Dialogue: Introductory note:
The following dialogue grew out of Andrew Eastham’s review of Anna Kventsel’s Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) for the second Melmoth supplement to appear in The Oscholars in December 2008:
In it, Anna and Andrew use texts such as James’s The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl as a springboard to explore further issues such as Pater’s ‘diaphaneite’, links between Modernism and Decadence, performativity, aesthetic detachment and romantic irony. I am sure Melmoth readers will agree that this beautifully nuanced dialogue carries something of the Aesthetic spirit in it and I thank Anna and Andrew for crafting such a wonderfully evocative discursive piece for the inaugural issue.
Editor
Dialogue: ‘“Diaphaneite” and Other Matters’
AK: The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott defines mental health as emotional maturity as age; illness, conversely, ‘always has behind it a hold-up of emotional development.’ This bears, for me, on the issue you raise of failed Bildung or stunted growth, the 'permanent adolescence' of Victorian decadence. When Pater writes, in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, 'Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,' he expresses resistance not only to Victorian moralism, but also to the forms of psychological maturity associated with it. The doctrine of art for its own sake – art as ‘experience itself’ – defies representational aesthetics; in a deeper sense, it defies psychological realism, the orbit of full-blown, three-dimensional, morally informed selves.
Wilde said of James that he wrote fiction as if it were a painful duty; he must have had in mind James’s Puritan legacy, but also the fictional lenses or centers of consciousness that filter and inflect it. James describes them as ‘finely aware’ and ‘richly responsible’ – a locution that belongs, however, to his late, modernist idiom, and cunningly mixes together sensibility and responsibility, sensuous attunement and moral discernment. In the sphere of decadence, by contrast, aware and responsible being is felt to be eviscerated and impoverished; in order to sustain itself, it disavows sense-laden experience, and the polarized passions which fuel primal psychic dynamics. Decadence itself – conceived of as a deliquescence, dissolution or disintegration – is the province of early disruptive, dissipative patterns of relation. Even where it crystallizes (defensively) into chiseled lapidary or marmoreal forms, and assumes anhedonic, ascetic or ritualistic features, it remains in possession of its 'fundamental passions' (James's phrase), and possessed by them.
In modernist literature, psychological realism is reconfigured along these lines. Subjectivity emerges as diaphanous, in Pater's sense as I understand it. In your review, you refer to ‘the condition of Paterian Aestheticism, where the call for a passionate attitude of sensuous enjoyment sits uneasily with the idea of a diaphanous personality who cultivates a peculiarly disembodied aesthetic subjectivity in order to disrupt the assumption of any singular or habitual identity.’ But perhaps diaphaneity is not (or not simply) a state of disembodiment; it may be best construed as great permeability to psychic and cultural currents otherwise excluded from the confines of a rigidly defined identity. It is capable of appearing ghostly, dematerialized or depersonalized, but is nonetheless rooted in the life of the senses, and linked to primitive fantasies of nurture and privation. Modernist selves are more mature and richly elaborated than decadent ones; but they are so only insofar as they sustain an openness to psychic deep structures, with their often inchoate or disruptive expressiveness. The vital core of modernism, its openness and expressiveness, is thus inherited (and transmuted) from decadence. It seems to me that for readers with 'resolutely literary' sensibilities (as you aptly put it), the appeal of a modernist work depends on the presence in it of this diaphanous quality; specifically, on the ability to mobilize the language of sensation or ‘aesthesis’ (in Ruskin's sense), but also of fantasy, myth and religion, to embody deep-lying psychic configurations.
