Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), originally published 1873.
I recently took a foray into John Ruskin, as you know, and while his reflections on subjects moral, religious, and political are mercifully few in the Elements of Drawing (while his reflections on drawing itself are sound and interesting) -- these minor instances were nonetheless stifling enough that I could immediately understand why Pater would come as such a fresh breeze by comparison.
To set even a toe over the gloomy threshold of Victorian orthodoxy makes one rush with inestimable aching gratitude into the arms of the rebels and iconoclasts of the age, Pater among them. One can well understand the impact he made on a young Oscar Wilde and other undergraduates who were exposed to his work.
Ruskin's Elements is certainly written for young and budding artists, and quite possibly for children. It's always a little difficult to tell with the great Victorians, since they write as children, and treat adults like children, but there is a section at the end that gives it away in Ruskin's case.
Ruskin's book assumes an especially pedantic tone when he comes to his end-notes, where he decides he is now going to tell you what to read and what to avoid. Coventry Patmore - author of a now universally-derided Victorian poem about ideal domesticity, called "The Angel in the House" -- is deemed wholesome fare.
And while we are told that, when we are older, we might be able to chance becoming great social reformers like Ruskin himself, we are to strictly avoid any reading material while young that might make us discontented with things as they are. "[F]or a young person, the safest temper is one of reverence," he writes.
Save me, Pater, please save me!
The greatness of Pater is that he certainly is not conducive to the spirit of reverence. His shocking "art for art's sake" dictum is conventionally associated with a Decadent rejection of morality, but of course -- as with all such dicta -- Pater was actually making a very sharp and specific intervention in the moral debates of his day.
As with Wilde, the rejection of one scheme of morality is always the implicit elevation of another. Any "amoral aestheticism" is always -- if you scratch its surface -- a particular and profoundly moral doctrine. "Antinomianism" in Pater and Wilde -- as in Blake -- is really a longing for liberation from one moral code in order to partake in a higher and freer kind of love.
Pater felt safest, of course, leaving most of his daring conclusions at the level of suggestion. A particularly blasphemous quotation from a medieval poem, Aucassin and Nicolette, he first disguises behind its original French. When this apparently failed to shield it properly from the gaze of Victorian critics, he excised it entirely from subsequent editions -- according at least to the end-notes of this scholarly edition.
His references to homosexuality in the essays on Winckelmann and Leonardo are even more oblique. Here we have many passages about friendship, beauty, grace, and other indefinite things. But the meaning would nonetheless have been as plain to his Victorian opponents as it is to us today.
What most endears Pater to us, over Ruskin and his ilk, however, is the honesty of his reactions. This is what makes him truly modern. Gazing upon a painting by Botticelli, he notes that the Christ child "has already that sweet look of devotion" which we have come to expect.
Pater then notes, it is a look "which men have never been able altogether to love[.]"
I am reminded of a lyric of the Christmas carol, "Away in a Manger": "But little Lord Jesus/No crying he makes." My mom would always point out when we got to this point, with salient indignation: "What, is it wrong for babies to cry??"
As Pater says of the Botticelli Christ child, it has a look "which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren."
There is a deeper sense than this in which Pater breaks with the pieties and orthodoxy of his day, however.
The heretical nectar that Pater draws out of Botticelli's other paintings -- as well as from the life of Leonardo and his other subjects -- is a certain kind of heroic refusal to take sides. A middle-groundism in the world of virtue, religion, and politics that is never so sure of its own righteousness that it can be wholly for or against anything.
It is interesting that Pater detects -- or extracts -- this idea from a Botticelli painting of Judith returning with the head of Holofernes. After all, it is precisely the image of Judith that the poet Robert Lowell would use -- in the 20th century -- to defend the same attitude -- a sort of moral Pyrrhonism. In a poem entitled, still more fittingly, "Florence," Lowell writes:
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side –
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many David and Judiths!
My heart bleeds for the monster.
Whether this is actually the lesson or the teaching Botticelli or Leonardo intended is another matter. And not perhaps one that mattered to the author at hand. It was his disciple, Wilde, after all, who famously declared in the "Critic as Artist" that criticism is essentially a creative and synthetic effort -- a process in which some original work of art may serve as a spur to the critic's own genius, but need not set any limits to it.
And Pater himself says of most treatises on aesthetics that their "value [...] has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way," rather than their predominant theses and messages.
Pater's moral Pyrrhonism, worthy of Montaigne (himself an embodiment of the Renaissance spirit Pater applauds) is certainly suggestive and penetrating, whatever it may have to do with the works of art that supposedly make him reflect upon it. Pater rejects the certainties of Dante, who consigns human beings to definite moral categories and immortal fates. He identifies instead with a legend of "the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for God nor for his enemies[.]"
Whether this is the best or final attitude one should have is not a question we need to answer, in order to appreciate Pater's importance as a corrective to what came before him in cultural history. Whatever else he did, he helped relieve us of the oppressive tut-tutting pieties, the tone of high-handed certainty, of the Ruskins of the world.
Pater recognized, like Mrs. Dalloway -- who was created by another great hero of self-emancipation from the Victorian moral system -- that nothing "made people callous" so much as "causes."
In place of piety and certainty, however, Pater did not really substitute antinomianism or amoralism, whatever his own claims or the claims of his critics. He actually substituted the same moral virtue that Robert Lowell urges upon us: pity.
What Pater praises in Botticelli he was also finding in himself, and urging as an ideal for all of us: "sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition [...] with his consciousness of the shadow upon it of the great things from which it shrinks [....] He paints Madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in unmistakeable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity."
It is a moral stance that Steinbeck once eloquently placed into the mouth of one of his characters, Sister Hyacinthe, in his odd and forgotten satire on modern France. She first warns the reader off of virtue entirely, saying that in most cases it is either simply a form of self-seeking, or a cowardly way of avoiding uncomfortable interpersonal difficulties. Here we see a reflection of Pater's so-called "amoralism."
But then, like Pater, she turns. She gives us the other side of the moral coin. Once she abandoned virtue, she tells us, she found in herself something else: compassion. "Having admitted that my impulse was less than pure," she says, "I found in myself kindnesses, understandings, that even I can find no fault with."
This, above all, is what we feel is missing in Ruskin. He has an excess of virtue, and a dearth of compassion.
Pater is just the opposite, and that is why we love him, why he comes to us as such a liberator, on the heels of the other Victorians. This is the alternative moral stream of which he is the source, and which we find also in Wilde, in Woolf, in Lowell, and in Steinbeck's "Sister Hyacinthe" (if not always in the author himself).
This is why we turn back to Pater.
And find, as we do so, some typos that ought to be corrected in future editions. I offer here my copy-edits, free of charge:
p. xxii "Metamorphoses in Marius," we are referring to two different books here, so the "in" should not be italicized.
p. 68 "to turn back 'to Leonardo's [...]" There is no closing quote - should be deleted.
p. 70 "the sins of the Borgias, She [...]" [sic.] replace comma with period
p. 76 "says Du Bellay' make [...]" The quotation mark is on the wrong word - should be an open quote preceding "make."
p. 88 "in born antiquaries Eke Wincklemann." I stared at this for a long time before realizing that "Eke" was supposed to be "like."
p. 90 "the Greek ideal By a happy." Missing a period.
p. 98 "Yet such, a view is" Unnecessary comma.
p. 126 "to the 'imaginative reason" There is no closing quotation mark to this.
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