n 1873, Walter Pater adverted to Arnold's phrase without naming its author. He was not inclined to give names. In the preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance he said:

"To see the object as in itself it really is" has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.

In practice, that "first step" was the only one Pater proposed to take. Where Arnold spoke of an object, Pater spoke of an impression, and by that he meant something that occurs in the mind of a qualified reader when he or she looks at a painting or a statue, reads a poem or a novel, listens to a piece of music. The impression is not entirely subjective; it is provoked by one work of art rather than by another. A different work would cause a different impression. But it is not objective, either; it occurs in that singular mind, it is not the same as the impression in someone else's mind. What happens in Kenneth Clark's mind--to speak of it in that way for the moment--is not the same as what happens in John Berger's or Adrian Stokes's, even though these critics are looking at the same painting. One's experience is relative, Pater would say. So an impression cannot be thought of as an object; it is not held in the mind as if it fulfilled that way of being there. In fact, it is misleading to speak of it as being contained in the mind. Rather, "impression" is the name we give to what the mind does, under sensory provocation.

Walter Pater (1839-94). By the time this photograph of the English critic and essayist was taken, he had already won acclaim for Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1871), which provided the theoretical grounding for the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Pater was Oscar Wilde's tutor at Oxford. (Photo: Elliot and Fry, c. 1889)

The most celebrated or derided record of an impression, as something not entirely subjective but more subjective than objective, is Pater's commentary on La Gioconda of Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa. It is not a commentary in any strict sense; it is a reverie. Pater does not examine the painting for its formal qualities. He does not lead us through the painting as Leavis leads us through "Surprised by Joy," helping us to "live through" the poem. Pater's main concern is to divine the particular sensibility, the structure of feelings, which he thinks of as Leonardo's, or at least as Leonardesque, and then to respond to that with his own. The painting embodies a distinctive psychological type which Pater identifies as Leonardo's. By looking at his works, or works deemed however inaccurately to be his, Pater gradually senses a type of human being, a particular discovery among the possible ways of being alive. Then, since he is an aesthetic critic, he lets that sense of the Leonardesque exert itself on his mind, inciting it to a new act of sensibility. The particular impression is what Pater's mind does in return. When he contemplates a particular manifestation of the Leonardesque--say, when he looks at the Mona Lisa--he trusts the impression the painting incites his mind to produce. It is a new act of his own mind, an extension of his creative life. That is what his "reading" of the painting comes to. The critical problem is then to find the right words to convey that impression. So Pater writes of the Lady Lisa:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

That passage of Pater's may sound bizarre, a gorgeous flourish of nonsense, so much the rhapsody of a hedonist that it could not establish a tradition of criticism, but it has done exactly that. Critics have Pater's authority, if they want to invoke it, when they give more credence to their mental acts in the face of a work of art than to any formal, historical or otherwise objective qualities the work may be shown to have. They have his authority, too, when they assume that the human mind or spirit is so abundant that no sequence of articulations could exhaust it. Critics can express some of that abundance: By divining it in the artist, they proclaim its possibility in themselves. We call that abundance one's sensibility. Pater responds to it in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo by trusting to his own provoked eloquence.

Virginia Woolf's essays on literature issue from similar trust in her sensibility; they never observe the discipline of objectivity I have ascribed to Trilling and Vendler. Woolf's own experience, reading certain books, is always uppermost in her account of them.

Wallace Stevens' essay on the poetry of Marianne Moore is another case in point: It makes me feel, not that Stevens' sense of Moore's poems is inconceivable, but that only he could have conceived it. He is appealing to no common understanding of those poems. So his essay is an intimate disclosure of his own mind and only marginally bears on Moore's poems, their way of being in the world. The essay is contiguous to Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West" in which we are told of the woman walking along the beach that "she sang beyond the genius of the sea" and that

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.
     Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

The nicety of the phrasing in that last line--the pointed specificity of "singing" before Stevens releases the second verb, "made"--embodies his concern to make the singer's idealism inescapably present.

