His polytechny and his style.
In two other main peculiarities or properties of his—the, we will not say confusion but deliberate blending of different arts in method and process, and the adoption (modifying it, of course, by his own genius) of the doctrine of the “single word,”—he is again more of a transmitter than of a kindler of the torch. The first proceeding had been set on foot by Lessing in the very act of deprecating and exposing clumsy and blind anticipations of it; the second was probably taken pretty straight from Flaubert. But in the combination of all three, in the supplements of mother-wit, and, above all, in the clothing of the whole with an extraordinarily sympathetic and powerful atmosphere of thought and style—in these things he stands quite alone, and nearly as much so in his formulation of that new critical attitude which we have seen in process of development throughout the present volume.
His formulation of the new critical attitude.
The documents of his criticism are to be chiefly sought in the Studies in the History of the Renaissance,[[981]] in parts of Marius the Epicurean, and, of course, in the volume of Appreciations, and the little collection of Essays reprinted from The Guardian.[[982]] The posthumous books are less to he depended on, in consequence of Mr Pater’s very strong tendency to cuver son vin—to alter and digest and retouch. I do not know any place setting forth that view of criticism which I have myself always held more clearly than the Preface of the Studies. “To feel the virtue of the poet, or the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth,—these are the three stages of the critic’s duty.” The first (Mr Pater does not say this but we may) is a passion of pleasure, passing into an action of inquiry; the second is that action consummated; the third is the interpretation of the result to the world.
The Renaissance.
He never, I think, carried out his principles better than in his first book, in regard to Aucassin et Nicolette, to Michelangelo, to Du Bellay, as well as in parts of the “Pico” and “Winckelmann” papers. But the method is almost equally apparent and equally helpful in the more purely “fine art” pieces—the “Lionardo,” the “Botticelli,” the “Luca della Robbia.” In that passage on the three Madonnas and the Saint Anne of Da Vinci, which I have always regarded as the triumph both of his style and of his method, the new doctrine (not the old) of ut pictura poesis comes out ten thousand strong for all its voluptuous softness. This is the way to judge Keats and Tennyson as well as Lionardo: nay, to judge poets of almost entirely different kinds, from Æschylus through Dante to Shakespeare. Expose mind and sense to them, like the plate of a camera: assist the reception of the impression by cunning lenses of comparison, and history, and hypothesis; shelter it with a cabinet of remembered reading and corroborative imagination; develop it by meditation, and print it off with the light of style:—there you have, in but a coarse and half-mechanical analogy, the process itself.