Walter Pater and an Aesthetic Conception of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
It is the 185th anniversary of the birth of Walter Horatio Pater (04 August 1839–30 July 1894), who was born in London’s East End on this date in 1839.
Walter Pater wasn’t a philosopher in the conventional sense, and he certainly wasn’t a philosopher of history, but he was what we might call a literary philosopher and a literary historian who was as interested in literary style of his exposition as in the doctrines he espoused. Pater was a man of the nineteenth century, and in fact a nineteenth century English man. Today we associate nineteenth century England with Victorianism, and we associate Victorianism with stuffy, uptight, highly repressed people, which I think says more about our time than it says about the Victorians.
I see the Victorians as a people who negotiated their way through the wrenching changes of the industrial revolution while keeping their civilization intact. The Victorians achieved nothing less than the orderly transition from agricultural civilization to industrialized civilization. In doing so, Victorianism became the template for other societies to make this transition without revolutionary violence or civil war. All throughout the nineteenth century, Marxists were predicting the coming communist revolution that would sweep away the bourgeois order, and often they were openly agitating for this revolution. In my episode on Thinking Historically about the Future I have discussed this in some detail. It would be accurate to call this period of industrialization a revolutionary milieu in which such a communist revolution could well have happened.
The transition from agriculturalism to industrialism was the most disruptive transition in the history of civilization, and can only be compared in its impact to the emergence of agricultural civilization from pre-civilized nomadic hunter-gatherers. While the transition from hunter-gatherer nomadism to settled agriculturalism occurred over thousands of years, the transition from agricultural civilization to industrialized civilization has in some cases occurred within a hundred years, though I would argue the transition is still underway on a planetary scale. The Victorians not only managed this transition, and were the first people in history to manage this transition, they moreover managed this transition without catastrophic warfare, without the widespread breakdown of civil order, and with a certain sense of style. If the Victorians had not managed this transition so well, rather than a new form of civilization taking shape, the industrial revolution might have resulted in a communist revolution, or even the collapse of civilization and a new dark age.
Today we think of Victorianism as a highly repressive social and cultural milieu that was finally cast aside with the innovations of the Edwardian era and then the great scientific and social revolutions that characterized the early twentieth century and which then instituted dramatic social and cultural changes that ever after left the Victorian period in the shadows of history. But Victorian repression was not arbitrary; it served a crucial social function in its time, and it may well have been the only possible social and cultural mechanism that would have made it possible for any society to be the first to make the transition from agriculturalism to industrialism. Victorianism not only made an orderly transition possible from agriculturalism to industrialism, it also made possible an orderly transition from a social order (i.e., a central project) based on religious tradition to a social order that was largely secular.
Americans, and especially Americans who don’t travel, aren’t fully aware of the degree to which European society is secularized, and much of this occurred in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach was an important Victorian expression of this secularization. Nietzsche already saw this secularization happening in the nineteenth century, and, of course, Darwin, a proper English gentleman, worked his own scientific revolution in the midst of the Victorian period, which played an important role in secularization. Rather than being personally destroyed for his efforts — which is what almost any other society would have done to a man like Darwin — Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey and treated like a national hero.
A lot of intellectual toughness was a necessary condition of making a peaceful transition from agriculturalism to industrialism, and we can find this necessary toughness in the writers of nineteenth century England. Matthew Arnold’s “Sweetness and Light” is a remarkable essay, and not at all how we today would characterize the aspirations of Victorian society, but in comparison to the horrific counterfactuals that might have attended the industrial revolution under other circumstances, the grim Victorian world described so movingly by Charles Dickens is relatively benign. Since we have, for the most part, in our collective historical imagination, consigned nineteenth century English literature to our understanding of a genteel and proper Victorianism, it is easy to believe that the men of the nineteenth century did not yet possess the kind of raw, unsparing honesty that the twentieth century forced upon us.
