Pater was an Oxford fellow in the nineteenth century. This a collection of essays on his somewhat idiosyncratic conception of the Renaissance. Foremost, he uses the history of the period for a larger discussion on his views of art, aesthetics, criticism, and the good life. He begins, “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative…. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics…. The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is.” Next, Pater defines his conception of the Renaissance, “For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, makes themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment…. In their search after the pleasures of the senses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christian ideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strange rival to religion.”
Pater discusses what makes the different forms of artistic expression similar and unique. “It is a mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought…. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations…. Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.”
Next, Pater takes on the spirit of aesthetic criticism. “Criticism must never for a moment forget that ‘the artist is the child of his time.’ But besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition. It acts upon the artist, not as one of the influences of his own age, but through those artistic products of the previous generation which first excited, while they directed into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of elevated points, taking each from each the reflexion of a strange light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The standard of taste [for the Renaissance] was fixed in Greece…. Pagan and Christian art are sometime harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented as a fashion which set in at a definite period. That is the superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the identity of European culture. The two are really continuous; and there is a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance was an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was ever taking place.”
Finally, Pater concludes a bit philosophically, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve…. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song…. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most…. The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner…. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is ‘so much to know,’ rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear…. The nature before us is a revolutionist from the direct sense of personal worth…. It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself.”
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