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Title: Walter Pater
Author: Arthur Christopher Benson
Release date: September 26, 2025 [eBook #76935]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALTER PATER ***
_ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS_
WALTER PATER
BY
A. C. BENSON
FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1906,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1906.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
In the absence of any official biography of Walter Pater, it has been
necessary to collect information as to the events of his life from his
relatives and friends. My thanks are due, in the first place, to Miss
Pater and Miss Clara Pater, his sisters, who have given me the most
kind and courteous assistance throughout; to Dr. Shadwell, Provost of
Oriel, Pater’s oldest friend and literary executor, of whose sympathy
and interest it is impossible to speak too gratefully; to Dr. Bussell,
Vice-Principal of Brasenose, who has communicated to me many important
particulars; to Mr. Herbert Warren, President of Magdalene; to Dr.
Daniel, Provost of Worcester, and Mrs. Daniel; to Mr. Basil Champneys;
to Mr. Humphry Ward, formerly Fellow of Brasenose; to Mr. Douglas
Ainslie; to Miss Paget (Vernon Lee), and others who have put their
recollections at my disposal; to Mr. Edmund Gosse, who has permitted
me to use his published materials; to Mr. Howard Sturgis and Mr. C.
Fairfax Murray for careful criticism; to Miss Beatrice Layman, who has
given me invaluable help in verification and correction.
The books and articles which I have consulted, and to some of which
reference is made in the following pages, are the original editions
of Pater’s volumes, of various dates, and the Collected Edition of his
works, edited by Dr. Shadwell, 1902–1904 (Macmillan and Co.); _Essays
from the Guardian_, privately printed in 1896, and since published 1901
(Macmillan and Co.); _A Short History of Modern English Literature_,
1898 (Heinemann); _Critical Kit-Kats_, 1896 (Heinemann), and an article
in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, 1895 (Smith, Elder, and
Co.), by Mr. Edmund Gosse; _Walter Pater_, by Mr. Ferris Greenslet, in
the _Contemporary Men of Letter Series_, 1904 (Heinemann); an essay,
_Walter Pater_, in _Studies in Prose and Verse_, by Mr. Arthur Symons,
1904 (J. M. Dent); and an article in the _Fortnightly Review_, “The
Work of Mr. Pater,” by Lionel Johnson, September 1894 (Chapman and
Hall).
A. C. B.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
Early Life 1
CHAPTER II
Early Writings 27
CHAPTER III
Oxford Life 59
CHAPTER IV
Marius the Epicurean 89
CHAPTER V
London Life 117
CHAPTER VI
Later Writings 140
CHAPTER VII
Personal Characteristics 178
Index 221
WALTER PATER
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE
Very little is recorded and still less is known about the pedigree of
Pater. It is only in the main line of families that are established
in ancestral estates, and whose home is inherited by a succession of
heirs, that family traditions are apt to accumulate.
The name Pater is uncommon in England, and not at all uncommon in
Holland, the Dutch frequently latinising their names; this, and the
fact that a Dutch Admiral of that name settled in England at the time
of William of Orange, made some members of the Pater family think they
were originally of Dutch extraction; but this has never been verified.
In a journey through Holland, Walter Pater was much interested in a
picture at Amsterdam, by Van der Helst, of archers, with a tablet
giving the names of the winners in a contest of skill; at the top of
the list stands the name Pater.
The forefathers of Walter Pater were living at Weston-Underwood,
near Olney in Buckinghamshire, the home of Cowper, in the eighteenth
century, and some verses in the handwriting of the poet were preserved
by their descendants. One of the Olney Paters emigrated to America;
and here Richard Glode Pater, the father of Walter Pater, was born.
Early in the nineteenth century the household returned to England,
settling at Shadwell, between Wapping and Stepney; and here Richard
Pater practised medicine, careless of money and success alike, a man
of unobtrusive benevolence, labouring at the relief of suffering among
poor people, who often could not afford to pay for his advice. Here
he married a Miss Hill: four children were born to him, two sons, of
whom the elder, William Thompson Pater, became a doctor and died in
1887, and two daughters. Walter Horatio Pater was born in 1839, on
August 4th. Dr. Richard Pater died so early that his famous son could
hardly remember him. After his death the household moved to Enfield,
and here at an old house, now demolished, with a big garden, in the
neighbourhood of Chase Side, the children were brought up. This quiet
life was varied by visits to a place called Fish Hall, near Hadlow in
Kent, the residence of Walter Pater’s cousin and godmother, Mrs. Walter
May.
It is stated in biographical notices of Pater that for some generations
the sons of the family had been brought up as Catholics, the daughters
as Anglicans. But this has been too much insisted upon; as a matter
of fact the Roman Catholicism in the family was of late date. Walter
Pater’s great-grandfather was a convert, having married a lady of great
piety and sweetness, whose mother’s maiden name was Gage, belonging
to an old Roman Catholic family in Suffolk. Richard Pater, Walter’s
father, quitted the Roman Church before his marriage, and adopted
no particular form of faith; and Walter Pater was brought up as an
Anglican.
At the age of fourteen the boy was sent to the King’s School,
Canterbury, where he seems to have been regarded at first as idle and
backward; but he was popular in spite of an entire indifference to
games. Not till he entered the sixth form did his intellectual ambition
awaken.
It would be interesting to know something of the thoughts of this
grave, silent, and friendly boy through the impressionable years; but,
like many boys of ability, he was affected by a sensitive shyness,
a reticence about his inner thoughts. Cheerful, lively, chattering
children, who too often, alas! degenerate into the bores of later life,
can generally talk easily and unaffectedly about their tastes and
interests, and blithely reveal the slender sparkling stream of their
thoughts. But with boys of perceptive and meditative temperaments it
is mostly far otherwise. They find themselves overmastered by feelings
which they cannot express, and which they are ashamed of trying to
express for fear of being thought eccentric. Pater was always apt to
be reticent about his own interior feelings, and confided them only
to the more impersonal medium of his writings. He had no taste at
any time for indulging in reminiscence, and tended rather to be the
recipient of other people’s thoughts, which he welcomed and interpreted
with ready sympathy, than to be garrulous about the details of his own
life, which, with characteristic humility, he was disposed to consider
destitute of interest.
