When Walter Pater’s Appreciations was first published in 1889, the chapters on Wordsworth and Coleridge were prominently afforded pride of place, uniformly praised, and generally considered the finest in the volume. In reviewing it for the Athenaeum, Arthur Symons astutely connected Appreciations with the critical principles outlined in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance (1873). Reminding readers of Pater’s language there regarding the role of the ‘aesthetic critic’ in distinguishing the special ‘virtue’ of a work of art in order to ‘disengage’ them from the undistinguished aspects, he inflected ‘appreciation’ as precisely that sort of critical weighing and valuing.¹ Symons cited the Wordsworth essay as ‘certainly the very best example of this, for it has fallen to the lot of Wordsworth to suffer more than most at the hands of interpreters’. The writing on Wordsworth was ‘perhaps the finest of Mr Pater’s critical essays’, because in ‘Disengaging the better from the baser elements, he seizes thus upon what is fundamental, getting at the true root of the matter’. Symons was not alone in lavishing praise on the Wordsworth essay: in the Spectator, C. L. Graves thought it ‘excellent, and full of acute remarks’, while Oscar Wilde, in the Speaker, singled it out as ‘the finest’ in the book, because ‘It appeals, not to the ordinary Wordsworthian with his uncritical temper, and his gross confusion of ethical with aesthetical problems, but rather to those who desire to separate the gold from the dross’.

Although not noticed in as much detail, the Coleridge essay was considered ‘difficult to overpraise’ and ‘one of the most delightful of all’, according to Clement Shorter in the Star. Graves thought that ‘Mr Pater is at his best in what he says of Coleridge’s superlative skill in handling the supernatural’ in ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’, while W. J. Courthope, in the Nineteenth Century, noted that ‘Mr Pater’s appreciation of Coleridge is more severe, and therefore more just’. Although Pater had previously published versions of both essays (on Coleridge in 1866 and on Wordsworth in 1874, with additional commentary on Coleridge’s poetry in 1880), the essays in Appreciations are the most frequently cited. In order responsibly to assess Pater’s ‘appreciations’ of both writers – and to understand the importance of these writings for Pater’s critical achievements as well as for the late nineteenth-century reputations of Wordsworth and Coleridge – it will be valuable to contextualise these essays within the longer arc of Pater’s career.

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Pater commenced his career as a critic with ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, published anonymously in the Westminster Review in January 1866. Nominally a review of the third edition of Thomas Allsop’s Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, it evaluates the competing priorities in Coleridge’s prose writings between his ‘religious philosophy’ and his ‘theory of art-criticism’ (‘CW’, 114, 117). It marks Pater’s first attempt to delineate the functions of criticism and culture in relation to religion (Christianity) and philosophy (both Greek and German Idealist) and, in doing so, offers a preview of the ‘religious aestheticism’ later developed in The Renaissance. It is an ambitious first foray into criticism: tackling the contested matter of Coleridge’s posthumous reputation, Pater examines both the prose writings and the man (with whom he clearly sympathises, even as he outlines what he considers to be Coleridge’s shortcomings) in the course of setting forth his own priorities as a critic. When he later revised much of ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ for the chapter on Coleridge in Appreciations, Pater reworked material from the opening sixteen pages and final two paragraphs of the article (excising most of the material in which he criticised prevalent Christian dogmatics) to bookend that study around the consideration of Coleridge’s poetry that he contributed to T. H. Ward’s The English Poets (1880).

In order to arrive at a proper assessment of both Pater’s aspirations and his achievements in the early essay, it will be useful to consider the book allegedly under review: the Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge. First published in 1836 (then republished in 1858 and 1864), Allsop’s volume had played a significant role in the shaping of Coleridge’s posthumous reputation for thirty years.² Noting in the preface to the third edition that ‘the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [is] a puzzle to this later generation’ (np), Allsop sought to resolve the ‘puzzle’ through presenting Coleridge as first and foremost a religious thinker, one who systematically attempted to ‘reconcile religion with philosophy’ and ‘truth with Christianity’ (np). This is not the (now) better-known Coleridge of the early poetry or the Biographia Literaria (1817), but the Coleridge of the Aids to Reflection (1825) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), whose readers were imagined as young men who were ‘becoming conscious of the difficulty of holding Christian beliefs within the new intellectual climate’ of the early nineteenth century.³ Aids to Reflection had been a popular, influential book since its first publication, and (after Coleridge’s death in 1834) was instrumental for the public perception of Coleridge and his writings.⁴ Coleridge was admired by many mid-century critics for his recognition of the need for a ‘spiritual’ religion and his attempt to define Christianity in philosophical terms, apart from questions of historical evidence. In undertaking a review of the third edition of Allsop’s collection (and taking various of his bearings from Allsop’s preface to the same), Pater in his first publication was plunging into a contentious public debate, not merely about Coleridge’s posthumous reputation but also about the authority of religion for English culture in the 1860s.⁵

‘Coleridge’s Writings’ may be considered Pater’s attempt to solve the ‘puzzle’ of Coleridge. He touches on numerous points from Allsop’s preface to the third edition (for example, the importance of German Idealist thinkers such as Kant for effecting the reconciliation Coleridge sought between religion and philosophy), and focuses on Aids to Reflection as the central text of what he ultimately denigrates as Coleridge’s reliance on ‘inferior theological literature’ (‘CW’, 111–12), when compared with his theory of poetry, or ‘art-criticism’, in which, according to Pater, Coleridge ‘comes nearest to true and important principles’ (117). As John Beer has noted, ‘Pater was singularly well equipped to attempt a critical re-evaluation of Coleridge, being temperamentally attuned to his poetic sensibility yet aware of the growth of evolutionary and relativist thinking’.⁶

