Florence Read Online Free PDF Page A

Pater, in a gesture of cowardly back-pedalling, removed the famous ‘Conclusion’ from the second edition, restoring it only in 1888. (He had been concerned, he wrote, that ‘it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I havethought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning.’)
    The danger of The Renaissance, in the view of its critics, lay in Pater’s advocacy of sensory experience, which was seen by the Reverend John Wordsworth, among others, as suggesting ‘that no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain, that the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment and that probably or certainly the soul dissolves at death into elements which are destined never to reunite’. In fact, Pater had little interest in the afterlife; his primary concern was with apprehension itself, as evidenced by the credo: ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.’ By contrast, progress, expansion and Empire were the watchwords of the Victorians, of whom he might have been speaking when he noted that in the Middle Ages, ‘the crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the ascetic interest, is already traceable’.
    It was against the Victorian creed of self-discipline and self-denial that Pater, knowinglyor otherwise, waged battle in The Renaissance, not directly, but rather by exalting its opposite: ‘any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend’. He writes approvingly of play, ‘the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not merely because play is in many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way with us’.
    Nor does Pater shrink, as this passage indicates, from explicitly erotic language, even if he eschews, in The Renaissance, any direct mention of sex. Instead language does the job, so that when, in his most famous phrase, he describes success in life as ‘to burn with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy’, he ends up giving voice to the more explicit frustrations that we have come to look at as definitive of his epoch. A brazen age is impatient for spectacular gestures, but in those years the mere evocation of David andJonathan or ‘the Greeks’ – even the utterance of the word ‘Hellenic’ – awakened the possibility of a life free from the punitive rigidities of Victorianism. As a result, the term ‘aesthetic’ began to be looked upon as having lewd or improper connotations. By 1903, Rollo St Clair Talboys, tutor to Ronald Firbank, was worrying lest his young charge should fall prey to ‘the cult of the purple orchid’ and become ‘a Parisian mondain of the de Goncourt school ... a slave of the senses – an emotional bon vivant to the last tremolo’. Firbank did, and worse: in his later writing we see Pater’s ideas not so much in full flower as at that stage when the petals are beginning to brown, and the heady apricot scent has given way to something mulchy and rotten-sweet.
    More about Firbank later. For now, let us consider another English writer who settled in Florence, the novelist Louisa Ramé, better known as Ouida.
    Born in 1839 in the village of Bury St Edmunds to a French father and an English mother, Ouida started writing early on, taking as a nom de plume a childhoodmispronunciation of her own name. Profit and popularity came swiftly for her, thanks in part to the velocity with which she churned out her turgid, semi-literary novels, which had titles like Granville de Vigne, Idalia, Pascarel, In Maremma, Two Little Wooden Shoes and A Dog of Flanders (she adored