A COMMUNION OF JUST MEN MADE PERFECT

WALTER PATER, ROMANTIC ANTI-CAPITALISM AND THE PARIS COMMUNE

Matthew Beaumont

In April 1895, the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, then living in political exile in London, where he acted among other things as one of Engels’s literary executors, published an article in Die Neue Zeit on the trial of Oscar Wilde. In this bulletin from the British metropolis, ‘On the Occasion of a Sensational Trial’, Bernstein insisted, in relatively enlightened tones, that it was not Wilde’s sexual activities or proclivities that might prove politically unhealthy but his aesthetics:

The doctrine of art for art’s sake, the release of art from everything which lives and should live in the popular consciousness, the proclamation of art as the preserve of an initiated aristocratic freemasonry – this double think is corrupt: it is far more dangerous to society than the actions of which Wilde was accused.1

Understandably, this critique of aestheticism, which accurately lances the movement’s elitist tendencies, has proved influential on the left. It prevailed, for example, in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), where he argued that, in aestheticism, ‘apartness from the praxis of life, which had always been the condition that characterized the way art functioned in bourgeois society, now becomes its content’.2 But it fails to capture aestheticism’s contradictory, sometimes confrontational relationship to the reified reality from which it attempted to escape.

The point of this essay is to reexamine the particular mode of aestheticism that the impressionist critic Walter Pater, who had reluctantly acted as a mentor to the scandalous Wilde, practised in the 1860s and 1870s; and to consider that mode, to express it in Andrew Hemingway’s terms, both as an instance of reification and as ‘a mode of resistance to its effects’.3 There has been something of a consensus among historians of the fin de siècle in England that Pater is not susceptible to a political interpretation. This is in part no doubt because the biographical record is so scant. It is also, more importantly, because his writings appear to retreat self-consciously from politics into aesthetics. Traditional scholars of aestheticism have tended simply to accept this impression, overlooking the fact that no movement is more political than one that strives to retreat from politics into aesthetics (the phrase l’art pour l’art, Adorno once ominously observed, ‘was the mask of its opposite’). 4

In the last couple of decades, queer theorists and other postmodernists have challenged the assumption that Pater is ‘a political embarrassment’.5 But, in spite of the pioneering accounts of aestheticism this has produced, it has had the effect of emphasizing sexual politics to the detriment of, well, politics. Perhaps this situation is beginning to change. Benjamin Morgan has for instance recently argued in a sophisticated article that ‘Pater’s interest in aesthetic freedom grounds the politics of his work in a way that does not depend upon his subversive queerness’.6 And Matthew Potolsky has made the ‘counter-intuitive claim’ that Pater ‘is a fundamentally political writer’.7 I prefer to think of him as at once an apolitical and a political thinker. In my meditations on Pater’s writings from roughly the mid-1860s to the mid-1870s, I posit him as a romantic anti-capitalist – one whose attunement ‘to the most fleeting individual reactions was bound up with the reification of these reactions’, as Adorno once formulated the problem, but at the same time constituted a concerted rebellion against this reification.8

Pater’s career as a published writer, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s, roughly coincides with the period in which – once the confidence in the capitalist system that had been characteristic of the third quarter of the nineteenth century had started to corrode, especially in the face of a sustained, if uneven economic depression – utopian literature became an almost compulsory form of political discourse. Hundreds of utopian fictions were printed in Britain, Europe and Japan in the final thirty years of the century, in addition to numerous polemical books and pamphlets that delineated the society of the future. ‘At the present day,’ G. W. Foote, editor of the journal Progress, put it in 1886, ‘social dreams are once more rife.’9 As I have explained in another context, an anticipatory consciousness shaped English culture in the late nineteenth century. A utopian structure of feeling helped to define the fin de siècle – one of those times in which ‘contradiction, fracture, or mutation within a class’, as Raymond Williams put it, ‘is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures’.10 Pater has not often been associated with this ideological climate, precisely because, as I pointed out, he is generally dismissed as anti-political, or apolitical. But his impressionist criticism can nonetheless productively be reconsidered as a species of social dreaming.