Pater frames his approach to Coleridge in terms of the tension between the ‘relative’ (or modern) spirit and the ‘absolute’ (or ancient) spirit: whereas ancient philosophy ‘sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in a necessary formula’, for the modern spirit ‘nothing is or can be rightly known except relatively under conditions’ (107):

Coleridge’s pursuit of an absolute was both his greatest ambition and his greatest shortcoming – his signature failure. In light of Pater’s conviction that only the relative can make a difference in contemporary thought, Coleridge’s insistence throughout his prose writings on fixed principles, in concert with his refusal ‘to see the parts as parts only’ (132), brings into view his ‘chief offence’ – namely, an ‘excess of seriousness, a seriousness that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner’ (111). In other words, Coleridge’s insistence on thinking in terms of an absolute marred what Pater would later denominate his ‘style’ as a critic, and compromised both his appeal and his reputation as a humanist. Despite this, there is for Pater a ‘peculiar charm’ about Coleridge, the ‘charm of what is chastened’ in Coleridge’s lifelong contention against the relative and ‘the new order of things’ (107).

Pater’s critical re-evaluation of Coleridge operates under two antagonistic yet complementary headings, as he disparages Coleridge’s ‘religious philosophy’ in order to celebrate his ‘theory of art-criticism’. Allsop’s volume is representative of the degree to which Coleridge’s posthumous reputation was tied to his status as a religious thinker, and Pater is pointedly taking aim at Allsop’s veneration of Coleridge when he castigates Aids to Reflection (the central text in the Victorian valorisation of Coleridge as one of the greatest philosophers of his age) as ‘ennuyant, depressing’, little more than ‘Archbishop Leighton’s vague pieties all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy’ (112). He repeatedly dismisses Coleridge’s attempt to fashion ‘an intellectual novelty in the shape of a religious philosophy’ that could reconcile the conflict between reason and faith (114):

Pater seems more interested in Aids to Reflection for its ‘dexterity’ as an ‘intellectual tour de force’ (a signature mark of Coleridge’s ‘literary egotism’ (112)) than as a sustained argument about the possible relation between rational thought and spiritual devotion.

Beyond the specific engagement with Aids to Reflection, Pater’s re-evaluation of Coleridge’s religious thinking provides him with the opportunity for a wholesale disparagement of Christianity. Maintaining that ‘what chains men to a religion is not its claim on their reason, their hopes or fears, but the glow it affords to the world, its “beau ideal”’, Pater argues at some length that, for those who no longer believe in traditional Christianity, its most compelling features are to be replaced by ‘culture’, understood as our ‘intellectual life’ (126). Characterising this new ‘spiritual element’ as ‘a chastened temper’, with its ‘passion for inward perfection with its sorrows, its aspirations, its joy’, Pater declares that ‘These mental states are the delicacies of the higher morality of the few’ and that ‘like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only by the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine in which there is no lifting of the soul at all’ (126). It is an uncompromising substitution of culture for religion, which Pater sums up thus:

David DeLaura has written of Pater’s ‘remarkable argument’ here that it not only ‘breathes a total and almost contemptuous detachment from Christianity and Christian belief’, but that it furthermore provides ‘the most explicit rationale for what may be called a “religious aestheticism”, not only in Pater but perhaps in the English language’, which ‘Pater himself, even in the years of the Renaissance studies, never again revealed so uncompromisingly’.⁷ It is one of the most memorable passages in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, and (as is also the case with the criticism of Aids to Reflection) it was removed when Pater revised the article for Appreciations.⁸ Under the heading of ‘the higher morality of the few’, Pater is attempting here to preserve a spiritual element in life ‘For those who have passed out of Christianity’ (127) – or, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘to get all the emotional kick out of Christianity one can, without the bother of believing it’.⁹

In between the critique of Coleridge’s theological writings and the celebration of a new religious aestheticism (both excised in 1889), Pater offers a sustained and sympathetic account of Coleridge’s art criticism (most of which was retained in Appreciations), claiming that it is here that Coleridge ‘comes nearest to true and important principles’ (117). Integral to Pater’s assessment of Coleridge’s non-religious criticism is his emphasis on the importance of German Idealist philosophy (what Pater goes so far as to claim was his ‘one singular intellectual happiness’), which Coleridge applied ‘with an eager, unwearied subtlety’, in an ‘attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of fixed laws’ (117, 118). This is most evident in the Biographia, in which Coleridge ‘refine[d] Schelling’s “Philosophy of Nature” into a theory of art’ (118). Pater is unusual among nineteenth-century readers in that he shares Coleridge’s interest in transcendental philosophy (certainly not the case with the first reviewers of the Biographia), and neglects the long chapters on Wordsworth (the usual centre of attention) in order to explain Coleridge’s critical philosophy, tracing the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ all the way back to evidences of pantheism in Greek philosophy (‘the suspicion of a mind latent in nature’, which he valorises as the ‘Greek spirit’ or ‘Greek mind’ (119, 132)). He even detects ‘that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature’ in Coleridge’s famous definitions of the imagination in the Biographia, setting forth the Coleridgean imagination as that faculty which ‘attains a strange power of modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to an inward ideal’: in Pater’s interpretation, ‘in imaginative genius, ideas become effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its latent purposes is fixed in works of art’ (121, 120).

