the Renaissance, they were infamous and had exerted a tremendous influence, the editor assured me, on the poets included in this volume.
I read these two essays, and they appealed to me on a certain level right away – particularly the Conclusion. I didn’t know exactly what it meant to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, but as a young person, I certainly felt excited at the prospect of trying. I appreciated the urgency of Pater’s wake-up call in the Conclusion, and I think my decision to declare English as a major had something to do it.
Over the next few years I didn’t really think too much more, directly, about the aesthetes and decadents or their literary Godfather, Walter Pater. But I found that my attitude toward reading literature had begun to shift a little. I wasn’t so resentful of that hidden lesson I could never seem to find, or that, when presented to me by a critic or a professor, never seemed to do justice to the book it had been teased out of. I found, to my surprise, that with certain works of literature I was able to develop a kind of intimacy, a close and personal relationship unobstructed by teachers, critics, the pressures of the canon, or my own insecurities.
Over the years that sense of intimacy has led to one of the most important and satisfying relationships of my life – the one I’ve managed to establish with certain works of literature. And I think I can trace the origins of this relationship, in part, back to the work of Walter Pater. I’m not alone, of course, in considering Pater’s thought to be revolutionary and lasting in its influence; critics like Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, as well as an assortment of Post-modern theorists, are quick to claim it as such. But for me, the revolution that his ideas inspired was personal, and it allowed me develop a new and profoundly satisfying relationship with literature. In the remainder of my presentation today I’d like to identify a couple of things Pater had to say about how we encounter art, about how we read, that make the work of reading itself as creative and dynamic as the work of any artist ever could be.
Preface
In the Preface to his book-length study of the art of the Renaissance, Pater explains the purpose of his book: it’s not to put forth a particular theory about the historical period, or to come up with a series of generalizations about the works he’s focusing on. In an odd way, it might even be said that his chief subject in the book is not actually the works of Renaissance art themselves, but the act of looking at them – the act of encountering art, or for my purposes today, the act of reading itself.
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that [viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
The great realization here seems to be that literature (and experience) is not simply valuable because it helps us understand some great abstract concept, some larger truth, that lies behind and beyond it; but that it’s the opposite: those big abstract truths are only valuable insofar as they help us read more clearly, with greater understanding and appreciation, the text before us.
And in para 2 he takes this argument a step further:
“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals–music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life–are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?
For Pater, study must, above all, prioritize the reality of the thing it is studying – which strikes me as a very respectful, humane attitude to hold towards the thing being studied. He describes this relationship between the text and self as an intimate one, a necessarily self-conscious one. The way to know, to understand the text, is not by taking recourse to something outside of it – some theory, some principle. Rather, it’s by nurturing your own relationship to the book, by looking to yourself and your own responses to it. The kind of reading Pater is referring to, then, is a necessarily reflexive process, one deeply sensitive to the interplay between one’s own reactions and the details of the text.
Of course this attitude towards reading could be disastrous. If we prioritize our responses, then reading becomes a self-absorbed, solipsistic process. But this isn’t what Pater is talking about at all. Quite the opposite, in fact; “our education becomes complete,” he explains in paragraph 3, “in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.” It’s a pretty amazing idea: learning to read well means developing a certain personality, one alive to the reality, the diversity and individuality of each text. “What is important,” Pater writes, “is not that the critic [or reader, I’d say] possesses a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.”
This approach to reading, in particular, had a powerful effect on my relationship to the study of literature. As I’ve mentioned, reading – particularly a challenging or difficult text, had been at times an adversarial process for me. Making sense of a text often felt like a struggle to achieve mastery over it, a process of wrestling it down until I could make it mean what I thought it meant. Or it could be a trial, of sorts: me cross examining the various attributes of a text so that I could decide what judgment of mine would be the most appropriate.
But Pater’s ideas open up a new possibility, that reading might become a far more personally engaging, and enjoyable process. True scholarship, Pater argues, requires us to become sensitive to the unique and individual excellences of a text, and each text contains the promise of instruction in the apprehension of new excellences.