But one trait of character does undoubtedly emerge. He was
instinctively inclined to a taste for symbolical ceremony of
every kind. In the family circle he was fond of organising little
processional pomps, in which the children were to move with decorous
solemnity. He looked forward to taking orders in the Church of England;
and this bias was strengthened by a visit he paid, as a little boy,
to a house of some friends at Hursley. There he met Keble, who had a
great devotion to children. Keble took a fancy to the quiet serious
child, walked with him, and spoke with him of the religious life, in a
way that made a deep impression on the boy’s mind, though they never
met again.
There are two of Pater’s studies, _The Child in the House_ and _Emerald
Uthwart_, with which it is obvious that a certain autobiographical
thread is interwoven. But it is necessary to resist the temptation to
take either of them as in any sense a literal representation of facts.
Rather it may be said that Pater’s early years supplied him with a
delicate background of reminiscence, upon which he embroidered a richer
ornament of dreamful thought, using, in his own phrase, the finer sort
of memory.
It is clear, however, that he was instinctively alive to impressions of
sense, and that his mind was early at work observing and apprehending a
certain quality in things perceived and heard, which he was afterwards
to recognise as beauty. He had few outbursts of high spirits or
unreasoning glee; it was rather a tranquil current of somewhat critical
enjoyment; but he was sensitive to a whole troop of perceptions, of
which the normal child would hardly be conscious—the coolness of dark
rooms on hot summer days, the carelessly ordered garden, the branching
trees, the small flowers, so bright of hue, so formal of shape, the
subtle scents of the old house, the pot-pourri of the drawing-room, the
aroma of old leather in the library; for it was about the house, the
familiar rooms, that Pater’s memory persistently dwelt, rather than on
the wider prospect of field and hill.
There is a beautiful and interesting passage in which Pater embalmed
his view of the permanence of these early impressions:—
“The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through
the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more
slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still
on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the
influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie
about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How
indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what
capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on
the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as ‘with
lead in the rock for ever,’ giving form and feature, and as it were
assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling
and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not
otherwise.”
But he points out clearly enough that very little that is critical is
intermingled with the perceptions of childhood:—
“It is false to suppose that a child’s sense of beauty is dependent
on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present
themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most
of us in later life.”
There were two strains of sentiment which he discerned to have chiefly
coloured his childish thoughts. One was “the visible, tangible, audible
loveliness of things ... marking early the activity in him of a more
than customary sensuousness ... which might lead him, one day, how far!”
And then, too, the sorrow and suffering of the world came home in dim
glimpses to the child, as a thing which was inextricably intertwined
with the life of men and animals alike. There was as yet no attempt to
harmonise the two dominant strains of feeling; they were the two great
facts for him—beauty and sorrow; they seemed so distinct from, so
averse to each other, sorrow laying her pale hand so firmly on life,
withering it at its very source, and striking from it what was lovely
and delectable. And yet he noted the pathetic attempt of beauty to
reassert itself, as in the violets which grew on the child’s grave,
and drew their sweetness from sad mortality. And there came too the
terror of death, the sad incidents of which imprint themselves with
so sinister a horror on the tender mind. “At any time or place, in a
moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed
around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the
straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright
carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself.”
These were the dreams of childhood, the unchecked visions of the
sheltered and secluded home; at Canterbury came a wider, nobler, richer
prospect of beauty. He found himself in that exquisite, irregular
city, with its narrow streets; the mouldering gateways leading to the
Close, where the huge Cathedral rises among a paradise of lawns and
gardens; with the ancient clustering houses, of which some contain the
gables and windows of the old monastic buildings, while some are mere
centos of ancient stone, the ruins having been used for a quarry; some
of mellow brick, with a comfortable Erastian air about them, speaking
of the settled prosperity of eighteenth-century churchmanship; the
whole tenderly harmonised by sun and rain into a picture of equable,
dignified English life, so that wherever the eye turned, it fell upon
some delicate vignette full of grace and colour.
It is of this period that _Emerald Uthwart_, that strange fanciful
story, holds certain reminiscences, but reminiscences coloured and
tranquillised by the backward-looking eye. “If at home there had been
nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems diminished to nothing
at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought
stone; the daring height, the daring severity, of the innumerable,
long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in due place,
into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic arch; the peculiar
daylight which seemed to come from further than the light outside.”
But still it must be borne in mind that all this was rather perceived,
noted, and accumulated in the boyish mind than expressed or even
consciously felt. The scenes, the surroundings, of boyhood just
inscribe themselves upon the mind, which seldom pauses to reflect or
to criticise; it is long after, in maturity, with the wistful and
tender sense of the past, that the recollection, tranquilly recalled,
is tinged with poetry and sweetness. There was little consciousness
in Pater’s boyish days of how deep these things were settling into
his mind, and still less foreshadowing of the magic power that would
enable him to recall and express them in melodious words. The only
definite artistic influence under which he is known to have fallen in
his school-days is the influence of Ruskin, whom he read as a boy of
nineteen. It is possible to trace this influence in Pater’s mature
style; there is something of the same glowing use of words, something
of the same charming _naïveté_ and transparency in the best passages
of both; but whereas Ruskin is remarkable for prodigality, Pater is
remarkable for restraint; Ruskin drew his vocabulary from a hundred
sources, and sent it pouring down in a bright cascade, whereas Pater
chose more and more to refine his use of words, to indicate rather
than to describe. Ruskin’s, in fact, is a natural style and Pater’s
is an artificial one; but he undoubtedly received a strong impulse
from Ruskin in the direction of ornamental expression; and a still
stronger impulse in the direction of turning a creative force into the
criticism of beautiful things—a vein of subjective criticism, in fact.
In June 1858 Pater entered Queen’s College, Oxford. He was a commoner,
but held an exhibition awarded him from Canterbury.