Pater singles out Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism (at the time available in the Literary Remains (1836–39) and Sara Coleridge’s Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare (1849)) to explain Coleridge’s theory of organic unity, the ‘law of gravitation from within’ that finds ‘the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety’ (121). In Coleridge’s terms, ‘The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it developes [sic], itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form’ (quoted, 122).¹⁰ Under the Coleridgean heading of organic unity, ‘“the absolute” has been affirmed in the sphere of art’ (Coleridge again ‘straining’ after the absolute), yet Coleridge ultimately ‘overstrained the elasticity of his hypothesis’, rendering the artist ‘almost mechanical’ as a result: while a theory of organic form may explain the ‘impression of a self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives us’, it ‘does not express the process by which that work was produced’ (122). Such an achievement, and such a limitation, are characteristic of Coleridge’s work as a critic: while he excels in determining the ‘metaphysical definition of the universal element in an artistic effort’ – the ‘absolute formula’ – he is less adept in explaining the ‘subtle gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and another’ (123). His comments on individual works of art are therefore of less interest and value than his abstract pronouncements on the rules of art: Pater’s Coleridge is ultimately not a practical but a philosophical critic.

When Pater revised ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ for inclusion in Appreciations, he retained much of his account of Coleridge the critic (rather than Coleridge the theologian) as a way to preface the ‘critical introduction’ to Coleridge’s poetry that he had initially contributed in 1880 to T. H. Ward’s multi-volume anthology The English Poets, which he then inserted fundamentally unabridged (collated with several pages on Wordsworth from ‘Coleridge’s Writings’) as the second half of the Coleridge chapter.¹¹ Pater continues to emphasise Coleridge’s dissemination of German metaphysics and transcendental philosophy (presented here as a manifestation of ‘the a priori, or absolute, or spiritual, or Platonic, view of things’) as ‘the one thread of continuity in a life otherwise singularly wanting in unity of purpose, and in which he was certainly far from uniformly at his best’ (App., 81, 82). ‘Fragmentary and obscure’ as he may have been, Coleridge was ‘often eloquent, and always at once earnest and ingenious’, classified by Pater ‘as a student of words, and as a psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or student than other men of the phenomena of mind’ (82). The latter designation is particularly important for Pater’s subsequent analysis, providing as it does a way to explain both Coleridge’s ‘imaginative philosophical expression’ in so much of his meditative blank verse and his ‘presentation of the marvellous’ in the supernatural poems ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ (93, 97).

Pater sympathetically describes Coleridge in terms of his ‘morbid want of balance … [mixed with] a kind of languid visionariness’, a poet who claimed he wrote poetry ‘after the more violent emotions of sorrow, to give him pleasure, when perhaps nothing else could’, which poetry was then characterised by ‘a certain languidly soothing grace or cadence’ (83).¹² The languid Coleridgean combination of sorrow and pleasure is central to Pater’s estimation of the poetry: as he remarks of several youthful lines pertaining to the mode in which ‘even saddest thoughts / Mix with some sweet sensations’, the ‘expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility in these lines, is very true to Coleridge:—the grievous agitation, the grievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with a certain physical voluptuousness’ (84). A related register is that of ‘stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief’ (the source of which was closely allied with the source of those pleasures), as Coleridge puts it in ‘Dejection: An Ode’, a poem critical for Pater’s understanding of Coleridge’s temperament, ‘with its faintness, its grieved dejection’, such as when he laments, ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life whose fountains are within’ (86; ll. 22, 45–6).¹³

Pater initially contrasts Coleridge’s dejection with Wordsworth’s joy, his ‘joyful and penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a kind of “heavenly alchemy”’ (85). But whereas Wordsworth instinctively believed in the reciprocal and ‘exquisite’ fit of the mind of man and the external world (such as in the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, which Pater quotes), for Coleridge this was not a belief so much as an idea (and one that failed him in moments such as those recorded in ‘Dejection’): ‘In Coleridge’s sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a philosophical idea’ (87). He is also compared and contrasted with the prolix Wordsworth in terms of the ‘limited quantity of Coleridge’s poetical performance’, memorably described as ‘like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the somewhat un-english air of Coleridge’s own south-western birthplace, but never quite well there’ (84–5). As astute as Pater can be in managing the comparison of the two poets, he somewhat reductively confines much of Coleridge’s poetic output to the annus mirabilis of 1797–98 with Wordsworth (to which Pater assigns the composition of ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’, and the first part of ‘Christabel’), lamenting ‘the sudden blossoming, through one short season, of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age’ (87).

