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Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"
Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2004 by Coates, John
"The arbitrary psychology of the last century" is one of a series of needling reminders, placed throughout "Style," of the limited and outmoded values that sustained the eighteenth-century prose Saintsbury admired. The need to controvert Saintsbury prompts Pater's "absurd" attack on Dryden. Pater's comment that it was odd that Dryden should set up correctness, "that humble merit of prose," as "the central literary excellence" since he was "really a less correct writer than he may seem" is not an exhibition of hauteur ( Works 5: 8). It is important for Pater to subvert a figure Saintsbury had offered as the law-giver who cast English prose in permanent form.
Pater next draws a distinction, as old as Aristotle's Poetics, between the transcribing of particular facts and the deeper, more philosophical truth arrived at through the generalizing imagination. He demotes specific fact, the enumeration of which, through science, is "reducible to various kinds of painstaking." This "good quality," he patronizingly adds, is involved in all skilled work, such as drafting an Act of Parliament or sewing. In history or in those "complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of science" ( Works 5:9), however, the writer is obliged to select from a multiplicity of facts. Such selection must be based on temperament.
Pater's view of the functions and possibilities of prose and the nature of his defense against attacks on his own stylistic practices are inseparable from his view of knowledge and of truth. His position is one of limited skepticism. He does not deny the existence of objective facts external to the observer but stresses their sheer volume and variety. Of two types of knowledge, the enumeration of facts and imaginative and personal verity, the latter is preeminent since, to move beyond an accumulation of raw data, one must select. The artist or the prose writer pursues, in an enhanced and self-conscious form, that personal "sense of fact" present in "every other product of human skill," even in "the moulding of a bell or a platter" ( Works 5: 10).
Pursuing this common act of selection in a more strenuous manner, the writer moves from the "transcript of mere fact" to that of fact "modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms." The more his aim comes to be "the transcribing not of the world, not of mere fact" but of "his sense of it" the closer he comes to being "an artist, his work fine art"( Works 5: 10-11). An essential requirement of good prose is an ability to draw authentically on the resources of the inner self. Certain temperaments or points of view are more potent and engaging than others.
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