Queen’s College was founded in 1340 by Robert Eglesfield, a chaplain to
Queen Philippa, who largely supplemented her priest’s endowment. The
medieval buildings have entirely disappeared, and the college consists
of a great Italian court, designed by Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, with a
fine pillared screen dividing it from the High Street, and a smaller
court behind. The Chapel is a stately classical building, designed by
Wren himself, and considered by him one of his most successful works.
It is rich with seventeenth-century glass by Van Linge, and dignified
woodwork. The Library is a magnificent room, with much carving by
Grinling Gibbons, certain panels of which are almost perfect examples
of freedom of form with an underlying serenity of design. The lofty
Hall might have come straight out of an Italian picture, and the
mysterious gallery at the west end, opening by curtained porches
on balconies of delicate ironwork, seems designed to be crowded by
fantastic smiling persons in rich garments.
It was a definitely ecclesiastical foundation, and preserved a larger
number of quaint names and symbolical customs than are preserved at
other colleges; such as announcing dinner by the sound of the trumpet,
and the retention of the name Taberdar for scholars. Pater lived a very
secluded and unobtrusive life in the back quadrangle, associating with
a few friends; he worked at classics with moderate diligence, amusing
himself with metaphysics, which even in his school-days had begun to
exercise an attraction over him. There is nothing which would lead one
to suppose that his thoughts turned in the direction of either art
or literature. It has been stated in some notices of his life that
Jowett discovered Pater’s abilities, and gave him gratuitous teaching.
From this it would seem to be inferred that Pater found a pecuniary
difficulty in providing himself with adequate instruction, which was
not the case. The explanation is simply that Jowett, as Professor of
Greek, offered to look over the Greek compositions and essays of any
members of his class who cared to submit them to him, and Pater took
advantage, like many other men, of the offer. Jowett indeed divined
a peculiar quality in Pater’s mind, saying to him one day, in one of
those lean simple phrases that seem to have exercised so remarkably
stimulating a power over his pupils’ minds, “I think you have a mind
that will come to great eminence.” But Pater failed to do himself
justice in his examinations, taking only a second-class in the Final
Classical Schools in 1862. For a couple of years he lived in lodgings
in High Street, and took pupils. In 1864 he was elected to a Fellowship
at Brasenose, where he immediately went into residence.
Pater’s mother had died while he was at school at Canterbury. His
aunt, an unmarried sister of his father, came to take charge of the
family in her place. When Pater went up to Oxford, his aunt took his
sisters to Heidelberg and Dresden, to complete their education, and
it was there that Pater spent his long vacations. But he made no
German acquaintances, and lived a life of quiet work and interior
speculation; he did not even acquire a conversational knowledge of
German. In 1869 he took a tour in Italy with Mr. Charles Lancelot
Shadwell, his closest and most intimate friend. They visited Ravenna,
Pisa, and Florence, and it was then that art became for him the chief
preoccupation of his inner life.
Up till this time there is little hint of the line on which he was
afterwards to develop. Such attempts as he had made in the direction
of literary expression were mostly destroyed by himself at a later
date; the only thing which survives is a curious little study called
_Diaphaneitè_, which is dated July 1864, and is now included in the
_Miscellaneous Studies_. This was written as a paper to be read aloud
to a small society called the “Old Mortality,” of which he was a
member, and to which many remarkable men belonged. The germ of his
later writings can here be clearly discerned, but there is a certain
dry compression about the little essay which is very unlike the later
ornate manner. It is crammed almost too full of thought, and the
evolution has a certain uneasiness arising from the omission of easy
transitions. In the essay Pater endeavours to indicate a certain type
of character presenting neither breadth nor colour, but a narrow and
potent sincerity.
“That fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature
refine themselves to the burning point.” “It seeks to value
everything at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or taking from
it, the amount of influence it may have for or against its own
special scheme of life.”
“Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity,
that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest one’s own
confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission from
without of light that is not yet inward.”[1]
[1] One circumstance, which gives the piece a special and
personal interest, deserves to be mentioned. It is not disputed
that the temperament there indicated was carefully delineated
from Pater’s intimate friend, C. L. Shadwell, now Provost of
Oriel.
In such strict compressed sentences Pater traces his ideal of
intellectual and moral sincerity; but the value of the paper is that,
in the first place, it shows a power of acute and subtle psychological
analysis, and in the second place it expresses with difficult
wistfulness the ideal with which the young student meant to approach
the world. To that ideal he was unfailingly true. He meant to know, to
weigh, to consider; not to see things through the eyes of others, but
to follow step by step the golden clue that ran for him through the
darkness. It indicates a fearlessness, an independence of mind, which
few achieve so early, and which fewer still have the patience to follow
out.
In these years Pater’s chief interest, apart from his prescribed work,
was in philosophy, which naturally led him to the study of German
authors; and here he fell under the influence of Goethe. Goethe came to
be for Pater the “true illustration of the speculative temper,” “one
to whom every moment of life brought its contribution of experimental,
individual knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, colour,
and passion was disregarded.”
It is necessary to bear in mind that there were two distinct strains
in Pater’s mind: there was on the one hand a strong impulse towards
transcendental philosophy, a desire to discern as far as possible the
absolute principles of life and being. He hankered after a certain
clearness of view, a theory which could explain for him the strange
confusion of the intellectual life, where so many currents of the human
spirit seem not so much to blend, as to check and oppose each other.
The human mind seems to be haunted by a conception of ultimate truth,
and to deal in intuitions which appear to hint at a possible solution;
but the higher in the scale of perception that a mind is, the more
complex are the influences which seem to distract it.
On the other hand there was a strong attraction to precise and definite
types of beauty. Pater was checked in his metaphysical researches by
his acute sense of the relativity of thought, by his apprehension of
the sacredness of beauty, by his deep sensitiveness to art. What he
longed for was a reasonable formula, which could connect the two, which
could make him feel that the same law was at work both in the region
of beauty and in the region of philosophical truth. “It is no vague
scholastic abstraction,” he wrote, “that will satisfy the speculative
instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the colour or curve of a
rose-leaf for that ... colourless, formless, intangible being Plato put
so high?”