This proposition can be tested, in the first instance, in relation to Pater’s anonymous assessment of William Morris’s poems in 1868, which was first published in the Westminster Review and then adapted for the controversial conclusion to his most famous book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). The opening paragraph of this review proposes that, from ancient Greece right up to the present, poetry has ‘project[ed] above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured’; but that, unprecedentedly, the kind of aesthetic poetry exemplified by Morris both ‘takes possession’ of this world and ‘sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or “earthly paradise”’. Beyond the abstract utopianism that is definitive of all poetry, Pater seems to be contending, Morris’s poetry contains a concrete utopianism – albeit of a paradoxically spectral sort. Pater goes on to argue that it articulates a spiritual longing: ‘The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.’11 This is not a political longing. It is noticeable, for example, that the incurable thirst diagnosed by Pater is not for escape itself but ‘the sense of escape’. So this is a peculiarly attenuated form of escapism; and no doubt the aesthetic that it adumbrates is therefore doubly depoliticized. But it is, perhaps, proto-political (in this respect it anticipates Morris’s exploration of both political and sexual longing, in News from Nowhere of 1891). It is best understood as a statement characteristic of romantic anti-capitalism, which according to the definition provided by Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy ‘represents the revolt of the repressed, manipulated and deformed subjectivity, and of the “magic” of imagination banished from the capitalist world’.12

Pater’s writings about art – which restlessly reach for ‘a world in which the forms of things are transfigured’, and for a ‘fainter, more spectral’ world beyond that – are visibly animated by what is sometimes described as a ‘utopian impulse’. I am generally suspicious of this phrase, at least in terms of its analytical value, because a ‘utopian impulse’ can be detected in almost anything if one looks hard enough. The concept of ‘an obscure yet omnipresent Utopian impulse’, as Fredric Jameson terms it in a slightly more generous assessment than mine, is impossibly capacious.13 This is the problem with the appropriation of Ernst Bloch’s celebration of the utopian impulse by the contemporary sub-discipline of Utopian Studies, as Matthew Charles has recently pointed out in a trenchant piece.14 But in relation to Pater it seems more promising, largely because he uses language precisely as a medium for registering and testing out impulses. And these impulses transmit a charge that is recognizable for its utopian energies. In his essay on Coleridge, to give a preliminary example, Pater observes that the poetry Wordsworth contributed to the Lyrical Ballads ‘vibrates with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happiness and self-possession’.15

An impressionist aesthetic like Pater’s, as in the preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, is the impossibly self-reflexive attempt to intellectualize one’s spontaneous response to an artefact, or some more quotidian phenomenon such as a face one happens to encounter in the street, in the precise instant of experiencing it – an aspiration quite as doomed as lighting the gas to capture a sense of what darkness looks like, as his exact contemporary William James put it in another context.16 It entails at the same time intellection and the cancellation of the intellect. ‘The function of the aesthetic critic’, he asserts in the preface, ‘is to distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a painter, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced.’17 The pseudo-scientific certainties from which this sentence starts steadily fall apart as Pater affirms the supremacy of the self, though they are reasserted once more in the reference to the conditions in which an impression is experienced. In Studies, aesthetics is a science of the faintest pulsations or sensations. It is an empiricist attempt to grasp almost imperceptible emotions.

In his comments on Wilde’s trial, Bernstein underlined the idea that the archetypal decadent is a descendent of the romantic: ‘Unlike the latter, [the decadent] does not look to the past, but neither does he look to the future, regarding which he remains sceptical.’18 Aestheticism, according to him, is immersed in a perpetual present. But this assumption is inapplicable in Pater’s case. In spite of his notorious claim, in the final sentence of the conclusion to Studies, that ‘art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’, Pater understands the present as a dialectic of the past and future (p. 121). This is apparent, for example, in his discussion of the ‘pictorial poetry’ of the School of Giorgione, which he admires because ‘it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps – some brief and wholly concrete moment – into which, however, all the motives, the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present’ (p. 133). These moments, embodied in more or less erotic encounters with those looks, smiles and gestures, redeem the present, assimilating the past and future to it, and imparting a sense of completion to it. If under capitalism, as I have argued elsewhere in relation to Morris, the present is not present to itself, Pater’s ‘significant and animated instants’ promise to redress this condition of alienation.19

The aesthetic that Pater excavates from the past, in particular that of the Renaissance, is in Studies intended to act as the foundation for an ethic that, in the future, might redeem the deformations of capitalist society (including the repression of homosexuality). The reception of this book, which was viciously attacked by conservative commentators, testified to the ethical implications of his impressionist criticism. As Michael Levenson has recently pointed out, it was ‘an effect of Pater’s writings … to promote new styles of life, as well as new works and opinions’. Levenson is thinking of aspects of what he calls ‘metropolitan experience’, including ‘conversational habit, dress’;20 but Pater’s prose also promoted a kind of attitude or disposition that was inescapably political as well as cultural. He admitted as much when, partly capitulating to the backlash against the book, especially in religious circles, he omitted its conclusion from the second edition. He later maintained that he had taken the decision to do this because he thought ‘it might possibly mislead some young men into whose hands it might fall’ – a disingenuous claim that Studies had been in danger of falling into the hands of those to whom he had effectively directed towards in the first place.21 Pater’s interest had always been in ethics as much as aesthetics, though he secreted the former in the language of the latter.

