Paterism and its influence

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

Footnote 6, 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.

aul Elmer More (The Drift of Romanticism: Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series, pp. 105-107) sees the weakness in Pater as deriving precisely from the "withdrawal from life" represented in the Oxford tradition, its monastic ideal of "faith fleeing the world" leading to "a worship of beauty isolated from, and in the end despised by, the real interests of life." "Paterism might without great injustice be defined as the quintessential spirit of Oxford emptied of the wholesome intrusions of the world--its pride of isolation reduced to sterile self-absorption, its enchantment of beauty alembicated into a faint Epicureanism, its discipline of learning changed into a voluptous economy of sensations, its golden calm stagnated into languid elegance"(p. 108).

Though marred by sentimentality and lack of interpretative power, William S. Knickerbocker's Creative Oxford: Its Influence in Victorian Literature usefully explores the idea of "rationalism and Catholicism" in contention for the soul of Victorian Oxford, especially in "Oxford's four great humanists"--Newman, Arnold, Ruskin, and Pater. His brief treatment of Arnold and Newman (pp, 148-149) is in line with my own thesis: "To have heard Newman, to have read him, to have caught the cadence of his style and his high, poetic realisation of Oxford's uniqueness and significance, tended to unify and to give point to all his [Arnold's] own varied efforts."

Last modified 3 April 2001