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Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"
Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2004 by Coates, John
In "soul," Pater points to an irreducibly spiritual dimension in writing, the expression of an "immediate sympathetic contact" ( Works 5:26) or, it may be, a repulsion not to be explained by any technical failure in the writer or any misapprehension on the reader's part. "Soul" is that "plenary substance" of which what is actually expressed can only offer "one phase or facet." "Soul," suggesting spiritual qualities of attraction and repulsion, which affect individual readers in mysterious, impalpable ways, takes the discussion of prose into an area fundamentally different from the one to which Saintsbury's essentially conversational model points. In such communication, the reader seems to know the author as a "person" and "by way of intuition" ( Works 5: 27) rather than by the verbal equivalent of social ease.
The fact that Pater borrows the concept of "soul" from Newman may not seem illicit or parasitic if we remember why he admired Newman. He remarks at the end of his review of Saintsbury's anthology that in a "manner as classical, as idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele's" Newman had dealt "with all the perturbing influences of our century" (Essays 16). As well as the formal graces of his prose, it is Newman's engagement with subjects that caused his readers most anguish, which wins Pater's admiration. In this connection, it is interesting that he should mention in "Style," as an example of "soul," Newman's Tracts for the Times.
Some commentators have reacted in a puzzled or hostile way to the last section of "Style." Donoghue complains that Pater's account of Flaubert does not quote from his fiction and says less about his work than Henry James managed to say in a sentence (227). Harold Bloom cannot see how the last paragraph of "Style" is to be reconciled "either with the rest of the essay or with the greater part of Pater's writings." A profound anxiety about the general response to his work caused Pater to "falsify his vision" (Bloom 125).
It may be easier to understand Pater's brief discussion of Flaubert by placing it in the context of submerged controversy that elucidates much of the rest of "Style." Clearly, Pater does not intend to offer a detailed discussion of Flaubert's work. Probably he felt an attempt to demonstrate the scale of Flaubert's achievement would be otiose and would, in any case, take up too much space in a short essay devoted to another topic. Rather, he intends to offer Flaubert as an exemplary figure of the scholarartist and to vindicate him from a charge, sometimes leveled, of morbidity. Pater's controversial intention is clear from the outset. Flaubert did not, like "false Ciceronians," search for "the smooth or winsome, or forcible word as such." Ciceronianism, a term as old as Erasmus's satire Ciceronianus, describesjust that pedantic and restrictive historical model of good taste Pater has been condemning throughout "Style." Flaubert's achievement was based on a "first condition" upon which Pater has already dwelt, "to know yourself, to have ascertained your own sense exactly" and, secondly, on the search for the "unique term" (Works 5: 31), the "true word" which would enable his reader to see exactly what he saw.
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