Abstract

Walter Pater is best known as a critic and theorist whose ideas provide the philosophical basis of fin-de-de-siecle literary "Decadence" and herald the development of Modernism. In this study, I argue that Pater's work stands in a direct line of major nineteenth century aesthetic theorists in England, from Wordsworth and Coleridge through John Ruskin and John Henry Newman, in its preoccupation with a conception, and practice, of aesthetic discipline or "ascesis." ;"Ascesis," a word Pater adopts from pagan philosophy and from Patristic authors, designates a complex of ideas relating training and discipline of body or mind, artistic or critical technique, and a spiritual aspiration to simplicity and completeness. Implicitly self-referential, the conception is a focus of ironies in Pater. He refuses directly to acknowledge its implications for the aesthetic and spiritual aspirations of his own work, recognizing discipline or aesthetic self-curtailment only as a virtue to be admired at a distance in other artists, in a relation of Platonic love. He recognizes it as a principle of artistic power and freedom, yet perceives that an aesthetic based on such a virtue runs the risk of losing a spontaneity and "receptivity" which art must allow to remain vital. In an apparently conservative theory of discipline or "submission," Pater proposes a model for artistic influence and cultural transmission, and ultimately for artistic communicability. Yet he implicitly challenges the orthodoxies of his time by asserting the historical and psychological contingency and relativity of different forms of aesthetic discipline, subverting its tendency to propose itself as a self-justifying absolute. ;Pater's ascesis is the occasion of a complex self-recognition: in the figures of his criticism and of his "Imaginary Portraits," he projects the dilemmas of this aesthetic and critical practice, nevertheless demonstrating them strikingly in the hesitations and ambivalences of his own prose. The problem of an aesthetic discipline answerable to the demands of modern experience ultimately evades Pater; his solution can only be in ironic displacement, coupled with an attitude of composed anticipation. Yet his work is an eloquent expression of the paradoxes of modern literary consciousness