Of much greater value, and lasting insight into Coleridge’s poetics, is Pater’s sustained and nuanced explication ‘of what Coleridge meant by Imagination’ across a wide range of poems (88). Pater demonstrates an uncannily Coleridgean sense of the ‘infusion … of the figure into the thought’, of the ways in which Coleridge manages the ‘identification of the poet’s thought … with the image or figure which serves him’, such as when he writes in ‘To a Gentleman [William Wordsworth]’, ‘Amid the howl of more than wintry storms, / The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours / Already on the wing’ (88–9; ll. 89–91). In Coleridge’s compressed figure here, in the collision of the winter tumult and the summer calm, the halcyon (already on the wing itself) ‘hears’ the voice of the (halcyon) vernal hours as if in anticipation of the peace that is nigh, the peace that Coleridge found so elusive. This sort of imaginative identification is in turn integral to the ‘impassioned contemplation’ (similar to Wordsworth’s) ‘on the permanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity’ that Pater celebrates throughout Coleridge’s writing, nowhere perhaps as prominently as in ‘To [William Wordsworth]’, when Coleridge’s celebration of Wordsworth’s Prelude – ‘high and passionate thoughts / To their own music chanted’ (ll. 46–7) – may be said to apply equally to his own blank verse, such as in the infrequently cited ‘Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode’, in Coleridge’s declaration to have found ‘That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive / Their finer influence from the world within’ (89–91).¹⁴ A crucial manifestation of the Coleridgean imagination is to be read in his ‘imaginative treatment of landscape’, such as in his foregrounding in ‘Fears in Solitude’ of ‘A green and silent spot amid the hills, / A small and silent dell!’ (ll. 1–2), against which silence his fears of a French invasion reverberate. In this pointedly political poem, ‘written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion’, the ‘silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place, maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece’ (92). Coleridge’s ‘singular watchfulness for the minute fact and expression of natural scenery’ (here, the dwelling of the poet’s mind on a particular spot, green and small and silent, and ‘bathed by the mist’), in concert with his ‘minute realism’, is integral to his imaginative and ‘highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external nature’ and, in the end, ‘pervad[es] all he wrote’ (90–1).

Pater reserves his most sustained attention for ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ (the 1817 text, with gloss) and the first part of ‘Christabel’. These are Coleridge’s ‘greatest’ poems, for ‘In poetic quality … they are quite out of proportion to all his other compositions’ (95). They are both ‘romantic’ poems, notable for their ‘bold invention, and appealing to that taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder’, Coleridge’s taste for which had been ‘encouraged by his odd and out-of-the-way reading in the old-fashioned literature of the marvellous’ (96). Pater is particularly interested in Coleridge’s handling of this aspect of the poem: ‘it is the delicacy, the dreamy grace in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge’s work so remarkable’ (96–7). Whereas intruders from the spiritual world are typically too palpable (even in Shakespeare and Walter Scott), Coleridge writes with a plausibility which Pater finds it hard to pin down: his power ‘is in the very fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are—the skeleton ship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the ship’s crew’, resulting in a ‘finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism’ (97, 98). Ever attentive to the fragmentary nature of Coleridge’s oeuvre, Pater celebrates ‘The Ancient Mariner’ for being a finished poem: ‘It is Coleridge’s one great complete work, the one really finished thing, in a life of many beginnings’ (99). ‘Christabel’, despite its length (and Coleridge’s repeated promises to complete it), ‘remained a fragment’, albeit one also representative of the tendencies of the ‘old romantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modern reflection’, and notable for Coleridge’s innovative experiments in metre (Pater being regularly attentive to Coleridge’s ‘cadence’ (100, 102)).

In citing the passage on the friendship of Sir Roland and Sir Leoline (from the second part of ‘Christabel’) as an illustration of Coleridge’s ‘gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling’, Pater revisits the question of Coleridge’s ‘grieved dejection’ in order to invert it, in his conclusion, into something radically different (100, 86). What is the predominant quality in Coleridge’s poetry? Joy is the unexpected answer:

That ‘joy’ should emerge as the signature component of the matter of Coleridge’s poetry (as ‘cadence is the predominant quality of its form’ (102)) comes as something of a surprise so near the conclusion of a long chapter that has attended throughout to Coleridge’s manifold failures, his characteristic dejection, his morbid languor, and his ‘diseased or valetudinarian temperament’ (84). Making this claim sets Pater up for a long excerpt from the late poem ‘A Tombless Epitaph’. In it, Coleridge describes someone who, though ‘besieged’ by sickness, ‘maintained / The citadel unconquered, and in joy / Was strong to follow the delightful Muse’. Equally familiar with the hidden paths of Parnassus and the ‘long-neglected holy cave’ of ‘old Philosophy’, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Coleridge the ‘Poet-philosopher’ (as fondly designated by Humphry Davy), and is finally eulogised for the same: ‘O studious Poet, eloquent for truth! / Philosopher! contemning wealth and death, / Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love!’ (102–3; ll. 18–20, 29–30, 35–7). Standing at the end of Pater’s long and sympathetic engagement with Coleridge’s poetry in Ward’s English Poets, these lines serve as Coleridge’s own epitaph – as postulated in the poem’s final lines (which Pater does not include), ‘Here, rather than on monumental stone, / This record of thy worth thy Friend inscribes, / Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek’ (ll. 38–40). It is with this sympathetic tribute that Pater concludes his commentary in 1880.