AE: I’m very much in sympathy with everything you’ve said about Pater’s ideal of diaphaneite, that ideal of sensuous receptivity and impressionability which is really at the basis of Aestheticism as a value. You describe diaphaneite as a ‘great permeability to psychic and cultural currents otherwise excluded from the confines of a rigidly defined identity’. And I think your are right that its in Decadence that this is most frequently figured, either positively or negatively, as a condition of adolescence, although there is clearly a dichotomy in the ways Decadence was imagined as arrested development or as the ‘autumn of the body’. Nevertheless, it’s in one of the foundational text of Aesthetic Hellenism, Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’, that I find the aesthetic ideal of adolescence articulated most explicitly. The sensuous capacities of youth are embodied or symbolized in the image of the adorante – the statue of a young man ‘as he springs first from the sleep of nature, his white light taking no colour from any one-sided experience.’ The value Pater finds here goes back to Keats’s image of poetic subjectivity as ‘ethereal chemicals’, and it’s the source of his famous critique of habit in the ‘Conclusion’. What the adorante figures is a personality who is ‘characterless, so far as character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life’. Now there is a very powerful force here both for sensuous receptivity and resistance to performative conventions, what you describe as the forms of psychological maturity associated with Victoran moralism. But there is also a negative side to the way that Pater approaches the aesthetic personality and aesthetic bildung which is closely associated with the diaphanous value. The danger is that what began as a resistance to conventional Victorian performatives – in terms of gender, sexuality, professional identity et al. – becomes a resistance to the performative as such, which is manifested in a compulsive ironic detachment. This subsequently becomes a performance of detachment which might in many cases mimic conservative or patriarchal constructions of authority, professionalism and maturity. But more generally it replaces diaphaneite with a habitual posture of negation. So whilst I would maintain your affirmation of diaphaneite as sensuous receptivity rooted in an impressionable body, there is another axis of diaphanous subjectivity which is less about aesthetic materiality and more about the cultivation of ‘ideal personages’. The idealist project of bildung is based on the idea of progress through supercession and stages, with the consequence that it invariably posits a movement of disavowal – a casting off of former selves, which was theorized in German Romanticism as the essential force of literary irony. You have illuminated the negative aspects of bildung in James’s work with extraordinary subtletly, particularly in your account of Wings. But I think the negative aspects of bildung are also integral to Pater’s work: they are manifested most clearly in the essay on Leonardo, where Pater uses the narrative form of the miniature bildungsroman in the wonderful vignette about Leonardo’s artistic progress according to a via negativa: ‘the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts’. Its significant to me also that the discourse of the sublime starts to creep into Pater’s essay here – the terrible and strange Romantic image and agony that rends the smooth surfaces of Aesthetic Hellenism, the struggle between reason and beauty – and I think this sublimity does tend to produce a disembodied state of aesthetic subjectivity, perhaps as a symptomatic or defensive reaction. I’m thinking now of your analysis of Milly, and her curious combination of diaphanous receptivity and what you describe as an almost military rigidity. And Milly herself has been subject to the shock of the sublime, dramatized but also hidden from us in the Alpine scene; this is an experience that she perhaps imagines she can somehow surpass or sublate in her return to the lifeworld of London, but I wonder if the immobility that you describe so well is to some extent the product of her sublime trauma – the shellshock of aesthetic infinity.
One of the reasons that Milly seems central to your analysis of Decadence is the peculiar frailty which you ascribe to the diaphanous subject: in your book you focus from the beginning on the ‘frail vessels’ James adopts as centres of consciousness. This opens up another problem which is perhaps integral to ‘diaphanous’ subjectivity. Aside from Strether, so often there is the suspicion that James’s various aesthetic ephebes – Isabel, Maisie, Fleda, Milly – may be excessively and dangerously impressionable, like the ‘beautiful exotic woman’ in Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’? Perhaps both James and Wilde gendered this impressionability. I’d be interested to know how you see the arc and progress of James’s thinking about Aestheticism and Decadence in this sense.
AK: I think of diaphaneite not only as an aesthetic ideal (though it certainly congeals into one in Pater's early essay), but, more fundamentally, as the sense of a terribly thin 'psychic skin' (Esther Bick's concept). No wonder then that James's vessels of consciousness, or ‘lucid reflectors,’  are variously embattled (Strether, to my mind, is no exception).
In the original version of the Conclusion, the lucent veil of ‘reverie’ filters deep-dyed primal realities. A passion whose ‘outlets are sealed begets tension of nerve, in which the sensible world comes to one with reinforced brilliance and relief – all redness is turned to blood, all waters into tears.’ Reverie, however, with its ‘absent or veiled object,’ generates not only redness – a feverish red, as of ‘scarlet lilies’ – but a ghostly translucence; ‘as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand […], somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them.’ The haunting imagery of white over red – a red concrete as blood, and a diaphanous veil concrete as tears – evokes a vision of macerated skin, a half-flayed envelope which fails to hold together the bodily self.
