Jean-Baptiste Picy
INTRODUCTION
It is certainly useful for a modern mind to read Walter Pater in succession to Friedrich Nietzsche, for both writers may undoubtedly cast some further light on each other. The quiet glow from Brasenose College and the incendiary Alpine sunset flushing precipitous philosophy have shades in common - To use more explicit language, their similar endeavours to question values and lay stress on aesthetics should be read as complementary.
Having had very different disciples and a very different kind of aftermath, never factually meeting (1) , both works have nevertheless found a common ground of singularity in belonging to special niches in both German and British cultures. Both written in an unusual style of " poetry-prose ", both would and will today trigger unusual reactions of adoration or reject (2).
Mere subjective metaphors, or perhaps a chance meeting of minds on library shelves? The contemporaneous existence of both thinkers (1839-1894 and 1844-1900) is of course not the only argument founding our comparative study, but it remains essential: a certain historical position for two scholarly intellectuals living in a modern but still not really modern society, a position affording hindsight towards the past of Western culture but also resting in the shadow of an overall decline, soon to be confirmed by the First World War. A life saturated with the consequences of Romanticism, too.
Important contacts feature on this line of definition, frequent similarities which will now be magnified, each in detail, ahead of any conclusions: the criticism of Platonism and that of Christianity, the celebration of the Renaissance and that of Dionysus.
SOCRATES AND PLATO UNDER SCRUTINY
Criticism of Socrates and of his teachings, such as " set in music " by Platon in the Dialogues, remains vivid in the minds of all Nietzsche readers, through the repeated accusations and even very personal attacks which the young philologist from Basel University - as willingly as the prematurely aged vagrant of Nice and Turin - kept firing on the Academy of Athens, on its very inheritance as well as on any of its moral successors.
After all, did not Nietzsche's philosophy earn one of its titles - as the so-called " philosophy of suspicion " - precisely on account of this primary indictment of the one man whom text-books still represent as a venerable victim? Indeed, Nietzsche will frequently reassert that the mighty cleavers of history and psychology must by all means be applied (See. the 23 sections 'Of Prejudices Belonging to Philosophers' in Beyond Good and Evil [1885]), in order to cut through the trappings and deceits of discourse: any statement (and especially from Socrates) is to be considered - always - as nothing more than an answer to a previously well-pondered question (historical genesis) and the answer itself is equally to be considered - always - as being personally motivated (psychological genesis).
Studies in British Literature have often neglected Pater's own philosophical views on the subject. Plato and Platonism (1893) is sometimes discarded as a dry body of text, a collection of university lectures having not much to do with actual literature, nor with actual philosophy. This might be quite a serious mistake. Several keys to Pater's attitude towards the Greek inheritance are to be found therein and this small book affords students a remarkable testimony of Pater's last years (3) .
The fact is that Pater delivers equally strong criticism of Platonic Idealism, though with admirable distance. Establishing a clear distinction between Socrates and his chief-disciple, masterly analysing events in the continuum of Greek invention, Pater nevertheless appraises Plato as a man " in love with ideas ", whose very passion may have led himself and his readers to transform reality with enthralling charms and to fall in love with-charming lies:
"Just there, then, is the secret of Plato's intimate concern with, his power over, the sensible world, the apprehensions of the sensuous faculty : he is a lover, a great lover, somewhat after the manner of Dante. For him, as for Dante, in the impassioned glow of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused together. While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material, on the other hand, will lose its earthiness and impurity."
VI. 'The Genius of Plato' [1892], reprint. in Plato and Platonism [1893], 120-21 ;
... / ...
"The Lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, and therefore, literally, a seer of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural force and acquired fineness -gifts akin properly to "tŕ erotiká", as he says, to the discipline of sensual love- in the world of intellectual abstractions ; seeing and hearing there too, associating for ever all the imagery of things seen with the conditions of what primarily exists only for the mind, filling that "hollow land" with delightful colour and form, as if now at last, them mind were veritably dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us through the affinities , the repulsion and attraction, of persons towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human friendship or love-There, is the formula of Plato's genius, the essential condition of the specially platonic temper, of Platonism."