It follows that Paterian or impressionist criticism tends to lead, after a while, an independent life. We forget what has occasioned it, and remember the sentences for their personal tone, the murmur of word to word. It is hardly surprising that when W. B. Yeats was compiling the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, he took the first of Pater's sentences from the passage on the Mona Lisa I have quoted, broke it into disparate lines, and printed it--not quite accurately--as a poem in "free verse," the first poem in the anthology. By 1936, when the Oxford Book was published, Pater's sentence had long since floated free of its context in his book on the Renaissance; it had attached itself to the expression of certain moods or tones of feeling which Yeats thought of as those of modernity.

But I should quote a modern instance of Paterian reading. It would be possible to choose virtually any book or essay by the French or Swiss phenomenologists. I choose Georges Poulet because he has a theory of reading and has practiced what he theorizes. In "Phenomenology of Reading" he starts with a book on a table: It is waiting to be read. Until I take it up and begin to read it, it is external and objective. But as soon as I start to read it, it becomes an interior object, part of "my innermost self." Interior objects have given up their materiality for the new destiny of being read, looked at, listened to. Poulet says:

The universe of fiction is infinitely more elastic than the world of objective reality. It lends itself to any use; it yields with little resistance to the importunities of the mind. Moreover--and of all its benefits I find this the most appealing--this interior universe constituted by language does not seem radically opposed to the me who thinks it. Doubtless what I glimpse through the words are mental forms not divested of an appearance of objectivity. But they do not seem to be of a nature other than my mind which thinks them. They are objects, but subjectified objects. In short, since everything has become part of my mind, thanks to the intervention of language, the opposition between the subject and its objects has been considerably attenuated. And thus the greatest advantage of literature is that I am persuaded by it that I am freed from my usual sense of incompatibility between my consciousness and its objects.

It is an extreme example of philosophic idealism.

Poulet assumes that in the act of reading and by exercising his imagination he can gain complete access to the "world" of the writer. He reads, say, Flaubert's works, and ignores the differences between one book, one genre, and another. Flaubert's letters are just the same as his novels in the force with which they constitute the writer's world. Poulet places himself at the hypothetical center of that world and surveys it from that point of vantage. He takes pleasure in the conviction that there is no incompatibility between his consciousness and the constituents of Flaubert's world. In Études sur le temps humain he describes what he sees as if he were inside Flaubert's mind. What he sees--according to his reports--is a distinctive sense of life in which the moments of greatest significance are those where a sensory event impels someone to have a direct intuition of time as duration. "These are the moments," Poulet says, "when sensation is so perfectly yoked with the general life of things that one becomes, so to speak, the metaphorical expression of the other." Then, "to feel oneself live is to feel oneself live life, to feel the pulse of duration beat."

Poulet's vocabulary is Bergsonian. In the Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson distinguishes between intuition and analysis:

Il suit de là qu'un absolu ne saurait être donné que dans une intuition, tandis que tout le reste relève de l'analyse. Nous appelons ici intuition la sympathie par laquelle on se transporte à l'intriéur d'un objet pour coincider avec ce qu'il a d'unique et par conséquent d'inexprimable. Au contraire, l'analyse est l'opération qui ramène l'objet à des éléments déjà connus, c'est-à-dire commune à cet objet et à d'autres.

[It follows from this that an absolute could only be given in an intuition, while everything else falls within the province of analysis. Here by intuition we mean the sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common to it and to other objects.]

What the intuitionist expresses is sympathy, an experience under the auspices of time, not of space. Intuition gives the critic the pleasure of apprehending himself as a creator.

