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‘Strenuous Minds’: Walter Pater and the Labour of Aestheticism

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The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910

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Abstract

In his late essay on ‘Style’ (1889), Walter Pater wrote that ‘To really strenuous minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous effort’. He installs in the process a set of artisanal conceptions that qualify the contemplative model of artistic experience set out in The Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885). More broadly, Pater issues a challenge to the familiar view that Aestheticism exchanged the work ethic for a leisure ethic. This discussion focuses on his admiring account of Gustave Flaubert’s working habits, and his account of composition as a laborious, indeed, a strenuously muscular activity. It argues that this French influence helped Pater reabsorb the working imperatives of mid-Victorian moralists, albeit critically and selectively.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hereafter given as The Renaissance; citations are from the 1873 text unless otherwise stated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Marcus Waithe

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  1. Marcus Waithe
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  1. Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Marcus Waithe

  2. Girton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Claire White

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Waithe, M. (2018). ‘Strenuous Minds’: Walter Pater and the Labour of Aestheticism. In: Waithe, M., White, C. (eds) The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_9

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