VI. 'The Genius of Plato', Plato and Platonism, 125.
Pater's intention is not however to limit his investigation to Plato's Symposium and such views are meant to apply to the whole of Plato's idealism as a motivating mental attitude, as an aesthetic temptation. Though his own brand of criticism may sound more amused than fulminating, though Pater does not indict Platonists with having " found a centre of gravity for this world outside of this world ", his mistrust is equal and his train of thought and analysis does tend to look for psychological, sensual motivations - and indeed historical ones - through Plato's recycling of Heraclitus, Parmenides and Pythagorus as it is examined in the first three chapters - motivations, all to be found behind statements.
Direct comparison with Nietzsche bears further proof of at least a shared diffidence. Psychological acuteness is equal, stylistic endeavour is as great. The only differences are in the degrees of verbal aggression (a higher one) and of distance (a shorter one). So it appears in the following passage, dealing with Plato's famous repudiation of poetry, while Nietzsche goes as far as suspecting something in the formal substance of Dialogues :
"This voluntarily brutal decision on behalf of Plato has something pathological about it; having reached such a point of view only through repression of his own flesh, having trampled, for the sake of Socratism, his own deep artistic nature underfoot, his bitter decisions do but reveal how little the deepest wound in his being is actually healed. When his irony is directed at the poets' creative powers, treating them as so much fortune-telling and base craft, the argument is to deny poetic gift any clear knowledge of the essence of things. A poet may not deliver, so he says, unless his reason should leave him in throes of enthusiasm and loss of consciousness. To such a "mindless" artist, Plato opposes his image of a true artist, of a philosopher, thereby implying he alone was able to reach this ideal, he whose Dialogues alone ought to be read within the boundaries of the ideal Republic. Yet the essence of a platonic dialogue is the absence of form and of style, created by the blending of all forms and of all styles. His worry was his new form of art should not be reproached with the main defect - again according to him - of the old form of art ; it must not imitate any delusive image ; for vulgar minds to admire, nothing belonging to Nature ought to have featured in his dialogues. Plato thus straddles all genres : prose and poetry, narratives, lyrical poetry, drama... He has broken the most essential law of unity in form and style."
'Socrates and Tragedy'
(a lecture dated February 1870, even before The Birth of Tragedy was published).
To sum up this evidence, it does appear in both writers that certain criteria, hitherto rejected or ignored as " irrational ", " nugatory " or even " subjective " (which, precisely since the days of Parmenides and Plato developing the thesis, has constituted an " ontological outrage ") were now being re-integrated in the process of evaluating philosophy. Without even trying to take sides in the age-old dispute, it is only fair to underline the process leading two scholars perfectly proficient in classical antiquity to be no longer satisfied in assessing the past with " objective " criteria. A new desire was therefore born to contemplate founding fathers in close-ups, in a henceforward more psychological, personal and humane light. Born with it too was the right to judge them on equal terms, down to the historical consequences of their ideas. As much for Nietzsche as for Pater, the faces of the old poring masters took on new suspicious traits.
SOMBRE CHRISTIANITY
John Keats was perhaps far engaged in a side-lane of Romanticism (4) when he rendered in a sonnet the oppressive feeling tolling bells induced in him, as they called their flock to church in the days of winter :
"Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition" [Dec. 1816], 1-14.
This feeling, the source it finds in antiquity and the optimism completing it are to be noticed in both Nietzsche and Pater as well, at least in the early impulse of their writing, as long as the intrinsic aesthetic value of Christianity - this is particularly true for Pater - would not be acknowledged, along with Christian morals in art, and no longer identified with those of Victorian Philistines.
Grounding the early stages of both Nietzsche's and Pater's reflection is therefore the belief that a man of culture in the second half of the 19th century is only confronted with what Disraëli used to call, in his youthful days, " defunct mythology " (5) . Pages in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and in Anti-Christ (1888) abound with bitter grudges against Christianity - especially in the Paulinian version -, with the clearest possible theory of the influence of Christian religion and its biblical precedent as a morbid influence. Furthermore, Nietzsche delights in pitiless, sardonic irony towards the " modernisation " of Faith, quite a Victorian speciality too (6) .