Attending simultaneously to both Coleridge the poet and Coleridge the philosopher allows Pater deftly to link the early writing for the Westminster Review with the later commentary for Ward’s English Poets, and prepare the way for the valedictory conclusion, in which Pater reminds us of the abiding tension in Coleridge’s life and work: everywhere ‘We see him trying to “apprehend the absolute”’, to attain ‘fixed principles’, ever ‘refusing to see the parts as parts only’ (103). And it is in this quest that Coleridge’s signature failure is most legible:

Through his summoning of the sensitive, restless, and melancholy heroes of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Chateaubriand’s René, and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (three immensely popular and influential examples of a certain type of Romantic malheur), Pater enshrines Coleridge too as a discontented outsider (‘the perfect flower of the romantic type’, as he put it in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ (‘CW’, 132; emphasis added). Coleridge furthermore epitomises what Pater repeatedly celebrates as the ‘simple, chastened, debonair’ essence of the ‘Greek spirit’: ‘with his passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, [Coleridge] may still be ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of our life’ (App., 104). Coleridge matters for Pater because he failed, because he provided an example of heroic, romantic failure that resonated for Pater himself. Pater clearly identifies with Coleridge, not least in terms of the languor and dejection he attributes to the older writer (with Coleridge’s ode on the same arguably the critical poem for Pater’s evaluation), and sympathises with the irony of his successful and abiding failure.¹⁶ Had Coleridge achieved the absolute after which he hungered, he would not have mattered nearly as much to Pater.

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If Pater’s Coleridge is principally distinguished by his languor and his abiding dejection, Pater’s Wordsworth is, among other things, a poet of joy and optimism. Pater compares the two in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, confidently pronouncing that, as early as their collaboration on Lyrical Ballads (1798), ‘What Wordsworth then wrote is already vibrant with that blithe élan which carried him to final happiness and self-possession’, whereas in Coleridge ‘we feel already that faintness and obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his writings’ (‘CW’, 108).¹⁷ In support of this stark contrast, Pater cites the important lines from the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse in which Wordsworth jubilantly proclaims, ‘How exquisitely the individual Mind / / … to the external World / Is fitted: —and how exquisitely, too, / The external World is fitted to the Mind’ (ll. 63–7).¹⁸ This is Wordsworth’s grounding belief, his ‘dream’, made possible by ‘that flawless temperament … which keeps his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature’ (‘CW’, 109). Coleridge, on the other hand, ‘could never have abandoned himself’ to this dream of the abiding affinity between the natural world and the mind of the poet. His temperament, ‘with its faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that’ (109), Pater explains, going on to cite Coleridge’s despair in ‘Dejection’. What for Wordsworth was a fundamental conviction and a permanent consolation was for Coleridge a source of doubt, a ‘vain endeavour’ (l. 42). For Coleridge’s sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of genius, according to Pater, ‘What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in [him] a philosophical idea’, subject to intellectual assent (110). Wordsworth’s ‘instinct’ was central to his genius: it was his belief in the ‘exquisite’ alliance between the natural world and the human mind that made possible his ‘sense of a life in natural objects’ and his depiction of nature as ‘ennobled by a semblance of passion and thought’ (App., 46, 48).

Wordsworth’s optimism (by which Pater means his sense of ‘the proportion of man to his place in nature’ (‘CW’, 109–10)), his sense of the sentience of apparently little or familiar things, his deeply reflective bent of mind, and the startling intensity of his best poetry – these qualities provide the basis for Pater’s sustained analysis in his essay ‘On Wordsworth’, first published in the Fortnightly Review in April 1874, and reprinted (largely unchanged) in Appreciations. Pater’s Wordsworth is an heroic example of ‘impassioned contemplation’ (App., 60), a poet whose work is to be celebrated less for the triumph there of imagination over fancy (a distinction which Pater immediately discounts) than for the ‘intensity in the poet’s perception of his subject, and in his concentration of himself upon his work’ (39). It is for this intensity, and for the ‘bold thought’ and ‘strange speculations’ (54, 53) that it made possible, that Wordsworth is to be read and studied. The challenge in reading Wordsworth, however, is that this ‘special power’ is not always on display, due to the perplexed mixture of the ‘higher and lower moods’ in his poetry (40, 41).

‘On Wordsworth’ was Pater’s first publication following The Renaissance, and it has been argued that it was originally intended for publication in that volume.¹⁹ DeLaura describes the essay not only as a landmark in Wordsworth criticism (appearing five years before Arnold’s influential ‘Preface’ to his anthology of Wordsworth’s poetry) but also as ‘one of the most crucial statements of his career’, a ‘distillation of the first decade of Pater’s critical career, his most precise attempt up to this time to define the nature of art and the nature of the perfected life’.²⁰ As a definition of the nature of art, the essay is arguably ‘Pater’s most consistent performance as an aesthetic critic’, a sustained exercise in ‘aesthetic criticism’, written according to the tenets set forth in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance.²¹ Indeed, Pater’s comments on Wordsworth in the ‘Preface’ provide the template and the critical lexicon for understanding the analysis of the poetry in ‘On Wordsworth’, for it is in the ‘Preface’ that Pater initially tries to explain the role of the critic in untangling the ‘absolute duality between higher and lower moods’, between the poetic and the prosaic, in the work of even the greatest artists (41).