The Victorian world may have been innocent of World Wars, genocides, nuclear annihilation, and the rigorously realized horrors bequeathed to us by the twentieth century, but it was not an innocent world. History may always reveal new horrors to us, but even in the slightly less horrific past, there were horrors aplenty to preclude any kind of robust innocence on the part of human beings. And it is interesting to reflect that, while the Victorian Era is remembered for its social and cultural repression, it is not remembered for the scope and scale of its atrocities. This is particularly significant in light of the fact that the twentieth century, which has been seen as a liberation of society once Victorian constraints were swept away, is remembered for the scope and scale of its atrocities. Again, the Victorians did a better job than we did in managing the great transitions of our respective times. During the Enlightenment Voltaire famously said that we commit atrocities because we believe absurdities. If this is true, then the absurdities believed by the Victorians were less pernicious than the absurdities believed in the twentieth century.
The late-Victorian or early Edwardian Oscar Wilde in his De Profundis had the kind raw and unsparing directness of the twentieth century, but was rather too self-serving to measure up to the standard of intellectual honesty set by others. But Oscar Wilde’s heresies were characterized by a great sense of style. We may criticize the Victorian legal and penal system for essentially destroying Wilde, but it was also the Victorian cultural milieu that made Oscar Wilde possible. If Wilde had not been quite so daring, he might have gotten by without provoking the authorities to respond to him as it did. Oscar Wilde’s life is a kind of testimony to the aestheticism of the Victorian period, which is something that gets less attention than the science of Darwin, the industry of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or the workhouses of Charles Dickens.
Walter Pater was one of the leading lights of this Victorian aestheticism. In particular, Pater’s book The Renaissance, first published in 1873 as Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and revised in 1877 as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, culminated in a passionate philosophy of life based on the ideals of the renaissance, as Pater understood them from his Victorian perspective:
“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment…”
The first sentence of this, To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, has been quoted many times in many contexts, and is the essence of Pater’s personal creed. And, again we don’t usually think of rebelling against a stereotyped world, the freeing of the spirit, or living in a state of ecstasy as familiar features of Victorian life. Pater continues,
“Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.”
Here Pater makes the transition from the intensity and the brevity of experience to the perennial difficulty of capturing this intensity or brevity in any theory. Further along, Pater comes closer to making and explicit a philosophical statement:
“What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. ‘Philosophy is the microscope of thought.’ The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.”
Note that in this passage Pater explicitly rejects Hegel, who by this time had already become a symbol of over-intellectualization. It was Hegel who was most strongly associated, rightly or wrongly, with the idea of a teleological conception of history, by which we could presumably judge whether an individual or a society has attained its proper end. In place of theories and philosophies, Pater directs us toward ideals, and especially the ideal of a well-lived life. An ideal that fallible human beings may fail to attain is no telos at the end of history, but it is always there for us, as a touchstone and a guidestar.
In his essays Pater has referred in passing to “poetical history,” as though we all will instinctively understood what he means by this. Whatever we may understand by poetical history, it isn’t the rational or intellectualized history Pater attributes to Hegel and Auguste Comte. And Pater goes even farther afield seeking an alternative to a rationalized and intellectualized history. In an essay in French author Prosper Mérimée, whose novella Carmen was the source of Bizet’s opera, Pater refers to a magical function of history:
“Mérimée, perhaps, may have had in him the making of a master of such science, disinterested, patient, exact: scalpel in hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated far. But quite certainly he had something of genius for the exact study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, in some special area of historic fact, to be determined by his own peculiar mental preferences. Power here too again, — the crude power of men and women which mocks, while it makes its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function of history to put one in living in contact with that.”
Pater points us toward the good life lived within a history animated by this magic function that puts us in contact with the power of ordinary human nature. Is this a philosophy of history? I think we could safely call it a philosophy of life. What does a philosophy of life have to do with a philosophy of history? If enough people hold a given philosophy of life and act upon it, they create an era of history. Men like Walter Pater were instrumental in what later came to be called the Aesthetic Movement, and this inaugurated a distinctive thread in modern Western civilization. We could call Pater’s philosophy of life and the aesthetic movement that it inspired a mentality.