The influence of his metaphysical studies is seen in his first
published writing, a fragment on Coleridge, considered as a
philosopher, which appeared in the _Westminster Review_ in 1866. This
was afterwards reprinted in the _Appreciations_ in 1889, with a passage
added on the poetry of Coleridge, which he had contributed, in 1883, as
a biographical introduction to the selections from the poet in Ward’s
_English Poets_.
The first part of this essay traces the retrograde character of
the philosophy of Coleridge, his rebellion against the patient
generalisation of the scientific method. There are flashes of acute
criticism, as when he points out that the chief faults of Coleridge’s
philosophical writings are in the first place their roughness,
their lack of form; and in the second place the writer’s excess of
seriousness, “a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but
from a misconception of the perfect manner.”
No doubt the reason why Coleridge as a philosopher won such
an influence in England was that he joined to a deep grasp of
transcendental metaphysics a somewhat tame acceptance of the orthodox
religious position. Here emerges the essential weakness of his
philosophy. He accepted as reasonable assumptions the orthodox views
of revealed religion. He made no attempt to treat in a critical spirit
the sources through which this revelation was made; the result was
that the religious writers of the day—and it must be borne in mind
that the main current of intellectual interest was in Coleridge’s time
religious rather than philosophical—welcomed Coleridge as a man who
had sounded the depths of metaphysical and speculative inquiry, and
had returned from his quest not a sceptic nor a rationalist, but a
convinced Christian. After such a triumph for religious feeling, his
lesser heterodoxies were eagerly forgiven.
Pater does not dwell upon this side of Coleridge’s influence; but
there is no doubt that it deeply affected his own religious thought.
He is believed at this time to have cherished the scheme of becoming a
Unitarian minister; his metaphysical studies did not in fact destroy
his strong religious instinct, but only drew him away for a time from
the spell of association and tradition which the Church exercised over
him, and to the domain of which he was eventually to return.
The essay on Coleridge is mainly interesting, not for its substance,
subtle as it is, but for the fact that it reveals the beginnings of
Pater’s style. It is clear that he is struggling hard with the German
influence; the terminology is technical, and a vague and dreamy emotion
seems to be moving somewhat stiffly in the grip of metaphysical ideas;
the sentences are long and involved, and there is a great lack of
lucidity of construction, combined with a precision of expression,
that produces a blurred and bewildering effect upon the mind.
It is impossible to believe that one who, like Pater, felt so strongly
the sensuous influence of external beauty in art and nature, can
have lingered long among abstractions. He never lost his interest in
philosophy, but it became for him not so much a region into which he
escaped from the actual world, as a region in which he could bring into
line the vague suggestions of beauty and the laws of pure thought. He
felt that beauty, while it haunted him, also distracted him; and while
he could not resist its appeal to his emotional nature, he longed to
be able to stand above it as well, and to see how it harmonised with
more abstract conceptions; to arrive, indeed, at a certain serenity and
tranquillity of thought, in which the perception of beauty might set,
as it were, a sweet and solemn descant to the reasonable and sustained
melody of the intellectual ideal.
Contact with practical life, together with his first sight of Italian
art, turned Pater’s thoughts gradually away from metaphysical
speculation; and the final conversion came in his discovery of Otto
Jahn’s _Life of Winckelmann_, which opened to him a new prospect. The
teaching of Goethe had begun to seem too passionate, too sensual; the
idealism of Ruskin degenerated too much into sentiment, and forfeited
balance and restraint; Hegel and Schelling were too remote from life,
with all its colour, all its echoes; but in Winckelmann he found one
who could devote himself to the passionate contemplation of beauty,
without any taint or grossness of sense; who was penetrated by fiery
emotion, but without any dalliance with feminine sentiment; whose
sensitiveness was preternaturally acute, while his conception was
cool and firm. Here, then, he discovered, or appeared to himself to
discover, a region in which beauty and philosophy might unite in a high
impassioned mood of sustained intellectual emotion.
Brasenose College, with which Pater’s life was to be identified, is
one of the sternest and severest in aspect of Oxford colleges. It has
no grove or pleasaunce to frame its sombre antiquity in a setting of
colour and tender freshness. Its black and blistered front looks out
on a little piazza occupied by the stately mouldering dome of the
Radcliffe Library; beyond is the solid front of Hertford, and the
quaint pseudo-Gothic court of All Souls. To the north lies a dark lane,
over the venerable wall of which looms the huge chestnut of Exeter,
full in spring of stiff white spires of heavy-scented bloom. To the
south a dignified modern wing, built long after Pater’s election,
overlooks the bustling High Street. To the west the college lies back
to back with the gloomy and austere courts of Lincoln. There is no
sense of space, of leisureliness, of ornament, about the place; it
rather looks like a fortress of study.
You enter the first court by a gateway under a tower. The interior
of the buildings is still more sombre, with the smoke-stained walls
and gables of friable stone. The Hall is on the south side, a lofty,
dark-panelled place, with some good portraits. Beyond the Hall on the
first floor is the Common-room, whither the Fellows adjourn after Hall,
and which by day answers the purpose of a club-room. This is also an
ample panelled chamber, with an air about it of grave and solid comfort.