In Marius the Epicurean, the concrete, sensory fullness of inner reality is half-veiled by the paler shade of reverie. ‘Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral or monastic,’ hangs about white-nights, the ancestral homestead. The place is the ‘peculiar sanctuary’ of the widowed mother, who is shrouded in perpetual mourning. For the son and namesake (‘Marius,’ named after his father, but also ‘Pater’), the late patriarch lives in the resentment he inspires. His ghostly presence is crystallized, malignantly, from the rigid, ritualized sorrow of the Mater Dolorosa. (Did Pater privately name her ‘Maria,’ after his own mother? Marius would then be obliquely her namesake as well.) The color template of white over red recurs in the description of the villa. Pater narrates:
‘The red rose came first,’ says a quaint German mystic, speaking of ‘the mystery of so-called white things,’ as being ‘ever an after-thought’ – the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material – the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal. So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous dreaming, only half-veiled by sleep.
You mention the paradox of adolescence/senescence that develops around decadence. The sense of antiquation or obsolescence seems to me to arise, in part, through contact with archaic substrates of the psyche – substrates which remain, however, permanently young. This is coupled with powerful ambivalent identifications with maternal figures, who, like Mona Lisa, are ‘older than the rocks.’
In Pater’s essay on Leonardo, the series of disgusts that leads to perfection does not seem to me to point to Bildung in the full psychological sense. (I would insist, here, on the psychodynamic resonance, which your notion of ‘negative Bildung’ does not register.) The buried hedonic charge of ‘disgust’ – degustation, or tasting (Carolyn Williams' insight), the punitive withdrawal and the (morbid) perfectionism it breeds, belong to a psychic sphere associated with sensuous gratification and its inhibition or control, not with a riper capacity for accommodation, for perceiving whole persons and their needs, for containing one’s aggression and guilt and feeling concern for others. Taking this phrase in isolation, there is little to choose between Pater's Leonardo and, say, Gilbert Osmond.
What you say about Milly’s crisis at the Alpine pass seems to me very useful. The issue is not (or not primarily) narrative ambiguity, though you seem to focus on that in your review. By now, James has lost interest in ambiguity as such. (The last work still entangled in it is The Sacred Fount, and I suggest in the book that the steeping of the imagination there in decadent motifs is instrumental in dissolving the ambiguous impasse.) Susan's cadence, as she reflects for us Milly's opacity and invests it with life, is unmistakably Jamesian, and so carries conviction (at least with me). Still, you do well to insist on the significance of Milly's recessiveness. Susan, I would say, reflects one level – the communicable level – of her experience. The rest is silent, and suggests, perhaps, a sense of the abyss which is incommunicable – perhaps a kind of primitive anxiety of falling endlessly through space. James had intimate knowledge of primitive anxieties and their persistent nature, both through his father's  'vastation' and through his own early agony at the galerie d'Apollon. There may well be a link here to the discourse of the sublime, but I’m not sure how I would pursue it.
With regard to the Jamesian trajectory, I think he becomes 'decadent' no sooner than he becomes 'modernist,' and this mixture seems to obtain for all modernist work that has vitality. In the early and middle fiction he does different things, more or less successfully, and is engaged all the while in trying to distill and integrate his vision.
AE: Thanks for your thoughts on Osmond and disgust/control, which acutely focus my hitherto vague feeling that the character is defined by a suppressed and disciplined wretching motion.
The reason I’ve focused on the opening of the sublime is that it seems to me that the late James tends to look for the origins of the aesthetic subject in trauma or sudden breakthrough; with Adam Verver it’s explicitly imagined as the sublime opening of a new realm (imagined through Keats’s Sonnet on Chapman’s Homer and Cortez’s discovery of America). With Milly it’s the darker recognition of mortality. I wonder if such traumas might be the origin of the ‘pyschic thin skin’ you define as the quality of Diaphaneite. If Pater’s diaphaneite is the idealized form of this thin skin, this begs the question of how it might protect and maintain itself as an ‘evanescent shade’. Laurel Brake mentioned to me at a Pater conference that she’d discovered a C19 advert for some very thin and impossibly fine French writing paper called ‘Diaphaneite’. I thought it was an exquisite figure for Pater’s sense of ‘the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the inward becomes thinner and thinner’? It does seem to me that Pater is unaware, at this stage, of the potentiality for trauma in this form of aesthetic personality – the capacity for the thin veil or membrane to be rent and torn, like impossibly delicate paper, whenever experiences etches itself permanently. The insistence on cultivating an autonomous sphere and elite culture might be read as the necessary means of protecting this from rupture, or as a symptomatic retreat - a defense mechanism of recoil from prospective trauma. For the Pater of the 1860s, though, there still seems to be the hope that this extraordinarily fragile psychic economy might be maintained as an ideal ‘repose and simplicity’, in spite of its forced independence and discontent with society.