In my episode on Marc Bloch, while discussing how the history of mentalities grew out of the Annales school of historians, I argued that the most interesting feature of the history of mentalities is the difference and the tension between the mentality of an individual and the mentality of an era or of a civilization. Walter Pater, in his aestheticist manifesto of The Renaissance presents us with an explicitly formulated individual mentality. This begins as the creed of one man who aims to live a life of passionate intensity, and as it diffuses in society it influences others and becomes a social phenomenon. As a social phenomenon, and aesthetic movement shapes history and in turn is shaped by history. It gives us a class of individuals who engage with the world aesthetically, and who pursue aesthetic goals.
Even if Pater does not provide us with a philosophy of history, he points us toward something that we didn’t even know we were missing, which is what we could call the missing aestheticist philosophy of history. The core ideals of Western civilization are truth, beauty, and goodness. We have philosophies of history that attempt to demonstrate that history is the unfolding of truth, and we have philosophies of history that argue history is the unfolding of the good, but we have no philosophy of history that attempts to prove that history is the unfolding of the beautiful. Taking this from the point of view of the traditional five branches of philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic — we know that there are moral philosophies of history and epistemological philosophies of history and metaphysical philosophies of history, and even logical philosophies of history focused on truth and rationality, but no aesthetic philosophies of history as far as I know.
Mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics will write about the beauty of mathematics or the elegance of a given proof, but I don’t know of anyone who has expressed an aesthetic appreciation of the grandeur of history, though it isn’t difficult for me to imagine that many have felt a sense of grandeur when witnessing history. More often we find expressions of the horror of history, or, as Mircea Eliade memorably put it, the terror of history. Hegel wrote that history was a slaughter-bench, “…upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed.” This is a vision that might inspire what Kant called the terrifying sublime, but not anything like Kant’s other categories of the beautiful and the sublime.
In this sense, there is an implicit aesthetic philosophy of history, but a philosophy of the horrors of history, and not of its grandeur. Sometimes, however, we get a hint of the aesthetic appreciation of history. J. M. W. Turner, who advanced the Turner Thesis, wrote:
“To enable us to behold our own time and place as a part of the stupendous progress of the ages; to see primitive man; to recognize in our midst the undying ideas of Greece; to find Rome’s majesty and power alive in present law and institution, still living in our superstitions and our folklore; to enable us to realize the richness of our inheritance, the possibility of our lives, the grandeur of the present — these are some of the priceless services of history.”
Augutin Thierry gave a populist spin to this idea:
“It should not be imagined that the middle class or the common people awakened but yesterday to patriotism and action. If one lacks the courage to recognize the grandeur and generosity that animated the insurrections which from the eleventh to the thirteenth century resulted in the rise of communes throughout France, the revolts of the burgher class, and even the Jacqueries of the fourteenth century…”
We can also come at this missing aestheticist philosophy of history from another angle, and that is the relationship between aestheticism and historicism. If the ultimate expression of aestheticism is art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake, with this formulation we aren’t far removed from Ranke’s historicism to say that it is history for history’s sake. Just as the representatives of the aesthetic movement wanted art to be beautiful and not for it to teach moral lessons, historicism wanted history to be just as it was, and not a vehicle to teach moral lessons. As aestheticism is an amoral conception of art, so historicism is an amoral conception of history. So we could perhaps say that historicism is the unrecognized aestheticist philosophy of history, or that it comes closest to this. That is to say, historicism is an intimation of an aesthetic conception of history.
One could expect this attitude to be condemned, and of course Pater was roundly condemned, called a hedonist and an Epicurean, among other insults. For example, George Eliot, whose life many at the time thought no less scandalous than that of Walter Pater, wrote in a letter to John Blackwood, the editor of Blackwood’s Review which had just published a critical review of Pater:
“I agreed very warmly with the remarks made by your contributor this month on Mr. Pater’s book, which seems to me quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life.”
This isn’t the first or the last time that the pot called the kettle black. I suspect it would have been wasted breath to try to explain to George Eliot that Pater’s chief concern was to overturn false conceptions of life and to seize what truth that the shortness of human life affords us.