The further court, to the south, which is entered by a flagged arched
passage under the southern wing of the first court, is an irregular
place, having been of late years considerably extended. The Chapel
at once attracts the eye. It is a Renaissance building, of the same
crumbling Headington stone, with broad classical pilasters, and windows
of a clumsy Gothic tracery. The designer appears to have wished the
tone to be classical, with a Gothic flavour. The very incongruity
has a certain sober charm. A beautiful Renaissance porch admits to
the ante-chapel; a fine classical screen of dark wood, with large
smooth columns, supports an organ, into the carved woodwork of which
are worked gilded swans and peacocks. There is a noble classical
western window, under which is set the memorial to Pater. This is not
wholly satisfactory, looking like a little tray of coins. It has four
medallions—Leonardo, Michel Angelo, Dante, and Plato—with a fifth in
the centre containing a bas-relief of Pater’s head; but the expression
is irritable and the chin is exaggeratedly protruded. The mottoes
above and below, in uncial Greek, are beautiful and appropriate: ΩС •
ΦΙΛΟСΟΦΙΑS • ΟΥСΗС • ΤΗС • ΜΕΓΙСΤΗС • ΜΟΥСΙΚΗС (since philosophy is the
greatest music) above; and ΟСΑ • ΕСΤΙΝ • ΑΛΗΘΗ • ΟСΑ • СΕΜΝΑ • ΟСΑ •
ΑΓΑΘΑ below (whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are holy,
whatsoever things are pure).
The interior of the chapel has the same simple gravity. There is
a plain marble reredos; the stall-work is Jacobean of dark wood,
the heavy cornice and the balls which serve for poppy-heads being
conspicuous. There is a great brazen chandelier and a noble eagle
lectern. The roof, taken from the destroyed chapel of St. Mary’s
College, which stood on the site now occupied by Frewin Hall, is of
a rich Gothic, brightly painted. The east window is a fine piece of
classical glass, but there are some poor ecclesiastical windows at the
side; of which it may be recorded that when the question of replacing
them was mooted, Pater said that he would not have them removed, as
they provided a document of taste. The velvet cushions, the tall
prayer-books, give a dignified eighteenth-century air to the whole.
There is something in these classical Oxford chapels which lends a
curious and distinct savour to the offices of religion. It has been
said that Gothic represents the aspiration of man to God, classical
architecture the tabernacling of God with men. There is a species of
truth in the statement. But it would perhaps be truer to say that in
Gothic one sees the uncultivated instinct for beauty feeling its way
out of barbarism into a certain ecclesiastical and traditional grace.
But the classical enshrinement of religious worship seems to hint at a
desire to bring the older and loftier triumphs of the human mind, the
Greek and Roman spirit, into the service of the sanctuary. Gothic seems
to depict the untutored spirit of man, nurtured on nature and religion,
working out a wild and native grace in intricacy of tracery and
ornament. But the classical setting brings with it a sober and settled
air, a wider and larger range of human interests, a certain antiquity
of mental culture.
Pater’s own rooms are approached by a staircase in the south-east
corner of the first court, which leads to a little thick-walled
panelled parlour, now white, then painted a delicate yellow, with black
doors; an old-fashioned scroll round the mantelpiece was picked out in
gold. The deeply recessed oriel window looks out upon the Radcliffe.
Some trace of Pater’s dainty ways lingers in the pretty and fantastic
ironwork of the doors, brought by him from Brittany. The room was
always furnished with a certain seemly austerity and simplicity, never
crowded with ornament. His only luxury was a bowl of dried rose-leaves.
He had little desire to possess intrinsically valuable objects, and
a few engravings served rather to remind him of the noble originals
than to represent them. Thus there exists, now in the possession of
the Principal of Brasenose, a little tray of copies of beautiful Greek
coins, bearing large heads with smooth and liberal curves, and other
dainty devices, on which Pater loved to feast his eyes. Mr. Humphry
Ward writes:—
“I well remember my first visit to his rooms—small, freshly
painted in greenish white, and hung with three or four
line-engravings. All dons had line-engravings then, but they were
all after Raphael. Pater had something more characteristic: the
‘Three Fates,’ attributed to M. Angelo; a head after Correggio; and
I think something of Ingres—a new name to Oxford! The clean, clear
table, the stained border round the matting and Eastern carpet, and
the scanty, bright chintz curtains, were a novelty and a contrast
to the oaken respectability and heaviness of all other dons’ rooms
at that day. The effect was in keeping with his own clear-cut view
of life, and made, in a small way, ‘the colours freshen on this
threadbare world.’”
But there was no luxury, no sumptuousness, no seductiveness of comfort,
about his surroundings. That might be left to those who misinterpreted
him. To the serious student, pleasure and joy must always have a
certain bracing austerity; might be sipped, perhaps, held up to the
light, dwelt upon, but not plunged into nor rioted upon.
Out of the little panelled sitting-room opened a door, which led into a
narrow passage full of cupboards, and admitted the occupant, by a low,
ancient, stone-framed Gothic doorway, into a tiny slip of a bedroom,
only a few feet wide. At one end a little window looked out into the
court; at the other end was an odd projection, like a couple of steps,
above the floor, forming the roof of the small cramped staircase below.
Considerations of space were so exacting that the head of the bed had
to rest, without legs, on the projection. The rest of the room only
just admitted a chest of drawers and a simple toilet apparatus. In
this miniature room Pater slept through the whole of his Oxford days.
He went to bed early, but in later days was an indifferent sleeper,
and to beguile the time before he could close his eyes, worked slowly
through the _Dictionary of National Biography_, volume by volume.
He had frequent opportunities of changing these rooms for a better
set; but partly from economy, and partly from the extreme simplicity
which characterised him, he preferred to stay. It is indeed almost
inconceivable that a man engaged on literary work requiring such
delicate concentration, should have lived so contentedly in rooms of
such narrow resources. The little sitting-room gave straight upon the
free air of the open passage. On a small square table his meals would
be spread. His outer door was always open; he was always accessible,
never seemed to be interrupted by any visitor, was never impatient,
always courteous and deferential; rising from a little round table near
the fire, in the middle of the most complicated sentence, the most
elaborate piece of word-construction.
His habits were marked by the same ascetic simplicity. He never took
afternoon tea, he never smoked. His meals were plain to austerity. But
he took great pains with the little entertainments he gave, ordering
every item and writing the menu-cards himself. The morning, he used to
say, was the time for creation, the afternoon for correction. He did
very little work in the evening. His habits were absolutely regular;
few days were without their tale of quiet study. He concerned himself
very little with college matters, though he held various college
offices; he was at one time Tutor and at the end of his life Dean.
