TERM PAPER WALTER PATER.

TERM PAPER

 CRITICAL TRANSACTION   : ARISTOTLE TO ELIOT

Walter Pater: From Studies in the History of the       Renaissance

Remi Mohandas

I MA ECL

LCL051517

Walter Pater was born on August 4^th 1839, Shadwell, London .He was a critic essayist and humanist whose advocacy of art for art sake became a cardinal doctrine of the movement know as aesthesis . Pater was educated at king’s school Canterbury and at queens college oxford where studied philosophy under Benjamine Jowelt . Pater early intention to enter the church gave way the interest in classical studies. The essay like Leonard da vince  , Pico della Mirandola and other essay were collected in 1837 as studies in the history of renaissance. This delicate and sensitive appreciation of Renaissances are is these essay is made reputation as a scholar and an aesthetic and he became the centre of a small group of admirers in Oxford  . In the concluding essay the Renaissances Pater asserted that art exist for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it acknowledge neither moral standers nor utilitarian function in its reason for being. He dedicated Studies in the History of Renaissances to his close friend C L Shadwell. Peters first essay was published anonymously in the later 1860s..

Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his most substantial work. It is a philosophical romance in which Pater’s ideal of an aesthetic and religious life is scrupulously and elaborately set forth. The setting is Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius; but this is a thin disguise for the characteristically late-19th-century spiritual development of its main character. Imaginary Portraits (1887) are shorter pieces of philosophical fiction in the same mode. Appreciations (1889)  is a return to the critical essay, this time largely on English subjects. In 1893 came Plato and Platonism, giving an extremely literary view of Plato and neglecting the logical and dialectical side of his philosophy. Pater’s Greek Studies (1895), Miscellaneous Studies (1895), and Essays from The Guardian (privately printed, 1896; 1901) were published posthumously; also published posthumously was his unfinished romance, Gaston de Latour (1896).

The primary influence on Pater’s mind was his classical studies, colored by a highly individual view of Christian devotion and pursued largely as a source of extremely refined artistic sensations. In his later critical writings Pater continued to focus on the innate qualities of works of art, in contrast to the prevailing tendency to evaluate them on the basis of their moral and educational value.

Pater’s early influence was confined to a small circle in Oxford, but he came to have a widespread effect on the next literary generation. Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and the aesthetes of the 1890s were among his followers and show obvious and continual traces both of his style and of his ideas.

Pater's first essays were published anonymously in the late 1 860s. A study of Coleridge in the Westminster Review (1866) suggests that Pater found a central theme ·early on: "Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the 'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute.' ... To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions."

Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of essays on writers and Italian painter appeared four years later.

Pater's next book, the romance Manus the Epicurean (1885), describes the development of a young Roman in the time of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century C.E. Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. He conceived it as the first of a three-part series-the second to be set in. sixteenth -century France and' the third in late eighteenth-century England-but the other volume!! remained unwritten

Studies in the History of the Renaissance was a momentous text for a number of Pater's younger contemporaries, including Oscar Wilde. Pater states that his primary concern is with Italy in the fifteenth century, but he deliberately defines the term Renaissance much more widely, describing it as an "outbreak of the human spirit" from the "limits which the religious system of the middle ages imposed on the heart and the imagination."

Throughout the book, Pater emphasizes the precious, fine textures of art, but always with the implication that only persons of rich receptiveness, of exquisite and accurate perception, can wholly sense and appreciate its singularities. Many attacks for advocating pleasure as the heights good and self gratification   as the best rule for the conduct of life and some of the critic accuse Pater for projecting 19^th century thinking into the Renaissances. To defend himself from all these charges Pater charge the title of the second edition to the Renaissance : Studies in Art and Poetry and omitted the conclusion which declared that nothing matters more than the experience of brilliant moments.

In the preface he tells the critic should seek general definition for key terms. He declared that beauty like all other qualities presented to human experience is relative. Pater intimates that there is no difference between life and art , nature and culture each matters only in so far as it gives pleasure.
Pater at first seems to directly challenge Arnold's dictum that the critic must see the object as in itself it really is by adding a necessary first step is "to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it ." the  goal is the same that is  knowing the impression is the means through, Which is one how and why one is. And one is deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." This response to art matters because  according to Pater, it is  frees in each form  being a solitary prisoner in its  own dream. of a world, the most important is the free individual from their bondage. Pater registers a heightened sense of fleeting beauty wherever it materializes, the  qualities  is also evident in so-called decadent literature and impressionist painting of the time. Pater's view of criticism and art startled his contemporaries, because God is absent from the life. Most of them saw death not as a final but as the pathway to the highest form

of life. Pater neither offers any religious consolation nor invokes the moral seriousness

 of  the earlier Victorian writers, including Thomas Carlyle, Arnold, and Eliot. This is the main limitation of his position, the responsibility of the critic is to maximizing his or her pleasure, not contributing to knowledge or to change in a body politic.