Pater is concerned in the ‘Preface’ to define the role and function of the aesthetic critic in identifying and analysing the ‘elements’ and ‘virtues’ of a work of art, whose ‘end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element’ (Ren., xxi). Once the critic has identified the particular virtue of a work of art – the power or ‘property’ it has ‘of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure’ (xx) – it becomes his responsibility to ‘disengage’ that virtue from ‘the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination’ (xxi), since the virtue does not necessarily appear in isolation or everywhere in an artist’s work. Noting that few artists (not even Goethe or Byron) ‘work quite cleanly, casting off all débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed’ (xxi), Pater suddenly presents Wordsworth as an example of a great artist whose work is far from free of débris: ‘The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten’ (xxi–xxii). Pater will repeat these points in ‘On Wordsworth’, characterising the ‘heat’ of his imaginative genius as his ‘intensity’, and noting that ‘Of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skilfully made anthology’, for ‘nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth’s own poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of almost no character at all’ (App., 40).

The function of the critic, then, is to read for the parts of an artist’s work that have been ‘crystallised’ by the ‘heat of his genius’, in the knowledge that it will be rare to find an entire composition so characterised (Pater cites ‘Resolution and Independence’ and the Intimations Ode as two isolated Wordsworthian examples). Instead, the critic must vigilantly comb the work, ever on the lookout for ‘a fine crystal here or there’ (part of what Pater has in mind in citing the Arnoldian dictum that the aim of criticism must be ‘To see the object as in itself it really is’ (Ren., xix)), in which he can ‘trace the action of [Wordsworth’s] unique, incommunicable faculty’ (Ren., xxii). This is no small task, but rather one that ‘will require great nicety’ (xxi): as Pater explains when developing this point, ‘the mixture in his work, as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the least promising composition even, lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden within—the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem’ (App., 41). Once he has identified the embedded lines which reveal Wordsworth’s ‘unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man’s life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences’ (Ren., xxii), the critic must proceed to disentangle them from the surrounding brush and make them legible for other readers. As Pater exclaims in concluding this Wordsworthian preview, ‘Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth’s poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse’ (xxii). In his later writing on Wordsworth, Pater proceeds to do precisely this.

What Pater here denominates Wordsworth’s ‘unique, incommunicable faculty’ he later inflects as the ‘special power’ of Wordsworth’s poetry, that which produces ‘precious morsels’ (akin to the earlier ‘fine crystals’) to be unearthed here and there, ‘the golden pieces, great and small, lying apart together’ that reward the attentive reader (App., 40, 42–3). Pater consistently emphasises the difficulty of reading Wordsworth in this regard, and the ‘peculiar savour’ available to the vigilant reader who persists (40). Pater’s Wordsworth is a challenging poet, and can be unsettling; to read him successfully requires an unusual degree of discipline and concentration. The constant tension and unpredictable alternation between the poet’s higher and lower moods ‘makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of training towards the things of art and poetry’:

The key term here may be ‘difficult’: reading Wordsworth is for Pater a sort of training, a ‘disciplina arcani’ which he characterises as an ‘initiation’ (42). Pater’s own essay is itself an initiation in the ways of reading this ‘strange’ and ‘peculiar’ poet, one designed to assist its readers in locating Wordsworth’s ‘secret’ and distinguishing ‘that which is organic, animated, expressive’ in Wordsworth (the bolder, higher mood) from ‘that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive’ (the tedious and prosaic lower mood (42)).²²

Wordsworth’s virtue – the ‘active principle’ that produces a particularly Wordsworthian ‘impression of beauty or pleasure’ – may be said to be twofold, consisting in both his heightened ‘sense of a life in natural objects’ (a new possibility of poetical thought, according to Pater) and the strange, ‘bold speculative ideas’ that Pater attributes to his peculiarly philosophical imagination (46, 56). This is what Pater is on the lookout for in Wordsworth’s poetry, what he tries to ‘disengage’ from the perplexed mixture of intense and tepid in the poet’s vast oeuvre. Proposing a ‘just criticism and true estimate’ of Wordsworth’s poetry (42), Pater sets forth several questions as the criteria for his assessment:

First and foremost there is Wordsworth’s ‘intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which weighs, listens, penetrates’, a product of the poet’s ‘quiet, habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence’ in concert with his ‘quite unusual sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the natural world’ (43, 44). Here Pater cites ‘Resolution and Independence’ (as also in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance) as a storehouse of such images, one of Wordsworth’s few poems that is entirely characterised by the higher mood and the heat of genius.

Pater turns to The Prelude to demonstrate the precision of Wordsworth’s imagery, such as the desolation of ‘The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old stone wall’ that anchor the second of the ‘spots of time’,²³ and quotes extensively from ‘Home at Grasmere’ (published for the first time in 1888) as evidence of ‘the leading characteristics of Wordsworth’s genius’, most prominently perhaps his delineation of the ‘close connexion of man with natural objects, [and] the habitual association of his thoughts and feelings with a particular spot of earth’ (46 n.1, 48). And he emphasises Wordsworth’s belief that ‘every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse’ (46–7). Although Pater doesn’t quote Wordsworth’s poetry in support of his ‘power of seeing life … in inanimate things’ (48), he might have turned to ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ to do so, specifically the climactic exclamation regarding ‘that serene and blessed mood’ in which we ‘see into the life of things’ (ll. 42, 50). Pater’s Wordsworth has the ‘power to open out the soul of apparently little or familiar things’ and, in doing so, to ‘rais[e] nature to the level of human thought’ (49). The intense correlation of man and nature, with its integration of daily life and permanent natural objects, allows Wordsworth in turn to ‘appreciate passion in the lowly’ (51). Wordsworth ‘chooses to depict people from humble life’, Pater reminds us, ‘because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, than other men’ (51). And it was because of this ‘direct expression of passion’, this ‘passionate sincerity’, that Wordsworth ‘chose incidents and situations from common life, “related in a selection of language really used by men”’, as he claims in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (51).²⁴