He lectured to the passmen, and later gave public lectures, of which
the volume _Plato and Platonism_ was the fruit. One of his friends
remembers attending these lectures: a number of undergraduates arrived,
spread out their notebooks and prepared to take notes; but the attempt
was soon abandoned, the lecturer reading, slowly and continuously, in
a soft mellow voice, one carefully turned phrase after another. Mr.
Humphry Ward writes:—
“Then, I suppose about May 1867, came his first lectures. Only six
or eight Brasenose men were then reading for classical Greats; the
system of ‘combined’ college lectures, to which afterwards Pater
owed the large audiences that came to hear him on Plato, was not
yet invented. We were six men, some novices, some dull, all quite
unprepared for Pater. He sat down and began—it was the ‘History of
Philosophy.’ We expected the old formulae about Thales, and some
references to Aristotle that we could take down in our books and
use for the Schools. It was nothing of the kind. It was a quickly
delivered discourse, rather Comtian, on the Dogmatic and Historical
methods: quite new to me, and worse than new to some others. I
remember, as we went out, a senior man, F——, who used to amaze us
by his ready translations of Thucydides in ‘Mods’ lectures, and who
passed as extremely clever—as he was in that line—F. threw down
his note-book with the cry, ‘No more of that for me: if Greats mean
_that_, I’ll cut ’em!’ (as he wisely did).”
Among Pater’s chief friends were, in early days, Professor Ingram
Bywater, his contemporary at Queen’s, Dr. Edward Caird, now Master of
Balliol, Professor Nettleship, Mr. W. W. Capes, tutor of Queen’s; but
his closest friend and lifelong companion was Mr. C. L. Shadwell, then
of Christ Church, now Provost of Oriel, who had been for a short time
his private pupil. Pater often travelled in his company, and on Pater’s
death he undertook to act as his literary executor, a task which he has
fulfilled with a rare loyalty and discretion.
The friends of a somewhat later date were Mark Pattison, the Rector
of Lincoln; Bishop Creighton, then a Fellow of Merton; the present
Provost of Worcester, Dr. Daniel, and Mrs. Daniel; Mr. Humphry Ward, a
Fellow of Brasenose, and his future wife, Miss Mary Arnold; Mr. Warren,
now President of Magdalen; of the larger world, Mr. Swinburne, who
often visited Oxford, Dr. Appleton, then editor of the _Academy_, Mr.
Basil Champneys and Mr. Edmund Gosse; in more recent days Mr. Douglas
Ainslie, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Mr. Lionel Johnson; but in later years
Pater was perhaps more often cheered and encouraged by the devoted
companionship of Dr. F. W. Bussell, now Vice-Principal of Brasenose,
than by any other of his friendships.
But, though one may enumerate his closer friends, Pater did not make
friends easily, unless he was met with a certain simple candour and
ready sympathy; what he valued was a quiet domestic companionship, in
which he could talk easily of what was in his mind. To those that were
without he showed a certain suave and amiable deference; and even to
his intimates he was often reserved, baffling, and mysterious, from a
deep-seated reticence and reserve.
When Pater was settled at Brasenose, he took a house, No. 2 Bradmore
Road, in Norham Gardens, which gave him opportunities for simple
hospitality and the easy domestic background that he loved. He liked
to have friends to stay quietly with him, and always manifested an
extreme solicitude about the comfort of his guests down to the smallest
details, planning the days that they spent with him so that they should
be entertained and amused. “Are you comfortable?” was a question,
uttered with the delicate and deliberate precision of pronunciation,
that was constantly on his lips. But the entertaining of guests tired
him, partly because it interfered with the simple and leisurely routine
of the day, and partly because, with his scrupulous considerateness,
it put a great strain on his sympathy. He could not pursue his usual
habits and leave his guests to amuse themselves; he was always
conscious that they were in the house, and felt the responsibility for
their comfort and amusement very deeply.
To give an impression of him in those early days, I will quote Mr.
Ward’s words:—
“When I entered Brasenose as a freshman-scholar in October, 1864,
W. H. Pater was junior Fellow. I did not make his acquaintance
till long afterwards, but from the first I was struck with his
appearance, his high, rather receding forehead; his bright eyes,
placed near together, his face clean-shaven except for a short
moustache (this was rare in those days), his slight stoop, and
his quick walk with a curious swing of the shoulders. As I got
to know senior men, especially of other colleges, I gradually
became conscious that Pater was already vaguely celebrated in the
University. He was supposed to have anew and daring philosophy of
his own, and a wonderful gift of style, owing his Fellowship to
these two, for he was no scholar, as the Universities understand
the word.”
That Pater was no scholar, in the technical sense of the word, is
true enough; but he answered rather to Lord Macaulay’s definition
of a scholar, as one who read Plato with his feet on the fender. He
was not at any time a great reader or a profound student; he was on
the look-out for quality rather than for definite facts. He was very
fastidious about the style even of authors whose matter and treatment
he admired. “I admire Poe’s originality and imagination,” he once
said, “but I cannot read him in the original. He is so rough; I read
him in Baudelaire’s translation.” Indeed he read less and less as time
went on; in later years, apart from reading undertaken for definite
purposes, he concentrated himself more and more upon a few great books,
such as Plato and the Bible, which he often read in the Vulgate; he
made no attempt at any time to keep abreast of the literature of the
day.
Pater regarded his Oxford life primarily as a life of quiet literary
study; this was his chief object; he had a strong natural dislike of
responsibility; he did not consider himself a professional educator,
though he thought it a plain duty to give encouragement and sympathy in
intellectual things to any students who desired or needed direction.
But he did not conceive that there ought to be any question of
disciplinary training or coercion in the matter; to those who required
help, he gave it eagerly, patiently, generously; but he never thought
of himself as a species of schoolmaster, whose business it was to make
men work; on the other hand he realised his personal responsibility
to the full. He was always ready to give advice about work, about
the choice of a profession, and above all laboured to clear away the
scruples of men who had intended to enter the ministry of the church,
and found themselves doubtful of their vocation. He had a special
sympathy for the ecclesiastical life, and was anxious to remove any
obstacles, to resolve any doubts, which young men are so liable to
encounter in their undergraduate days.
