This document provides an overview of Walter Pater and his influential 1873 work Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Some key points: - Pater was an Oxford scholar who studied Greek philosophy and published Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873, seen as manifesto of aestheticism. - The book explored how 15th/16th century Italian culture embodied qualities Victorians wanted to appropriate, like classical scholarship and valuing individualism. - It promoted embracing sensory experiences and momentary pleasures over fixed moral or religious principles, generating controversy. - Pater's work influenced Oscar Wilde and notions of "art for art's sake," though some critiqued it for espousing a theory

1. The Victorian Experience

2.  Critic, essayist,
humanist, aesthete
 Studied Greek
Philosophy at Oxford
 1864 Fellow at Brasenose
College Oxford
 1873 Studies in the
History of the
Renaissance
The Victorian Experience

3.  widely regarded as the manifesto of aestheticism
 1860s: the Italian Renaissance was emerging as a new
subject for Victorian criticism
 15th & 16th century Italian culture was seen to embody
many qualities that Victorian thinkers wanted to
appropriate: classical scholarship, visual artistry, and
prizing of individualism captured in e.g. the
“genius” inventor or artist.
 A screen by which Victorian authors could explore
forbidden themes?
The Victorian Experience

4.  Quotes but undermines Matthew Arnold:
 ‘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. . . .
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality
presented in life or in a book, to me? ‘
The Victorian Experience

5.  The Mona Lisa:
a vampire?
“the animalism of Greece,
the lust of Rome”
The Victorian Experience

6.  ‘truths for Pater’s version
of aesthetic experience, a
beauty mixed with
darkness and death.’
 (Teukolsky, “Walter Pater’s
Renaissance (1873) and the British
Aesthetic Movement”)
The Victorian Experience

7.  Pater admits that he uses the term ‘Renaissance’ ‘in “a
much wider scope than was intended by those who
originally used it to denote that revival of classical
antiquity in the fifteenth century.”
 For him, the Renaissance is a distinctive “outbreak of
the human spirit” whose defining characteristics
include “the care for physical beauty, the worship of
the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle ages imposed on the
heart and the imagination.”
The Victorian Experience

8.  As Margaret Oliphant notes, Pater imparts
sentiments that “never entered into the most advanced
imagination within two or three hundred years of
Botticelli’s time, and [were] as alien to the spirit of a
medieval Italian, as [they are] perfectly consistent with
that of a delicate Oxford don in the latter half of the
nineteenth century” (Blackwood’s Magazine, Nov. 1873).
 Pater responded to such criticisms by retitling the book in later
editions as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
The Victorian Experience

9.  ‘Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the conscience: it
is shameless and childlike. Christian asceticism, on the other
hand, discrediting the slightest touch of sense, has from time to
time provoked into strong emphasis the contrast or antagonism
to itself, of the artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness. — I
did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in
mine hand, and lo! I must die. — It has sometimes seemed hard
to pursue that life without something of conscious disavowal of a
spiritual world; and this imparts to genuine artistic interests a
kind of intoxication. From this intoxication Winckelmann is
free: he fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with
no sense of shame or loss. That is to deal with the sensuous side
of art in the pagan manner. ‘
 a “homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal
or transcendental terms” (Linda Dowling,
The Victorian Experience

10. ‘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 be 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 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 catch
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’.
The Victorian Experience

11.  ‘I cannot disguise from myself that the concluding pages
adequately sum up the philosophy of the whole; and that
that philosophy is an assertion, that no fixed principles
either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain,
that the only thing worth living for is momentary
enjoyment and that probably or certainly the soul dissolves
at death into elements which are destined never to reunite.’
(John Wordsworth, chaplain of Brasenose College 1873)
 “Can you wonder that to young men who have imbibed this
teaching the Cross is an offence, and the notion of a
vocation to preach it an unintelligible craze?” (Bishop of
Oxford 1875)
The Victorian Experience

