Pater's Portraits

Originally published in 1967. Monsman undertakes a comprehensive critical analysis of Walter Pater's fiction, which presents the critic with numerous causes of frustration, not the least of which is a lack of both dramatic narration and description. Pater is rarely vivid and firsthand in his fiction; he tends instead toward exposition. Monsman's emphasis in Pater's Portraits is "e;tracing out"e; the conscious artistic structure of Pater's fiction. The scope of Pater's writings comprises nothing less than Western culture itself; its subject is all that man has written, thought, said, sung, hoped, or prayed as a civilized creature over two and one-half millennia. Pater's success in handling such panoply is attributable to his discovery of a coherent pattern by which art, religion, and life can be organized. Monsman aims to discover in Pater's fiction the use of old scientific-religious patterns of myth to explain moments of religious and cultural awakening, to reveal the way in which one man arrived at a credo that would answer to the desolation of life and culture.