The preface lays out what to me is an inspiring role for the reader. In it, I found a justification for my old suspicion that any revelation as to the lesson of a text, it’s real meaning, could never be more important than the text itself. An inspired interpretation might alert me to a particular excellence I’d not been sensitive to before, but that was the only purpose of lectures, critical essays, my classes themselves: to make books mean more to me.
Conclusion
But it’s the conclusion to Pater’s work that had an even more lasting effect on my habits as a reader. It’s certainly the most notorious essay Pater ever wrote: after its publication in 1872 it provoked such a furor that it had to be withdrawn from the second edition of The Renaissance. It was reviled by some, as a deeply immoral work, and championed by others, many of whom reportedly memorized the whole thing word for word to be recited at appropriate events, whatever those might’ve been. Of it, Yeats tells us that Oscar Wilde once said "It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written."
As an essay, it’s an odd coda to a book dedicated to the appreciation of the peculiar uniquenesses and wonders of the arts of the Renaissance. If the tone of the Preface is one of confidence, of eagerness at the prospect of unmediated experience of great works, the tone of the conclusion is far darker. It’s infused with melancholy; there is a kind of hunger to it that underscores the urgency with which Pater explores the works with which he is so much in love. In the Conclusion, we are made acutely aware of the bleak and existential origins of this urgent desire for intimacy with a work of art, or a text. Rhetorically, the Conclusion is designed to pitch us into a state something akin to despair, from which we are offered the possibility of redemption.
Here’s the despair part.
The first paragraphs of the conclusion are written in the language of 19th century positivism, the conviction that through the rigorous application of reason, all phenomena -- social, psychological and metaphysical -- could be understood most accurately. Pater begins his Conclusion with an almost clinical description of the physiology of perception:
TO regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without–our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them–the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, [234] the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound– processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them–a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.
The example he uses is purposeful, of course: the shock our body feels plunging into cold water on a hot day. Even such an intense physical sensation such as this can be understood as the product of nothing more than contracting muscles, twitching nerve endings and flickering neurons. All that seems so intensely real to us can be understood as the product of our physiological responses, and these responses are transitory: what seems solid is a temporary pattern imposed upon flux. The image he uses to express the bittersweet nature of transitory perception is poignant and revealing: it is the body of another: “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb,” he writes, “is but an image of ours, under which we group them [our physiological responses] – a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.”
Okay, so he’s given us an account of the physiology of perception. Consciousness organizes sensory data. The trouble is, Pater, asserts, that consciousness is a double edged sword. The same power to make meaning and order from sensation can disassemble it.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when [235] reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions–colour, odour, texture–in the mind of the observer. [I think of when, as a child I would repeat the name of someone familiar to me, again and again, until the person that it stood for disappeared and the name became just a jumble of sounds.] And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.
It’s a pretty dire predicament he’s described. The same writer that has urged us to become intimately conscious of the individual excellences of that which we study, to become aware of their effects upon us, is here reminding us that that same consciousness has a solvent effect on experience and perception – it dissolves the world around us. Furthermore: it surrounds us, imprisons us in that “thick wall of personality” through which nothing ever really gets through. We’re alone, and to truly know something, Pater suggests – to pay careful attention to the thing that it actually, uniquely is, rather than the thing that it represents, is to become acutely aware of its imminent loss, in time. Appreciation and mourning seem to go hand in hand.
All in all, these two paragraphs amount to a pretty devastating description of the dead-end that this sort of rational, positivist thought concludes in – which is precisely the kind of thought that scholarship requires, by the way. And, though I’m assuming most of us don’t walk around in this fever-pitch of anxiety and despair, I do think that Pater accounts for a couple of genuine feelings most of us are familiar with: the sense of how fleeting things are, how quickly things we love are lost to us in time, and that loneliness we all experience on some level, the one that hungers for connection. What role, then, does Pater’s artistic method play in redeeming us from all this? After all, the study of literature has to do more than simply cure the disease that it itself causes; it has to make life better: it has to add something, give us something we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
And this is precisely what, for Pater, the particular style of studying literature that he outlined in the preface can do. It affords us more of that most precious of commodities: life.
