Walter Pater, Oxford scholar, classicist, lover of the art of the Renaissance and other periods, author of ‘imaginary portraits’ and ‘appreciations’, might seem to belong in a different universe from that which presided over the emergence of intertextual theory in the intellectually and politically effervescent Paris of the mid to late 1960s. While his name is virtually synonymous with the idea of subjective aesthetic response, the notion of intertextuality, first named and honed at the hands of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, is, by contrast, tightly intertwined with the idea of authorial impersonality. Yet these realms and modes of style and thought are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear, however starkly distinct their critical languages. Over the decades since his death, Pater’s works have given rise to considerable comment regarding his use of source material. As such, his extensively ‘second-hand’ writing – to use a term suggested by Antoine Compagnon’s history of quotation – begs for consideration alongside the writings of those prose modernists such as Flaubert and Joyce, whose extreme citational practices paved the way for the emergence of intertextual theory.¹ While such a comparison opens up the possibility of a neutral – descriptive rather than judgemental – assessment of Pater’s sometimes surprising treatment of his sources, it also highlights the nature and scale of the difference between his compositional methods and those of these later practitioners of the second-hand.

‘Style’ is a salient case to examine in this context. The opening essay of Appreciations (1889), first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1888, is a piece which not only engages with Flaubert – whom the coiners of intertextuality placed at the origin of a new kind of citationality – but does so in ways which are both markedly intertextual and highly curious.² Indeed, Pater’s ostensible alignment with Flaubert in the piece rests upon a number of compositional peculiarities and argumentative tensions.³ On the one hand, Pater makes distinctly odd use of Flaubert’s correspondence in quotation and shrouds in silence the name of an important source of knowledge about him; on the other, he glosses over significant points of difference between their conceptions of writing.

The fact of Pater’s dependence on source material for information and inspiration is well established. As Billie Andrew Inman puts it, ‘he turned to the writings of others for substance and fire’, or, as Robert MacFarlane remarks, for Pater ‘creation was never a primary act but only a response to or renovation of pre‐existing matter’.⁴ Among many identified instances of Pater’s practice of appropriating and modifying other authors’ words, his treatment of Flaubert in ‘Style’ stands out as ‘particularly noteworthy’.⁵ In 1914, Samuel C. Chew, Jr. led the way in an article devoted to ‘Pater’s use and misuse of citations from various authors’.⁶ Chew lists among Pater’s persistent habits ‘the separation of passages joined in the original, the junction of passages far distant in the original, unnoted omissions, and, in some cases, mistranslations’.⁷ In support of these claims, he provides numerous instances of acts of textual ‘tamper[ing]’, all carried out ‘with no indication of the liberties taken with the text’ of another.⁸ At the heart of Chew’s demonstration sits the revelation of Pater’s handling of Flaubert’s letters in ‘Style’. Having checked Pater’s Flaubertian quotations against the text of the first volume of the newly published Flaubert Correspondance (which Pater reviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette three months before ‘Style’ was first published), Chew finds the result ‘really astonishing’:

In the course of his detailed analysis of these quotations, Chew itemises the components of ‘an astonishing amalgam’ consisting of sentences drawn from several letters to two different recipients and derived, in reverse order, from five different sections of the book.¹⁰ Though Chew’s amazement is clear, John J. Conlon, writing several decades later, calls this ‘conflation of excerpts’ a ‘classic case of [Paterian] mis-representation’.¹¹

As well as silently altering the verbal contents and addressees of Flaubert’s letters, Pater withholds the name of the author of the preface to the Lettres de Gustave Flaubert à George Sand, which had appeared in 1884, and on which he relies for his portrait.¹² Variously referred to as ‘a sympathetic commentator’, ‘our French guide’, and ‘Flaubert’s commentator’, the mystery source is none other than Pater’s famous if rather scandalous contemporary Guy de Maupassant (‘Style’, App., 29, 36).¹³ If Pater’s bricolage with Flaubert’s letters is relatively well known, his anonymisation of Maupassant has received little attention.¹⁴ In an essay so invested in scholarship (the writer, Pater declares, is a ‘scholar writing for the scholarly’), such choices raise compositional and ethical questions (17). To what end does Pater produce such misrepresentations and partial representations, and with what consequences?

