Chapter 9 - Pater and the Quaintness of Seventeenth-Century English Prose

Summary

This chapter aims to expose what ‘quaint’ means for Pater, and the work it does in his criticism. His use of ‘quaint’ is idiosyncratic but connected to a wider pattern in criticism: on the one hand, the attempt of his predecessors and contemporaries to account for Browne’s peculiarity; on the other, a vogue for the word as a critical term with strong and ambivalent associations. It is a keyword, marking a simultaneous discomfort with and interest in the lingering appeal of outmoded aesthetic objects which connects it to Pater’s broader theoretical statements on style, and on the relationship between Classicism and Romanticism. The chapter shows how Pater’s quaintness fits in the longer history of the reception of Browne, which traces changing attitudes to difficulty, Latinity, and ‘metaphysical’ style. These qualities were associated with forms of religion and philosophical education rejected in the later seventeenth century, just as ‘classical clearness’ became the ideal of prose, and they have remained variously embarrassing, threatening, or appealing ever since: a complex of aesthetic effects which ‘quaint’ works both to name and conceal.