I take from my reading of your book that James’s late fiction comes to fundamentally overturn this ideal, and that it does so primarily on a psycho-dynamic level? For me, this represents a significant development or shift from his earlier focus on the cultural and performative coordinates of Aestheticism.
To clarify this sense of historical shift, let me just go back to one important figure of the diaphanous we’ve not mentioned. James could represent Diaphaneite with a certain mixture of parody and sympathy as late as 1890, in the figure of Gabriel Nash. But I think his critique of Paterian Aestheticism in The Tragic Muse is primarily focused around the cultural politics of consumption, the incompatibility of aesthetic idealism with the new logics of the marketplace, and its refusal of what James sees as the necessary independence afforded by artistic institutions as opposed to the aristocratic independence of Nash’s angelic indifference (which again returns to my thematic of Romantic irony). But after Decadence, these are no longer James’s concerns. I take your message now to be that one of the fundamental shifts in the late James is his concern with the psychodynamics of Aestheticism, and that this is quite distinct from any of his early engagements and portraits. And that this is the ground of his modernity or modernism.
AK: In ‘Diaphaneite,’ Pater may be more sensitized to the presence of violence and pain than you allow for– after all, one of his exemplary diaphanous figures is Charlotte Corday, Marat’s murderess. You will remember, too, that ‘blitheness and repose’ constitute for him a circumscribed achievement; Winckelmann’s conception of art, he writes, excludes ‘that bolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil.’
You’ve written: “If Pater’s diaphaneite is the idealized form of [psychic] thin skin, this begs the question of how it might protect and maintain itself as an ‘evanescent shade.’”
I’m not sure I follow, but it seems to me that idealization is, precisely, protective.
I think it would be fair to say, in line with your argument, that in his late work James dispenses with the defense of ironic detachment; this is shadowed forth, perhaps, in The Tragic Muse, as the ghostly evanescence of Gabriel Nash. By the same stroke, however, the grip of realist modes, anchored in what Lawrence calls ‘the old social and moral ego of character,’ is loosened. Aesthetic experience is steeped in fury and mire, to borrow Yeats’s image – steeped, that is, in the element of decadence.
In a larger sense, the notion of aesthetic autonomy is retained in much decadent and modernist literature. While it clearly serves, in part, to deflect the growing impingements of the culture of consumption, its center of gravity is different. The forces of the market signify less in their proper terms than through conversion and assimilation into psychic matrices. Fundamentally, the segregated realm of art serves to limn a space where psychic strife can be contained and experienced. As aestheticism mutates into decadence, ‘art for art’ provides a frame in which the hardened integuments of identity can safely dissolve. In this domain, well-wrought form holds together recalcitrant or messy matter, the fabric of sense-saturated imagining.
Your paper on aesthetic irony (“‘Master of Irony’: Henry James, Transatlantic bildung and the Critique of Aestheticism”; Symbiosis, October 2008) brings into focus James’s recoil from the ideal of autonomy. In The Portrait of a Lady, Osmond’s ironic façade emerges as a posture, designed to disguise a host of vested interests. ‘You seem to me to be always envying some one,’ Isabel says near the end. ‘Yesterday it was the Pope; to-day it’s poor Lord Warburton.’ Osmond’s reply is revealing: ‘My envy’s not dangerous; it wouldn’t hurt a mouse. I don’t want to destroy the people – I only want to BE them. You see it would destroy only myself.’ With the unmasking of detachment, profound dependencies rise to the surface. We become aware of the form of primal privation Osmond embodies – of the radical curtailment in him of personal existence. It seems to me that the sense of anguished, outraged dependence lays a powerful claim to authenticity; but in the world of this novel, where psychological realism is poised defensively against primitive urges and fears, it finds no viable expression.
Your analysis of irony draws on Kierkegaard’s insight: ‘There is in the ironist an Urgrund (primordial ground), an intrinsic value, but the coin he issues does not have the specified value but, like paper money, is nothing, and yet all his transactions with the world take place in this kind of money.’ Osmond, you note, is figured as ‘a fine gold coin’; and I think it is the deeper value of such currency, the inner trans-activity it triggers, that impels or enables Isabel’s return to Rome.
You find that Isabel fails, deplorably, to break free of her husband’s ‘aristocratic forms of aestheticism’; I, however, incline to read into her seeming failure an intimation of deeper realizations. The fruit of her experience, in this sense, is James’s late phase. The supple textures of the late style are richly expressive of the ‘primordial ground’ of identity. Gilbert Osmond transforms, if we like, into Adam Verver, a character who tastes of life as from ‘a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty.’ The imagery (I cite freely from the book) suggests the sealed-off, insular quality of his inner being. It is difficult not to read ‘uneffaceable guilt’ into the history of the deposed dynasty which is at once his own and not his own, usurped and disowned – a connection whose gilded surface is cut off from its darker depths. The museum he erects in American City is a ‘monument to the religion he wished to propagate, the exemplary passion, the passion for perfection at any price.’ The price of Adam’s perfectionism (and its motive force) is a buried destructiveness, a violence stamped inversely, as it were, as strenuous denial, on his conscious experience, like gold-coating on a fragile vessel.
Prince Amerigo, whom Adam acquires for his daughter as a human morceau de musée, is, like Osmond, an ‘old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used.’ His insularity or obsolescence is linked to a deep-seated fear of staking out a hidden core, of subjecting selfhood to a disruptive process of becoming known. His vision of a ‘great white curtain’ which separates him from his prospective relations bears out his sense of the opacity, to them, of his ‘personal quantity.’ In conversation with Maggie, he seems anxious that this quantity should find expression, so that he may escape ‘futility’; but in a later, introspective passage, it is the idea of self-realization, measured against ‘the quantity of confidence’ reposed in him by the Ververs, which proves to be laden with anxiety. He knows he is the subject of ‘general expectation, an expectation not so much of anything in particular as a large bland blank assumption of merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and value. It was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used, stamped with glorious arms, medieval, wonderful, of which the worth in mere modern change, sovereigns and half-crowns, would be great enough, but as to which, since there were finer ways of using it, such taking to pieces was superfluous. That was the image for the security in which it was open to him to rest. He was to constitute a possession yet escape being reduced to his component parts. What would this mean but that practically he was never to be tried or tested? What would it mean but that if they didn’t ‘change’ him they really wouldn’t know – he wouldn’t know himself – how many pounds, shillings and pence he had to give?’
Beyond the avowed need to have his mettle tried, the passage registers the force of his resistance to being ‘changed’ in the process – reduced, taken to pieces, exploited or consumed. The mystery beyond the veil, the ‘white mist’ of the Ververs’ confidence, takes shape for him as a question of required action: ‘It would come to asking what they expected him to do.’ They, however, would look at the matter differently: ‘Oh, you know, it’s what we expect you to be!’ The license, seemingly, is to remain in essential integrity, preserving the indivisible, ‘ameristic’ quality traditionally attributed to the soul and echoed in his Christian name; the feeling which prevails with him, however, is that, ‘say what they might,’ the Ververs’ estimate of him would subject him, sooner or later, to ‘the practical proof’; he would be taken apart, reduced to ever smaller bits. For the present, he allows himself to be purchased all of a piece, a perfect fragment. ‘You’re a rarity,’ Maggie tells him, ‘an object of beauty, an object of price. You’re not perhaps absolutely unique, but you’re so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you – you belong to a class about which everything is known. You’re what they call a morceau de musée.’ (49) As she speaks, the Prince seems to emerge for us as an edible ‘morsel’; we’re brought in touch with the greed he arouses, and with the terror associated with it.