Pater’s writings of the 1860s and 1870s do indeed look to the future. A principle of hope, to use Bloch’s concept, is for example constituent of the piece that, in the absence of a paper on Fichte, which has been lost, is generally said to inaugurate Pater’s intellectual biography. This is ‘Diaphaneitè’, a paper he read aloud in July 1864 to his intimates in the Old Mortality Society, a fraternity of young, mostly agnostic intellectuals studying at Oxford. John Nichol had set up the Society in 1856, and for the next decade it thrived as an alternative, albeit exclusive forum for philosophical debate inside the university, attracting a number of intellectual luminaries, including A. C. Swinburne and J. A. Symonds. According to the one historian to have collated the scattered records of this group, in literature and art, but also in politics, ‘the Old Mortality was radical’. Its four main causes, most vehemently prosecuted by Swinburne, were the nationalist struggle in Italy, the overthrow of tyranny in France, the abolition of university tests, and the campaign against ‘all restrictions on the freedom of opinion’.22 The Society’s reputation for radicalism, and a certain intellectual avant-gardism, probably persisted up to Pater’s time; but I suspect that, in the 1860s, once Swinburne had moved on, its commitment to republicanism and agnosticism or atheism declined. Revealingly, Pater offended one of his more conservative confederates when he delivered a paper at his own lodgings in February 1864. S. R. Brooke, who in spite of his protestations might not have been representative of the Society’s opinions, denounced Pater’s defence of aestheticism on this occasion as ‘one of the most thoroughly infidel productions it has ever been our pain to listen to’.23

Pater devised the elusive title of ‘Diaphaneitè’ in order to evoke a condition of diaphanousness; that is, a transparency of spirit at once luminous and mysterious. The paper is an enigmatic, highly poetic meditation on the ‘type of life’, as he puts it, that ‘might serve as a basement type’ (p. 140).24 By ‘basement type’ he means the archetype that might form the foundation of a different social order, one that is peaceful and filled with a sense of completeness (again, not unlike the utopian society in News from Nowhere, which Morris characterizes as ‘an epoch of rest’). Pater looks to the past, particularly the Hellenic past, for the proleptic image of a utopian future that might still be realizable: ‘the character we have before us is a kind of prophecy of this repose and simplicity, coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature, by some happy gift, or accident of birth or constitution, showing that it is indeed within the limits of man’s destiny’ (p. 137). To claim, as Kate Hext has done, that in this paper ‘the individual and society become dichotomies’ is to depoliticize it.25 Their relationship is dialectical rather than dichotomous. In its synthesis of individual and social perspectives, and of politics and aesthetics, ‘Diaphaneitè’ is in effect Pater’s manifesto. Certainly, in terms both of form and content, it is closer to a manifesto than the conclusion to Studies. It is tempting, in fact, to claim that it is one of the forgotten manifestos of the fin de siècle. It is in some respects the equivalent of his disciple Wilde’s essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’: ‘The Soul of Man Under Aestheticism’.26

‘Diaphaneitè’, then, posits nothing less than the prototype of a utopian society. ‘The type must be one discontented with society at it is’, Pater declares; and the mass proliferation of this man of the future, he adds, ‘would be the regeneration of the world’ (p. 140). This is no activist, though, not even of an ascetic, transcendental kind. ‘The philosopher, the saint, the artist, neither of them can be this type.’ No, Pater’s ‘revolutionist’, to use his ascription, is the diaphanous type (p. 138). The diaphanous character, innocent, transparent, sublimates ‘the human body in its beauty’, and so incorporates ‘the true, though visible, soul or spirit in things’.27 It creates a perfect communion of body and spirit. ‘Like all the higher forms of inward life this character is a subtle blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual elements’, Pater announces in ‘Diaphaneitè’; ‘it is a mind of taste lighted up by some spiritual ray within’ (p. 137). In this, and in its perfect simplicity, it represents a critique of the dessicated, spiritually dissociated conditions of life in industrial society, one that is paradoxically both crystalline and quicksilver. In contrast to the saint, the artist or the philosopher, who is so often ‘confused, jarred, disintegrated in the world’, the diaphanous type is ‘like a relic from the classical age, laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere’ (pp. 137, 138). It floats in and out of both Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater’s novel, and his Imaginary Portraits (1887); and it haunts Studies too. One might even interpret its characteristic disposition, its ‘wistfulness of mind’, which he defines as ‘a longing after what is unattainable’, a longing that is social or political as well as intellectual, as a precise definition of the utopian impulse.

