Reviewed in Essays in Criticism

By Stefano Evangelista, St. Anne’s College, Oxford

If there is a weakness in Daley’s book, it lies in its too restricted understanding of Pater’s Romantic models. Its exclusive focus on Wordsworth precludes other interpretative possibilities. An incorporation of Pater’s treatment of his German sources (Goethe and Schiller for example) would have made for a more incisive analysis of Pater’s Hellenism, which Daley does recognize as indivisible from Romanticism, and of its Ruskinian legacies.

More importantly, there are only a couple of superficial references to Shelley, whose Romantic aesthetics were certainly no less important that Wordsworth’s in the formation of Pater’s own. I agree with Daley when he claims that Pater’s adoption of sympathy as the supreme moral category is Romantic in origin, but it owes as much if not more to Shelley’s writings that to Wordsworth. The features of Pater’s aestheticism are probably prefigured more clearly in The Defense of Poetry than in The Prelude, Shelley’s belief in the civilizing power of the poetic imagination and in the artist as antinomian critic of society is taken up by Pater and used to articulate his critiques of scientific positivism, organized religion, and Victorian morality. Similarly, it is Shelley’s sensuous paganism, with all its Platonic echoes, and the Shelleyan ideal of the poet as sexual radical that lie at the basis of Pater’s (same sex) model of sexual dissidence.

Such shortcomings do not diminish the value of The Rescue of Romanticism, a study that treats with clarity and concision the often overlooked debate over the role of Romanticism in the late nineteenth century Britain. Its understanding of the interlinked influence that Ruskinian aesthetics and Romantic poetics exercised in the development of Pater’s thought offers valuable insights into Pater’s work and its relation to late Victorian culture.

Essays in Criticism