AE: This terrible consumption you describe is perhaps also that ‘sacred terror’ which filters through the gilded salon of The Awkward Age – a flame figured by the impossibly refined Vaderbank and which binds together a coterie of decadents by an obscure mimetic aspiration. Or the ‘cold still flame’ which you cite in your book as the basis of Adam Verver’s circumscribed psychic space of connoisseurship. It’s perhaps specific to Adam that the cold flame is never properly manifested, in contrast to Osmond, Vanderbank or Amerigo – all of whom are figuring their sacred terror or fine gold coin in a performance of taste. In one of Adorno’s typically irascible pot-shots at Symbolist aesthetics, he suggests that ‘the emptier the mystery, the more its guardians must rely on “bearing”’, and by ‘bearing’ he means that posture of distinction claimed through an artifice of aristocracy. And the model here is Hoffmanstahl, who ‘convulsively identifies with aristocracy’ (Prisms, 195). I think this amalgam of psychic convulsion and performative identification aptly figures the way that James figures the decadent personality. But I’d like to return, via the Amerigo, to The Portrait of a Lady, with the hope that there is a value to be retrieved from the axis of Pater and James. It’s important for me to qualify here that I don’t see Isabel Archer’s aristocratic Aestheticism as a ‘deplorable failure’, nor as a suggestion of her indebtedness to Osmond. It’s clearly a sign of her inability to formulate her own concept of freedom within an ideal of aesthetic democracy (so Linda Dowling’s work is pertinent to the case). But there is a ‘finer’ aspiration in Isabel’s aesthetic sense, and she is noble to have the faith to believe that she shared this with Osmond. To live up to this ideal would demand a consistent performative effort – and at this stage James is fundamentally concerned with the performative construction of Aestheticism, both in a Greenblattian sense – self-fashioning as manipulation of courtly conventions – and in a Foucauldian sense – the ethics of care for self. Isabel’s performative aspiration to an aristocratic Aestheticism is related to Wilde’s whimsical student pose of ‘living up’ to his blue china, since it is grounded in aesthetic self-fashioning, but for her it is an ethical performance. She feels this as a dimly formulated but sincere idealist project; ‘she should be what she appeared and she would appear what she was’. It is part of Osmond’s bad faith that he refuses to be identified with his performative construction, but this is equally what constitutes his value as a ‘fine gold coin’ which is irreducible to the ‘common currency’. As you have suggested, Amerigo continues to carry the sacred flame through his resistance to ‘mere modern change’, and of course we both note the economic-aesthetic registers here, but I’d like to conclude with a sense of how these figures manifest a fundamental difficulty and challenge in the discourse of Pater’s Aesthetic Hellenism.
Osmond, Vanderbank and Amerigo are Pater’s ‘characterless’ disposition perfected, but precisely in so far as the protected image of the adorante is achieved, the value of diaphaneite is betrayed. ‘Godlike geniality’, it seems, can only come at the expense of mobile receptivity. As an essentially processual and inchoate sensuous value, Diaphaneite can never be figured nor achieved – this is both its abjection and its sublimity. But this is a different kind of sublimity to that which is figured by Prince Amerigo, or the flame-like Vanderbank. These Jamesian decadents nurture a sublime darkness – a resistance to figuration which has a terrible quality to their admiring satellites. This fulfils the gothic potential of Osmond, but I think you have articulated many of the ways that the late James presses on these decadent figures in order to extract and distill a much darker range of psychic substances. What I value in Isabel Archer might be contrasted directly with the mimetic desires and devices of Osmond. There is another kind of mimetic sensibility suggested by Pater in his late work on Platonism: ‘Imitation: - it enters into the very fastnesses of character; and we, our souls, ourselves, are for ever imitating what we see and hear, the forms, the sounds which haunt our memories, our imagination […] we imitate unconsciously the line and colour of the walls around us, the tree by the wayside, the animals we pet or make use of, the very dress we wear’ (Plato and Platonism, 248). As one of these ‘susceptible beings’ (249), Isabel, the aesthetic ephebe, experiences the most painful tutelage, but her capacity to be deceived is compact with her fidelity to the diaphanous ideal. Freedman writes about her capacity for aesthesis emerging late in the novel, almost as a compensatory mechanism, but it is integral to her impressionable, adolescent or youthful subjectivity from the beginning. This is not only a quite different model of aesthetic subjectivity to Osmond’s, but also to that model of bildung as the ‘cultivation of detachment’ which has been circulated in recent discussions of Victorian cosmopolitanism. It’s a significant blessing then that Pater and James, ideal figures of a cosmopolitan Aestheticism, should have so consistently revealed the fissures and symbolic cracks in this well-wrought distance in order to uncover more permeable and fugitive forces.
Anna Kventsel	Andrew Eastham
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.	Independent Scholar
anna.kventsel@hotmail.com	easthamandrew@googlemail.com
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