ELH

i. critical discussions of pater’s retreat

Lawrence Evans’s superb introduction to his edition of Pater’s letters provides one of the richest and most haunting descriptions of Pater’s retreat. In this introduction Evans is primarily concerned to manage and make something of what turned out to be, in Ann Laura Stoler’s terms, a “thin” archive—for Pater’s letters, Evans discovered, are few and bland.⁵ “The correspondence,” Evans informs us, “like Pater’s style of life in his later years, is polite, reserved, and conventional.”⁶ The “reticent and ingratiating” Pater that emerges in these letters differs, Evans argues, from the Pater of 1864–73—the early years of his fellowship at Brasenose (LWP, xxii). Pater was then perceived as “a daringly original thinker and critic,” known for attention-grabbing dress and “outspoken unconventionality,” and characterized by “brusque self-confidence and self-assertion” (LWP, xx). Yet after 1873, the year in which Pater’s controversial book The Renaissance was published, Pater took on a “defensive” reserve (LWP, xxii). There was “a kind of ‘weary courtesy’ in his manner, as if his motto were, in the words of one of his favorite passages from the Book of Common Prayer, ‘I am utterly purposed that my mouth shall not offend’” (LWP, xxiii). This “more wary Pater” developed “a guarded, evasive manner, a style or strategy of polite accommodation” (LWP, xxii) that is encapsulated in the “bland” and “deferential” correspondence (LWP, xii).

Pater’s retreat is evident not only in his letters but also in his publishing career, which, as Brake has shown, came to be characterized by prevarication and hesitancy.⁷ Pater removed the controversial [End Page 972] “Conclusion” to The Renaissance from the second edition and only reinstated it after the publication of Marius the Epicurean (1885), which constitutes an apologia for the ideas presented in the “Conclusion.” After The Renaissance, Pater did not publish another book of essays until Appreciations (1889). During the intervening sixteen years, Pater did publish essays in periodicals, but the period was marked by the abandonment of two book-length publishing projects: a series of essays on Shakespeare and other British authors, and a project entitled, variously, The School of Giorgione and Other Studies and Dionysus and Other Studies.⁸ Pater’s publishing career, then, like his persona, bespeaks a tendency toward withdrawal and reticence as well as a practice of self-censorship.

Evans attributes Pater’s retreat to the reception of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which was published in 1873. Although the book attracted both positive and negative reviews, many, particularly in Oxford, regarded it as a scandalous work that encouraged hedonism and sexual immorality, particularly in its notorious “Conclusion.” In 1980, however, Brake uncovered a second controversy that can be regarded as a cause of Pater’s retreat. In 1873 Benjamin Jowett, Pater’s mentor and superior at Oxford, came into possession of compromising letters that Pater had written to a male undergraduate. Although this situation was not broadcast publicly, the disastrous interview that ensued between Pater and Jowett left Pater personally devastated and professionally blocked at Oxford.⁹ The two scandals, of The Renaissance and of Pater’s homoerotic letters, are in fact closely linked since the controversy that The Renaissance aroused was rooted partly in aversion to the references to homoerotic desire that abound in The Renaissance. The scandal of Pater’s letters, though, allows us to loosen the chronological framework within which we understand Pater’s retreat. Although the letters came to light in 1873, their connection to a relationship that had taken place before 1873 and to a form of desire that Pater was obliquely writing about long before 1873 allows us to conceive of retreat as a discipline that Pater began to cultivate far earlier in his career, but which became more pronounced in its influence on him after the upheavals of 1873.¹⁰