But what ought to be brought to light with this preliminary quotation from Keats is the will to draft a final balance-sheet, the assumption that one is in fact witnessing Christianity on the way out. This again links Pater with his German counterpart, even in the more indirect field of art criticism, of literature, architecture and painting. In his enthusiastic mood of the 1870s, young Pater does not care to sound the depths of Christian feelings but goes boldly forth to attack Christian influence.
Hence to be found in Pater's writings something close to Nietzsche's evocation of Christ and his disciples as characters worthy of Dostoďevsky, " with altogether sublime, morbid and puerile features " (Anti-Christ, section 31, 44): not in terms of brutal confrontation but in terms of humour and distance, creating an almost archaeological reduction in Pater's vision of Christian inheritance. This is Pater's view on the erotic and mystical poetry of St. Catherine of Sienna :
"But then the Church, that new Sibyl, had a thousands secrets to make the absent near. Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, and becomes a prolonged somnambulism. Of religion it learns the art of directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction is towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by the absence of the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting against all lower uses of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian.
"Aesthetic Poetry"[1868], rprnt. in Appreciations [1889], 110.
This comparison between the Church and the Sibyl, the old worn-out prophetess (7) , as well the detailing of the instinctive manoeuvres of the mystic disciples trying to make up for the Messiah's absence by means of quaint - though quite direct - eroticism, is obviously deriving some fun from the commiserating dissection of Christian aporiae ? "Prolonged Somnambulism"... this phrase does sum up Pater's conclusions in his first phase: modern times are essentially mankind's awakening from a long lethargy of Christian anguish.
Even far later at the end of his life, as he observed Pascal's activities with great respect and understanding, Pater nonetheless comes to the conclusion of having found one more instance of some " Christian disease ":
"Intellectually, the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous avons, he observes, un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies. Now in him the imagination itself was like a physical malady, troubling, disturbing, or in active collusion with it..."
'Pascal' [1894] , rprnt. in Miscellaneous Studies [1895], 84.
The date of this quotation is remarkable (8) , just when Pater is supposed no longer to criticise Christianity, having on the contrary drawn closer to it for ten years through the writing of Marius the Epicurean. Yet examples still abound in Pater's final works. The imprint of his juvenile rejection had proved to be lasting, only the former dreams of suddenly cracking the shell to find sweetness and light had receded. Pater's analytic powers would still search and scrutinise with suspicions.
A strange figure of a monk was always there to personify the uncanny sacrifice, the ascetic values celebrated for worship of the impalpable, shapeless and colourless Being which Parmenides had conceived, Pure Being or Pure Nothingness, whose heir the Christian Godhead perhaps is (9) . Even when a more mature Pater is dealing with a pantheistic heretic - for instance Giordano Bruno - the critic always sees in him the monastic creature obsessed with the One, only changing madnesses as its swaps religions:
" Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk ; and his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion ; very new indeed, yet, a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets, that " enthusiasm " he was inclined to set so high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. "
'The Lower Pantheism' (1889), 190-91. This was then chapter VII, when added to the unfinished novel Gaston de Latour in C.L Shadwell's posthumous edition of 1896.
Ought not the artist as a free being to get rid of this obsession and return to the abundant variety in palpable Nature, with colours and with a thousand different shapes ? This is implied in the passionate descriptions of Amiens' Cathedral, always a fascinating spot for English eyes. Pater doubts such beauty could have been achieved without some liberating influence from Greece:
It was not with monastic artists and artisans that the sheds and workshops around Amiens Cathedral were filled, as it rose from its foundations through fifty years ;
... / ...
In the natural objects of the first Pointed Style there is the freshness as of nature itself, seen and felt for the first time ; as if, in contrast, those older cloistral workmen had but fed their imagination in an embarrassed, imprisoned, and really decadent manner, or mere reminiscence of, or prescriptions about, things visible.
... / ...