As Dr. Bussell, in a Memorial Sermon preached in Brasenose Chapel after
Pater’s death, finely said, we may see in Pater
“a pattern of the student life, an example of the mind which feels
its own responsibilities, which holds and will use the key of
knowledge; severely critical of itself and its own performances;
genially tolerant of others; keenly appreciating their merit; a
modest and indulgent censor; a sympathetic adviser.”
His attitude towards younger men was always serious and kindly, but
he never tried to exert influence, or to seek the society of those
whose views he felt to be antipathetic. That a man should be ardently
disposed to athletic pursuits was no obstacle to Pater’s friendship,
though he was himself entirely averse to games; it rather constituted
an additional reason for admiring one with whom he felt otherwise in
sympathy, though it was no passport to his favour. He took no part in
questions of discipline, which at Brasenose are entirely in the hands
of a single officer; indeed it is recorded that on the only occasion
when he was called upon to assist in quelling an outbreak of rowdyism,
he contrived to turn a hose, intended to quench a bonfire, into the
window of an undergraduate’s bedroom, to whom he had afterwards to give
leave to sleep out of college in consequence of the condition of his
rooms.
Besides delivering lectures, it was a chief part of Pater’s work to
look over and criticise the essays of his pupils. He spent a great
deal of pains on the essays submitted to him; he seldom set subjects,
but required that a man should choose a subject in which he was
interested. It is usual for a lecturer to have an essay read aloud to
him, and to make what criticisms he can, as they arise in his mind,
without previous preparation. But Pater had the essays shown up to
him, scrutinised them carefully, even pencilling comments upon the
page; and then, in an interview, he gave careful verdicts as to style
and arrangement, and made many effective and practical suggestions.
Mr. Humphry Ward says, “He was severe on confusions of thought, and
still more so on any kind of rhetoric. An emphatic word or epithet was
sure to be underscored, and the absolutely right phrase suggested.”
Pater always followed a precise ritual on these occasions. He always
appeared, whatever he might be doing, to be entirely unoccupied; he
would vacate his only armchair and instal the pupil in it; and then
going to the window, he would take his place on the window seat and
say, “Well, let us see what this is all about.”
Though his own literary bent was so clearly defined, he never had the
least idea of forming a school of writers on the model of his own
style; all such direct influences were distasteful to him; he merely
aimed at giving advice which should result in the attainment of the
most lucid and individual statement possible. He had no sort of desire
to be a master or a leader, or to direct disciples on any but the old
and traditional lines. His principle indeed was the Socratic ideal—“to
encourage young men to take an interest in themselves.”
He would sometimes ask a student to join him in the vacation, which
must have been a severe tax on one so independent and fond of seclusion
as Pater, when he would coach him and walk with him. At the same time,
says one of those who came within his circle in later days, it was
felt that his relations with younger men were guided more by a sense
of duty than by instinct. He was like Telemachus, “decent not to fail
in offices of tenderness.” He was careful, says the same friend, to
write and inquire about one’s interests and one’s progress. But it
was clear that he was in a way self-centred, that he _depended_ on no
one, but lived in a world of his own, working out his own thoughts
with a firm concentration, and that though he was endlessly kind and
absolutely faithful, yet that few made any vital difference to him. He
was a steady friend, and always responsive to the charm of youth, of
sympathy, of intellectual interest. But even those who were brought
into close contact with him were apt to feel that far down in his
nature lurked a certain untamed scepticism, a suspension of mind,
that lay deeper than his hopes and even than his beliefs. But it was
impossible to doubt his real tenderness of heart, his fellow-feeling,
his goodness.
Mr. Ward, who spent part of a summer vacation at this time in Pater’s
company, writes:—
“The month at Sidmouth made us rather intimate, and afterwards I
often walked and lunched with Pater at Oxford. He had begun to
publish then: the articles on ‘Coleridge’ and ‘Winckelmann’ in the
_Westminster Review_ had appeared, and had made a great sensation
in the University. Unfamiliar with Goethe at first-hand, and with
the French romantics such as Théophile Gautier, the men of about my
standing had their first revelation of the neo-Cyrenaic philosophy
and of the theory of Art for Art, in these papers. None the less,
even those of us who were most attracted by them, and men like
myself to whom Pater was personally very kind, found _intimacy_
with him very difficult. He could be tremendously interesting in
talk; his phrases, his point of view, were original and always
stimulating; but you never felt that he was quite at one with you
in habits, feelings, preferences. His inner world was not that of
any one else at Oxford.”
CHAPTER II
EARLY WRITINGS
I have thought it best in this study of a life marked by so few
external events, to follow as far as possible the chronological order
of Pater’s writings, for this reason; that though he revealed in
conversation and social intercourse scarcely anything of the workings
and the progress of his mind, yet his writings constitute a remarkable
self-revelation of a character of curious intensity and depth, within
certain defined limits.
After disentangling himself from metaphysical speculations, after what
may be called his artistic conversion, which dates from his first
journey to Italy, he threw himself with intense concentration into the
task of developing his power of expression. Thus his first deliberate
work is a species of manifesto, an enunciation of the principles with
which he began his artistic pilgrimage.
The interest of the study “Winckelmann” is very great. It has been
made the subject of a myth, the legend being that it was written
while Pater was a boy at school. This statement, which is wholly
without foundation, is only worth mentioning in order that it may be
contradicted. The origin of the story is probably to be found in the
desire to make Pater’s boyhood prophetic of his later interests; but
the study was as a matter of fact written in 1866. It appeared in
January 1867, in the _Westminster Review_.
There is a charm about the early work of writers whose style is
strongly individual. Sometimes these early attempts are tentative and
unequal, as if the writer had not yet settled down to a deliberate
style; they bear traces of the effect of other favourite styles.
The curtain seems to rise, so to speak, jerkily, and to reveal the
performer by glimpses; but in the case of the “Winckelmann” the curtain
goes up tranquilly and evenly, and the real Pater steps quietly upon
the stage.