Flaubert makes his first appearance in ‘Style’ as the author of Madame Bovary, which Pater praises as ‘a composition utterly unadorned’, without ‘removable decoration’ (19). As such, it represents the realisation of Pater’s ideal of stylistic ‘[s]elf-restraint’. ‘[A] skilful economy of means, ascêsis’, he writes, ‘that too has a beauty of its own’ (17). What matters in style, ‘as Flaubert was aware’, is to banish ‘[t]he otiose, the facile, surplusage’ in favour of ‘conscious artistic structure’ (23, 21, 24).

The central section of the essay, starting a few pages later, draws on Maupassant to sketch its portrait of ‘the martyr of literary style’ (27). In his prefatory étude to the Flaubert-Sand correspondence, Maupassant recalls that ‘a single passion, the love of letters, filled his life to his last day. He loved it furiously, absolutely, uniquely’.¹⁵ Pater, following suit, refers to Flaubert’s ‘leading passion’ for literature – one to which ‘a living person could be no rival’, and one which assumed a quasi-religious place in Flaubert’s life (28). While Maupassant mentions the sanctity of Flaubert’s writing instruments (‘as sacred to him as objects of worship to a priest’), Pater depicts his art as a ‘cloistral refuge’ (18).¹⁶

Maupassant also provides the basis for Pater’s emphasis on scholarship and revision, referring to Flaubert as an ‘insatiable reader’ and ‘indefatigable researcher’, and repeatedly wondering at his ‘formidable’, ‘superhuman’, ‘beloved’, and ‘excruciating’ labour.¹⁷ It is not surprising that Pater should have felt drawn to such descriptions. He too was an author whose work was ‘always the result of much patient and unseen labour’ and, as such, ‘a travail and an agony’.¹⁸ (‘Style’ was, fittingly enough given its celebration of literary graft, an especially demanding piece of work.¹⁹ ‘Pater once told me’, wrote Arthur Symons, ‘that the most laborious task he ever set himself to accomplish was his essay on Style’.²⁰)

For Flaubert, ‘the problem of style’ entailed a thrilling and tormenting quest for ‘[t]he one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do’ (App., 29). Here, Pater paraphrases an assertion by Maupassant which he has in fact already given in translation just above. Flaubert, states Pater’s anonymised ‘French guide’, was ‘[p]ossessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it’ (29).²¹

This obsession with the selection of the ‘unique and just expression’ is linked by both Maupassant and Pater to Flaubert’s conviction that ‘the style therefore had to be, as it were, impersonal’.²² Pater quotes Maupassant’s account of Flaubert’s theory of style:

It is in the attempt to reconcile Flaubert’s commitment to impersonality with his own contrary investment in subjectivity that Pater finds himself stating that ‘If the style be the man … it will be in a real sense “impersonal”’ (38). Though presented as paraphrase, this rewriting is framed with signs of hesitancy – the opening conditional ‘If’, the distancing quotation marks around ‘impersonal’. And for good reason, for Pater’s formulation completely alters Maupassant’s meaning, proclaiming as it does that a work’s impersonality is, in a rich paradox, a factor of the personality of its style. This idea that ‘the style is the man’ (thrice repeated in ‘Style’) encapsulates precisely the common view Flaubert opposed (35, 36, 37). As Maupassant explains:

By contrast, ‘Style’ accords a defining primacy to an author’s subjective apprehension. True art, affirms Pater, consists not in the mere transcription of fact but in the rendition of an author’s ‘sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world’ (8). ‘[F]ine art’, he continues, is such in proportion to its success in communicating the author’s ‘vision within’, in delineating ‘a specific personality’ (10). Pater’s conception of style, as it emerges here and elsewhere, is, to a significant extent, circular: both the matter of art and the style deployed to convey it are ‘the man’.²⁵ Pater’s ostensible alignment with Flaubert, then, conceals a stark discrepancy.