The diaphanous type embodies the youthful Pater’s utopian dreams of a homosocial society that might reinstate the ethics and aesthetics associated with the spirit of Hellenism, and in particular ‘the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body’ that he celebrates in the preface to Studies (p. xi). His description in ‘Diaphaneitè’, it is evident, like his characterization of Marius, is on one level an attempt to sublimate the painful, sometimes exquisite sensitivity that, as a man who loves other men, he feels as he confronts life in ‘the adulterated atmosphere of the world’ (p. 139). More immediately, it is thought to have been inspired by Charles Lancelot Shadwell, a friend and former student famed for his handsomeness and himself a member of the Old Mortality. ‘Often the presence of this nature’, Pater intones in a calmly controlled voice that nonetheless seems to tremble with erotic excitement, ‘is felt like a sweet aroma in early manhood’ (p. 139). Adolescence, as this demonstrates, carried a certain utopian as well as erotic charge in the Hellenic milieu of Oxford in the 1860s and 1870s.28 Pater subsequently dedicated Studies to Shadwell, who had in the summer of 1865 accompanied him on the trip to Italy during which he soaked up many of the impressions that permeate the book.

The chapters of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, especially the one on Winckelmann, which lifts some of its sentences directly from ‘Diaphaneitè’, read like a sustained effort to recover the diaphanous character, this time by excavating the past rather more systematically, if still idiosyncratically. At one point in ‘Diaphaneitè’ he characterizes diaphanousness as ‘a thread of pure white light that one might disentwine from the tumultuary richness of Goethe’s nature’ (p. 139). Studies traces the thread of light that runs through the richness of the Renaissance; and, having unpicked this thread, as the conclusion reveals, it also attempts, in a far more violent movement, to weave it deep into the nineteenth century, in the hope that, like a late form of Romanticism, it might eventually redeem the dispiriting realities of life in an industrial society. Like Romanticism, it thus constitutes a critique of the present and, at least potentially, a utopian alternative to it (one critic has pointed out that ‘Pater’s volume might have been titled Studies in the History of Romanticism’).29 Romanticism, too, is for Pater an ‘outbreak of the human spirit’, as he puts it in the preface to Studies (p. xi). The book thus constructs an antinomian tradition – openly aesthetic, surreptitiously both homoerotic and atheistic – that it uses to recruit readers to a secret, elitist association that can constitute the nucleus of an ideal society. As Rachel Teukolsky observes in an insightful discussion of Pater’s art criticism, ‘while he eschews violence, his writings constantly touch on a subtle thematics of revolt organized around an elite group identity’.30 This coded thematics of revolt, which sublimates violence and ascribes responsibility for social transformation to an elite group, is characteristic of romantic anti-capitalism. It entails both an expression of oppositional politics and a displacement of it. Pater’s paper on the diaphanous character might be described as an attempt to articulate a utopian politics that is apolitical. It acknowledges that to prognosticate about the Coming Race is to engage a political language; but it seeks at the same time to escape the logic of political language by etherealizing it, diaphanizing it.31 What Pater hopes for is a revolution without revolution (which is rather different from a process of evolution, and rather more radical):

Revolution is often impious. They who prosecute revolution have to violate again and again the instinct of reverence. That is inevitable, since after all progress is a kind of violence. But in this [diaphanous] nature revolutionism is softened, harmonised, subdued as by distance. It is the revolutionism of one who has slept a hundred years. [p. 138]

Pater’s revolutionist is a Rip Van Winkle relieved to discover, on awakening from his epochal sleep, that the social transformation that has taken place in the meantime embodies not the sudden appearance of modernity but its utopian displacement. This revolution has occurred ‘with an engaging naturalness, without the noise of axe or hammer’ (p. 140). Pater’s utopia is thus ideological in the sense that Althusser intended when he referred to the imaginary resolution of real contradictions.

