H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: SIMONI

 G.: Speranza has a weakness for saying that Walter Pater is perhaps the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers. [dev.gutenberg.org] S.: “Pro-Italian” in the retrospective sense, I take it. Not because he belonged to an Italian school, but because he learned to inhabit Italy as an English mode of spiritual correction. [dev.gutenberg.org], [books.google.com] G.: Exactly. He does not merely travel to Italy; he introjects it. Or rather, he introjects certain Italian figures until they become styles of inwardness. And in the case we are discussing, he introjects Michelangelo Buonarroti under the chapter-title “The Poetry of Michelangelo.” [en.wikipedia.org], [victorianweb.org] S.: Which is already interesting, because he chooses the poems as his way in, not merely the marble. [victorianweb.org] G.: Yes. That is philosophically revealing. Pater’s Michelangelo is not only a sculptor or painter but a consciousness, and the poetry gives him an English route to that consciousness. [victorianweb.org], [books.google.com] S.: So when you and I call him Simoni in our little economy, we are not playing with a mere surname. We are insisting on the person before the mononym. [en.wikipedia.org] G.: Quite. “Michelangelo” is what tourists say, and the tourist is always half a metaphysician of surfaces. S.: Whereas “Simoni” returns him to family, civic rootedness, and a Tuscan human particularity. G.: Exactly. And Pater, though he writes “Michelangelo,” is actually trying to rescue something like Simoni: the inner exactness, the severity, the sweetness under force. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org] S.: Ah yes, sweetness and strength. G.: Quite. Pater’s famous formula: sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, ex forti dulcedo. That is where the philosophy begins for him. Pater is not doing mere art history; he is asking what kind of human form of life can hold terror and grace together without collapse. [victorianweb.org] S.: So the philosophical question is one of synthesis. G.: Better: one of disciplined tension. Pater sees in Simoni a managed excess, an energy always about to break through form and yet somehow recovering loveliness touch by touch. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org] S.: Which sounds almost Gricean, if one were indecent enough to say so. G.: Only structurally. Meaning lies in what is controlled rather than spilled. Freud later says something similar of the Moses: not action frozen, but passion mastered. The significance is in the delay, the restraint, the not-yet. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: So for Pater, Simoni is philosophical because he gives visible form to the question how force may remain intelligible only under self-command. G.: Excellent. That is exactly right. S.: And this is where the sublime enters? G.: Yes, though not in the crude Burkean sense of mere astonishment or fearfulness. For the Englishman after the Grand Tour, Simoni becomes one of the ways Italy defines the sublime as disciplined magnitude rather than picturesque ruin. S.: So not merely Alps and thunder, but interior amplitude made visible in art. G.: Precisely. The Grand Tour had trained the English eye to collect objects, sites, names, ruins, and views. Pater belongs to the post-Grand Tour condition, where Italy becomes not a route but a repertoire of inward styles. [jstor.org] S.: That is, the older traveller goes to Italy to acquire cultivation; Pater reads Italy in order to acquire a form of self. G.: Very good. The Grand Tour produces connoisseurship. Pater produces introjection. S.: Then Simoni, for Pater, is less a destination than a mode of seriousness. G.: Exactly. He becomes the exemplary case of how form may contain convulsion without losing dignity. That is philosophical because it touches the relation of body to spirit, matter to intention, form to force, pleasure to severity. S.: Almost Aristotle by way of Aestheticism. G.: More Hellenic discipline after Christian and Renaissance pressure, but yes, the structure is philosophical. Pater’s criticism is always pretending to be only criticism while actually asking what sort of life deserves admiration. S.: And in Simoni’s case, the answer is a life in which strength has been rendered sweet without becoming soft. G.: Splendid. S.: Then why call Pater the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers? G.: Because he does not merely admire Italian works; he lets Italian forms reorganise English sensibility. The Renaissance is not a handbook of places but a school of inward migration. [dev.gutenberg.org], [books.google.com] S.: A curious thing for Oxford to produce. G.: Not so curious. Oxford often produces those who escape it best by making the escape inward first. S.: And later figures like you or your friends receive Pater at a distance. G.: Yes. By our generation, Pater is no longer merely the dangerous aesthete of undergraduate legend. He is a stylistic ancestor of seriousness without system. S.: That sounds like faint praise. G.: On the contrary. It is high praise. He knows that an essay may carry metaphysical pressure without becoming doctrinally swollen. S.: Which again