Two important assessments of Pater published within the last five years—in Ruth Livesey’s Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History—engage with the question of Pater’s retreat. Livesey’s book discusses a late-nineteenth-century socialist aesthetics that emerges in the works of writers such as John Ruskin, William Morris, Olive Schreiner, Edward Carpenter, and George [End Page 973] Bernard Shaw. In her first chapter, on William Morris, Livesey juxtaposes Morris with Pater. In contrast to the active, masculine, and politically engaged Aestheticism of William Morris, Livesey argues, Pater’s withdrawn, feminized, solipsistic Aestheticism expresses “a mournful masculinity that desires the aesthetic to remain at a remove from the historical conflict that is the world” and thus constitutes “an ideal that has no communal material correlative, no collective ethical response.”¹¹ Livesey’s reading discusses Pater’s retreat without taking into account Pater’s position as a sexually marginalized subject. It thereby reproduces a commonplace critique of Aestheticism, which often takes Pater as its straw man, in which Aestheticism is condemned for recommending an irresponsible and solipsistic withdrawal from social, historical, and political engagement. Here Pater’s retreat constitutes the bugbear of a politically engaged criticism that seeks to find signs of active engagement in its materials.

Love’s persuasive reassessment of Pater offers a contrast to Livesey’s account. Love also presents Pater as a “shrinking” figure, reluctant to participate actively or masterfully in the world.¹² Love, however, engages Pater as part of a broader project of exploring the range of negative experiences and affects, such as shame, fear, and isolation, that constitute an important but often ignored aspect of queer history. Love’s argument is rooted in Pater’s discussion of Botticelli in The Renaissance. Botticelli’s “peevish-looking Madonnas,” Pater suggests, encapsulate a position of neutrality that shrinks from becoming entangled in the great affairs of the world: Botticelli’s Madonna “is one of those who were neither for Jehovah nor for his enemies.”¹³ On the basis of this reading Pater argues that Botticelli is the sympathetic, accepting artist of a “middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals,” and Pater seems to propose this stance as in some way exemplary or desirable (R, 36). Rather than rejecting the “shrinking,” refusing, and retreating Pater that is revealed in this material, Love embraces this figure as part of her larger project of acknowledging and accepting disowned and disturbing aspects of queer history. She argues that it is possible to recuperate Pater’s vision of “great refusals” as “an alternative form of political subjectivity.”¹⁴

Love’s work generates the space in which I locate my exploration of Pater’s writings, a space in which it is possible to consider materials that bespeak a history, both public and personal, of silencing, disempowerment, and withdrawal. But while Love is quick to look forward while feeling backward, seeking to recuperate Pater for the political [End Page 974] subjectivities of the present day and thus, in a sense, to render his retreat productive, I linger in the landscape of Pater’s retreat, taking to heart Sedgwick’s suggestion that some kinds of critical practice might be, above all, descriptive. I seek out pockets of unguardedness within the milieu of Pater’s guarded life and oeuvre, in order to reveal in greater depth the complex and idiosyncratic cultural and affective modalities that flourished within Pater’s world of retreat.

ii. retreat and ecstasy: pater’s institutional erotics

I consider here Pater’s representation of regimes of an ascetic discipline that manifests itself in two different kinds of school: the British public school presented in the imaginary portrait “Emerald Uthwart” and the artistic “school” (as when works of art are designated as part of the school of a particular artist or tradition) discussed in the essay “Luca Della Robbia.” In these writings on ascetic practices Pater conjures imaginary sites of monastic retreat, envisaging them as spaces of pleasure. The particular kind of pleasure that they offer is that of submitting to institutional discipline. Ascetic regimes, in the pieces that I discuss here, do not showcase the subject’s willpower, but rather constitute enveloping environments that allow the subject to dispense with will altogether, and enjoy instead a state of sheer passivity. Asceticism allows a form of retreat—from agency, worldly presence, and self-directed action—that enacts a dissolution of the self. This dissolution makes it possible to achieve a rapprochement with overwhelming forces of authority and discipline, for the subject takes on a special kind of relationship with the institution, sensually melding and mingling with it in a union that feels orgasmic and oceanic.¹⁵ Pater in effect eroticizes the very position of retreat and withdrawal that was invoked as a way of disciplining the desires and pleasures of the sexually dissident subject.