The artist, as such, appears at Amiens, as elsewhere in the thirteenth century; and, by making personal way of conception and execution prevails there, renders his own work vivid and organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people. He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek-an unconscious Greek.
'Notre Dame d'Amiens' [1894], rprnt. in Miscellaneous Studies [1895], 115-117.
The natural conclusion of this second theme under study is therefore the obvious creation in both thinkers' brains - at least in their youthful days - of a specific reading of history linking, at the outcome of a sickly Christian " bad spell ", the modern Aesthetes and the Ancients before they were " tainted " with Christianity, linking the Europeans (almost as Henry James saw them) and the Indo-Europeans (as incarnated in Dorian Greek genius). Delirious or not, such a reading of history does is as much significant for Pater as it is for Nietzsche: it reveals on the one hand the anticipation of a quick de-christianisation and on the other hand, the expectation of an overall return to the sources of Western art and philosophy. Awarenesses, reflex thoughts and intuitions are similar for both men. Though maturity seems to have cut short much of this brash impulse, it still defines the Aesthetic instinct as an inbred and lasting diffidence towards the ascetic mind-frame- may be another instinct.
WORSHIP OF THE RENAISSANCE
The 15th and 16th centuries in European history had been Stendhal's dream of a realm of passion and action really blending and breaking all bounds of bourgeois standards. But in the eyes of Nietzsche and Pater, the Renaissance became a vast collective experience, exalting in the Italian glorious tapestry of cities, cardinals, palaces and chronicles the many potential aspirations of mankind, the " Many " itself as opposed to the " One ".
Nietzsche very often celebrates Cesare Borgia's heroic nature and Montaigne's sheer honesty but what is perhaps his main concern with the Renaissance is its nurturing of the famous Gaya Scienza, the backdrop behind the other backdrops. In Human, All too Human (1878, specifically in 'The Soul of Artists and Writers') and then again in Dawn (1881, books IV &t V) is to be found the precise analysis of the intellectual wheels having switched into action to allow for the progressive repudiation of the Middle Ages and for the re-discovery of Antiquity, its texts, its sensual appeal, its philosophy and general outlook on life. But again Nietzsche cannot in any way envisage the Renaissance as a Reformation, as a phenomenon preserving and modernising Christianity: Martin Luther is Nietzsche's pet hate, precisely because of his paradoxical attempts at maintaining Unity.
Elements quite akin to this general vision are obviously evidenced in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (first edition in 1873). But Pater's own territory is certainly that of Eros in association - quite in keeping with Renaissance fashion - with mysticism. Pater focuses on Venus and describes her re-birth as the coming to light of colours, the material nature of which then comes to take on a spiritual equivalent. His technique as he deals with Botticelli's masterpiece is eerily close to Plato's own habits as he had outlined them :
"At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth century ; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come to understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will like this peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves of the finest period."
'Sandro Botticelli' [1870] rprnt in Studies in the Renaissance, 38.
Such playing with colours suddenly becoming symbols of a Greek resurrection resembles a process of almost photographic revelation, progressive but irresistible - just the one metaphor Pater will later use in Plato and Platonism to describe the workings of anamnesis. The Renaissance is now almost the crowning moment of a precious mystical cycle, whose early stirring are painted with devotion:
"He has the freshness, the uncertain and diffident promise, which belong to the earlier Renaissance period itself, and make it perhaps the most interesting period in the history of mind. In studying his work, one begins to understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called."
'Sandro Botticelli' [1870] rprnt in Studies in the Renaissance, 40.
The kind of mimicry underlined above i.e. writing after the model of Plato's own technique, does not imply however that Pater is now parting company with Nietzsche. The German philosopher was himself prone to remarkable patches of word-painting worthy of Plato's own periods, however much Nietzsche had denounced them in the first place. His own depiction of " the Great Noontide " bear ample proof to this. But the moment when the two thinkers coincide again is perhaps more precise : a precise concept used by the two worshippers of the Renaissance. Indeed, Pater's notion is that of a preternatural, demeterian cycle perpetually renewing Life. Vitalism is not the only consequence : the " Eternal Return " is in fact, according to us, seriously involved. As regards to this bold " rapprochement " between Nietzsche & Pater, the striking conclusion of Pater's book is the best of all indicators:
"Philosophieren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisieren, vivifizieren. 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 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 ?"
