Studies in the History of the Renaissance

"The Renaissance , published in 1873, comprises a series of essay-portraits of Renaissance artists, mainly in France and Italy. The exception is that it ends with a portrait of a great eighteenth-century critic named Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Through these portraits, Pater offers us a whole sensibility—a way of appreciating the world. The particularly rich form of living that these individuals model is condensed at the very end of the book in Pater’s famous conclusion, which is much-excerpted. It’s his manifesto or philosophy of intense experience, which immediately became a scandal. “Pater was, like Socrates, accused of corrupting the young” Many of his readers were young and looking for the resources by which to have an interesting life, not unlike Eliot was when she was younger. They saw Pater was a writer who could really set them thinking about how to live a vivid life. The enthusiasm of undergraduates in Oxford at the time was part of the scandal: Pater was, like Socrates, accused of corrupting the young. Well, there were many scandalized reviews (George Eliot herself called the book “poisonous”!); and it was denounced by clergymen, in Oxford and Cambridge, in sermons and addresses. Pater certainly removed the conclusion from the next edition, but it was subsequently replaced with a slightly expanded version of The Renaissance which he felt justified and tempered what he’d originally said in the conclusion. The whole picture offered by Pater’s book is slightly different to the conclusion. Whatever the case, it cost Pater the chances of any promotion within the University. Though a Fellow at Brasenose College, he applied for various promotions and didn’t get them because he was seen as an undesirable figure. Ultimately, we can’t distinguish one from the other. Certainly, there was a small scandal involving boys in Pater’s life. That was the other aspect of the scandal that surrounded him that cost him success in the normative world. But most of all, one of the messages of the book is about rejecting shame—of bodily or sensuous or aesthetic pleasure in the physical and material world. He talks about Winckelmann approaching Greek marble, saying “he fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense of shame or loss.” That alone would be enough to have people turn a skeptical eye upon it. The thing about Pater’s writing is that it’s the most astonishing prose you’ve ever read. It’s like nothing else. It divides people. It’s the kind of writing that would get thrown out of an American MFA program in a second. But Pater has an incredibly alive, exciting, and stimulating prose style that somehow transmits the excitement, the refinement and sheer imagination of his critical mind to the page. He’s trying to create his own genealogy of an enlivening, hopeful and vital sensibility. He’s not so interested in defining that sensibility according to set chronological parameters. His first readers found it very strange that he would begin an account of the history of the Renaissance in medieval France and end it in the eighteenth century, but what he does is provide an account of a rich sensibility that could happen at any moment at any time. It could happen to us, too—that’s part of the excitement of the book. That’s also why it ends with this stirring conclusion. His enthusiastic readers got the message that it was addressed to them . It wasn’t a dry, scholastic, closed off part of history. It was a question of a living, possible repertoire of relations by which we might be able to handle the world, if we chose to take it on. That’s why it’s connected to this broader question of a history of tact. That’s right. For Pater, the essay provides other forms of continuity than dates, because writers and artists speak to us across time."