Any exploration of Pater’s engagement with asceticism requires a consideration of James Eli Adams’s key discussion of the topic in Dandies and Desert Saints. Adams argues that Pater’s writings exist in continuity with discourses of other nineteenth-century male writers, such as Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, which sought to define Victorian masculinity. In these discourses, masculinity was conceived of in terms of askesis, as Michel Foucault has described it: the working on and molding of the self through a rigorous regimen of physical and mental practices. Victorian masculinity was, therefore, in itself an ascetic discipline. Thus, although [End Page 975] we often think of Pater as an important figure in the emergence of excluded or disavowed (homosexual) forms of masculinity, Adams points out that at the same time, “Pater’s aestheticism draws on well-established models of masculine authority that had wide currency in contemporary social and cultural commentary.”¹⁶ Adams argues that Pater uses this conception of masculinity as asceticism as a way of ratifying and bestowing status upon Aestheticism. Pater “was able to present aesthetic contemplation as a strenuous discipline closely akin to, perhaps precisely congruent with, that discipline which shaped both the subjects and the techniques of Greek art” (D, 175). In short, Pater proposed a “muscular aestheticism” that depended upon a masculine “virtuoso asceticism” (D, 2).

In Adams’s account asceticism turns into something oriented to outwardness and action—something that facilitates the self-assertions of Victorian masculinity. This tendency to turn ascetic askesis outward is most obviously apparent in Adams’s account of Pater’s reserve. Adams argues that Pater’s writings present critical activity as a form of performance, a mask, characterized by “a peculiarly theatrical reticence and ostentatious reserve” (D, 186). This reserve, presented as “an index of self-regulating power,” aligns the critic’s way of operating with the standards of gentlemanly behavior, thereby enhancing the status of the critic (D, 189). In addition, the critic’s reserve has a seductive quality that has an effect like that of charisma: “Precisely by holding in reserve one’s merely or singularly personal identity, one establishes that one is worth knowing” (D, 194). Thus unworldliness becomes worldly, self-effacement becomes self-promotion, privacy becomes publicity, and social withdrawal becomes “social strategy” (D, 192). Overall, Adams argues that Pater valued asceticism, by definition an unworldly phenomenon, against the grain, as it were, using it as a strategy for garnering status, authority, and worldly power.

Pater’s accounts of asceticism, however, reveal a second story that coexists with Adams’s. In representations by Pater of the school as ascetic regime we do indeed find Pater dwelling on the way in which the discipline of austere regimes inculcates self-discipline in the ephebe, building his character. But these texts also reflect upon the ways in which severe institutional discipline allows for an eroticized experience of submission that, rather than molding character, relieves the student of the responsibility of having to have a character at all, instead allowing him the opportunity to disperse and dissipate into a pleasurable reverie of formlessness. That is to say, we find in these pieces not only a discourse of disciplined, masterful masculinity and [End Page 976] “muscular aestheticism,” but also a wistful fantasy about a soft, diffuse, and yielding way of being masculine and an intimate, loving relationship with authority. While Adams has shown how Pater connects asceticism to disciplined self-cultivation and masterful self-assertion, I reveal another strain in Pater’s representation of asceticism, which focuses on the unraveling of character (the “unweaving” of the self, as Pater put it in The Renaissance) in the context of an erotics of submission (R, 152).

“Emerald Uthwart,” originally published in 1892, is an imaginary portrait—a genre that Pater invented: a semi-narrative description of a singular character. This particular portrait presents the eponymous Uthwart’s formative experiences in a British public school, his disgrace, as a young soldier, for a brave but disobedient act, and his early death. The British public school is presented as a monastic site of seclusion and ascetic discipline: “Here everything, one’s very games, have gone by rule onwards from the dim old monastic days, and the Benedictine school for novices with the wholesome severities which have descended to our own time.”¹⁷ Through various lessons in “attention and patience” (T, 347), the school aims to “systematize your vagrant self” (T, 349). In this sense, Pater presents the British public school as a space in which character is formed, where the ascetic project of nineteenth-century masculinity is carried through. There is, however, a countervailing tendency in this piece. In “Emerald Uthwart” the school is shown to play directly against this objective of forming and defining character, for its discipline effaces individual character under the force of an overwhelming disciplinary regime and institutional culture. The regime of the school has a powerful, peremptory, and encompassing quality, “a claim to mould all who enter it to a perfect, uninquiring, willing or unwilling, conformity to itself” (T, 350). This is reflected by its endless and enveloping buildings, which constitute a total environment for the boys in the school: there is no outside. When Emerald stands in the college chapel he feels a “sense of responsibility to the place”: “He belongs to it, its great memories, great dim purposes,” and this sense deepens “the consciousness he had on first coming hither of a demand in the world about him, whereof the very stones are emphatic” (T, 351).

The student’s role in the school is “to be taught, to be drilled into, his small compartment” (T, 347). Within this system, Emerald’s greatest ability is his capacity to submit utterly, easily, and unstintingly to that drilling: “Submissiveness!—It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart” (T, 355). To the school’s rigorous ascetic discipline, Uthwart “as under a fascination submissively yields himself” (T, 350). After being [End Page 977] beaten “he rose, and facing the headmaster … said submissively: ‘And now, sir, that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my fault’” (T, 354–55). As the beating scene suggests, this submissiveness is heavily eroticized; in a telling description of Uthwart’s arrival at the school, Pater informs us:

He is shown the narrow cubicle in which he is to sleep; and there it still is, with nothing else, in the window-pane, as he lies;—“our tower,” the “Angel Steeple,” noblest of its kind. Here, from morning to night, everything seems challenged to follow the upward lead of its long, bold, “perpendicular” lines. The very place one is in, its stone-work, its empty spaces, invade you; invade all who belong to them, as Uthwart belongs, yielding wholly from the first.

(T, 348–49)

Replete with such obvious phallic imagery, the story is easily read as a homoerotic fantasy about a perfect type of British schoolboy. But Uthwart’s submissiveness also represents a fantasy about asceticism, about the regimen of the school; that is to say, the story can foster identification with, as well as desire for, Emerald Uthwart.

In the account of asceticism presented in “Emerald Uthwart,” Pater does present the idea of the building of character, but at the same time he offers a set of reflections upon the experiences of being invaded, being taken possession of by something larger and more powerful than oneself, and sliding into the groove of a discipline imposed from outside. He proposes an environment and a discipline so encompassing that the self dissipates on contact with it in a process of easy and pleasurable submission. Thus Emerald’s yielding is described in terms that denote an effortless and sensual melding with the institution, the hard substance of the school’s buildings and regimen softly accommodated by, or uniting with, the acquiescent body of the student: “If at home there had been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone” (T, 350). The English public school in Pater’s rendition, then, is a space where character is not only formed but also rendered formless by the “wave upon wave” of an oceanic process of melting and melding, a “patiently-wrought,” orgasmic dissolution into the very substance of the institution.

A similar possibility emerges in the essay “Luca Della Robbia,” from The Renaissance, although in this essay the discipline is not the English public school regime but the traditions of the school of the fifteenth-century Italian sculptor Luca Della Robbia. Pater describes the lives of the sculptors of this school in terms that evoke an ascetic [End Page 978] retreat from the world, a kind of monasticism. Their artistic practice is governed by a regime of discipline: a “skilful” and “subtle” “system of conventionalism” (R, 45), a set of narrow limits that they chose to impose on their work, but within which they “often reach perfection” (R, 41). The existence of the artists, meanwhile, is characterized by “reserve,” “austere dignity,” and “simplicity” (R, 41) and has an atmosphere of “tranquility” and “repose” (R, 45). They have the air of the cloister about them, for they produce “sepulchral portraits,” “monuments such as abound in the churches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement” (R, 45).

Pater suggests that the ascetic practice of these monkish artists builds character, for he argues that their works “bear the impress of a personal quality, a profound expressiveness, what the French call intimité, by which is meant some subtler sense of originality—the seal on a man’s work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of apprehension” (R, 46). Yet, as in “Emerald Uthwart,” another force runs counter to this vision of ascetically built and defined character. These sculptors, Pater writes, “worked for the most part in low relief”—a form in which the sculpture is raised slightly from a background plane, rather than constituting a freestanding statue (R, 42). Using this method renders these artists “haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade”; instead they “seek their means of delineation among those last refinements of shadow, which are almost invisible except in a strong light, and which the finest pencil can hardly follow” (R, 42). The sculptors of this school create an ethereal kind of work whose significance lies in the smallness of its claims, the lightness of its touch, the quietness of its statements. The school, that is, not only fosters individual voice, but also, as a school and a “system of conventionalism” must, imposes conformity and self-effacement on its disciples, causing them to produce works that constitute discussions of invisibility and silence.

This rubric of effacement extends to the historical record of these artists’ lives, which are traced by an outline as faint as that which delineates their works. Pater describes the life of Luca Della Robbia as one of “labor and frugality, with no adventure and no excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artistic processes” (R, 45). As for the artists of Della Robbia’s school: “From their lives, as from their work,” Pater declares, “all tumult of sound and color has passed away” (R, 41). It is as though they have left the things and passions of the world behind in order to devote themselves to their art and died to the [End Page 979] world in the making of their sepulchers. “One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who have given expression to so much power and sweetness,” Pater declares, “but it is part of the reserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their existence, that their histories are for the most part lost, or told but briefly … one asks in vain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days” (R, 41). These shadowy artists sink silently, like Emerald, into a corporate identity. Here oceanic feeling merges with Thanatos—the death drive. In an enactment of a distinctively Paterian “funereal eroticism” (to use Ellis Hanson’s term), the disciplinary regime allows the subject to meld with the institution in a grateful enactment of death, a relieved sinking into a state of inertia and non-being that feels like home, for it constitutes every organism’s origin.¹⁸ Pater offers a fantasy in which the submission to discipline, rather than constituting an ongoing labor, is effortless, easeful, and even pleasurable.

iii. “little arts of happiness”: charles lamb, reparation, and the genre of the essay

In his reflections on monastic retreat, then, Pater develops an ecstatic institutional erotics that fantasizes a rapprochement between the subject and the force of authority. We can look upon this maneuver as one exemplary instance of an overarching strategy that, I suggest, is often characteristic of Pater’s work, and that Pater theorizes in his essay on Lamb. In this essay, which I read as a self-reflexive metadiscourse on his own oeuvre, Pater explores another version of the idea of retreat. He proposes that the familiar essay, with its penchant for the little, the particular, and the local, constitutes a caressing little world that may offer, or function as an analogy for, a safe and secluded space (physical, cultural, psychic) into which the damaged subject can retreat in order to recuperate. Thus the familiar essay embodies, fosters, and allows Pater to theorize processes of healing and reparation. Through this work of theorization Pater uses questions of genre to self-reflexively reconceptualize his own projects and purposes, developing an account of criticism as an activity that is oriented toward pleasure, comfort, and reparation and thus offering us an insight into the reparative orientation that underlies much of his own work.

Pater offered various commentaries on the essay; these include some observations on the early essayist Michel de Montaigne in the lecture series Plato and Platonism (1893), as well as several essays in Appreciations (1889), including those on Charles Lamb and Sir Thomas Browne and the famous “Essay on Style.” Before considering [End Page 980] Pater’s discussion of Lamb, it is necessary to take into account the well-known commentary on the genre of the essay in Plato and Platonism. Here Pater focuses on the relationship between the familiar essay and the philosophical tradition of skepticism. Pater argues that different written forms indicate “essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth.”¹⁹ He classes critical and sage writing, with its “ambitious array of premiss and conclusion,” as the “treatise” (P, 175). He differentiates the treatise from the essay, which, for Pater, constitutes the form par excellence, not of assertion, but of doubt, for the essay is the form determined primarily by “a refined sense of one’s ignorance” (P, 175). Pater cites Montaigne, the “representative essayist because the representative doubter,” as the founder of the essay tradition (P, 175). In naming Montaigne a “doubter” Pater makes reference to Montaigne’s philosophical skepticism. The essay, Pater argues, constitutes “the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realizable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je?” (P, 175–76). By citing Montaigne as the founder of the essay tradition, and by categorizing more authoritative and structured types of non-fiction prose as treatises, Pater erases the history of polemical and critical essay writing in English starting with Francis Bacon, and places in its stead the history of the familiar essay, which starts with Montaigne. Pater thus foregrounds the strand of the essay tradition that accommodates hesitancy, reticence, and indecision—the retreating qualities that he favors. Pater effectively redefines the very tradition in which he wrote.

Pater’s essay on Lamb, I argue, also contributes to his project of reinventing the essay tradition—but it develops this reinvented tradition in a new direction. Pater’s comments in Plato and Platonism present Montaigne as the founder of the genre; but it is Lamb who is generally seen as the primary originating figure for the tradition of familiar essay writing in English (Lamb’s contemporaries William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt follow close behind, of course). We can, therefore, read Pater’s essay on Lamb as an alternative story of the origins of the familiar essay. This alternative origin story allows us to conceive of the familiar essay as embedded, not in philosophical skepticism, but in a particular affective orientation that Lamb, for Pater, exemplifies. The familiar essay in this account is determined by the question, not of [End Page 981] how the mind relates to truth, but rather of how the individual relates to experience, and particularly to trauma.

Pater’s account of the familiar essay in his essay on Lamb presents the genre not primarily as a vehicle of philosophical skepticism, but rather as the container or location of a realm of “caressing littleness” (T, 460). This description derives from the characteristic particularity of the familiar essay. Lamb, Pater observes, works “ever close to the concrete, to the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere abstract theories” (T, 460). The familiar essayist is thus “in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing littleness” (T, 460). The familiar essay’s realm of “caressing littleness” is in its own way a space of retreat, for just as the skepticism of the familiar essay absolves the genre from engaging in big claims and controversy, so the limited range of its subject matter allows it to constitute a location aside from the events of politics and history. The familiar essayist withdraws into personal, private concerns and objects and is “unoccupied” with “great matters” (T, 460); thus Lamb’s writings are “in no way concerned with the turning of the tides of the great world” (T, 459).

Pater acknowledges that this retreat to the concrete and the particular can be seen to detract from the significance of the familiar essay, to render it “no very important thing” (T, 459). The familiar essay is, in a sense, a genre that dismisses its own importance, just as Lamb was characterized by “this very modesty, this unambitious way of conceiving his work” (T, 459). Pater, however, ascribes value to this tendency toward littleness. It is not an impulse that is opposed to the taking up of great matters and public stances, but rather a way of operating in the world that partakes of an entirely different order of experience and endeavor. It is a mode belonging to an existence necessarily dedicated to recuperation and healing. Pater roots his account of Lamb’s writings in the well-known tragedy that formed Lamb’s entire adult life—the “fateful domestic horror” in which Lamb’s sister, Mary, killed their mother “in a sudden paroxysm of madness” (T, 458). Lamb undertook to watch over Mary, thereby negotiating her release from incarceration, and he cared for her for the rest of his life (he predeceased her). “In estimating the humour of Elia [Lamb],” Pater declares, “we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story” (T, 459). This “fate, dark and insane as in old Greek tragedy,” lies underneath Lamb’s essays as a shadowy and constant presence, as indeed it did in his life (T, 467). The key point of Pater’s account of Lamb is to reveal the connection [End Page 982] between the vast and inhospitable register of tragedy and the caressing world of littleness that the familiar essay invokes.

In Lamb, Pater argues, we find one whose experience of the world is dark and brutal, taking every opportunity for pleasure, taking all phenomena as objects of delight—as though to persuade himself of the world’s capacity to contain goodness. In his discussion of Montaigne, Pater describes the essayist as one who notes “faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way” (P, 175–76), and this evokes well the mode in which Lamb operates, who treasures the smallest of good phenomena: “The quaint remarks of children which another would scarcely have heard, he preserves—little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic wit—and has his ‘Praise of chimney-sweepers’ … valuing carefully their white teeth” (T, 460). This desire to find and preserve the goodness in the world reveals itself also in Lamb’s penchant for collecting; he was “a true ‘collector,’ delighting in the personal finding of a thing … Wither’s Emblems … when he finds it at last, he values not the less because a child had coloured the plates with his paints” (T, 465). In Lamb’s writings and life, then, the caresses of small pleasures coexist with the horror of tragedy in an intimate relationship, the former offering consolation for the latter.

Pater’s description of Lamb’s life and personality anticipates the constellation of writings around the concept of “reparation” that is initiated by Melanie Klein’s work and reaches its most paradigmatic formulation for literary studies, via the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, in Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading. Sedgwick defines reparative readers partly by describing their opposite: paranoid readers. Paranoid readers are committed to a hopeless, defensive kind of knowing; they constantly analyze discourses in order to reveal the forms of discipline and control that, in their view, determine both private and social life. Reparative readers, in contrast, are driven by the possibility of discovering sources of sufficiency and pleasure in the world. Their objective is to maximize positive affect, rather than, as in paranoia, seeking to minimize negative affect. As Sedgwick puts it, “the desire of a reparative impulse … is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”²⁰ Thus, “like Proust, the reparative reader ‘helps himself again and again,’” and a study of reparative cultural practices will reveal “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”²¹ [End Page 983]

For Pater, to read Lamb is to bear witness to Lamb’s great suffering but also to rejoice in Lamb’s instinct for survival and self-preservation—the prudent economy of reparation that he practices, his “little arts of happiness” (T, 460). Pater writes of Lamb, “He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the places he knew and liked best, and where his lot fell” (T, 467). These places were centered in and around London and included the London suburb, Enfield, in which Lamb lived for a time. “Here,” Pater tells us,

the surface of things is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where the child goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together more grandly; those quaint suburban pastorals gathering a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.

(T, 467)

In these last sentences of the essay on Lamb, Pater evokes the most powerful trait, as Pater sees it, in Lamb’s personality: his responsiveness to sunshine, his capacity to be transfigured by passing moments of hope and joy, even while the clouds bore down upon him.

Pater’s description of Lamb’s personality is paired, in this essay, with a vision of how a reparative orientation might drive critical practice. Pater offers a model of a reparative critical mode when he describes Lamb’s own critical writings—writings that Pater regards as exemplars of “excellence” in criticism (T, 460). Pater speculates that if “the dead do care at all for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his [Lamb’s] exquisite appreciations of them” (T, 460). Here Pater evokes a mode of criticism based in allegiance and connection—a mode that caresses the writer and the writer’s work and cleaves closely to them, working through contact with them. Importantly, Pater’s description of this ideal mode of criticism has a self-reflexive quality, for Pater talks about Lamb’s “appreciations” (T, 460) and his “gift of appreciation” (T, 463). In naming Lamb’s reparative orientation his “gift of appreciation” Pater invokes the title of his own book, Appreciations, in which the Lamb essay was published. The essay on Lamb uses the word “appreciation” and its various synonyms and analogues lavishly, and so presents itself as a location for thinking through the core purpose of Appreciations—of thinking of Pater’s criticism, that is, as a project [End Page 984] that is aligned with the rich but self-effacing tradition of reparative criticism that Lamb here embodies—a project that caresses its loved objects with attention as part of a process of surviving in the world. In essence, Pater generates an earlier account of that particular kind of fascination that, for Sedgwick, characterizes queer reading and criticism—a capacity “to attach intently to a few cultural objects,” which constitutes “a prime resource for survival.”²²

Pater reimagines the critical essay not as a public, authoritative, interventionist form of sage writing, but rather as the vehicle of a certain kind of retreat: a reparatively oriented withdrawal into the caressing little world of loved objects, of good things found in a bleak world. In so doing, Pater not only attends to a literary generic issue, but also bears witness to a broader affective phenomenon: the thoughtful economy of reparation by which the “faintly-grey” subject, neither entirely abject nor entirely heroic, invests in its own ongoing existence. This economy of reparation might be understood to characterize much of Pater’s own writing, revealing to us the impulse toward healing and the commitment to survival that often underlie his retreats. In addition, when considered in this light, Pater becomes a queer theorist avant la lettre, embodying and theorizing queer reparative strategies at the fin de siècle.