SOURCE: “Walter Pater and the Art of Misrepresentation,” in Annals of Scholarship, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1990, pp. 165-79.

In the following essay, Conlon examines several of Pater's “artful misrepresentations” and argues that they were created to more fully present Pater's “imaginative sense of fact.”

Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf                     and blind; But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such                     a heavy mind! 

—Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi's” (1855)

One immediate problem with the issue of representation/misrepresentation in Victorian art and letters is that it is embedded within the ubiquitous question of authority in Victorian culture: who is to decide what, in criticism, is a representation or a misrepresentation of Leonardo's “Mona Lisa” or, in painting, of a rocket falling in the night sky above Cremorne Gardens? In Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) an approving Inspector of...