As I have implied, ‘Diaphaneitè’ sets the template for Pater’s thinking in the 1870s and 1880s to the extent that this thinking can be described as utopian. I have argued elsewhere that the decisive event of the final three decades of the late nineteenth century for the utopian (and dystopian) imagination is the irruption of the Paris Commune in 1871.32 Here, I want to speculate that it is at least partly in the shadow of this event that Pater shapes his social dream in Studies in the History of the Renaissance. In spite of the Commune’s tragic failure, which can be summarized by recalling that in the so-called semaine sangliante at least 25,000 proletarians were slaughtered by the French army, the democratic workers’ state briefly instituted by the Communards fundamentally, triumphantly reorganized the conception of the future that had prevailed in Europe up to that point. Marx said of the Communards that, ‘they have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’, thereby suggesting that they had simultaneously materialized the socialist utopia and made the concept historically irrelevant.33 If for the emergent socialist movement the Commune represented a brave attempt to institute a utopian future, for the bourgeoisie it represented the apparition of a dystopia that had only narrowly been exorcized.

The impact of the Commune on aesthetics has in general been drastically underestimated; and not least because T. J. Clark, among others, has authoritatively argued that modernism emerged largely from the bourgeois modernization of Paris. More recently, Albert Boime has instead emphasized the fact that ‘Modernism is wrought out of the unexpected dislodging of that bourgeoisie and the replacement of its rule – if ever so brief – of Paris by that of another class: the proletariat and its political expression in the Commune’.34 In late-nineteenth-century France, the emergent aesthetic of the Impressionists – the term was first used in this context in 1874 – was shaped to an important extent by the cultural politics of Paris in the aftermath of the Commune: ‘The Impressionists – moderate republicans – descended into the public sphere to reclaim its sullied turf for the bourgeoisie.’ ‘Their aesthetic purposes’, Boime adds, ‘are inseparable from their participation in the political and cultural reclamation of Paris.’35

At the time, conservative commentators often pointed to the elective affinities, as they perceived them, between Impressionism and communism or anarchism. For example, Art Age, an American journal, fulminated that Impressionist painting was ‘communism incarnate, with the red flag and the Phrygian cap of lawless violence boldly displayed’; and, in The Times, a British critic of the first Impressionist exhibition commented, ‘One seems to see in such work evidence of as wild a spirit of anarchy at work in French painting as in French politics.’36 These responses are intimations of the entanglement of aesthetics and politics that will characterize the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Levenson underlines the idea that ‘the event of the Paris Commune hung over later Modernism as a memory’ because it instituted the ‘radical undecidability of the tie between aesthetics and politics that became an abiding mark of Modernism’.37

The relevance of the Commune to apparently esoteric debates about aesthetics in England at this time is revealed in an anonymous review from 1872 of J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle’s A History of Painting in North Italy (1871), the prime example of the new scientific art criticism against which Pater defined his impressionist aesthetic in Studies.38 In ‘these days of “Communism” and “Internationalism”’, it portentously notes, barbarism is once more a historical possibility. It is therefore of supreme importance that the morals of the proletariat should be schooled, in Arnoldian fashion, through the appropriate cultivation of artistic taste. I will quote from the opening pages of this review at some length:

The ‘Communists’ of Paris, whatever may be said to the contrary by their apologists, waged war against the arts and literature as a part of that civilization which they consider it their mission to destroy. If they had been allowed a few more hours to mature and carry out their plans, it has been proved, beyond question, that the public and probably the private libraries, galleries, and museums of the capital, would have been destroyed. We hope and believe that our working classes are not inspired by the same ignorant and fanatical fury. The interest they have hitherto shown in the collections of art and science, which at such vast expense and such infinite labour have been collected together in this great metropolis, leads to a contrary belief. If London had ever the misfortune of falling into the power of a mob, we trust that they would prevent the repetition of such scenes as were witnessed in Paris. But there are always reckless men to be found, and they would be encouraged and directed in their recklessness by foreigners, who, outlawed and expelled from the rest of Europe, conspire against civilization and order under the protection of our laws, and would rejoice in being able to bring about the destruction of our most glorious national monuments.39

More sympathetic commentators correctly argued that the English and European press had largely fabricated the destruction caused by the Communards. The positivist Frederic Harrison, for instance, who courageously praised the ‘skill and efficiency with which the Commune has been organised’ in an article for the Fortnightly Review, a periodical to which Pater contributed at this time, condemned the ‘lurid inventions’ of the English press.40 For the reactionary critic in the Quarterly Review, though, the Commune represented an extremely dangerous political precedent; not least because, according to him, the exiled Communards who had fled to London threatened to foment a comparable destruction of bourgeois civilization in England. The prospect that the review of A History of Painting in North Italy opens up is of ‘the return of Europe to a state of barbarism, anarchy, and misery scarcely surpassed in the darkest periods of the middle ages’. ‘These considerations force themselves upon us’, the anonymous author continues, ‘when we take up Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s volumes.’41