'Conclusion', Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1st edition [1873], 152.
Has this nothing to do with the Eternal Return ? The quotation from Novalis is in fact weakly translated and should probably read more like what it is: a vitalist outcry. The message is flamboyant, precipitous, and embodies the perfect instant ecstasy:
"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life".
'Conclusion', Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1st edition [1873], 152.
To conclude on this section, it eventually appears that the Renaissance is the substratum for far more than a personal indulgence in escapism or a proof that criticism of Plato was null and void. On the contrary, it seems that it is the cross-roads where the two thinkers meet: Pater's English Aestheticism and Nietzsche's German Individualism seem to have a common border with the oldest forms of Vitalism, whose rebirth the Renaissance is thought to signal. At least it is undeniable to say that both writers seem to border on the same things.
WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS
One main contact must however be examined with Dionysos. To the contrary of the three previous items we discussed, it will establish the real essential differences between the two authors. Indeed, as Pater wonderfully revived him in the first of the posthumous Greek Studies (1895), A Study of Dionysus. The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew, this god is double-faced and a second self is found for him in his ending as Dionysos Zagreus, the hunter :
"Dionysus in winter-storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills, from which, like Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into Greece ; the thought of the hunter concentrating into itself all men's forebodings over the departure of the year at its richest, and the death of all sweet things in the long continued cold, when the sick and the old and little children, gazing out morning after morning on the dun sky, can hardly believe in the return any more of a bright day. He is connected with the fears, the dangers and hardships of the hunter himself, lost or slain sometimes, far from home, in the dense woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so ardently ; becoming, in his chase, almost akin to the wild beasts-to the wolf, who comes before us in the name of Lycurgus, one of his bitterest enemies-and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in the true intention of the myth."
'A Study of Dionysus' [1876], rprnt. in Greek Studies [1895], 42
Such remarkable words point first and foremost to Pater's awareness - even as soon as the imaginary portrait of "Denys l'Auxerrois" (10) - of the final necessary downfall of the god. Though celebrating him with as much fire, dew, and enthusiasm as Nietzsche did, Pater knew how to understood the concrete impossibility of a permanent state of aesthetic enjoyment from the wine and pipes. His patient observation and discussion of Christian reasoning along the pages of Marius the Epicurean (1885), is certainly more explicit of his resignation but his expounding of the god's myth and adventures is deeper and provides the reader with the real keys to what was not a recanting on hisideas but a maturing of the wine, so to speak. In our own view, thereby opposing much recent criticism, the Dionysos figure in Pater's writings does embody rage and repression against tragic reality but the acceptance of tragedy.
Nietzsche's final interpretation of Dionysos, inasmuch as one may trust the words in the very controversial Will for Power (rather heavily edited by his sister Elisabeth in 1901 (11) , remains quite opposite. Nietzsche destroys the luminous balance he had reached with The Birth of Tragedy (1873). His almighty Dionysos comes as direct opposite equivalent of Christ and loses all the rich after-thoughts of a Greek divine figure, to become a modern messiah-figure:
" The God on the Cross is a curse on life, a way to be delivered from life. Dionysos torn limb by limb is a promise of life, of eternal life, forever rising from destruction. "
Last lines in Will for Power (1901)
Pater never forgot the saying in Plato's Phedo: "métron, tň béltiston". His knowledge of Dionysos is not artificially partial. It starts and will end with the simplicity of the soil, from which the god was born in the first place :
"The noise of the vineyard still sounds in some of his epithets, perhaps in his best known-name-Iacchus, Bacchus. The masks suspended on base or cornice, so familiar an ornament in later Greek architecture, are the little faces hanging from the vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds. The garland of ivy, the aesthetic value of which is so great in the later imagery of Dionysus and his descendants, the leaves of which, floating from his hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and Titter, was actually worn on the head for coolness; his earliest and most sacred images were wrought in the wood of the vine.