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,–for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a [237] stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
It is easy to read these impassioned lines as a shout for ordinary old hedonism, the pursuit of physical sensation; this is certainly the way that many of the Conclusion’s admirers and detractors saw it. But remember, this is the coda to a study of art and literature. In fact, Pater argues in the last paragraph of the Conclusion, it is only the study of art and literature that allows us more than our own perceptions:
we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. [239] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
“Multiplied consciousness.” Even more than the hard gem-like flame, that’s the phrase from this essay that has stuck with me all these years. I can think of no better argument for the study of literature. Alone, we might feel the impress of a handful of people’s personalities on our own throughout our lives – a beloved, a child, a parent, or a close friend. But beyond that, it’s only in a poem, or a novel, or some other form of expressive art that we can get the clearest impress of another human’s consciousness on our own. And I don’t think Pater’s referring here simply to the impression that the lead character in a novel makes on us, or the singer of some lyric poem; it’s the artist’s personality itself that lies behind the novel and the poem – that’s the consciousness that he feels pressing up through that “thick wall of personality” that surrounds and imprisons us.
So: what do the Preface and Conclusion of Pater’s work tell us about the study of literature? We can identify what it is not, certainly: the sort of reading he’s describing is not archeology, the hunt for some buried truth, and it’s not a sifting of evidence to find support for a cultural theory, or a paper for class. It’s not detective work, a search for clues to some mystery of its own making.
Rather, for Pater being a reader requires us to approach a text with a certain openness, without an agenda or a particular system, or theory or idea we hope to prove or disprove. He urges us to develop a kind of disciplined sensitivity, and awareness of how the text is affecting us, and a questioning of why. He invites us to look for traces of the personality behind the work of art, accepting the kind of intimacy that an artist offers in the work of art. And he contends, finally, that this sort of reading is a genuinely creative process – a collaboration between the self and some author, however distant in space or time that author may be. The meaning and significance that arises out of this collaboration is personal, and it becomes a part of our own character, which may, after all, be the thing in the process of being created.
The most lasting effect of the kind of aestheticism Pater preaches in The Renaissance to me is this: he urges us to pay attention -- to ourselves, to the text, and to the world behind and beyond it. Reading does more than offer us an opportunity to pay attention: it teaches us how. We can’t live longer, Pater reminds us, but the study of literature might allow us to live more deeply.
I was not always a reader of literature. Since childhood I had enjoyed reading, of course, mostly because I loved stories. I didn’t have to think twice about whether, and why, I liked a book or not: my criteria were utterly subjective and unexamined.
But reading literature in college English classes was a different experience, and one that I learned to approach warily. That stack of books I purchased for a literary survey course or a 1B class I regarded with a mixture of reverence, of intimidation, and, because I was an independent-minded teenager, with more than a little skepticism. The books represented a substantial commitment; I’d spent a good chunk of my student loan checks on these books because, presumably, they were important, in some yet unrevealed way. They held something of value. Their presence on the course’s reading list suggested as much. Their somber, not-flashy covers implied it. History itself – the “canon” – said as much. Buying the books and taking the class meant that I’d accepted a challenge. Would I, in the 15 weeks or so allotted me, be able to find that hidden value that lie, I was promised, somewhere within these pages?
It was a problematic way of approaching literature, and one that put an awful lot of pressure on both myself and the books I held before me (not to mention the poor professors). Under this approach, literature was at best a mystery to be solved: reading meant looking for clues as to the secret that, if I was lucky and perspicacious, and the author was generous, would be revealed to me in some way. And further complicating things was the ever-present suspicion nagging at me, that the whole thing might be a con; that the secret an author was promising wasn’t there at all, or was something I’d already known anyway. In fact, the whole process made me pretty insecure: watching my fellow students eagerly engage with a text, or a professor unweave some cool idea from the dense fabric of an old poem, I wondered if I was alone in this fraught, anxious relationship I had with the books I was assigned to read in college.
