Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2004 by Coates, John

Given the tendentious nature of Saintsbury's views, it is appropriate to ask what standing they would have had when Pater encountered them. Would he have felt such arguments about the nature of English prose worth challenging? Although his preface was published nine years before Saintsbury's appointment to the Regius Chair of English at Edinburgh (1895), marking his establishment as "the nearest thing to Critic Laureate" (Gross 159), his star was certainly in the ascendant. Saintsbury's scholarship and the sheer range of his reading would be bound to command general approval. His forthright, amiably assertive manner perhaps appealed to some readers. It must have been his opinions, however, that won over so many of his influential contemporaries. ("Mr Balfour let slip a complimentary reference in his Romanes lecture, Lord Morley paid tribute in his presidential address to the English Association, the universities began bestowing honorary degrees" [Gross 159].) The notion of a standard, set in the eighteenth century, of urbane, clear, and well-mannered writing, uncluttered with novel ideas or too much individual perception (unless it was charming eccentricity) clearly recommended itself. Whatever its other advantages, it put the brakes on innovation and provided a means to deprecate stylistic experiments. Saintsbury's conception of good English prose is sympathetic to the aims of an educational system that at the public schools and universities of the day promoted "losing one's angles" as a desirable end. (One remembers Chesterton's comment on Edwardian Oxford that a desire to retain one's angles was "common to all those human beings who do not set their ultimate hopes on looking like Humpty Dumpty" [93].)

Saintsbury's contemporary standing must be set in the context of the emergence of English Studies in the universities. (The Merton Professorship at Oxford was set up in 1885 and the English Honours School in 1893.) In this connection, it is interesting to note the reasons for Pater's reservations about the establishment of English as a subject in Oxford. When invited by the Pall Mall Gazette to comment on the proposed Oxford English School in 1885, he was somewhat doubtful. Such a course of study might turn the "liberal pleasure" of English literature into a "long, pedantic mechanical discipline" (Letters 69). The remark suggests that, apart from particular reservations about Saintsbury's attitudes, Pater, in general, was suspicious of coercive and systematizing tendencies in literary study.

Pater recorded his first impressions of Saintsbury's opinions in a review of Specimens of English Prose Style (along with three other textbooks) published in The Guardian ( 17 February 1886), two years before the appearance of "Style." It is worth looking at this review since it anticipates several of the points made in the later essay. The connection between the two corroborates Saintsbury's presence as the silent adversary in "Style." As later in "Style," Pater begins by complimenting Saintsbury before delicately unpicking his arguments ("It takes a scholar indeed to make a good literary selection" [Essays 3-4] ). At the same time, from the outset, he relativizes Saintsbury's claims to authority: "The making of an anthology of English prose is what must have occurred to many of its students. . . . Such an anthology . . . might well follow exclusively some special line of interest in it" (Essays 3). In effect, there are many competent readers of English prose, all with differing and plausible views of what constitutes its central tradition. Along with compliments, there are flickers of irony. Pater notes that the epigraph of the book he is reviewing has been chosen from "Dryden, the first master of the sort of prose he prefers-that is Mr Saintsbury's burden" (Essays 4). The last word may mean theme but also carries a suggestion of the laborious. "The sort of prose he prefers" scales down Saintsbury's prescriptive pronouncements and attempts at critical legislation to mere expressions of his personal choice.