For Max Saunders, the apparent espousal in ‘Style’ of an impersonal aesthetic positions Pater at the source of modernism:

Yet such a reading neglects to register the contortions involved in Pater’s attempt to telescope the subjective and the objective. Far from advocating the prose equivalent of the ‘elocutionary disappearance of the poet’ evoked by Mallarmé in ‘Crise de Vers’ (1897) or the ‘depersonalization’ advocated by T. S. Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Pater’s essay presents style as, in Ian Fletcher’s phrase, ‘a total responsive gesture of the whole personality’.²⁷ The incompatibility of impersonality with Pater’s enduring partiality for subjectivity is indicated by the change of mind discernible in his review of the second volume of Flaubert’s letters, published the following year.²⁸ There he states that

In other words, the style is the man, and it cannot be impersonal. This revision would seem to testify to Pater’s realisation that his argument about impersonality in ‘Style’ was, as Conlon puts it, ‘an aberration from the personal note in literature and art he consistently admired and found so exciting and praiseworthy in the Romanticism of any age’.³⁰

These shifting formulations do not exhaust Pater’s fascination with the ‘im/personality’ dyad (to use Saunders’ contraction).³¹ His essay on Mérimée, published two years after ‘Style’, suggests a way in which the pair might be reconciled.³² Mérimée’s ‘superb self-effacement, his impersonality’, argues Pater, is ‘itself but an effective personal trait’ (MS, 37). Thus is impersonality redeemed as a litmus test revealing the lineaments of the very authorial personality it is intended to conceal.

Why, then, to return to our overarching enquiry, does Pater obscure Maupassant’s contribution to his portrait (while acknowledging his recourse to a source), and what, more generally, are we to make of Pater’s extensive and at least partly covert practice of the second-hand? While his copying-and-pasting of Flaubert’s letters may conceivably have been motivated by the wish to set out his notion of style ‘with a skilful economy of means’, the withholding of the name of a well-known contemporary – and a fortiori that of a man of letters like himself – is perplexing (App., 17). The case is not unique. As Inman notes, ‘Pater’s errors and omissions in regard to proper names are baffling’.³³ Any explanation is necessarily conjectural, but one plausible hypothesis is that Pater was impelled by a reluctance to risk arousing disapproval: ‘[h]e had’, as Inman states, ‘learned to engage in controversy indirectly’, and ‘would occasionally omit an author’s name or omit some suggestive details to avoid being thought decadent’.³⁴ Such a theory would fit the facts of Maupassant’s reputation in England in the 1880s.

‘Style’ was written at a time when Maupassant was beginning to receive increased attention in the English periodical press. As George Worth chronicles, he ‘emerged into the literary world in the 1880s under the dual sponsorship of Zola and Flaubert’.³⁵ Maupassant was then a far more controversial figure than Flaubert. While the connection to Flaubert worked to Pater’s benefit – the trial of Madame Bovary lay more than three decades in the past and his death in 1880 had further dimmed memories of his alleged ‘offenses against morality and religion’ – the connection to Zola and the naturalists was detrimental to his standing.³⁶ An anonymous essayist writing in 1892, for example, described the naturalists as counting ‘among the most dangerous enemies that France has nourished in her bosom’, bemoaning their irredeemable ‘brutality’ and ‘putrescence’.³⁷ It was, Worth observes, extremely common for critics to oppose form and matter in their discussions of Maupassant in this period, castigating him for what they deemed to be his salacious subjects on the one hand, and praising him for his exceptional prose style on the other.³⁸ (The perceived mismatch, if Pater reflected on it, might have made Maupassant seem a less than ideal expositor of Flaubert’s theory of style, prescribing as it does a perfect accommodation of form and matter.) George Saintsbury, for instance, deplored Maupassant’s obsession with sex (‘He can write on nothing else’), but also called him ‘a man of genius’ and ‘the most really gifted writer, both in prose and verse, that has happened in France in more than twenty years’.³⁹ Henry James published a long and influential piece on Maupassant, also in the Fortnightly Review, two months later. Referring to Flaubert as Maupassant’s ‘great initiator’, he took aim at the unremitting crudeness of his subject-matter while simultaneously dubbing him ‘a master of his art’ and ‘a writer with whom it is impossible not to reckon’.⁴⁰ James’ and others’ references to Maupassant as Flaubert’s disciple make it clear that Pater’s choice to cite his French guide under cover of anonymity comes at the cost of establishing the special authority of his source – one based on a close personal relationship and years of a ‘long and hard apprenticeship of letters’ undergone at Flaubert’s hands.⁴¹ But maybe the price seemed worth paying to avoid association with an author by whom so many were powerfully repelled.

