Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

For Pater, there is something heroic in this "lifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art-art facile and flimsy" ( Works 5: 32). (It is interesting that Benson records as one of the very few times when Pater could loose his habitual composure and "occasionally fire up" [185] an instance when someone spoke disparagingly of Flaubert. ) Pater is keen to emphasize that there was nothing neurotic or unhealthy in the French writer's search for the mot juste. He distinguishes Flaubert's integrity from his health problems. His almost endless hesitation had "much to do with diseased nerves," and his anxiety in seeking the right phrase was aggravated by a "physical condition" ( Works 5: 32). This condition, however, did not prompt and does not invalidate Flaubert's necessary struggle against the meretricious and on behalf of "the one indispensable beauty . . . truth" ( Works 5:34).

Pater saw no contradiction between his own pursuit of an inner vision and what has been called Flaubert's concentration on objective fact. He felt that both he and Flaubert believed in a "pre-existent adaptation" between the "relative" in "the world of thought" and "its correlative, somewhere in the world of language." (He quotes Flaubert's statement that there "are no beautiful thoughts without beautiful words" [Works 5: 30] as justification for his own interpretation.) Pater would not have accepted that Flaubert was seeking a passionless reproduction of fact, a view, in any case, by no means dominant among commentators on Flaubert's work.

The final paragraph of "Style" is certainly more overtly moral than is customary in Pater's writings. Yet its assertion that "great" as opposed to "good" art is so because it increases men's happiness, helps to redeem the oppressed, enlarges the range of our sympathies, or offers us new truths about ourselves and the world is cognate with the arguments of "Style" as a whole. The bulk of the essay has been given over to asserting moral qualities in the making of effective prose. Pater has deprecated the notion that form is an end in itself. He has stressed the prose-writers' need for austerity, self-exploration, self-knowledge, and the submission of personal judgment to that of sensitive and intelligent readers. He has emphasized the paramount importance of "soul," the underlying spiritual meaning in writing, and dwelt on the writer's stylistic quest as a search for truth. The last paragraph of "Style" may extend but hardly contradicts the arguments and spirit of what has gone before.

In "Style," Pater does not directly attack Saintsbury. Here, as in his criticisms of Arnold and Ruskin, he is oblique and deliberately unconfrontational. When "Style" is set against Saintsbury's preface, which Pater had recently reviewed, however, its arguments grow clearer. In several specific instances, the points Pater makes challenge or answer Saintsbury's views. "Style" gains in force and significance if one sees it as a defense of what Pater valued and tried to practice in writing against the formidable and authoritative pronouncements of a dominant figure in the rise of English Studies.