Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

A main reason for the aesthetic pleasure a highly self-conscious style may achieve lies in the struggle, scrupulously waged and carried to success, of the writer with his meaning. "Self-restraint, skilful economy of means," self-denial, and "that frugal closeness of style which makes the most of a word" (Works5: 17) have a beauty of their own. It is a beauty intimately connected with the sense of difficulty overcome.

In an intelligent and plausible defense of self-conscious style, Pater must break the hold, so firmly fixed in many minds and endorsed by Saintsbury, of a belief that prose is either simple and natural or else overdecorated, mannered, and striving for effect. For Pater, such an alternative is naïve and historically illinformed. In the later phases of a culture prose cannot be natural and simple, the transparent medium of thought. It comes to the writer as "no more a creation of his own than the sculptor's marble" ( Works 5: 12). Since it is the "product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues" it is full of "obscure and minute association" and governed by "often recondite laws" (Works 5:12). Pater would not have felt the reproach that he wrote English like a dead language. In his view, writing in English required a cultivated and learned sensitivity to the context and the historical associations of words.

"Style" sketches a portrait of the literary artist as scholar, the main purpose of which is to rehabilitate the whole notion of self-consciousness in writing. Pater has to dispel notions that a self-conscious style is artificial, showy, or rhetorical in the pejorative sense. He must challenge the view that the main (perhaps only) requirement of good writing is to have something to say and to say it directly and energetically. If in addition to directness one also aspired to grace, then one would (on this view) choose some standard model, like Saintsbury's early eighteenth-century prose. For Pater, however, "the literary artist" is of necessity selfcritical and wary because he writes for a reader "full of eyes" (Works 5:12). The writer-reader relationship is obviously crucial. Pater does not differ from Saintsbury in rejecting unnecessary ornament or flowers of speech, well-aware that his discriminating readers would find them meretricious. In fact, he goes further than Saintsbury. Even for a writer who avoids "tarnished or vulgar decoration" ( Works 5: 18) there is a problem in the very literariness of language formed by a sophisticated culture. A well-read writer and his readers will share a fund of direct or submerged quotation and verbal memories, "parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally." There is, no doubt, a pleasure to be had by participating in a common cultural or educational tradition. For Pater, however, such pleasure is a "vagrant intruder," a "diversion" which acts with "narcotic force" on the "negligent intelligence" ( Works5:l9). It beguiles minds that are more than ready, at any time, to wander away from a demanding argument or subject.