ABSTRACT
This use of the word 'harmony' might cause alarm. Pater is notorious for trying 'to bring literature ... under those conditions, by conformity to which music takes rank as the typically perfect art'.3 But this is by no means the trivial formalism it is taken to be. On the contrary, Pater insists that 'over and above ... colour and mystic perfume and ... reasonable structure' - the merely aesthetic - truly great literature 'finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life'. The key words linking the two halves of this claim are 'harmony', 'reasonable structure', 'logical', 'architectural' and 'structure of human life' - all implying determinate systems of relation, coherent and recurring patterns of difference, which persist 'in and through the series of their mutations'. This is a much tougher idea than the deference to human values signalled in the phrase 'the great structure of human life'. The principle of sanity in art, in logic, in language, and in mind is not, Pater argues, the permanence of things, or meanings, or possibilities of sensation, or even values, but the permanence and the return of 'relationships ... wrought out in and through the series of their mutations'. This is a conception which takes us to the heart of what may be called the literary theory of the Decadents.
