Aspects of the Intellectual Context of Pater's 'Imaginary Portraits'

Abstract

There is no denying the importance of the 'imaginary portrait' as a technique, or preoccupation, in appreciating Pater's intention and achievement. The term covers somewhat disparate material drawn from Pater's career after 1878: the clearly semi-autobiographical 'The Child in the House', Marius the Epicurean, the evocations or short stories of Imaginary Portraits, the part historical reconstruction, part fiction of 'Hippolytus Veiled'. Critics have, perhaps a little too readily, found enough coherence and common purpose in these works to warrant a general classification. The resulting 'imaginary portraits' have been, broadly, subject to two kinds of attention. Scholars have seen them as in varying ways autobiographical or, alternatively, have explored themes, images, and dramatic patterns within them. Gerald Monsman's Freudian and structuralist account, identifying the portraits' inspiration in Pater's 'dreaded yet desired separation from parental dominance' and U. C. Knoepflmacher's study of Marius the Epicurean are recent examples of the two approaches.' Both the psychological and the thematic frames of reference are valuable means of rescuing Pater from the charge of intellectual and emotional confusion brought, for example, in Eliot's well-known essay.2 However, both methods have their dangers. The critic who explores the metamorphosis of the unconscious materials of literary art into conscious image and symbol may fall into unwarranted speculations and assertions, as Monsman seems to do (even if one wholly accepts Freudianism, there are insuperable difficulties in the 'diagnosis' of a long-dead subject). The problem with discovering themes and patterns is that they may become formulaic and restrictive, offering emblems rather than aeteologies. It might be useful to approach Imaginary Portraits, not by psychological speculation or the arrangement of mythic patterns but by investigating the traces in them of submerged controversial intention (I will omit 'Denys l'Auxerrois', where Pater's treatment of his source material is less interesting than in the other three portraits). The early notion of Pater, based largely on