... / ...
Then the goat was killed, and its blood poured out at the root of the vines ; and Dionysus literally drank the blood of goats ; and being Greeks, with quick and mobile sympathies, "superstitious", or rather "susceptible of religious impressions", some among them, remembering those departed since last year, add yet a little more, and a little wine and water for the dead also ; brooding how the sense of these things might pass below the roots, to spirits hungry and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy homes."
'A Study of Dionysus' [1876], rprnt. in Greek Studies [1895], 14-15.
CONCLUSIONS
To put forward some final conclusions in this short comparative piece, based on four main " contacts " between Walter Pater and Friedrich Nietzsche, one ought to sketch a clearer picture of what the relationship undoubtedly existing between the two, beyond mere contemporary life-times.
Firstly, the singular historical resemblance between the two intellectuals must be stated : both are scholars witnessing the decline of Christianity and the further progress of Capitalism (12) / (13) . This remark is not intended to support any Marxist approach but, more in line with the two author's own intellectual nurture, to bring in a rather more Hegelian one : the University professor has ample time to experience the strange feeling of inadequacy between the Victorian or Prussian Empire's sense of acme and creative order and the actual sense of collapse to be found in the field of religion i.e. the absence of a proper ideological incarnation of Zeitgeist, a void, a space which mercantile Utilitarianism, Science or Socialism cannot fill up.
The past and especially glorious Antiquity is then felt to be the only place where to look for a necessary " Renaissance " as a salvation from contradiction. Whereas Athens or Sparta used to glow with strong religion and philosophy, London and Berlin (or rather Oxford and Iena or Weimar) languish in the depths of a decomposing process affecting Christianity, with only ersatz-solutions being proposed (14) (15) . " Fifty years of ever-broadening Commerce !/Fifty years of ever-brightening Science !/Fifty years of ever-widening Empire ! ", Tennyson had proclaimed (16 ). But he had not mentioned Faith, as he knew by personal experience how problematic it was. Life was threatened and a " Renaissance " needed, the writing of new sacred books (17).
But if this very simple reasoning - which we have even further simplified above - was enough to explain everything, Matthew Arnold would have been really Nietzsche's match, especially with his famous distinction in Culture and Anarchy (1869) between "hebraism" and "hellenism". Even as far as Nietzsche's criticism against his own countrymen is concerned :
" Whenever a German ceases to be a Faust, the greatest danger is at hand that he should become a Philistine and fall in the hands of the Devil-only celestial powers may then rescue him."
Untimely Considerations [1874] III, " Schopenhauer as an Educator ", 46-47
Pater would never have praised Faust in this fashion. The real distinction between Pater and Nietzsche therefore consists in a difference of intentions. Pater, " the somewhat embarrassed guru of the aesthetic movement " (Richard D.Altick (18) does not believe in Dionysos as a messiah. Pater is not schizoid and his Dionysos is perhaps a harbinger of Apollo - however paradoxical this notion may sound - as the one hope of uniting contradictions all the same. Such is Pater's real programme, as it transpires also in this passage which Pr. Gerald Monsman has recently so rightly quoted in his introduction to Gaston de Latour's at last " complete " version (19) :
" An age of faith, if such there ever were, our age is certainly not : an age of love, all its pity and self-pity notwithstanding, who shall say ?-in its religious scepticism, however, especially as compared with the last century in its religious scepticism, an age of hope, we may safely call it, of a development of religious hope or hopefulness, similar in tendency to the development of the doctrine of Purgatory in the church of the Middle Age:-quel secondo regno/Ove l'umano spirito si purga:-a world of merciful second thoughts on one side, of fresh opportunities on the other, useful, serviceable, endurable, in contrast alike with that mar si crudele of the Inferno, and the blinding radiancy of Paradise. "
Introduction to The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri, translations by his friend and posthumous editor C.L.Shadwell, 1892, p. XX
The future is to be found in the pursuance of a sort of " third-way purgatory " and the final demise of Dionysos is the signal of progress, of Apollo's own coming. Pater's Dyonisos is indeed primitive in the fullest meaning of this adjective, i.e. preceding some form of secondary development, some secondary redemption.