12.  Character of Mr Rose:
 “a pale creature, with large
moustache, looking out of the
window at the sunset… . [H]e
always speaks in an undertone,
and his two topics are self-
indulgence and art.” “What a
very odd man Mr. Rose is!” one
character exclaims, “He always
seems to talk of everybody as if
they had no clothes on”
The Victorian Experience

13.  H. Hutton : “perhaps too visibly laboured, [but]have
subtle touches of lovely colour, and a sweet, quiet
cadence, hardly amounting to rhythm, which are
distinguishable from those of poetry only in form”
(The Spectator, June 1873)
 Oscar Wilde called The Renaissance “the golden book
of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.” -claimed to
travel with it everywhere .
 George Eliot ‘“quite poisonous in its false principles of
criticism and false conceptions of life.” (Letters, Nov
1873)
 T. S. Eliot criticized Pater for propounding “a theory of
ethics” in the guise of a theory of art (1930)The Victorian Experience

14.  Katharine
Harris Bradley
(1846 – 1914)
and Edith
Emma Cooper
(1862-1913)
The Victorian Experience

15.  Originally jointly
published as Arran and Isla
Leigh – 1881: poems & an
Ancient Greek–themed
poetic drama, Bellerophôn
 began to publish as
Michael Field in 1884 two
blank-verse dramas: the
ancient Greek Callirrhoë
and the English historical
Fair Rosamund.
The Victorian Experience

16.  Much of Field’s verse,
such as the collections
Long Ago (1889) and
Sight and Song (1892),
deals quite openly with
feminine sexuality and
erotic love between
women.
 Bradley to Havelock Ellis:
“We cross and interlace
like a company of
dancing summer flies; if
one begins a character,
his companion seizes
and possesses it; if one
conceives a scene or
situation, the other
corrects, completes, or
murderously cuts away.”
The Victorian Experience

17.  A Girl,
Her soul a deep-wave pearl
Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;
A face flowered for heart’s ease,
A brow’s grace soft as seas
Seen through faint forest-trees:
A mouth, the lips apart,
Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze
From her tempestuous heart.
Such: and our souls so knit,
I leave a page half-writ —
The work begun
Will be to heaven’s conception done,
If she come to it.
The Victorian Experience

18.  “these men found it inscrutable, incomprehensible,
that two people could write poetry together.” (Bradley
of Thomas Hardy and Theodore Watts-Dunton)
 “Spinoza with his fine grasp of unity says: “If two
individuals of exactly the same nature are joined
together, they make up a single individual, doubly
stronger than each alone,” i.e., Edith and I make a
veritable Michael. “ (Bradley to Browning)
The Victorian Experience

19.  Sapphos’ poetic
fragments had just been
reintroduced to
Victorian audiences
through Henry
Wharton’s 1885
translations
 Became a rallying point
for an emergent lesbian
subculture
The Victorian Experience

20.  In 1889 Michael Field
publishes Long Ago -
“completes” the
fragments of Sappho’s
poetry
The Victorian Experience

21. Although his prayer the Muses bless,
The poet doth require
That ye, in frolic gentleness,
Should stand beside his lyre.
Ne’er will he mortal ear delight,
Nor care-vex’d spirit ease;
Except he sing with ye in sight,
Rose-flushed among the trees.
The Victorian Experience

22.  “Bradley and Cooper appropriate Sappho as a
name simultaneously proper and improper, their
own and not their own”. Yopie Prinz, Victorian Sappho,
Princeton University Press, 1999
 “Field in fact anticipates the feminist, historicizing
scholar, the scholar who seeks representations of
women and gender in the fracturing mirror of past
texts in order to put the fragments together in her
own documents” (Hollie Laird, ‘Coupled Women of
letters’ in Women Coauthors, Illinois UP, 2000)
The Victorian Experience

23.  Historic, side-long, implicating eyes;
A smile of velvet's lustre on the cheek;
Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and does not seek
For prey; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously:
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die.
The Victorian Experience