Thomas’s criticism of Pater’s ideas, which homes in on the latter’s
insistence that art is a matter of self-conscious selection. In his preface
toThe Renaissance, Pater described the task of the aesthetic critic to
‘distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by
picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this
special impression of beauty or pleasure... His end is reached when he
has disengaged that virtue, and noted it’^26. Its ‘virtue’ was its inner core of
individuality, and Pound used the same word when he described the
poetic quality ‘which is in some peculiar and intense way the quality or
virtuof the individual; in no two souls is this the same’.^27 The idea of a poem’s individualvirtuis the basis of Imagism’s demand for precision
and themot juste, and sponsors Pound’s condemnation of Wordsworth,
who buried the Imagist he sometimes was ‘in a desert of bleatings’.^28 This
critical opinion was also borrowed from Pater’s remark in the preface that
‘in that great mass of [Wordsworth’s] verse there is much that might well
be forgotten’, so the task of the aesthetic critic is to locate in Wordsworth
despite himself, ‘the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that
strange mystical sense of a life in natural things... thevirtue, the active
principle in Wordsworth’s poetry’ (xi). The Imagist poet, in other words,
is the heir of the aesthetic critic of Wordsworth, cutting down the poems
to their essential and unique core. The great enemy of such an art was
redundancy, as Thomas describes:
It is not surprising that one thus in search of the exquisite, of what has been
cleansed of the impurity, irrelevancy and repetition of ordinary life, should arrive
at the opinion that music is the typical art, and that all art constantly aspires
towards the condition of music, because in music it is impossible to distinguish
matter from form... [he] denied formulas ‘less living and flexible than life itself ’,
and saw poetry cultivating in us those ‘finer appreciations’ on which true justice
in this subtle and complex world depends.^29
But Thomas’s description of Pater’s ‘virtue’ as ‘the exquisite’ contains
the essence of his complaint. For Pater’s criticism combined two things
that Thomas thought self-contradictory. In order to be faithful to the
experience’s uniqueness, the aesthetic critic must do away with prescrip-
tive categories, means–end rationality and moralising: beauty must simply
be experienced as it is experienced. As the infamous ‘Conclusion’ toThe
Renaissancehas it:
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?...Toburn always with
74 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism