Pitter-Pater Went His Heart : WALTER PATER: Lover of Strange Souls, <i> By Denis Donoghue (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 368 pp.)</i>

Walter Pater died in 1894, just before his 55th birthday. If he is dimly remembered today, it is as the author of “Marius the Epicurean,” an influential if little-read essay-novel that continues to live a shadow life in used-book stores. Pater’s devotees (it’s not clear that he ever had real friends) found him at best obscure. Oscar Wilde, who while in prison requested and received six of Pater’s books, nevertheless quipped upon hearing of his death: “Was he ever alive?” Arthur Symons, long an admirer, wrote after finally meeting Pater that he was “a little difficult to talk with on account of his excessive complaisance.” Even his praising biographer in the 11th Britannica called him “remote” and “so centered upon reflection, that he never perhaps gave full utterance to his individuality.”

Yet if we are to believe Denis Donoghue, Henry James Professor of English at New York University, this obscure Oxford don’s ethos of pure style “is audible in virtually every attentive modern writer--in Hopkins, Wilde, James, Yeats, Pound, Ford, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Aiken, Hart Crane, Fitzgerald, Forster, Borges, Stevens, Ammons, and Ashberry.” A large claim indeed. Even if such pervasiveness is not in the end thoroughly substantiated here, the sheer magnitude of the proposition--Pater as “the enabling force” of antinomian modernism--powers an adventurous look at a largely misunderstood moment of intellectual history, one that also provided the aesthetic and social codes for a flourishing homoerotic subculture.

This moment has been known by many names more tendentious than illuminating--epicureanism, hedonism, decadence, art for art’s sake. In trying to free the artistic temper from the constraints of bourgeois utility and morality, it would become, according to Donoghue, an “antithetical culture denoted by magic, astrology, psychic research, opium-addiction, homosexuality, pornography, solipsism, and the internal capacities of a language freed from the duty of reference.” Though certainly widely practiced, these creative deviancies were for Pater’s generation more often touchstones--motifs and emblems employed to delineate an alternative world view.

For Pater such transgressions were almost entirely subsumed by his aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations with pagan religion, Platonic idealism, Greek sculpture’s celebration of the heroic body, and the Renaissance efflorescence of sensuality and heterodoxy. His only actualized indulgence came through his strong interest in handsome male students. Unlike some of his more reckless peers, when hints of scandal were bruited he quickly retreated and covered his traces. Indeed, the indelible image we have of Pater’s erotic sensibility comes from his one-time barber, Ed Dugdale:

“Mr. Pater was a frequent visitor to the hair-cutting salon of Spier’s and Son, his hair being very scanty and fine. I was the lucky individual whom he selected to wait upon him; and being a mere youth of two-and-twenty, I was almost alarmed when one day, as I stood in front of him arranging his hair, he suddenly stooped down and gazed intently at my slippered feet; without saying a word, he took up one of my feet and placed it upon his knee, stroked it and observed it from every angle possible. Evidently he admired some curves or lines which the foot exhibited.”

Pater’s lifework consisted, for the most part, of essays on artists, writers and philosophers. He also produced a series of “imaginary portraits” (including the book-length “Marius”), which are not full-bodied fictions but rather provide the author with conveniently thin persona through which he could project his own peculiar mixture of images and thoughts.

As Donoghue takes pains to point out, Pater was not an expert in any of his subjects--art, philosophy, myth, poetry. Nor was he an original thinker; his ideas came primarily from French and German critics and philosophers, though he was often the first to elaborate them in English. What was original was his insistence on the absolute primacy of the individual impression over the thing that produced it, of experience itself over any abstract principle of evaluating it or lesson to be drawn from it.

“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us--for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

This notorious credo is from the conclusion to “The Renaissance,” Pater’s most influential book and one widely seen as a corrupting influence, especially on the younger generation that it did, in fact, greatly affect. It stirred such a fuss that Pater quietly removed the entire final chapter for the second edition four years later. In this passage the concern with speed, isolated moments, and interior experience we can hear an authentic voice of nascent modernism, an urge to renewed perceptual intensity that was simultaneously leading to the fracturing of the image in early Impressionism.

Arthur Symons offered a typical report of the book’s initiatory qualities in saying that it “opened a new world to me, or, rather, gave me the key or the secret of the world in which was living. . . . It taught me . . . that life . . . could be itself a work of art. . . . I caught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction of curiosity into definite channels.” The homosexual undertone is unmistakable, but also the note of heady freedom in what Donoghue aptly calls “the adversary sense of life upon which art for art’s sake depends.” He goes on, in an invigorating defense of Pater’s aesthetic:

In the experience of finding an object interesting in itself, I exert my own freedom and participate in the freedom of the object. The object is free because it has not accepted the responsibility of being other than it is or of furthering some extraneous aim. This explains why objects of aesthetic interest are thought to be more spiritual than material even when, as in a painting, they are palpably material. It also explains why materialists resent the spiritual form commonly ascribed to works of art.

In his later years, though he remained an unbeliever, Pater developed an attentive relationship with Christianity. This puzzled many of his followers, who saw it as inconsistent with an aesthetic grounded in pure experience. He considered his position to be “conformable to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen,” thereby voicing what is surely a common religious sentiment.

To his chagrin, Pater was a physically unattractive man. Even those who liked him called him “gross,” “an ugly pig,” or said that he resembled “some species of ape.” In Donoghue’s account, even without the burden of these descriptions, he is not an especially appealing figure today. His brazen maneuvering to assure good reviews, the obsequious excisions and alterations in his texts to defuse public disapproval, his refusal to defend his principles or his admirers--these strike a sour note.

His acquiescence in the throttling of his sexual nature has a spinelessness about it even for the time. His celebration of art’s neutrality will antagonize some (though perhaps here he might usefully serve as an antidote to art’s current usurpation by social agendas).

Donoghue has given us more than just a sympathetic account of a complex man and his literary constellation. He has produced a lucid portrait of the ideas lurking in the often murky, equivocal lives of Pater and his followers; their sources, their importance then, and how they still matter. “Walter Pater” is the best sort of cultural criticism, a re-evaluation that illuminates another age while getting us to look again at our own.