But I wasn’t. That feeling that oppressed me so – the notion that greatness in literature was tied to the presence of some important idea that had been, for some unknown reason, hidden away in the text – has a long and glorious history. For centuries, of course, the foundation of school curricula throughout Europe and later,America revolved around the unquestioning study of Greek and Latin classical authors. The 19th century saw the development of an entire professional class of writers and cultural critics whose chief employment was to instruct the general public as well as students as to what great literature meant, what it could teach you, how it could help you get on in life, and why it was important. I’m certainly sympathetic to the work of the Victorian Sage Writers, as they came to be known. It’s very appealing to imagine that a great book is great because it has a distinct, helpful lesson to impart to me, one that if I’m smart enough I can discover for myself, and if I’m not, can be shown to me by an expert. This attitude towards literature certainly lingers to the present day, when a work might be considered great, in part, because of the political or social value of the lesson it teaches. And such lessons are certainly to be found in great books, and they can be wise and useful, and I can appreciate a book because it imparts them to me, and a critic for showing them to me.
But still. If that was, in fact, the primary basis for greatness in literature – reading for the lesson that a book might impart – I can safely say I’d never have chosen to study literature. I probably would’ve gone into philosophy, or history, or political economics, or gender studies, where I could’ve grappled with such ideas directly, I imagined, head-on, without all the ambiguity and filler.
But somewhere in my sophomore year, as pressure to declare a major mounted, I ran across the work of a somewhat obscure Victorian writer, a fellow named Walter Pater. A couple of his essays were included in an anthology of poetry written by what the rather garish cover proclaimed were “Aesthetes and Decadents.” I’d been attracted by that word “decadence,” of course, and imagined all the depravities that these poets indulged in (most of which I found out later were true). But though I quickly realized that the poetry itself was a little overblown, there were two of Pater’s essays included in the appendix that really caught my attention. Called the preface and the conclusion to a longer book entitled Studies in the Art and History of the Renaissance, they were infamous and had exerted a tremendous influence, the editor assured me, on the poets included in this volume.
I read these two essays, and they appealed to me on a certain level right away – particularly the Conclusion. I didn’t know exactly what it meant to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, but as a young person, I certainly felt excited at the prospect of trying. I appreciated the urgency of Pater’s wake-up call in the Conclusion, and I think my decision to declare English as a major had something to do it.
Over the next few years I didn’t really think too much more, directly, about the aesthetes and decadents or their literary Godfather, Walter Pater. But I found that my attitude toward reading literature had begun to shift a little. I wasn’t so resentful of that hidden lesson I could never seem to find, or that, when presented to me by a critic or a professor, never seemed to do justice to the book it had been teased out of. I found, to my surprise, that with certain works of literature I was able to develop a kind of intimacy, a close and personal relationship unobstructed by teachers, critics, the pressures of the canon, or my own insecurities.
Over the years that sense of intimacy has led to one of the most important and satisfying relationships of my life – the one I’ve managed to establish with certain works of literature. And I think I can trace the origins of this relationship, in part, back to the work of Walter Pater. I’m not alone, of course, in considering Pater’s thought to be revolutionary and lasting in its influence; critics like Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, as well as an assortment of Post-modern theorists, are quick to claim it as such. But for me, the revolution that his ideas inspired was personal, and it allowed me develop a new and profoundly satisfying relationship with literature. In the remainder of my presentation today I’d like to identify a couple of things Pater had to say about how we encounter art, about how we read, that make the work of reading itself as creative and dynamic as the work of any artist ever could be.
Preface
In the Preface to his book-length study of the art of the Renaissance, Pater explains the purpose of his book: it’s not to put forth a particular theory about the historical period, or to come up with a series of generalizations about the works he’s focusing on. In an odd way, it might even be said that his chief subject in the book is not actually the works of Renaissance art themselves, but the act of looking at them – the act of encountering art, or for my purposes today, the act of reading itself.
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that [viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
The great realization here seems to be that literature (and experience) is not simply valuable because it helps us understand some great abstract concept, some larger truth, that lies behind and beyond it; but that it’s the opposite: those big abstract truths are only valuable insofar as they help us read more clearly, with greater understanding and appreciation, the text before us.
And in para 2 he takes this argument a step further:
“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals–music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life–are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?
