1 - The periegetic critic and the imaginative sense of place

Summary

In several ways “Emerald Uthwart” may serve as a type of the immobile art favored by Pater in his late period. We may begin with its narrative mode. “Emerald Uthwart” comes as close as Pater ever did to that narrative ideal toward which the fiction of his last decade consistently tends: a story from which motion has been excised. For both Uthwart and his author movement is something to be renounced. The “intensely pleasant, the glorious sense of movement renewed,” so attractive to Uthwart when he can no longer tolerate the inactivity enjoined on him, proves nevertheless fatal (MS, p. 234). And Pater's mode of narrating Uthwart's story is peculiarly consonant with its subject. Any impression of chronological sequence is persistently disrupted by acts of narrative anticipation. Before describing the life of Uthwart and Stokes at their university Pater informs us that they “left it precipitately” (MS, p. 225). Before recounting their act of disobedience he describes their punishment. And his account of Uthwart's childhood is preceded by repeated notices of his death. The effect of these anticipations is to render the fiction static by depriving it of anything like narrative movement and thus to suggest that movement is an artistic as well as a moral sin.

Like Uthwart's impulsive incursion, the movements of Pater's other fictional protagonists are often unhappy in their outcome. Journeys, for example, are either aborted, as in “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” (1887), or fatal, as in “Apollo in Picardy,” “Hippolytus veiled,” and “A prince of court painters” (1885).