The essence of what both men had to say is certainly in this crucial distinction and the double sense of tragedy is therefore in fine finis what this comparative exercise intended to bring to greater light : a choice between rage and distance, madness or measure.
Some may attack Mr Rose (20) , exactly as he used to be attacked. Some may be more charitable, just as A.E. Housman was :
" I go to Mr Leslie Stephen, and I am always instructed, though I may not be charmed. I go to Mr Walter Pater, and I am always charmed, though I may not be instructed. "
'Matthew Arnold ', a lecture for the London University College (late 1890s)
But the truth is that the Brasenose fellow was perhaps even more of what Mrs Humphrey-Ward made out of him under the disguise of one of her characters : "a languid sensationalist". A worshipper of Dionyos but not a re-incarnation of the god.
________________________________________________________________________ _______
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
As to Nietzsche, I may only venture to recommend the monumental (Swiss-)German biography of
1) Janz, Curt PaulFriedrich Nietzsche, Biographie. 3 Vols.
Munich : Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978.
As to Pater, the standard reference edition is of course :
2) Pater, Walter HoratioThe Works of Walter Pater / Ed. C.L.S. Shadwell
(Library Edtion, 9 Sections, 10 Volumes).
London : Macmillan, 1910.
Biography :
3) Levey, Sir Michael .The Case of Walter Pater
: Thames & Hudson, 1978.
20th c. criticism:
4) Bokanovski, HélčneWalter Pater, la Renaissance et l'esprit de la modernité.
Paris : José Corti, 1992.
5) Cecil, Lord David.Walter Pater, the Scholar Artist.
Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1955
6) Donoghue, Denis. Walter Pater : Lover of Strange Souls.
New-York : A.A. Knopf, 1995.
7) Eliot, T.S.'Arnold and Pater' in Selected Essays.
London : Faber & Faber, reprint 1951.
8) d'Hangest, Germain Walter Pater, l'homme et l'oeuvre 2 volumes
Paris : Didier, 1962.
The reference Ph.D.-thesis on Pater.
9) Hough, Graham.The Last Romantics.
London : Duckworth, 1949.
10) Keefe, Janice/RobertWalter Pater and the Gods of Disorder.
Athens : Ohio UP,1988.
11) Loesberg, JonathanAestheticism & Deconstruction : Pater, Derrida and De Man.
Princetion : Princetion UP, 1991.
12) Moliterno, Frank.The Dialectics of Sense and Spirit in Pater & Joyce.
British Authors 1880-1920, nˇ 12
Greensboro : ELT Press, 1998.
13) Monsman, Gerald.Walter Pater.
Boston : G.K. Hall, 1977.
''''Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography.
Yale : Yale University Press, 1980.
''''Gaston de Latour : The Revised Text.
Greensboro : ELT Press, 1995.
14) Seiler, R.M.Walter Pater : The Collected Critical Heritage.
Victorian Thinkers
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995.
15) Shuter, William F.Re-reading Walter Pater.
Cambridge Studies in 19th c. Literature and Culture
New York : Basil and Blackwell, 1997.
16) Williams, CarolynTransfigured World : Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism.
Ithaca : Cornell UP, 1990.
Letters :
17) Evans, Lawrence Letters of Walter Pater
Oxford : Oxford UP (Clarendon Press), 1970.
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Pater share many interesting common interests and characteristics. Often set aside to the margins of their respective national literary heritage, liable to adoration as well as contempt, both works are not only contemporary but also relevant to similar fields of late 19th century cultural and philosophical inquiries. Criticising Socrates and Christian doctrine, worshipping the Renaissance and the figure of Dionysus, Pater and Nietzsche eventually reveal the peculiar position of the academic, artist and thinker - tragic though quaintly optimistic - in the times of European greatness slowly sliding down towards World War I.
