The relationship between the arts was central to Pater. Although Pater never devoted a whole essay to Blake, his name surfaces in discussions about form and style, soul and mind. This chapter traces Pater’s engagement with Blake, focusing on Blake’s function in Pater’s anachronic poetics. He appreciates Michelangelo through Hugo and Blake, who features as a ‘“survival” from a different age’ in essays on Demeter and Dionysus. Exhibitions in 1871 and 1876 present Blake’s allegorical portraits of Pitt, Nelson, and Napoleon as ‘Spiritual Forms’, a dystopian title Pater paradoxically repurposed to capture an embodied aesthetic and heal the separation between form and content. Comparison with Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue (1809) reveals how both Blake and Pater look to sculpture to develop an ideal of the human form divine. Explicit references to Blake’s illustrations to Job and Robert Blair’s The Grave reveal the role played by visual images in Pater’s writing, illuminating the inter-art dynamics of his critical practice. Pater’s Blake brings out a discipline of literary form that is shaped by a multisensorial aesthetic.

The Introduction frames a collection that makes the case for Pater’s importance for the study of English literature, bringing to the fore key themes and preoccupations and thus underlining the unity and coherence of the book. Discussion starts in 1886 when the Pall Mall Gazette asked writers, intellectuals, and educators to comment on the proposal by J. Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford; Pater’s writings on literature are looked at in the light of institutional debates and developments in literary criticism at this time. The Introduction explores in detail Pater’s commitment to what, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he calls ‘aesthetic criticism’, derived in part from German philosophical aesthetics, and what he intends by his stress on ‘style’ and ‘form’. Finally it looks at Pater’s conception of education as dialogic process, stemming in particular from Plato and Montaigne, and the role his use of the essay plays in that process; the case is made that Pater has much to offer us when we think about desirable forms of English Studies for today that are neither nationalistic nor exceptionalist but cosmopolitan.

This chapter explores the impulse to understand reading and criticism in the terms provided by the natural and social sciences, asking both what generates such an impulse and whether it can deliver on what it promises. Such an impulse dates back to the early days of literary studies as an academic discipline, if not longer, but it has returned with a vengeance in the early twenty-first century. The chapter explores two recent instantiations of the impulse: the effort to use Big Data to understand the history of the modern novel, and the hope to understand aesthetic experience in the terms developed by neuroscience. Each of these models presents itself as a radical departure from traditional aesthetic criticism, and promises to break down boundaries between disciplines in ways that would revolutionize how we understand the practice of criticism. Wittgenstein’s writing on language, the mind, and aesthetics, the chapter argues, helps us understand the misplaced assumptions and conceptual weaknesses that pervade these efforts. Instead of giving us the generalizing causal accounts that define the most coherent and rigorous scientific disciplines, criticism and aesthetic understanding arise from a kind of immersive experience, a prolonged encounter with a singular artifact, and one in which empirical studies have no clear explanatory role.

This essay focuses on “Music Decomposed” and, to a lesser extent, “A Matter of Meaning It” (they are companion pieces), contextualizing these texts, and exploring some important parallels between musical composition and philosophical authorship. Colapietro shows how, in subtle and surprising ways, some of the main themes of Cavell’s philosophical investigations are articulated in “Music Decomposed” (themes such as voice, timing, extemporaneity, contingency, deep listening, rule-following, and an uncompromising affirmation of the radical nature of human responsibility made in the teeth of one or another fashionable celebration of impersonal mechanism). Tradition and technique are necessary for creativity, even if creativity reconfigures tradition and transcends technique.