For Pater, study must, above all, prioritize the reality of the thing it is studying – which strikes me as a very respectful, humane attitude to hold towards the thing being studied. He describes this relationship between the text and self as an intimate one, a necessarily self-conscious one. The way to know, to understand the text, is not by taking recourse to something outside of it – some theory, some principle. Rather, it’s by nurturing your own relationship to the book, by looking to yourself and your own responses to it. The kind of reading Pater is referring to, then, is a necessarily reflexive process, one deeply sensitive to the interplay between one’s own reactions and the details of the text.
Of course this attitude towards reading could be disastrous. If we prioritize our responses, then reading becomes a self-absorbed, solipsistic process. But this isn’t what Pater is talking about at all. Quite the opposite, in fact; “our education becomes complete,” he explains in paragraph 3, “in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.” It’s a pretty amazing idea: learning to read well means developing a certain personality, one alive to the reality, the diversity and individuality of each text. “What is important,” Pater writes, “is not that the critic [or reader, I’d say] possesses a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.”
This approach to reading, in particular, had a powerful effect on my relationship to the study of literature. As I’ve mentioned, reading – particularly a challenging or difficult text, had been at times an adversarial process for me. Making sense of a text often felt like a struggle to achieve mastery over it, a process of wrestling it down until I could make it mean what I thought it meant. Or it could be a trial, of sorts: me cross examining the various attributes of a text so that I could decide what judgment of mine would be the most appropriate.
But Pater’s ideas open up a new possibility, that reading might become a far more personally engaging, and enjoyable process. True scholarship, Pater argues, requires us to become sensitive to the unique and individual excellences of a text, and each text contains the promise of instruction in the apprehension of new excellences.
The preface lays out what to me is an inspiring role for the reader. In it, I found a justification for my old suspicion that any revelation as to the lesson of a text, it’s real meaning, could never be more important than the text itself. An inspired interpretation might alert me to a particular excellence I’d not been sensitive to before, but that was the only purpose of lectures, critical essays, my classes themselves: to make books mean more to me.
Conclusion
But it’s the conclusion to Pater’s work that had an even more lasting effect on my habits as a reader. It’s certainly the most notorious essay Pater ever wrote: after its publication in 1872 it provoked such a furor that it had to be withdrawn from the second edition of The Renaissance. It was reviled by some, as a deeply immoral work, and championed by others, many of whom reportedly memorized the whole thing word for word to be recited at appropriate events, whatever those might’ve been. Of it, Yeats tells us that Oscar Wilde once said "It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written."
As an essay, it’s an odd coda to a book dedicated to the appreciation of the peculiar uniquenesses and wonders of the arts of the Renaissance. If the tone of the Preface is one of confidence, of eagerness at the prospect of unmediated experience of great works, the tone of the conclusion is far darker. It’s infused with melancholy; there is a kind of hunger to it that underscores the urgency with which Pater explores the works with which he is so much in love. In the Conclusion, we are made acutely aware of the bleak and existential origins of this urgent desire for intimacy with a work of art, or a text. Rhetorically, the Conclusion is designed to pitch us into a state something akin to despair, from which we are offered the possibility of redemption.
Here’s the despair part.
The first paragraphs of the conclusion are written in the language of 19th century positivism, the conviction that through the rigorous application of reason, all phenomena -- social, psychological and metaphysical -- could be understood most accurately. Pater begins his Conclusion with an almost clinical description of the physiology of perception:
TO regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without–our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them–the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, [234] the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound– processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them–a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.
The example he uses is purposeful, of course: the shock our body feels plunging into cold water on a hot day. Even such an intense physical sensation such as this can be understood as the product of nothing more than contracting muscles, twitching nerve endings and flickering neurons. All that seems so intensely real to us can be understood as the product of our physiological responses, and these responses are transitory: what seems solid is a temporary pattern imposed upon flux. The image he uses to express the bittersweet nature of transitory perception is poignant and revealing: it is the body of another: “That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb,” he writes, “is but an image of ours, under which we group them [our physiological responses] – a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.”