From Studies in the History of the Renaissance

In the preface to his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Pater rejects as useless any attempt to define “beauty in the abstract.” While on the surface Pater claims to accept Matthew Arnold’s imperative that the function of true criticism is to “see the object as in itself it really is,” he redefines this formula in a subjective way: to see the object as it really is, he says, “is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly” . The kinds of questions we should ask are: “What is this song or picture . . . to me? What effect does it really produce on me?” The answers to these questions are the “original facts” which must be confronted by the critic.

Pater’s views of aesthetic experience are rooted in his account of experience in general. In the conclusion to Studies he observes that modern thought tends to view all things as in constant flux. Our physical life is a “perpetual motion” of ever changing combinations of elements and forces. This is even more true of our mental life, of the world of thought and feeling. At first sight, he says, “experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects . . . But when reflexion begins to play on those objects they are dissipated under its influence . . . the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind”. Hence the world which seemed overwhelming, which seemed solid and external and of boundless scope, is actually encompassed within the circle of our impressions, our experience . Not only does the whole world reduce itself to our impressions, but these impressions themselves are ever vanishing and in “perpetual flight” . Given the brevity of our life, we must “be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.” For Pater, experience must be undertaken for its own sake: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end  To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” Such intense experience is furnished foremost by “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake” Pater visited Italy in 1865 and was deeply affected by the Renaissance paintings he saw in Florence and elsewhere. The subject themselves are the French, Italian and German writes , painters ranging from the 15^th to the 18^th century in whom lives and in whose work Pater finds represented in many sides the divergent attitude of the Renaissances.

The task of the aesthetic critic he says is first to realize distinctly the exact impression that a work of art makes upon him or her , then to determine the source and condition ‘the virtue’  of that impression and finally to express that virtue so that the impression it has made on him may be shared by others. The Renaissance is the record of the impression induced in the refined sensibility of Pater by the art of the studies.  Wordsworth's poetry and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle ,to disengage it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse

We have here reached a point in Western culture where experience is disrupted and abstracted from any kind of constraint whatsoever, even from its consensual overlap with that of other individuals. Hegel would have regarded such experience as an abstract category, not even possible; but Pater expresses a desperate attempt to redeem experience from the weight of centuries of oppression and coercion and molding into various socially acceptable forms. He effectively aestheticisms experience, equating the fullness of experience with beauty, in an attempt to extricate the category of experience from the burdens invested in it by bourgeois thought. Experience is no longer a reliable source of knowledge or a basis of scientific inquiry; it is not a realm which constrains the operations of reason; nor is it a realm under the strict surveillance of morality or of religious institutions. It is raised from the mereness of means to the exaltation offend, a celebration of purposelessness, a celebration of indirection,

The most influential pages of the Renaissances come in a brief conclusion of the aesthetic manifesto adapted from the Pater 1868 review of William Morris .Earthly paradise turns away from the explicit subject of Renaissance art to address the reader directly. What matter according to Pater is not any of the usual Victorian middle class values of Christian faith or social status nor any kind of public life. The Renaissance as a unified historical period ended with the fall of Rome in 1527. The strains between Christian faith and classical humanism led to Mannerism in the latter part of the 16th century. Great works of art animated by the Renaissance spirit, however, continued to be made in northern Italy and in northern Europe. One important part of that later Renaissance, according to Pater, was the effort made by fifteenth century Italian scholars “to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola typified that effort, in his writings as well as his life; he was “reconciled indeed to the new religion, but still [had] a tenderness for the earlier life.” Lacking the historic sense, Pico and his contemporaries sought in vain, as Pater saw it, a reconciliation based on allegorical interpretations of religious belief: The “Renaissance of the fifteenth century was . . . great, rather by what it designed . . . than by what it actually achieved.”

Pater wants his readers to take pleasure in sense impression and the pursuit of knowledge , whether admiring an artwork or another person.   

                            BIBLIOGRAPHY

William E. Buckler, Walter Pater: The Cd.tic as Artist of Ideas (1987)

Jonathan Loesberg, Aesthetic and Deconstruction

Nagarajan , M S. English Literary Criticism and Theory. Hyderabad . Orient BlackSwan Private Limited , 2006