brings him near Simoni. G.: Precisely. Simoni’s own works do not merely assert; they withhold, concentrate, delay, imply. Meaning is organised by restraint. That is exactly the sort of thing Pater’s sensibility can recognise. [grokipedia.com] S.: Then the chapter on Michelangelo is really a chapter on form as implication. G.: That is very good. Pater says less than his chapter means, but the means are arranged so that the reader gathers what sort of greatness is under inspection. [victorianweb.org], [en.wikisource.org] S.: So the later Gricean generation may read him as someone who practises in prose what Simoni practises in marble. G.: With due caution, yes. Pater’s essay is itself built on controlled under-saying. He does not force a system; he arranges impressions until one sees the form beneath them. S.: Which is why some accuse him of impressionism while missing the discipline. G.: Exactly. Pater is often called impressionistic by those who cannot detect organisation unless it arrives wearing a table of categories. S.: Then what is specifically philosophical for Pater about Simoni’s poetry? G.: The poetry lets him locate the inward metaphysics more directly than sculpture alone would. There the tensions of body and spirit, earthly beauty and transcendence, desire and renunciation, appear in language. Michelangelo’s letters and poems make the artistic problem audible as a problem of the soul. [grokipedia.com] S.: So Pater’s “Michelangelo” is not just the maker of David and Moses, but the poet of unresolved ascent. G.: Yes. The figure becomes philosophically legible because the poems articulate what the statues imply: that greatness lies not in solved repose but in held tension. S.: Which again shades into the sublime. G.: Indeed. The sublime here is not the endless formlessness of mountain or sea, but the experience of form under pressure from what exceeds form. S.: So Simoni gives the Englishman a specifically Italian sublime: not vastness without shape, but excess governed by shape. G.: Excellent. That is the line. S.: And this differs from the ordinary Grand Tour inheritance. G.: Very much. The Grand Tourist often takes home fragments, marbles, engravings, taste, and stories. Pater takes home a criterion of intensity. Italy becomes for him a discipline of perception. [jstor.org] S.: Which is why his conclusion in The Renaissance became so infamous among undergraduates. G.: Yes. The hard, gemlike flame and all the rest. But one must not reduce that to hedonism. Even the famous conclusion is really about concentration, selection, heightened awareness, not mere indulgence. [dev.gutenberg.org], [cdn.bookey.app] S.: Then Simoni, for Pater, teaches a severe form of intensity. G.: Precisely. Austerity can be more intense than indulgence. Michelangelesque form proves that. S.: This is why you think Pater more philosophically serious than many modern critics allow. G.: Certainly. He is philosophically serious because he asks, through art, what sort of form life itself should take. S.: And the answer is not English moderation. G.: No. Or not merely. It is moderation under pressure from greatness, which is another matter. S.: Then how do you and I, from a later generation, regard all this? G.: We regard it with a double perspective. First, we see how deeply English culture once needed Italy as a corrective of scale, intensity, and form. Second, we see that Pater’s Italy is no simple national object but a selective inward construction. S.: So he is pro-Italian, but in a highly chosen way. G.: Exactly. He is not interested in Italy as census or parliament. He is interested in the Italy that yields forms of seriousness unavailable in ordinary English weather. S.: Which is why he can seem to some almost anti-English. G.: Only to those who think England should never be corrected. S.: An abundant class. G.: Extremely. Now, Simoni’s role in defining the sublime for the Englishman—how would you put that? S.: He teaches that the sublime need not be formless terror or natural immensity. It may be the felt pressure of inward magnitude upon perfectly controlled form. G.: Very good. That is the Michelangelesque sublime. S.: And Pater makes it available in English prose. G.: Yes. He naturalises it without domesticating it completely, which is his finest trick. S.: Then the post-Grand Tour Englishman no longer needs to collect Italy physically; he may carry it as a criterion. G.: Excellent. Italy becomes not itinerary but interior standard. S.: And Pater’s chapter is one of the chief instruments of that transfer. G.: Yes. Through The Poetry of Michelangelo, he gives Oxford and its afterlife a way of speaking of greatness that is neither merely moral nor merely aesthetic. [victorianweb.org], [books.google.com] S.: Which is also why later readers can take him philosophically without pretending he wrote treatises. G.: Exactly. Philosophical pressure does not require scholastic format. An essay may do the work if it arranges attention correctly. S.: So Speranza is justified in treating Pater as an Oxford philosopher, not merely a belletrist. G.: Entirely justified. Pater’s medium is criticism, but his object is a form of life. S.: And Simoni helps because he makes “the whole” visible. G.: Yes, the whole