The Renaissance

Ask what could be removed from a book gathered out of periodical essays, and it gives two answers. “Luca della Robbia” could go with small loss: it restates the Michelangelo study’s argument about sculpture and relief in a thinner key. “Joachim du Bellay” carries the thesis into France but adds little that the French stories and the Preface have not set out. Against that the frame is strongly required. The Preface sets the method, the Conclusion says what the method is for, and the span from the tales of twelfth-century France to an eighteenth-century German is itself the argument that the Renaissance is a temper and not a period. That span needs both its ends, and has them; inside the best studies the sentences resist cutting. What holds the axis low is that Pater himself treated a part as removable, withdrawing the Conclusion in 1877 and restoring it in 1888.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What the book brings into the open is a condition and not only a mood: the modern mind after the loss of a fixed object, for which experience is a passing of impressions within the single mind, and the self a flux of them. “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end”: that is a position that can be held and argued with, and Victorian England argued with it. The Preface’s turn on Arnold makes the subjectivity of judgement a principle, and the Giorgione study uncovers something true of form and matter in every art. What holds the axis below the gate is that, as a history of the Renaissance, much of the book discloses Pater rather than its objects. Its attributions and its Botticelli are partly projection, and the ethics of the Conclusion are stated more than tested.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Height is real and is reached several times. The summit is the passage on La Gioconda, who is “older than the rocks among which she sits”, prose that Yeats set out as free verse at the head of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936. The Conclusion rises in its last pages, through the Heraclitean flux, to the sentence on the flame. The Botticelli Venus, Winckelmann among the pagan marbles and Pico’s gods of Greece in exile give lesser heights. Frequency is the charge. Long stretches of the Michelangelo, della Robbia and du Bellay studies are level, connoisseurial and slow, and the elevation, when it comes, is of one kind: a hushed and melancholy transport, never grandeur or terror.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The book builds one myth and evokes several. Built: La Gioconda as the figure in whom all the ages are summed, Leda and Saint Anne, the lust of Rome and the mysticism of the middle age gathered on one head; the femme fatale and the eternal feminine made a single image so strongly that it passed into the culture as Pater’s rather than Leonardo’s. Built also, across the whole: the Renaissance as the return of the pagan gods, exiled and surviving in disguise, reconciled with Christianity in Pico, Botticelli and Michelangelo, and embodied at last in Winckelmann as the Hellenic man born late. Evoked rather than built: Heraclitus in the Conclusion, the Dionysian in Giorgione, Tannhäuser in the French stories. What holds the axis below the gate is that this is a critic’s mythmaking, laid over other men’s images: its load is real in the Leonardo and Winckelmann studies and light elsewhere.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The turn is from the moral and religious criticism of Ruskin and the objective standard of Arnold to a criticism whose ground is the critic’s own sensation and whose end is the quality of the moment. Pater took Arnold’s sentence and inverted it; he took Ruskin’s subject, Italian art, and stripped it of Ruskin’s ethics. The stake was real and was paid. The Conclusion was read at Oxford as a counsel of hedonism to undergraduates, Pater was attacked from the pulpit and satirised as Mr Rose in Mallock’s The New Republic (1877), and he withdrew the Conclusion for eleven years. What holds the axis a tenth short of the gate is precedent: Gautier and the French doctrine of art for art’s sake, Baudelaire, and Swinburne’s notes on the Florentine drawings (1868) had gone part of the way, and the Hegelian scheme of the Renaissance is borrowed.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The form is the essay as portrait: a figure, a temper, a single impression drawn out in long, qualified, cadenced sentences that hold a perception without closing it. The method of the Preface, to discriminate the impression and find its virtue, is enacted in the prose rather than applied by it. The sentences trail their qualifications as the impression trails its changes, and the Conclusion’s argument about the flux is carried in a syntax that will not settle. Put the same content into a treatise or a history and it can no longer say what it says: that the critic’s sensibility is the instrument and the evidence at once. The charge falls on the book as a whole, a sequence of occasional essays given a frame and ordered by the chronology of its subjects rather than shaped as an argument; the Winckelmann study, the earliest written, sits where history puts it, though its place before the Conclusion works.