With this emphasis on passion (what Wordsworth ‘values most is the almost elementary expression of elementary feelings’ (52)), Pater clinches his argument regarding ‘this strange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which [Wordsworth] first raised the image’ (think of the haunting pastoral ‘Michael’, a frequent point of reference for Pater), and shifts his attention to what he calls the ‘philosophy’ of Wordsworth’s poetry, the ‘strangeness’ of which is for Pater Wordsworth’s other great and distinguishing virtue (53). It is here that the real discernment of Pater’s reading of Wordsworth emerges. Noting the high value that Wordsworth placed on customariness, ‘upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground’, and that, as such, one might ‘regard him as one tethered down to a world … with no broad outlook, a world protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence of received ideas’, Pater abruptly pivots to claim that Wordsworth ‘is at times also something very different from this, and something much bolder’ and ‘seems at times to have passed the borders of a world of strange speculations’ (54, 53). This is the essence of the ‘higher mood’ that Pater so values in Wordsworth, when the poet moves away from the humble and the local ‘on bold trains of speculative thought, and comes, from point to point, into strange contact with thoughts which have visited, from time to time, far more venturesome, perhaps errant, spirits’ (54). Pater is thinking here of Wordsworth’s preoccupation (most notably in the ‘Ode (Intimations of Immortality)’) with ‘those strange reminiscences and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and behind us’ and his ‘sense of man’s dim, potential powers’ (54). More pointedly, Pater is trying to account for moments of intense imaginative power (although Pater doesn’t mention them, the ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude again provide an important example), when ‘the actual world would, as it were, dissolve and detach itself, flake by flake, and he himself seemed to be the creator, and when he would the destroyer, of the world in which he lived’, or ‘periods of intense susceptibility, in which he appeared to himself as but the passive recipient of external influences’ (55, 56). It was in the grip of such susceptibilities that ‘a new, bold thought lifted [Wordsworth] above the furrow, above the green turf of the Westmoreland churchyard, to a world altogether different in its vagueness and vastness, and the narrow glen was full of the brooding power of one universal spirit’ (56).

It is at such times that Wordsworth achieved the ‘conditions of poetical thought’, a rarefied atmosphere in which ‘philosophical imaginings’ find a place in ‘true poetry’, being deployed there for ‘poetical purposes’ (56). Pater admires Wordsworth’s avoidance of technical diction in writing about philosophical concerns in his poetry (he emphasises books 12 and 13 of the 1850 Prelude, regarding the decay then subsequent restoration of the imagination), his ability to keep them ‘within certain ethical bounds’ (57). Nevertheless, it is

The ‘speculative boldness’ of Wordsworth’s philosophical imaginings constitutes for Pater the highest register of his higher mood, that ‘virtue’ which any critic of Wordsworth must ‘disengage’ from the mass of the more prosaic writing in the lower mood. It is a mood characterised by ‘faultless expression’, a seemingly effortless unification of ‘the word and the idea; each, in the imaginative flame, becoming inseparably one with the other, by that fusion of matter and form, which is the characteristic of the highest poetical expression’ (57, 58). Pater’s ‘strange’ Wordsworth is most legible at these moments, such as the stolen boat episode in The Prelude.

Pater’s argument regarding Wordsworth’s arresting strangeness and speculative boldness effectively ends here – but the chapter does not.²⁵ In what remains, Pater moves from ‘aesthetic criticism’ of the poetry to his assessment of the more comprehensive significance of Wordsworth as an example of ‘impassioned contemplation’ (‘being as distinct from doing’), which in turn is ‘the end-in-itself, the perfect end’ and the fundamental principle of what Pater proceeds to formulate as ‘the higher morality’ (60, 62).²⁶ Pater doesn’t present Wordsworth as a moralist per se (his work is ‘not to teach lessons, or enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends’ (62)) but, like other great poets, as a ‘master’ in the ‘art of impassioned contemplation’ who manifests what it is ‘to withdraw the thoughts for a little while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them, with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in man’s existence which no machinery affects’ (62–3). What are these great facts? Pater turns to Wordsworth for clarification, quoting two important passages from the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads regarding ‘the great and universal passions of men’ and ‘the operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible universe’ (63).²⁷ Wordsworth’s poetry serves as an effective stimulant for the ‘appropriate emotions’ with which to contemplate the great facts of life, for ‘he sees men and women as parts of nature, passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connexion with the grandeur and beauty of the natural world’, ‘suffering, amid awful forms and powers’ (63; quoting from Prelude 8.165). This is Pater’s final rationale for persisting with the disciplina arcani necessary to learn how to read the difficult Wordsworth, to access ‘the more powerful and original poet, hidden away, in part, under those weaker elements …, a poet somewhat bolder and more passionate than might at first sight be supposed’ (63).