If wariness of controversy or fear of being classed a decadent prompted the erasure of Maupassant’s name from ‘Style’, it may also explain Pater’s disalignment from Flaubert in the essay’s closing peroration. The central Flaubert-focused section of ‘Style’ manages to convey strong admiration in spite of its contradictions. The final paragraph, however, introduces a new conundrum for the reader by effecting a sharp turn away from Flaubertian principles (as indeed from views expressed elsewhere in Pater’s oeuvre).⁴² Just pages earlier, ‘the martyr of literary style’ had been quoted railing against the idea that art should have a ‘moral end’, or any end other than the creation of ‘the beautiful’ (29). But Pater’s epilogue distances itself from this ‘art for art’s sake’ position by training its sights on the definition of ‘great’ rather than merely ‘good’ art (38). Where Flaubert’s dedication to style over matter was so absolute as to engender his fantasy of ‘a book about nothing … sustained only by the inner force of its style’, Pater’s conclusion stresses the importance of subject matter, and indeed right-thinking causes, to the production of ‘great’ art.⁴³ ‘Great art’, writes Pater’, will be distinguished by its ‘dignity of interests’, ‘its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it’. If it ‘be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God’ or if ‘it has something of the soul of humanity in it’, it will also be great art (38). The vague and tautological nature of these criteria (as encapsulated by the gnomic assertion that ‘great art’ must be allied to ‘great ends’) is striking. But the listing is sufficiently flavoured with Christian language (‘redemption’, ‘ennoble’, ‘fortify’, ‘our sojourn here’, ‘the glory of God’, ‘the soul of humanity’) to suggest a thoroughly orthodox understanding of the purpose of ‘great art’. Such a stance would have been anathema to Flaubert, as Pater cannot but have known – not least because it would also have been anathema to other versions of himself.⁴⁴ As René Wellek observes:

Pater’s attitudes to his sources, whether they be considered through the prism of his misquotations or failures of acknowledgement, have aroused ambivalence in even firm admirers. Chew, ultimately a defender of Pater’s borrowings, acknowledges the discomfort caused by misquotations which verge on the ‘dishonest’. ‘[H]as the critic a right to do this?’⁴⁶ he asks, at the close of his catalogue of such discoveries. Conlon, as was mentioned above, refers to Pater’s inexactitudes and omissions as ‘misrepresentations’. About the collage of Flaubert’s letters in ‘Style’ specifically, he comments that:

Inman, meanwhile, acknowledges ‘[t]he liberties that Pater took with his sources’ and the ‘evasive strategy’ he sometimes deployed ‘as a defense against misinterpretation and criticism’.⁴⁸ Others are less ambivalent. Christopher Ricks impugns Pater’s ‘inappropriate appropriatingness’ and ‘play[ing] loose’ with other authors’ words, deploring a ‘faith to one’s meaning’ which comes at the cost of ‘faithlessness to another’s meaning’.⁴⁹

For champions of Pater, the answer to the problems raised by his less than scrupulous handling of second-hand language is to take him on his own terms – the terms, set out in ‘Style’ and elsewhere, which make the artist himself the matter of his art, and make of criticism ‘a form of creative self-portraiture’.⁵⁰ The solution, in other words, involves an adjustment of the reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’, to use Jauss’ phrase.⁵¹ Thus, for Chew, ‘when we find him transposing, omitting, re-arranging, mis-ascribing, and in a few cases even apparently substituting his own for somebody else’s ideas, there is needed but a generous interpretation of what Pater conceived to be the function of criticism, namely, that it has in it something of the creative art’.⁵² For Conlon, Pater’s procedures should be understood as intentional aspects of a project to ‘make a high art of misrepresentation’.⁵³ And for Inman, too, the problem is fundamentally generic:

As much is suggested, of course, by the title of Appreciations.