organised by withheld force. That is why Freud’s Moses comes in so naturally. Meaning resides in the organisation of restraint. Simoni’s greatest figures do not simply do; they hold themselves in intelligible suspension. [en.wikipedia.org] S.: Which is very close to your own taste in conversation. G.: Naturally. I prefer people who can mean more than they say without spilling their minds onto the carpet. S.: Pater would approve. G.: He would at least italicise the approval delicately. S.: Then what about the Englishman and the sublime before Pater? G.: Before Pater, the sublime comes heavily through Burke, landscape, terror, magnitude, obscurity, and natural excess. Pater gives the Englishman an Italian revision: the sublime of the humanly made, where force is interiorised and disciplined in form. S.: So the mountain is replaced by the statue, and the storm by the held gesture. G.: Exactly. That is a large shift. It civilises the sublime without diminishing it. S.: Which is perhaps why Pater remains so useful to those who dislike mere atmospheric inflation. G.: Quite. He refines grandeur into pressure felt through form. S.: And Oxford receives that as style. G.: Yes, though the better sort of style: style as criterion of intelligence, not decoration. S.: Then perhaps the philosophical heart of Pater’s Simoni is this: greatness is not brute intensity, but intelligible intensity. G.: Splendid. That is the phrase to keep. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: Only intermittently. G.: Good. Now, one might object that Pater’s Italy is too selective, too aesthetic, too little social or political. S.: Of course. But that is not a damaging objection if one knows what kind of work he is doing. G.: Exactly. He is not writing a handbook to the peninsula. He is identifying forms of sensibility. S.: Which is why Simoni is less a citizen than a spiritual test-case. G.: Yes. Pater reads him as the site where strength, sweetness, inward conflict, and formal mastery become mutually legible. S.: Then the “most pro-Italian” phrase should be heard in this exact sense: Pater is pro-Italian because Italy supplies him not with subject-matter but with standards. G.: Very good. S.: And Grice, from later on, would grant that Pater has in some sense put himself into Simoni’s shoes. G.: Or at least into his posture. Not as contemporary companion, obviously, but as inward imitator of a style of seriousness. S.: Which is perhaps the more interesting form of reception. G.: Much more interesting. The Grand Tour takes one to Florence; Pater lets Florence happen inside English prose. S.: And the later generation can admire this without necessarily sharing the whole Aesthetic programme. G.: Certainly. One can reject the cult and keep the discrimination. S.: Which is exactly what you would do. G.: Naturally. I take from Pater the seriousness of form and leave him his more undergraduate admirers. S.: Their waistcoats, especially. G.: Especially their waistcoats. Now, should we say that Simoni becomes for Pater a philosophy of the whole? S.: Perhaps in the sense that each single work intimates an organising discipline larger than itself. The whole is not total theory, but total pressure. G.: Excellent. The whole as governing norm, not as explicit system. That is much better. S.: Then Simoni’s letters and poems matter because they prevent the visual works from floating free as mere monuments. G.: Yes. They reattach form to consciousness, and that is philosophical gold. S.: Which is why the Oxford edition of Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry is itself so apt to the case. [grokipedia.com] G.: Indeed. It reminds readers that the artist has a voice, not just a dome. S.: A dome is never enough. G.: Quite right. Nor a David. S.: Especially not for the English imagination, which likes words even when pretending to adore silence. G.: Very true. Then one more point: Pater’s prose itself becomes a kind of post-Grand Tour vehicle. S.: Because it transports without itinerary. G.: Exactly. It gives one the cultivated afterlife of travel, when travel has been turned into inward criticism. S.: So if the eighteenth-century traveller returns with casts and notebooks, the nineteenth-century Paterian returns with categories of impression. G.: Yes. And the twentieth-century reader inherits both, while pretending to despise tourism. S.: A familiar modern duplicity. G.: Entirely. Now, can we formulate the final answer simply? S.: Pater finds in Simoni a philosophical image of form under pressure: sweetness with strength, discipline with inward excess, the sublime humanised without being diminished. In doing so he gives English readers, especially Oxford readers after the Grand Tour, an Italian criterion of greatness that can be inwardly inhabited rather than merely externally admired. G.: Perfectly done. S.: And Speranza’s thought that Pater is the most pro-Italian of Oxford philosophers? G.: Not foolish at all. So long as “pro-Italian” means that Italy furnishes him with the standards by which English inwardness is corrected, enlarged, and refined. [dev.gutenberg.org], [victorianweb.org] S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Florentine, with one Oxford candle burning in the studiolo.