Harold Bloom on Walter Pater:
1. Pater's "value inheres neither in his accuracy at the direct interpretation of meaning in texts nor in his judgments of relative eminence of works and authors. Rather, he gives us a vision of art through his own unique sensibility, and so his own writings obscure the supposed distinction between criticism and creation. 'Supposed,' because who can convince us of that distinction? To adapt Shelley's idea of the relation between poetry and the universe, let us say that criticism creates the poem anew, after the poem has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."
2. Pater's key terms as a critic are 'perception' and 'sensation,' which is response to perception. 'Vision' for Pater, as for Blake, is a synonym for Coleridge's or Wordsworth's 'Imagination,' and Pater further emulated Blake by questing after the 'spiritual form' of phenomena as against 'corporeal form.' This is the 'form' that: 'Every moment...grows perfect in hand or face,' according to the almost preternaturally eloquent 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance."
3. "For this is Pater's Gospel, but it is Ruskin's manifesto: '...the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.'"
4. "What Wordsworth called 'spots of time,' periods of particular splendor or privileged moments testifying to the mind's power over the eye, Ruskin had turned from earlier, as being dubious triumphs of the pathetic fallacy. Pater, who subverted Ruskin by going back to their common ancestor, Wordsworth, may be said to have founded his criticism upon privileged moments of vision, or 'epiphanies' as Joyce's Stephen, another Paterian disciple, was to term them."
5. "Pater's strange achievement is to have assimilated Wordsworth to Lucretius, to have compounded an idealistic naturalism with a corrective materialism. By de-idealizing the epiphany, he makes it available to the coming age, when the mind will know neither itself nor the object but only the dumbfoundering abyss that comes between."
6. "An Epicurean or hedonistic askesis is only superficially a paradox, since it is central in the Lucretian vision that Pater labored to attain."
7. "His great achievement...was to empty Ruskin's aestheticism of its moral bias, and so to purify a critical stance appropriate for the apprehension of Romantic art. More than Swinburne, Morris, Rossetti, he became the father of Anglo-American Aestheticism, and subsequently the direct precursor of a Modernism that vainly attempted to be Post-Romantic. I venture the prophecy that he will prove also to be the valued precursor of a Post-Modernism still fated to be another Last Romanticism."
From H.B.'s essay on Pater reprinted in
Essayists and Prophets (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005).
