Walter Pater - Method and Style

Method and Style

Pater's critical method was outlined in the 'Preface' to The Renaissance (1873) and refined in his later writings. In the 'Preface' he argues initially for a subjective, relativist response to life, ideas, art, as opposed to the drier, more objective, somewhat moralistic criticism practised by Matthew Arnold and others. "The first step towards seeing one's object as it really is," Pater wrote, "is to know one's own impression, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality in life or in a book, to me?" When we have formed our impressions we proceed to find "the power or forces" which produced them, the work's "virtue". "Pater moves, in other words, from effects to causes, which are his real interest," noted Richard Wollheim. Among these causes are, pre-eminently, original temperaments and types of mind; but Pater "did not confine himself to pairing off a work of art with a particular temperament. Having a particular temperament under review, he would ask what was the range of forms in which it might find expression. Some of the forms will be metaphysical doctrines, ethical systems, literary theories, religions, myths. Pater's scepticism led him to think that in themselves all such systems lack sense or meaning – until meaning is conferred upon them by their capacity to give expression to a particular temperament."

Pater's critical method, then, sometimes seen as a quest for "impressions", is really more a quest for the sources of individual expression.

Pater was much admired for his prose style, which he strove to make worthy of his own aesthetic ideals, taking great pains and fastidiously correcting his work. He kept on his desk little squares of paper, each with its ideas, and shuffled them about attempting to form a sequence and pattern. "I have known writers of every degree, but never one to whom the act of composition was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater," wrote Edmund Gosse, who also described Pater's method of composition: "So conscious was he of the modifications and additions which would supervene that he always wrote on ruled paper, leaving each alternate line blank." "Unlike those who were caught by Flaubert's theory of the unique word and the only epithet," wrote Osbert Burdett, "Pater sought the sentence, and the sentence in relation to the paragraph, and the paragraph as a movement in the chapter. The numerous parentheses deliberately exchanged a quick flow of rhythm for pauses, for charming little eddies by the way." As a result, Pater's style, serene and contemplative in tone, suggests, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, a "vast attempt at impartiality." Indeed, in its richness, depth, and acuity, in its sensuous rhythms, his style was perfectly attuned to his philosophy of life.