The example Poulet chooses is the scene, Chapter Seven of Madame Bovary, in which Emma and Rodolphe make love in a forest outside Yonville:

Les ombres du soir descendaient, le soleil horizontal, passant entre les branches, lui éblouissait les yeux. Cà et là, tout autour d'elle dans les feuilles ou par terre, des taches lumineuses tremblaient, comme si des colibris, en volant, eussent éparpillé leurs plumes. Le silence était partout; quelque chose de doux semblait sortir des arbres; elle sentait son coeur, dont les battements recommencaient, et le sang circuler dans sa chair comme un fleuve de lait. Alors, elle entendit tout au loin, au delà du bois, sur les autres collines, un cri vague et prolongé, une voix qui se traînait, et elle l'écoutait silencieusement, se mélant comme une musique aux dernières vibrations de ses nerfs émus.

[Evening shadows were falling, and the level rays of the sun streamed through the branches and dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all about her, among the leaves and on the ground, were shimmering patches of light, as though hummingbirds winging by had scattered their feathers. All was silent; a soft sweetness seemed to be seeping from the trees; she felt her heart beating again, and her blood flowing in her flesh like a river of milk. Then from far off, beyond the woods in distant hills, she heard a vague, long, drawn-out cry--a sound that lingered; and she listened silently as it mingled like a strain of music with the last vibrations of her quivering nerves.]

Poulet comments:

In this passage Flaubert succeeds in giving the moment a spatial and temporal destiny so particular that one could say (and it is undoubtedly the effect Flaubert wished to produce) that this moment belongs to a different duration from that of ordinary days, a duration whose tempo of things is made sweeter, slower, and therefore more perceptible; a duration that spreads out. It is as if time, like a passing breeze, could be felt in the renewed beatings of the heart, in the blood that flows like a stream of milk. It is no longer the bitter consciousness of an interval, there is no more interval; there is only a gliding motion which carries away simultaneously the things and the sentient mind with the sense of an absolute homogeneity between the different elements that compose the moment. The mind, the body, nature, and life all participate in the same moment of the same becoming.

To write those sentences, as a commentary on the lovemaking passage in Madame Bovary, Poulet has to assume that Emma's feeling and Flaubert's are one and the same. The fact that Emma is an invented character in a novel cannot be allowed to make a difference. Nor does it make a difference that the passage is written in "free indirect style," the style in which a novelist uses not the vocabulary he would use if he were describing the event objectively but the vocabulary the character in the case would use if she were managing her own narrative. Poulet must also assume that Flaubert's feeling, Emma's, and his own are one and the same: His projective imagination can inhabit Emma's feeling, which is deemed to be identical with Flaubert's, without any sense of discrepancy. It follows that Poulet has nothing to say about the passage in any objective sense. There is nothing to be analyzed or even pointed to, because he is himself within the language. He does not mention the voice, the cry, that Emma heard. By way of commentary, he can only repeat the words of Emma's rapture, her swoon of unity with the forest, writing sentences which mime those that Flaubert has invented for Emma by first divining them, apparently, in himself. Poulet has to assume that nothing in the given world importunes his mind: Everything yields to the prescriptive force of that mind.

It is no wonder, then, that Poulet breaks off the quotation before it reaches the next and last sentence:

Rodolphe, le cigare aux dents, raccommodait avec son canif une des deux brides cassée.

[Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending a broken bridle with his penknife.]

That sight must have shaken Emma out of her swoon. Poulet could not have quoted the sentence, because it is clearly incompatible with his thesis, that every detail in Flaubert's writing is predicated on making the very working of duration visible. Cigar, broken bridle, penknife: These do not dissolve into the mind that sees them. Flaubert's irony cannot be accommodated in Poulet's phenomenology of reading. The interest of such a reading consists in its moving toward independence. Typically, Poulet places a grand theme--human time--in the vicinity of Flaubert's work. If the theme is well chosen, its vocabulary will catch rays and reflections from Flaubert's texts, and will minister to Poulet's own meditation, his reverie.

But there is a further degree of independence.

(More, to Part 3 of 3)

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