Brenton Thompson

“Truant Reading”:
Walter Pater’s Imaginative Historicism

Mrs. Mark Pattison, the proto-feminist art critic to whom Walter Pater extends a generous footnote in his essay on “Joachim Du Bella,” complained in The Westminster Review that the original title of Pater’s volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), was “misleading” because “the historical element is precisely that which is wanting, and its absence makes the weak place of the whole book.” Pater, always sensitive to criticism, changed the book’s title to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry for subsequent editions. Much less has been made of that title change than the famous retraction of the controversial “Conclusion” for the second edition. Yet, it is in Pater’s purposefully imprecise relationship to the term “history” that he later absents from his masterpiece’s title that some of his most significant influence on later thought can be found.

Pater does not employ historical facts and sources in empirical or positivist fashion; instead, he adduces half-truths, legends, corrupt, spurious or misattributed texts, impressions, and fanciful associations that force his reader to reconsider the uses of history and its power to shape the reader’s contingent subjectivity in the present. Sifting through the dustbins of history with a mind to appropriate a “pose” would, of course, become for Pater’s decadent acolytes’ the pastime par excellence, but for one of its originators this endeavor was an almost religious affair. Through his intense devotion to the rich possibilities of the imaginative and subjective uses of the past, Pater later leant impetus to the rise of hybrid genres that blur the line between historical fact and fiction in efforts to construct from silence a queerly imagined past. What I call Pater’s imaginative historicism (he himself termed it an “imaginative sense of fact”) is a deeply subversive and, in his time, startlingly original strategy. This essay probes both those impressionistic projections onto the past as well as the stylistic features of Pater’s prose that enable them to flourish in that strangest of places between historical fact and fiction.

Brenton Thompson is in his fourth year of study as a Presidential Fellow at the University of Iowa.  His research and writing focus on affective stylistics, British Aestheticism and the history of sexual dissidence.