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PARTISAN REVIEW
and expository trajectories of most of his essays and fictional pieces.
The one unambiguously important consideration of Pater's life has to
do with his homosexual disposition. He seems never to have been in doubt
about it himself, and neither so far as one can tell were any of his contem–
poraries. He was as explicit about it as the written codes of the period
permitted, and more so in his earlier writing than later on. In this sense he
is one of the princi pal figures in the emergence of what was to become con–
solidated as an increasingly explicit or semi-visible sub-culture of
homosexual life, art, literary interests, writing, and social associations, friend–
ships, and even cult-like behaviors among middJe- and upper-class males in
Britain toward the end of the nineteenth century and after. He is such a fig–
ure because it is in his writings, muffled though they often are, that certain
characteristic expressions of homosexual sensibility, interests, tastes, and
idiomatic turns of phrase first found their transitional way into the wider
common stream of modern British literary discourse. Found their way, and
were also legitimated, accepted as part of the general discourse about art and
culture, under the rubrics of aestheticism, or art for art's sake, or even deca–
dence, a "comely decadence" to be sure. When George Eliot wrote of
Pater's
Studies in the History
if
the Renaissance
that the book "seems to me
quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of
life," one can be quite assured that her acrimonious disapprobation was not
being directed principally at Pater's impressionism or aestheticism or even
his hedonism. It was being directed at what must have appeared to her, and
to others as well, as the insidious and inseparable entwining, among all those
other dubious tendencies of sensibility, of an incitement to dissolute,
promiscuous and criminal sexuality on top of everything else.
That inci tement was to remain, in the instance of Pater himself, large–
ly a matter of words. Despi te some vagrant if persistent tatters of gossip
no substantial evidence has yet turned up to demonstrate that he ever
acted conclusively upon his homosexuality - although he seems to have
made no efforts to deny it or his interest in it ("it" being as late as the
1880s not yet clearly or consensually defined either medically, legally, or
even socially), while remaining consistently decorous in his speech and
behavior. These inhibitions, combined with such narcissistic or quasi-nar–
cissistic vacancies and deficits as I have touched upon already, must have
made for an internal life suffused wi th misgivings, mortifications, and
instabilities, and toward agitations of self-esteem. Indeed, when Donoghue
remarks of Pater's life that, "At Oxford he was that comfortable being, a
bachelor don of homosexual disposition," I think he is rather overstating
the case, almost certainly as far as the younger Pater is concerned. I am
prompted to this amendment by one passage at least. It occurs in the first
published version of what was to eventuate as the famous Conclusion to
