Gaston De Latour: An Unfinished Romance

by Walter Pater

Scarcely two years after Walter Pater's death, Macmillan & Company published Gaston de An Unfinished Romance. The author of works critical to the formation of the Transition and Modernist periods set his last novel in the turbulent years following the Reformation. Selected chapters first appeared serially in Macmillan's Magazine and the Fortnightly Review, but the posthumous volume edited by Charles L. Shadwell, Pater's long-time friend, remains controversial. For a century readers have seen only a portion of what Pater wrote for Gaston de Latour. Shadwell withheld six manuscript chapters. Pater's prominence and widening influence in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century studies makes those missing chapters more intriguing than ever. ELT Press is pleased to publish this long-awaited new edition Gaston de The Revised Text. Edited from the holographs and based on definitive material incorporating all known fragments, The Revised Text includes the crucial suppressed chapters.

Genres: English Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1896

About the author

People know British writer Walter Horatio Pater for his volumes of aesthetic criticism, including Appreciations (1889).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...

Reviews

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest revelation for me of all of the writers on the Powys list has been Walter Pater. Perhaps it was my visit last year to Florence and the cities of Umbria (which inspired me to read the List), but I found his Studies in the Renaissance to be a watershed moment in my cultural life, and the famous 2-page conclusion I was carrying around in my wallet for a while, to be read from time to time.

Gaston is the fifth of the books on the Powys list, it is sort of a combination of "Marius the Epicurean" and "Imaginary Portraits," taking place in French in the 16th century during the French Wars of Religion. The "portraits", which are chapters 3, 4, 5 and 7, are of Montaigne (he gets two chapters), Ronsard and Bruno. The first two chapters discuss Gaston, his castle in the middle of La Beauce (a great flat open space in the center of France, where corn is grown), and also Chartres, where he goes to serve as an assistant. Chapter 6 discusses the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, where thousands of Huguenots were killed.

The book is, like the others, of incredibly high quality and subtlety, and, like Henry James, needs to be read twice (or three times) in order to capture the meaning. Pater's language is hypnotic, beautiful, and delicate. There's really no plot, it's more of a collection of images. Meeting Ronsard in his garden, going to church, and then returning for a dinner is treated with such richness and depth you really feel like you're there, and the visit to Montaigne in his famous tower-library is also vivid. The book elevates you to a refined aethestic level which is difficult to describe.

To understand the work (and frankly some things did not seem believable), I had to read the biographies of these writers, also a lot about the history of France at the time. Unfortunately Pater did not complete the work, but I felt like these delicious fragments were so wonderful, I was grateful for what I had.

Pater invented criticism as an art form (see Wilde's essay "The Critic as Artist") and historical fiction ("Marius" is the first one. He was the intellectual founder of the Aesthetic Movement.

Anyway, a strong recommendation, but it should perhaps be the last of the Pater books that you read, as reading this as a stand-alone book, it would be incomprehensible.

[Ray's Artshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading Gaston de LaTour was a pleasure. In Charles Shadwell's preface, he writes that the novel "if completed, would have been a parallel study of character to "Marius the Epicurean": the scene shifted to another age of transition" and it was to Marius that my thoughts returned several times as I read.
Where Pater, here, interprets Bruno's nature and beliefs as justifying a sensuous and sensitive eye for "humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks", he shows us Marius protesting against the unnatural contempt for the body that he had found with Marcus Aurelius, and the young man relieved that "the very person of [his Christian friend] Cornelius was nothing less than a sanction of that reverent delight Marius had always had in the visible body of man".
If you have previously read Marius I don't think you can miss the contrasts (as well as the similarities) in these 'parallel studies'. For instance, whereas Bruno's conception of the 'indifference of contraries' leads to his wondering "Dare one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be superficial rather than substantial differences", it is the very traits of "distinction, selection, refusal" that set Cornelius apart. Because the rest of the novel is lost to us, I suppose we can only guess how much of a lasting influence Bruno's thought was going to have on Gaston's mind.

This review is longer already than it needs to be, I can't help but talk at length about the book, that's the effect Pater's concentrated thought has.

I will say one thing more, that I was really impressed by the supernatural episode involving Gaston's three friends, Jasmin, Amadée and Camille, who meet their doubles, stained with blood. I appreciate the memorable supernatural aspects in some of the Imaginary Portraits too. I wonder if Pater would have touched on this haunting image again later in the novel, had he finished it?

[Edit Burla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a slow reader at the best of times, but when I read Walter Pater I need to slow down even more to absorb the meaning of his writings. Pater's prose is so meticulously constructed, at the same time so complex and yet so efficient, that I have to read it word for word to follow along. That does not make it tedious, though, as the rewards of reading it attentively are great indeed. It is a great pity that this book was never finished.