Rather more significantly, these considerations also forced themselves, in the aftermath of the Commune, on Friedrich Nietzsche. He too was convinced, in the words of the Quarterly Review, that its representatives had ‘waged war against the arts and literature as a part of that civilization which they consider it their mission to destroy’. Indeed, as Dominic Losurdo has alleged, the ethics and aesthetics elaborated by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), his meditation on ancient Greek culture, were significantly shaped by the traumatic impact of the Commune. In a letter of 21 June 1871, referring back to the false rumour that the retreating Communards had set fire to the Louvre, he pontificated as follows:

For some days I was completely destroyed by doubts and overcome by tears: all scientific, philosophic and artistic existence seemed to me an absurdity, if a single day could obliterate the most marvellous works of art, or rather, entire periods of art.

This feeling of ‘the autumn of culture’, as Nietzsche put it in a letter several years later, persisted long after it had become obvious that the destruction of the Louvre was in fact a falsification used for propagandist purposes. As Peter Thomas has explained, ‘Losurdo demonstrates that whatever else The Birth of Tragedy became, it must also be understood in its own historical moment, as a theoretical response to a specific political event – the uprising of the Commune – articulated within a constellation of ideologies.’42

A number of critics have emphasized the parallels between Pater and Nietzsche, almost exact contemporaries who, in spite of their cultural and intellectual differences, were both highly idiosyncratic Hellenists indebted to the example of Winckelmann’s classicism. J. Hillis Miller, for example, once described Pater as ‘the nearest thing to Nietzsche England has’, and Nietzsche, conversely, as ‘the Pater of the German-speaking world’.43 I am not proposing that Pater, like Nietzsche, was positively traumatized by the Commune; but I am suggesting that, in spite of the unpromising biographical material available, we read Pater centrifugally rather than centripetally, opening him up to the Commune.44 On the continent, of course, the ideological effects of the Commune were considerably greater than in England. I would claim, however, that, if the Commune was a non-event in England, it was nonetheless a decisive non-event.

Pater’s impressionism, it might be said, is a sustained effort to redeem the aesthetic in the face of its bourgeois degradation, on the one hand; and, on the other, its complete abolition, according to apologists for the bourgeoisie, by the proletariat. If the proletariat threatened to destroy the work of art, as in the propagandist caricatures of the Commune, then the bourgeoisie, through the processes of commodification and mechanical reproduction, had effectively already destroyed the aura of the work of art. Pater’s aesthetic is an attempt to salvage the aura of art in the face of this dual prospect. The famous ekphrastic discussion of the Mona Lisa in Studies, first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1869, which is a sustained attempt to restore an auratic quality to the painting, takes on an especially intense resonance in this context – susceptible as this painting subsequently became both to the Communards’ alleged attack on the Louvre and to the relentless capitalist logic of technological reproduction.

My deliberately provocative contention, then, is that the publication of Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873, like that of The Birth of Tragedy in the previous year, represents an intervention, albeit a characteristically elliptical one, in aesthetic debates that had been fundamentally transformed by the example of the Paris Commune (and in spite of the fact that a number of its chapters first appeared before the Commune). To put the claim at its most polemical, the ‘Parisian Commune’, as Pater briefly refers to it in a review of Edmund Gosse’s poems published in 1890, is an absent determinant of his thought at this time.45

By the early 1870s, almost a decade after the composition of ‘Diaphaneitè’, the application of words like ‘revolutionist’ had of course become ideologically unacceptable, but Pater continues to develop an aesthetics that, in part because of its ethical and political implications, is shaped by the utopian structure of feeling characteristic of the late nineteenth century. The development of the concept of diaphanousness, first in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, then in Marius the Epicurean, embodies a double movement. It describes both an interiorization, most emphatically in Studies; and a kind of collectivization, most obviously in Marius. In the former, diaphanousness operates as a principle of hope, momentarily perceptible in the Paterian subject’s response to the art object – a fine alchemical deposit of the utopian impulse. In the latter, Pater recasts interpersonal relationships, in so far as they are reminiscent of a forgotten culture, specifically a homosexual pagan culture, as ‘a communion of just men made perfect’, as he calls it, that might redeem the society of the future.46

A communion of these men, of course, is not a commune. This utopian emblem is a delicate, probably fragile equilibrium of the political and the spiritual. In his attempt to find a refuge from the reification of contemporary culture, Pater is an exemplary romantic anti-capitalist – because he reaches both into the past and, less overtly, into the future; and because he strives for both an individualist and, more covertly, a collectivist solution. The inner and the outer life are dialectically interfolded. In a review of Dostoevesky’s novellas from 1922, Lukács identified the Russian writer as a man who, ‘as the “forerunner” of the human being living out his inner life and liberated both socially and economically, attempted to portray the soul of this man of the future’.47 Pater too might be interpreted as someone whose prose explores the inner life of someone as it might be recast in a society that had been socially, economically and sexually liberated. His prose, in its persistent, delicate attention to the most refined of aesthetic impulses, is an evocation of the soul of the man of the future.

