Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART THREE.

Matthew Beaumont's "Introduction" to the Oxford World Classics edition of Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance is first rate scholarship and, at times, almost moving in the degree to which it communicates the personal struggles of this most unusual of Oxford dons. Through the close and careful attention that he pays to Pater's writings, Beaumont is able to discern the impress of his subject's otherwise repressed emotional life. In the early essay "Diaphaneite," Beaumont discovers a Paterian manifesto that will haunt all of the don's subsequent academic work:

"'Diaphaneite' posits nothing less than the proto-type of a utopian society: 'the type must be one discontented with society as it is,' Pater declares; and the mass proliferation of this man of the future, he adds, 'would be the regeneration of the world'"(Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, p. xii).

This Paterian "man of the future," like Weber's Berufsmensch or Gesamtpersonlichkeit is also a man of the past. The past of Weber's ideal type is early modern Europe and Protestant; the past of Pater's ideal type is also early modern Europe, but the Europe that juxtaposed the pagan sensibilities of a revived Hellenism to the severe Hebraisms of a Luther or Calvin. In my view, the difference in these sensibilities leads Beaumont to take a small misstep in his reading of "Diaphaneite," for he argues that Pater's "revolutionist" (Pater's term) is "no activist ... not even of an ascetic, transcendental kind" (ibid).

My own response to such a statement is an Abelardian yes and no; for it seems to me that Pater, at this particular point in his intellectual development, is of two minds about the way in which his coming man will make an impact upon the world. He signals his ambivalence in the very term he chooses to name this figure. The verbal form "diaphaneite" can be rendered both as "you will cause something to appear" and "you will allow something to shine through" and, hence, expresses activity or passivity, depending upon how one chooses to render the verb in English. As Ulrike Stamm has observed, this means that "the transparency [of the 'diaphanous character'] works in two directions. It refers on the one hand to a greater ability of reception, of taking in perceptions and ideas, and on the other hand to an ability to express the inner self to the outside world and to form one's self as a clear outline in accordance with one's own system of inner law" (see Stamm, "Walter Pater's essay 'Diaphaneite' as a bridge between romanticism and modernism," in Nineteenth-Century Prose, September 22, 1997, emphasis added).

It may well be that Stamm finds Kant in Pater before Pater found Kant, but I do not think so. For, in "Diaphaneite," Pater refers to this specific type of character as one that exemplifies "all the higher forms of inward life" by its "subtle blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual elements." One salient effect of this "subtle blend" is that it manages to elevate "taste" from a "mental attitude or manner" to a new level: "Its beautiful way of handling everything that appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by the laws of the higher intellectual life" (Pater, Renaissance, p. 137).

Pater does not make explicit to what "laws" he may be referring, but Stamm's Kantian phrase, "one's own system of inner law," does not strike me as far from the mark. As with Weber, Kant's voice seems to be a latent strand within the Paterian complex but one that becomes more pronounced as Pater's thinking matured. He will not speak of "the charm of ascesis" until he writes the Preface to his history of the Renaissance, but I would suggest that the "passivity" Beaumont detects in the character of the Paterian "Diaphaneite" is perhaps better understood as the reticence of one who knows his own mind too well to allow himself to be caught up in what Pater called "the play of circumstances" (Pater, p. 138). Such reticence is an instinctive mode of ascesis, one that expresses "the direct sense of personal worth ... that of pride of life" that Pater's ideal type possesses in spades and that makes him a different kind of "revolutionist" than those who act out of "self-pity, or indignation for the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception of the dominant undercurrent of progress in things"--but a revolutionist nonetheless (ibid). Pater writes:

"It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world ... Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature" (ibid., 139).

In "Diaphaneite," Pater offers us an ideal type that presents an alternative to that of Weber, and yet one that shares much in common with the Weberian ideal. Ascesis, it seems, produces more than one kind of character and, with it, varieties of charisma. Unlike Weber, however, Pater does not appear to have imagined that his "basement type" of character could serve as the foundation for a new social order. His "utopianism" is not expectant, it does not even appear to be particularly hopeful:

"Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own" (ibid).

A rather sobering conclusion if one is looking for relief from yet another round of Weberian capitalist-Protestants.