It is also relevant to recall that twentieth- and twenty-first-century notions of critical writing are misplaced in the apprehension of a piece written at the contested dawn of English Studies. The institutionalisation of literary criticism to which Pater objected (wary of literature being turned into a ‘long, pedantic, mechanical discipline’⁵⁵), and the concomitant regimentation of the essay form over subsequent decades, have fostered expectations of punctilious quotation and formal citation which were, as Inman has explored, not then as entrenched as they have since become.

How, finally, does Pater’s practice of second-hand writing compare with that of modernists whose reputation is in large part founded on their deployment of a form of sustained intertextuality designed to facilitate the apprehension of literature as a realm governed by repetition? First, it is important to note that a valuation of the second-hand had been underway for some time when Pater set to work on ‘Style’. As MacFarlane has shown, ‘from the late 1850s onwards, unoriginality – understood as inventive reuse of the words of others – came increasingly to be seen as an authentic form of creativity’. At the fin-de-siècle, ‘the idea of literary originality ex nihilo came under greater pressure than ever before’, with authors such as Pater, Wilde, and Lionel Johnson placing ‘great emphasis upon the concept of stylish reuse’.⁵⁶ Indeed, there is evidence that Pater himself regarded second-handness as a defining feature of all writing. In ‘Style’, he makes reference to the ineluctable secondariness of the literary artist’s relationship to language itself: ‘the material in which he works’, he avers, ‘is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor’s marble’ (12). The scholar-artist, in other words, operates within the realm of the déjà, working with inherited linguistic materials, meticulously chiselling them to meet particular needs. In Plato and Platonism (1893), Pater goes considerably further, articulating a strikingly post-structuralist conception of literary originality as intertextuality:

Pater’s assertion that ‘there is nothing absolutely new’ in Plato, as well as his metaphors of the ‘palimpsest’ and ‘tapestry of which the actual threads have served before’ are remarkably aligned with statements which have become emblematic of intertextual theory. Gérard Genette, for instance, entitled his study of ‘second-degree’ literature Palimpsestes. Sarah Dillon, too, following Genette, seizes on the image of the palimpsest as a figure for intertextuality. Barthes invokes a textile metaphor in referring to texts as ‘tissue[s] of quotation’.⁵⁷ With this in mind, Pater’s handling of sources can be viewed less as the sign of suspect dependence and more as a self-conscious embrace of what he, like Barthes, recognised as ‘the truth of writing, [that] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original’.⁵⁸ Viewed in such light, Pater, too, can be cast as a forerunner to twentieth-century theory. As indeed he has been: in 1976, Hillis Miller wrote of him as ‘a precursor of what is most vital in contemporary criticism’.⁵⁹

If Flaubert, in association with whose name the notion of intertextuality emerged, can be celebrated as being, in André Topia’s words, ‘among the first to have deliberately blurred the hierarchy between the original text and the secondary text’, should Pater be eligible for similar appreciation?⁶⁰ Intertextual theory’s founding axiom that ‘any text is a mosaic of quotations’ is relevant to Pater’s case in that it has the power to parry any imputation of plagiarism or overdependence by declaring ‘absorption and transformation’ to be a universal law of writing.⁶¹ Certainly, Paterians have used the term to give a neutral assessment of the density of appropriated words and ideas in his works. Pater’s ‘attitudes toward sources and techniques of using them’, comments Inman, ‘created in his works a profound intertextuality that is essential to his remarkable style’.⁶²

That being granted, major differences obtain between Pater’s intertextual writing and that of the most radically intertextual modernists. The most fundamental relates to the nature of the intention underpinning these authors’ deployment of the second-hand. Intertextuality, in Pater’s case, appears to have been incidental rather than programmatic – a means to the end of aesthetic criticism or self-portraiture (whichever one takes to have been his aim). His objective was not to highlight the fact of second-handness as a constitutive feature of all writing, but to style his borrowings in service of his own ends. By contrast, Flaubert’s and Joyce’s final works, Bouvard and Pécuchet, the Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Finnegans Wake, were assembled through the mobilisation of extremely extensive systems of intra- and intertextual writing, as these authors’ enormous manuscript archives testify.⁶³ In these works, intertextuality becomes an end as well as a means: a compositional principle in and of itself. They were, to reprise Topia’s adverbial emphasis, deliberately designed to cultivate the reader’s sense of language and literature as realms of the déjà. This insight is proclaimed in the title of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas; narratively literalised in Bouvard and Pécuchet’s decision to devote the remainder of their lives to the manual copying-out of books; and self-referentially inscribed in Finnegans Wake’s mentions of ‘piously forged palimpsests’, ‘pelagiarist pens’, ‘borrowed plumes’, and ‘quashed quotatoes’.⁶⁴ By contrast, Pater, though a ‘scissors and paste man’ (to use words Joyce once used to describe himself), and one fully aware of the part played by repetition in language and literature, appears to have been a far more discreet, if not secretive, practitioner of the second-hand, even by the standards of his own day.⁶⁵ ‘[M]uch fin‐de‐siècle writing’, writes MacFarlane, ‘was more open about its borrowings, appropriations, and renewals than any preceding literary period of the century.’⁶⁶ Against such a background, ‘Style’ stands out for its silent alterations and at best only partial openness about its sources.

Another difference, touched upon above, pertains to the idea of impersonality. Where ‘[s]ubjectivity – the self – is … the beginning, the end, and the persisting basis in all Pater’s writings’, Joyce and Flaubert picture the author as an invisible author-god.⁶⁷ Intertextual theory was shaped by this modernist intertwining of extensive citationality and authorial impersonality – defined, from the outset, as antithetical to ideas of authorial and readerly subjectivity. As Kristeva points out in the essay in which the concept was first named, ‘[t]he notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity’.⁶⁸ And as Barthes puts it in ‘The Death of the Author’, ‘[w]riting is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost’.⁶⁹

To these discrepancies of purpose and aesthetic disposition can be added discrepancies of scale. The sheer feats of endurance involved in the deployment of Flaubert’s and Joyce’s intertexualities are arresting. Flaubert claimed to have read 15,000 books in preparation for the writing of Bouvard et Pécuchet; 3,848 pages of notes survive to testify to this labour. Joyce amassed 25,000 pages of manuscript material – many of them filled with reading notes – over the seventeen-year-long genesis of Finnegans Wake.⁷⁰ Though Flaubertian critics have wondered whether Flaubert ‘falsif[ies] the character of what he quotes’, the distortions and decontextualisations Joyce wrought on his borrowings are both far more obvious (altering the very make-up of words as his portmanteaus do) and far more numerous – so numerous, indeed, as to have prompted speculation that every single word in the Wake may be traceable to a source.⁷¹ Moreover, the effects of Pater’s derivations on the one hand, and Flaubert’s and Joyce’s on the other, are sharply distinct, for reasons relating to genre. Whatever the relative freedom of nineteenth-century essayists to gloss over their debts and ‘misrepresentations’, and whatever Pater’s ambition to ‘dissolve the critical and creative acts into one another’, expectations of careful quotation and faithful translation are nonetheless greater in the reading of discursive prose than in the encounter with that fastest-evolving and ‘most fluid of genres’, the novel; greater, too, in the experience of a personal, recognisable style than in the immersion in the kind of impersonal, unstyled textuality produced by Joyce in Finnegans Wake.⁷²

If the extremity of such writing methods paved the way for the emergence of intertextual theory, that theory has in turn given rise to new ways of experiencing literary texts – ways driven not by censoriousness but by a neutral acceptance of the second-handness of all writing. If Pater’s silences about his sources suggest a high degree of caution (about courting controversy and owning up to his debts and manipulations), it is also possible to see the idiosyncrasy of his approach as a sign of the poise of one ‘bold enough to think himself an artist to whom interfering rules of the antiquarian or the scholar did not apply’.⁷³ In that disposition, at least, he and his modernist successors are aligned. ‘[A] brilliant original who did not originate’,⁷⁴ he had the confidence to know that styling the second-hand was art enough.