In the conclusion to Studies, Pater famously used an image of a ‘swarm of impressions’ in order to portray individual experience (p. 119). It is perhaps significant that, five years later, in an essay on ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ (1878), he redeployed the image of the swarm in the context of collective, socially transformative, even violent experience:

An emphatically interior metaphor, the swarm of impressions, opens out onto an unexpectedly exterior one, the swarming of people spontaneously generating ‘some new and rapturous spirit’. The seething inner life of the conclusion, imprisoned by the ‘thick wall of personality’, is in the piece on Euripides momentarily liberated (in part, perhaps, because it is identified with the disruptive and joyfully subversive sexuality of female dancers). In a striking metaphorical shift, the involutions of the spirit are suddenly and surreptitiously transformed into a carnivalesque, if not revolutionary movement. Here is an explosive reinscription of the hope Pater had expressed at the end of ‘Diaphaneitè’, that the diaphanous type, ‘discontented with society as it is’, might form a ‘majority’, and so ensure ‘the regeneration of the world’.

1 Eduard Bernstein, ‘On the Occasion of a Sensational Trial,’ in Bernstein on Homosexuality: Articles from ‘Die Neue Zeit’ 1895 and 1898, trans. Angela Clifford (Athol Books: London, 1977), p. 17. He continues: ‘We will think no worse if Wilde [is] found guilty, and no better if the jury acquit him. Whatever the law says, his actions were quite inconsequential. It is the mental outlook which he represented and to which he gave expression which is important.’

2 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984), p. 48.

3 See Andrew Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing: Pittsburgh, 2013), pp. 22–3.

4 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Athlone Press: London, 1997), p. 239.

5 Heather K. Love, ‘Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism,’ in Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds.), Bad Modernisms (Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2006), p. 39.

6 Benjamin Morgan, ‘Aesthetic Freedom: Walter Pater and the Politics of Autonomy,’ ELH, vol. 77, no. 3 (2010), p. 733. ‘Perhaps what is aesthetic about aestheticism’, Morgan explains, ‘is not just its obsession with “convulsed sensuousness” or purified ideals, but rather its recognition that physical beauty dramatizes the dilemma of the modern subject who is immersed in the material world, but striving to be free of material contingency’ (p. 749).

7 Matthew Potolsky, ‘Literary Communism: Pater and the Politics of Community’, in Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (eds.), Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2010), p. 185. Slightly implausibly, Potolsky goes so far as to identify Pater with ‘a properly activist politics’ (p. 186).

8 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 239.

9 G. W. Foote, ‘Social Dreams’, Progress, vol. 6 (1886), p. 190.

10 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1977), pp. 133–5. See Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900 (Brill: Leiden, 2005), p. 3 – the final version of this book, it should be noted, was indebted to the characteristically scrupulous and perceptive comments that Andrew Hemingway made in a report for the publisher.

11 Peter Faulkner (ed.), William Morris: The Critical Heritage (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1973), pp. 79–80.

12 Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, ‘Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism’, in G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins (eds.), Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods (Associated University Presses: London, 1990), p. 36. By the time they came to adapt this article, first published in New German Critique in 1984, for their book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Duke University Press: Durham, North Carolina, 2001), Löwy and Sayre had decided to reject the term ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ on the grounds that it is a pleonasm: ‘for us Romanticism is anticapitalist by its very nature’ (p. 15). Hemingway has wisely commented that ‘such a usage ignores the functions and value of romanticism as a period concept’, thereby dehistoricizing romanticism and missing ‘the force of its revivals and the work of updating and adaptation that needs to be done with each phase of neo-romanticism’. Hemingway, The Mysticism of Money, op. cit., p. 207.

13 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), p. 3.