Okay, so he’s given us an account of the physiology of perception. Consciousness organizes sensory data. The trouble is, Pater, asserts, that consciousness is a double edged sword. The same power to make meaning and order from sensation can disassemble it.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when [235] reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions–colour, odour, texture–in the mind of the observer. [I think of when, as a child I would repeat the name of someone familiar to me, again and again, until the person that it stood for disappeared and the name became just a jumble of sounds.] And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.
It’s a pretty dire predicament he’s described. The same writer that has urged us to become intimately conscious of the individual excellences of that which we study, to become aware of their effects upon us, is here reminding us that that same consciousness has a solvent effect on experience and perception – it dissolves the world around us. Furthermore: it surrounds us, imprisons us in that “thick wall of personality” through which nothing ever really gets through. We’re alone, and to truly know something, Pater suggests – to pay careful attention to the thing that it actually, uniquely is, rather than the thing that it represents, is to become acutely aware of its imminent loss, in time. Appreciation and mourning seem to go hand in hand.
All in all, these two paragraphs amount to a pretty devastating description of the dead-end that this sort of rational, positivist thought concludes in – which is precisely the kind of thought that scholarship requires, by the way. And, though I’m assuming most of us don’t walk around in this fever-pitch of anxiety and despair, I do think that Pater accounts for a couple of genuine feelings most of us are familiar with: the sense of how fleeting things are, how quickly things we love are lost to us in time, and that loneliness we all experience on some level, the one that hungers for connection. What role, then, does Pater’s artistic method play in redeeming us from all this? After all, the study of literature has to do more than simply cure the disease that it itself causes; it has to make life better: it has to add something, give us something we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
And this is precisely what, for Pater, the particular style of studying literature that he outlined in the preface can do. It affords us more of that most precious of commodities: life.
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,–for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a [237] stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
It is easy to read these impassioned lines as a shout for ordinary old hedonism, the pursuit of physical sensation; this is certainly the way that many of the Conclusion’s admirers and detractors saw it. But remember, this is the coda to a study of art and literature. In fact, Pater argues in the last paragraph of the Conclusion, it is only the study of art and literature that allows us more than our own perceptions:
we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. [239] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
“Multiplied consciousness.” Even more than the hard gem-like flame, that’s the phrase from this essay that has stuck with me all these years. I can think of no better argument for the study of literature. Alone, we might feel the impress of a handful of people’s personalities on our own throughout our lives – a beloved, a child, a parent, or a close friend. But beyond that, it’s only in a poem, or a novel, or some other form of expressive art that we can get the clearest impress of another human’s consciousness on our own. And I don’t think Pater’s referring here simply to the impression that the lead character in a novel makes on us, or the singer of some lyric poem; it’s the artist’s personality itself that lies behind the novel and the poem – that’s the consciousness that he feels pressing up through that “thick wall of personality” that surrounds and imprisons us.
So: what do the Preface and Conclusion of Pater’s work tell us about the study of literature? We can identify what it is not, certainly: the sort of reading he’s describing is not archeology, the hunt for some buried truth, and it’s not a sifting of evidence to find support for a cultural theory, or a paper for class. It’s not detective work, a search for clues to some mystery of its own making.
Rather, for Pater being a reader requires us to approach a text with a certain openness, without an agenda or a particular system, or theory or idea we hope to prove or disprove. He urges us to develop a kind of disciplined sensitivity, and awareness of how the text is affecting us, and a questioning of why. He invites us to look for traces of the personality behind the work of art, accepting the kind of intimacy that an artist offers in the work of art. And he contends, finally, that this sort of reading is a genuinely creative process – a collaboration between the self and some author, however distant in space or time that author may be. The meaning and significance that arises out of this collaboration is personal, and it becomes a part of our own character, which may, after all, be the thing in the process of being created.
The most lasting effect of the kind of aestheticism Pater preaches in The Renaissance to me is this: he urges us to pay attention -- to ourselves, to the text, and to the world behind and beyond it. Reading does more than offer us an opportunity to pay attention: it teaches us how. We can’t live longer, Pater reminds us, but the study of literature might allow us to live more deeply.