2 - ‘A Passionate Coldness’

Summary

For many in the late nineteenth-century Pater was a by-word for sensual pleasure and sexual licence, and it is this Pater that dominates Decadent Studies today. But many Victorians read Pater as recommending austere discipline and sensuous continence. Restraint can be read as central to Pater’s attempt to base a practical ethic on sceptical, aesthetic principles. Sense experience was crucially important to this ethic. But Pater repeatedly distinguishes between healthy, productive sensuousness, and a harmful sensuality that he associates with an excess of transience, disease, and death. He represents continence as evidence of the personal discipline that allows the aesthete to effectively filter the good from the bad, the healthy from the unhealthy, in objects or periods or people; as he put it, to make ‘use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless or poisonous’. And although Pater always leaves interpretative space for continent eroticism, especially homoeroticism, in his texts, attending to restraint is crucial for understanding his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception.