The Influence of Newman, Pater and Arnold

David J. DeLaura, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

Footnote 2, Introduction, of the author's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater, which University of Texas Press published in 1969. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

ohn Pick ("Divergent Disciples of Walter Pater," Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, XXIII [March 1948], 114-128) pointed out that nearly all of Pater's disciples "fastened upon the Pater of the 'Conclusion' to the Renaissance" and read into his later works the earlier ideals. Barbara Charlesworth (Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, pp. 81-95) notes, however, that three chief influences on Lionel Johnson, the admitted anomaly, were Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Moreover, studies of Wilde seem consistently to miss the religious quality in his work and (as revealed in his letters) his significant attraction, perhaps through Arnold and Pater, to Newman and Catholicism. For the conflict of "Christian Idealism" and Hellenism in Wilde's poetry, see Aatos 0jala, Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde, Part 1: Life and Letters, pp. 158-171. There is reason to question the statement of Wendell V. Harris ("Pater as Prophet," Criticism, VI [Fall 1964], 350) concerning Pater's role in the nineties: "The more one knows about the lives of the members of the 'decadent' coterie, the less importance has Pater in determining either their art at their personal tragedies."

Even apart from the notorious case of Wilde, a book like George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1886), important in establishing the climate of the nineties in England, is suffused, quite explicitly, by vulgarized Paterian rhetoric. Ruth Z. Temple, in "The Ivory Tower as Lighthouse" (Edwardians and Late Victorians, ed. Richard Ellmann, pp. 28-49) suggests the wide extent of Pater's influence, not only on the nineties but also on the fiction and criticism of the twentieth century. See Enid Starkie (From Gautier to Eliot: The Influence of France on English Literature, 1851-1939, p. 57) on Pater: "The nineties would not have been possible without him."

Last modified 3 April 2001