Pater’s Wordsworth is not the soothing Wordsworth of John Stuart Mill, who characterised the poetry in his Autobiography as ‘a medicine for my state of mind’, or Leslie Stephen, who wrote that Wordsworth ‘seems to me to be the only consoler’, or John Morley, who remarked that ‘What Wordsworth does is to assuage, to reconcile, to fortify’, leading his readers ‘into inner moods of settled peace’.²⁸ Such writers represent the ‘fervent Wordsworthian[s]’ against whom Arnold says one must be on guard, given their propensity to praise Wordsworth for the wrong things.²⁹ Although Arnold too had earlier praised Wordsworth in ‘Memorial Verses’ for his ‘healing power’,³⁰ by the time of his influential ‘Preface’ to his anthology of Wordsworth’s poetry (1879), he sounded much more like Pater, whose essay of 1874 resonates throughout the later ‘Preface’.³¹ Arnold shares Pater’s conviction that Wordsworth’s oeuvre is radically uneven, that there is a ‘mass of inferior work … imbedding the first-rate work and clogging it’, as a consequence of which ‘Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him’.³² Arnold’s understanding of the work of the anthologiser is precisely what Pater advocated in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, namely ‘To disengage the poems which show his power’.³³ Arnold also joins Pater in presenting Wordsworth as a poet ‘Of joy in widest commonalty spread’ (citing the ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse) and develops Pater’s insight into the unification of word and idea in the poetry of his higher mood when he writes of ‘the successful balance’ in Wordsworth’s best poems ‘of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution’.³⁴ Arnold departs from Pater, however, in discounting the quality of Wordsworth’s thinking in the poetry: where Pater champions Wordsworth’s ‘bold trains of speculative thought’, Arnold dismisses any ‘formal philosophy’ in Wordsworth: ‘Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion.’³⁵

Pater’s influence extends beyond the reception of Wordsworth in the 1870s and 1880s. In his Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), A. C. Bradley contrasts Arnold’s and Pater’s essays, criticising Arnold for portraying Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘more easily apprehended than it ever can be’ (far from Pater’s difficult Wordsworth) and for downplaying anything resembling a ‘Wordsworthian philosophy’.³⁶ Pater is praised for not being so one-sided, and for having written ‘an extremely fine piece of criticism’, but Bradley nevertheless takes issue with Pater for what he perceives to be an excessive emphasis on ‘the peculiar function of Wordsworth’s genius’ as a poet of nature.³⁷ Bradley’s objective is to bring into greater critical focus the ‘“mystic”, “visionary”, “sublime” aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry’,³⁸ but that seems to be precisely what Pater had already done in concentrating on the ways in which Wordsworth crosses ‘the borders of a world of strange speculations’ with his ‘speculative boldness’. Indeed, it is the strangeness and difficulty of Pater’s Wordsworth that distinguishes his interpretation from the more conventional emphases on the poet of consolation or the poet of nature. Therein remains Pater’s insight and influence as a critic of Wordsworth.

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Pater initially wrote about both Coleridge and Wordsworth at times when their posthumous reputations were still unsettled. While certainly viewed as integral parts of what was coming to be called the ‘Romantic’ canon, it was unclear for what writings they would be remembered. After his death, Coleridge was thought of first as a religious ‘philosopher’ and second as a poet. Pater’s essay of 1866 marks an important re-evaluation of his prose writings, with its unabashed criticism of his recycling of ‘inferior theological literature’ (particularly in the Aids to Reflection) and its detailed praise for his ‘theory of art-criticism’ in both the Biographia and the lectures on Shakespeare. Later, in his commentary on the poetry in 1880, Pater was instrumental in redefining Coleridge’s relationship to the ‘Lake School’ and explaining the significance of the poems he considered to be Coleridge’s finest achievements, notably ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. In revising and combining these writings for the chapter on Coleridge in Appreciations, Pater effectively codified the Coleridge that mattered for the final decades of the nineteenth century. In his essay on Wordsworth of 1874, Pater simultaneously completed the work that he proposed in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance and anticipated many of the criteria for the evaluation of Wordsworth that Arnold would popularise five years later in his ‘Preface’. He wrote at a time when the textual authority of various editions of the poet’s work was unclear, and for readers who were often confused or put off by Wordsworth’s strange, unwieldy classifications of his own poems. Pater presented Wordsworth as a poet who required effort to read, but rewarded this disciplina arcani with ‘an excellent sort of training towards the things of art and poetry’ (41–2). As is the case with his writing on Coleridge, Pater’s essay on Wordsworth was instrumental in shaping the poet’s reputation and reception from the 1870s onwards.

These writings are significant not only for shaping the posthumous reputations of two Romantic poets, but also for what they reveal about Pater’s development as a critic. The precocious (if not always internally coherent) Coleridge essay reveals Pater assimilating Arnold’s writings, even as he moves away from the older critic in the development of what would become his ‘higher morality’ or ‘religious aestheticism’. And the Wordsworth essay shows Pater completing, as it were, the work he began in The Renaissance in what is arguably his most sustained piece of aesthetic criticism. When revised and republished in Appreciations, they provided telling examples of the combination of critical acumen, admiration, and sympathy that Pater implies in the modest term ‘appreciation’. A remark of Pater’s on Charles Lamb is noteworthy for what it reveals about Pater’s own critical sensibility: ‘To feel strongly the charm of an old poet … and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others … this is the way of his criticism’ (App., 112). ‘Charm’, of course, is the note on which Pater began the essay on Coleridge in 1866. The ‘disengagement’ and interpretation of that charm (or ‘special power’, in the case of Wordsworth) is integral both to Pater’s aesthetic practice and to his enduring value as a critic.