Chapter 6 - Form, Matter, and Metaphysics in Walter Pater’s Essay on ‘Style’

Summary

‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, the essay stands out for the breadth and importance of its subject and its capstone prominence within Appreciations, one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced. Scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, yet the essay tends to disappoint precisely on these terms. If ‘Style’ is the key to Pater’s aesthetic principles, most readers have found the lock jammed; or worse, they have concluded that the essay betrays the essential nature of his aestheticist vision. By contrast, this chapter argues that, while elusive, ‘Style’ is in fact a lucid and authentic intervention that at once tacitly responds to several of the most influential writers and critics of Pater’s generation (Wilde, Arnold, Saintsbury, Newman), while clarifying – rather than contradicting – his own convictions on the relationship between literary beauty or ‘perfection’, and the idea of transcendent ‘truth’.