Pater on the Romantic Temper

In his now canonical essay “Romanticism” published in Macmillan’s Magazine 35 (1876-1877), literary critic Walter Pater argued that the human repertoire of responses to the found world tends to oscillate between “classical” and “romantic” modes, i.e., between responses which privilege, respectively, the familiar and known over the unfamiliar and unknown and those which privilege the latter over the former. The conclusion one may draw from Pater’s formulation is that the particular concentration and constellation of Romanticisms that dominated late 18th and 19th century European culture was exceptional, but not unique. Romanticisms did not begin and end then and there. Indeed, they had been present within European literature in embryonic form in such works as Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The cultural transformation that occurred in the late 18th century, and throughout the 19th, was one in which Romanticisms ceased from being phenomena that waxed and waned but resisted complete occlusion to phenomena that wax and wane and are impossible to completely avoid.