14 See Matthew Charles, ‘Utopia and Its Discontents: Dreams of Catastrophe and the End of “the End of History”’, Studies in Social and Political Thought, vol. 18 (2010), p. 31: ‘It is Bloch’s failure to properly resolve the theoretical tension between these two aspects – Utopianism and Utopia’ [i.e., the utopian impulse and the utopian blueprint] – that makes his work so amenable to the kind of jettisoning of the Utopia in its historical form that is currently being performed.… In The Principle of Hope, that which Adorno describes as the innermost antinomy of Bloch’s thought is stretched so wide that it appears as if one problematic half can simply be lobbed off [sic], and the other half uncritically taken up by Utopian Studies.’

15 Walter Pater, ‘Coleridge’, in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (Macmillan: London, 1924), p. 85.

16 William James, ‘On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,’ Mind, vol. 9 (1884), p. 3.

17 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010), p. 4. Hereafter, references to this edition appear in parentheses after the quotation.

18 Bernstein, ‘On the Occasion of a Sensational Trial’, op. cit., p. 15.

19 See my discussion of ‘Utopia and the Present in News from Nowhere’ in Utopia Ltd., op. cit., chapter 5.

20 Michael Levenson, Modernism (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011), p. 28.

21 For further discussion, see Matthew Beaumont, ‘Introduction,’ in Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, op. cit., p. xxv.

22 Gerald C. Monsman, ‘Old Mortality at Oxford’, Studies in Philology, vol. 67 (1970), p. 372.

23 Cited in Monsman, ‘Old Mortality at Oxford’, op. cit., p. 371.

24 Walter Pater, ‘Diaphaneitè,’ Appendix B in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, op. cit., p. 140. Hereafter, references to this edition appear in parentheses after the quotation.

25 Kate Hext, ‘The Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Individualist Aesthetic’, in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions, op. cit., p. 216.

26 For a discussion of ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, see Matthew Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2012), chapter 8.

27 These phrases are taken from Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. Michael Levey (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 87.

28 See Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: The Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2010), p. 59: ‘The value of adolescence to admirers of classical art like Schiller and Pater was precisely in its characterlessness, the smoothness of a vacuous face showing something of the detached indifference of the Gods.’

29 John J. Conlon, Walter Pater and the French Tradition (Bucknell University Press: London, 1982), p. 65.

30 Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009), p. 147.

31 See E. G. E. Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (Alan Sutton: London, 1995). Lytton’s post-human is sphinx-like in ‘its calm, intellectual, mysterious beauty’ (p. 8) – in short, it is diaphanous.

32 See Beaumont, Utopia Ltd., op. cit., chapter 4. Lukács noted that ‘the years 1870–1 marked [a] turning-point in the development of ideology’: see The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Merlin Press: London, 1980), p. 310.

33 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1977), p. 545.

34 Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995), p. 3. See also John Milner, Art, War and Revolution in France 1870–1 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2000), pp. 139–81.

35 Boime, Art and the French Commune, op. cit., pp. 7–8.

36 Both judgments are cited in Adam Parkes, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford University Press: New York, 2011), p. 10.

37 Levenson, Modernism, op. cit., p. 14.

38 See Rachel Teukolksky, ‘The Politics of Formalist Art Criticism: Pater’s “School of Giorgione”,’ in Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams (eds.), Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (ELT Press: Greensboro, 2002), op. cit., pp. 152–8.

39 Anonymous, review of A History of Painting in North Italy, Quarterly Review, no. 133 (July 1872), pp. 119–20.

40 Frederic Harrison, ‘The Revolution of the Commune,’ Fortnightly Review, no. 53 (1 May 1871), p. 558.

41 Anonymous, review of A History of Painting in North Italy, op. cit., p. 121.

42 For both Losurdo’s argument and Nietzsche’s comments on the Commune, I am reliant on Peter Thomas’s review of the former’s intellectual biography of the latter, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (2002), ‘Over-Man and the Commune,’ New Left Review, vol. 31 (Jan/Feb 2005), p. 139.

43 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait’, Daedalus, vol. 105, no. 1 (Winter 1976), p. 97.

44 The terms centrifugal and centripetal, used in this sense, are taken from Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1988), p. 10.

45 See Walter Pater, ‘Mr. Gosse’s Poems,’ in Essays from ‘The Guardian’ (Macmillan: London, 1901), p. 109.

46 Pater, Marius the Epicurean, op. cit., p. 178. The phrase is taken from a Stoic professor who acts as Marius’s mentor and who expounds ‘the idea of Humanity – of a universal commonwealth of mind, which becomes explicit, and as if incarnate, in a select communion of just men made perfect’.

47 Georg Lukács, ‘Dostoevsky: Novellas’, in Reviews and Articles, trans. Peter Palmer (Merlin Press: London, 1983), p. 51.

48 Walter Pater, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, in Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (Macmillan: London, 1918), pp. 56–7.