NOTES
1 There were, however, some accounts of Nietzsche's writings in the British press, e.g. one in the Spring of 1875 concerning the Untimely Considerations in the Westminster Review. It is moreover well established that Nietzsche read some of the works of major Victorian thinkers, such as Spencer or Bagehot, whom he often hinted at. The main introduction of Nietzsche's thought to the intellectual elite in the British Isles did not take place until the second issue of the decadent Savoy (April 1896), when an essay by Havelock Ellis was published, comparing his works and those of William Blake.
2 See. among many other examples the rather dismissive - I think- introduction drafted by Mr. Adam Phillips for the World's Classics edition of The Renaissance (Oxford : OUP, 1986).
3 Pater did not actually die soon after Marius the Epicurean was published in 1885. Yet this novel is time and again put forward as his last will and testament, as a final recant or return to a sorrowful acceptance of Christian faith. Ten years of literary output were in fact left to Pater. Having somehow retired with his sisters, gradually after his failure to obtain the Oxford professorship he had aimed at in 1877. Pater led a quieter life, but not an altogether silent one.
4 Of British romanticism, that is. German romanticism deals sometimes bluntly with this theme : Hölderlin (1770-1843) might thus keep John Keats company for serious repudiation of Christianity. This parallel is valid not only for Christianity (cf. his poem 'The Archipelago' [1802]) but also for reverence towards the ancient gods (cf. the 'Stuttgard' elegy [die Herbstfeier, 1800]). The case of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who seems to have directly inspired Pater for his frequent theme on the return of Hyperborean Apollo, cf. Die Götter Griechenlands (1827), is equally to the point.
5 Before he changed his mind a lot on the subject. See. André Maurois, La Vie de Disraëli (Paris : Gallimard, 1927).
6 See. among other things his violent attack on F.D. Strauß in Untimely Considerations I (1873). This German character was the author of a Life of Jesus (1846) which George Eliot translated into English.
7 That of Cumae for example, of whom T.S. Eliot reminds us in the Wasteland (1922). She said she would like to die: " apoqanein qelw". The Greek verb here indicates both her assent and intention to the fact of dying.
8 In fact, Pater's very last work. Pater died of heart failure as he was working on this lecture.
9 Along Plato and Platonism (1893), Pater keeps presenting monks as the heirs to Pythagorian brotherhoods. See. 'Plato and the Doctrine of Rest', and his vision of Sparta in 'Laecedemon', Plato and Platonism (1893), II & VIII.
10 1886. One of the most beautiful among the Imaginary Portraits (1887). It is about the glory and demise of a young man resembling the god of wine and feasts in the French mediaeval city of Auxerre.
11 Another common ground between the tow is the importance of women in their respective lives.
12 His caricature equivalent in W.H. Mallock's satire The New Republic (1877). Germain d'Hangest made a recension of those attacks and studied them in detail. Cf. his Ph.D. thesis in the bibliography section.
13 Nietzsche was the son of a Protestant minister and Pater tried in vain to become a Church of England minister. He was denounced to the Bishop by a friend for his...actual lack of faith!
15 The German question, in spite of his final pretensions about being a " Polish count " are important for Nietzsche. His sarcasm about the Empire reveals great concern all the same. See. Untimely Considerations II (1874), section 4.
16 " On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria ", IX (1887).
17 Nietzsche willingly fancies his own writing as sacred as states clearly that Thus Spoke Zarathustra ought to replace the Bible. W.B. Yeats in his Autobiographies (London, Macmillan 1926), is thankful for Pater's learning and incentives towards learning. He also entitles one chapter " The Trembling of the Veil " : " Is it true that our air is disturbed, as Mallarmé said, by he trembling of the veil of the Temple', or that 'our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book' ? Some of us thought that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide sank again. ", p. 315.
18 Cf. Victorian Studies in Scarlet, Londres : Dent & Sons, 1970, p.133.
19 Cf. Bibliography section.
20 His caricature equivalent in W.H. Mallock's satire The New Republic (1877). Germain d'Hangest made a recension of those attacks and studied them in detail. Cf. his Ph.D. thesis in the bibliography section.
21 Cf. A.E.Housman, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, Ed . Chr Ricks, London : Penguin, 1988, p. 276.