Walter Pater: The Critic As Artist of Ideas.

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Gutes Exemplar / Good copy. - Preface Walter Pater: The Critic as Artist of Ideas is, as the title suggests, an effort to show that Pater created a unique critical literature through the constructive interfusion of three basic qualities: a native sensitivity, reinforced by relentless attention and practice, to those elements in a work of art that determine its aesthetic, as distinct from its historical or philosophical, character; a respect for his subject so complete that he sought to employ the formal or artistic resources of his critical medium to create a suggestive if oblique and infinitely lesser approximation of it; an extraordinary dexterity in the identification and differentiation of ideas, together with a persuasion that ideas lose most of their interest and all their charm�become abstract, cold-blooded, and dehumanized�unless they are perceived in relation to human beings� direct efforts to cope with the actual facts of their lives, to rise above an infinity of hectoring details and achieve something equivalent to a sense of spiritual freedom. Pater is a difficult writer whose prose requires the same kind of patient scrutiny and myriad-minded expectancy that waits upon the explosion of meaning in poetry. He customarily made explicit a good deal less than he actually meant, and the straightforward, graceful ease with which he handled the subtlest historical and philosophical ideas was largely a mask for an inner suggestiveness that he hoped would engage the readers imagination and affections as well as his mind. Thus, his writing rejects xii PREFACE even while it seems to invite a history-of-ideas approach. Like Rossetti, Pater considered �fundamental brainwork� indispensable to art and looked upon the logical structure of even the most lyrical poems as one of its wholesome and exhilarating aspects. But, though indispensable, ideas per se were not nearly enough either for the artist or for the critic interested in art�s �power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter.� To comment on the ten volumes of Pater�s prose with the mental concentration and concern for imaginative conversion demanded by poetry would be an almost impossible undertaking, and no such ambitious claim is made for the present study. Perhaps the best that can be said for it is that it points in that direction. Pater is, in my judgment, a major writer who has been underrated by many readers who have brought to his writings much more conventional expectations than those to which he sought to appeal. Wholly without metaphysical illusions, Pater is yet one of the most spiritually affective of writers. Indeed, the distrust that many readers feel toward him is probably the result of their resistance to the fundamental reordering of values he tempts them to make, an ironic inversion of the creative faith he inspired irt many of the writers who ushered in the twentieth century. What Pater did certainly needed to be done; it was an expression of humanism�s need constantly to correct itself. That he did it so superbly well fully justifies calling him a major writer. [.] ISBN 9780814710920