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The evidence of return runs for a century and a half: Wilde’s generation; then Yeats; then the modernists who read Pater in order to refuse him, Eliot in “Arnold and Pater” (1930); then the critical revival from the 1960s, with Harold Bloom’s claim of Pater as a hidden ancestor of modern poetry, and the readings of Victorian Hellenism and same-sex desire that find the Winckelmann study central. Each age has found a different book: a manifesto of aestheticism, a forerunner of the epiphany and the moment of being, a coded text of desire, a theory of perception. What holds the axis at 8.0 is that the yield is concentrated in the frame and three studies. The middle essays are returned to little, the historical judgements have been exhausted rather than deepened by return, and the depth is more of temper than of argument.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is English prose and criticism of the nineteenth century, and the poetry and fiction that took their aesthetics from it. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what English criticism could be for, from judgement of the object to the cultivation of the subject, and gave the aesthetic movement its scripture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Wilde, who in De Profundis named it in substance as a book that had shaped his life, and whose “The Critic as Artist” and The Picture of Dorian Gray are built on its Conclusion; Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pater’s pupil; Yeats; Joyce, whose epiphanies and Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetics descend from the moment and the flame; Virginia Woolf’s moments of being; Wallace Stevens; and in art history the Botticelli revival and the cult of the Mona Lisa. Eliot’s attack in 1930 measures the pressure still felt. The discount: its claims on art history were superseded, and the influence travelled chiefly through one page and one sentence.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The highest of the twelve. A hundred and fifty-three years since 1873 are weighed as such. The text survives whole, in four editions Pater made, continuously in print, edited critically and kept in the standard series. Presence is the charge. The book is read now mainly in the academy and in anthologies, and outside them chiefly as the Mona Lisa passage and the Conclusion. Its connoisseurship, the Giorgione attributions above all, many of them now given to Titian and others, is fixed to the knowledge of the 1860s, and its manner was long a byword for preciousness after Eliot. The surface is partly of its moment, the aesthetic movement of the 1870s to the 1890s, though the Conclusion has outlived that moment. These charges hold the axis a tenth under the figure its span would otherwise carry.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Command of English prose is the book’s first claim, and it is high: the long periodic sentence balanced on its qualifications, the cadence that slows at the point of perception, the precise sensuous diction of a “hard, gem-like flame”, and the last paragraph of the Conclusion built to a single sentence and a final turn to the moments for their own sake. The making is load-bearing: the effect is the argument. The charges are three. The manner is uniform across subjects and at times precious; the qualifications multiply past need in the weaker studies; and the scholarship is careless by the standards of its own day, with Vasari taken on trust in the Leonardo and attributions in the Giorgione that were already disputed. Across the book the structure is that of a gathering, not a design.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the medieval French tales of Amis and Amile and of Aucassin and Nicolette at the start, and the eighteenth-century German scholar Winckelmann, with the Conclusion’s physiology of perception after him. One law governs both: the Renaissance as an outbreak of the human spirit, its love of the things of the senses and of the intellect, recurring wherever that temper appears and read through the impression it makes on one sensibility. The Preface announces the law, every study obeys it, and the Conclusion carries it from history to the conduct of a life. The range is wide in time and medium, romance, philosophy, painting, sculpture, poetry and scholarship, and the voice does not alter across it. What holds the axis at 8.3 is that the coherence is partly the uniformity of the manner, and the law a temper rather than a structure, held more firmly in the frame than in the middle studies.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The lowest of the twelve. The orders held are real and are held together under one temper: consciousness and perception, made the ground of the whole; art across its media; history, as the passage from the medieval to the modern; the sacred, in the long negotiation of paganism with Christianity through Pico, Botticelli’s Madonnas, Michelangelo and Winckelmann’s conversion; and desire, under a veil, in the friendship of Amis and Amile and in Winckelmann. What holds the axis there is what is absent or thin: labour, the state and the family, and the natural order except as light and landscape in painting. Politics and the economy of patronage are almost wholly missing from a book about Florence and Rome. The world encompassed is the inner life of a cultivated observer before works of art.

Score: 7.2 / 10