The style in which “Winckelmann” is written is a formed style;
it contains all the characteristics which give Pater his unique
distinction. It is closely and elaborately packed; the sentences have
the long stately cadences; the epithets have the _soigneux_ flavour;
and it is full, too, of those delicate and suggestive passages, where
a beautiful image is hinted, with a severe economy of art, rather than
worked out in the Ruskinian fashion. There is, too, a rigid suppression
of the ornamental; it is like gold from which the encompassing gravel
has been washed. But it has also a passion, a glow, which is somewhat
in contrast to a certain sense of weariness that creeps into some of
the later work. It is youthful, ardent, indiscreet. But for all that
it is accurately proportioned and mature. It shows the power, which
is very characteristic of Pater, of condensing an exact knowledge
of detail into a few paragraphs, retaining what is salient and
illuminating, and giving the effect of careful selection.
It is plain, in the “Winckelmann,” that the writer had been hitherto
occupied in somewhat experimental researches; but here he seems to
have found his own point of view in a moment, and to have suddenly
apprehended his attitude to the world. It is as when a carrier-pigeon
released from its prison beats round and round, determining by some
mysterious instinct the direction of its home; and at last sweeps off,
without doubt or hesitation, with steady strokes on the chosen path.
Winckelmann was one who, after a dark and poverty-stricken youth, of
mental and indeed physical starvation, became aware of the perfect
beauty of Greek art, and renounced all study but that of the literature
of the arts, till he became “consummate, tranquil, withdrawn into
the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a
passionate intellectual life.” He renounced his metaphysical and legal
studies, in which he had made progress. He joined the Church of Rome,
to gain the patronage of the Saxon Court; and finally transferred
himself to Rome, where he wrote his _History of Ancient Art_. He lived
a life of severe simplicity, absorbed entirely in intellectual and
artistic study, his only connection with the world in which he lived
being a series of romantic and almost passionate friendships. His end
was tragic; for he was murdered by a fellow-traveller at Trieste for
the sake of some gold medals which he had received at Vienna. Goethe,
whose intellectual ideal had been deeply affected by Winckelmann’s
writings, was awaiting his arrival at Leipsic with intense enthusiasm,
but was not destined ever to see him.
Such was the figure that appealed so strongly to Pater’s mind; and
perhaps the chief interest of the essay is the strong autobiographical
element that appears in it. Pater saw in Winckelmann a type of himself,
of his own intellectual struggles, of his own conversion to the
influence of art. After a confused and blinded youth, self-contained
and meagrely nourished, Winckelmann had struck out, without hesitation
or uneasy lingering, on his path among the stars. It is impossible not
to feel in many passages that Pater is reading his own soul-history
into that of his hero.
“It is easy,” he writes, “to indulge the commonplace metaphysical
instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things
which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic
perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of
absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions
which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic
contrasts of life.”
And again:—
“Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting
claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so
many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of
unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than
it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life....
The pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all
that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own
strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It
must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of
every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the
relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms
till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into
its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of
passionate coldness, such natures rejoice to be away from and past
their former selves.”
And once again:—
“On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and
direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the
understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is
the more liberal life we have been seeking so long, so near to us
all the while. How mistaken and roundabout have been our efforts to
reach it by mystic passion, and monastic reverie; how they have
deflowered the flesh; how little they have emancipated us!”
An eager intensity of feeling thrills through these impassioned
sentences. One feels instinctively that the writer of these words,
after years of blind and mute movements, like the worm in the cocoon,
had suddenly broken free, and had seen his creased and folded wings
expand and glitter in the sun. Art, friendship, perception, emotion,
that was the true life he had been desiring so long; and yet, after
all, what an inner life it was to be! There was no impulse to fling
himself into the current of the world, to taste the life of cities,
where the social eddy spun swift and strong; he was to be austere,
self-centred, silent still. Only in seclusion was he to utter his
impassioned dreams in a congenial ear. “Blitheness and repose!” these
were to be the keynotes of the new life; a clear-sighted mastery of
intellectual problems, a joyful perception of the beauties of art, a
critical attitude, that was to be able to distinguish by practised
insight what was perfect and permanent from what was merely bold and
temporary. And so, light of heart, his imagination revelling at the
thought of all the realms of beauty it was to traverse, undimmed and
radiant, the dumb and darkened past providing the contrast needed to
bring out the brightness and the hope of what lay before, Pater set out
upon his pilgrimage. And yet there is a shadow. As he writes in one
of the most pathetic sentences, in one of his later and most tender
sketches, of just such another pilgrimage, “Could he have foreseen the
weariness of the way!”
The years began to pass slowly and quietly. Pater performed his tale
of prescribed work, and gave himself over to leisurely study and
meditation. He was not averse to social pleasures in these days,
and began to make congenial acquaintances, among whom he gained a
reputation as a brilliant and paradoxical talker. He fed his sense of
beauty by frequent visits to Italy, though he never gained more than
a superficial acquaintance either with Italian art or modern Italian
life. He was in this matter always an eclectic, following his own
preferences and guided by his prejudices. He had little catholicity of
view, and seldom studied the work of artists with whom he did not feel
himself at once in sympathy. His travels were rather a diligent storing
of beautiful impressions. He wrote to Mr. Edmund Gosse in 1877, of a
visit to Azay-le-Rideau:—
“We find always great pleasure in adding to our experiences of
these French places, and return always a little tired, indeed, but
with our minds pleasantly full of memories of stained glass, old
tapestries and new flowers.”
Pater certainly showed no undue haste to garner the harvest of the
brain in these years. He was studying, enjoying, meditating. He wrote
at the rate of a short essay or two a year. The essay of 1868 on
“Aesthetic Poetry” was suppressed for twenty-one years. In 1869 he
wrote the “Notes on Leonardo da Vinci,” one of the most elaborate and
characteristic of his writings. In 1870 it was “A Fragment on Sandro
Botticelli.” In 1871 it was “Pico della Mirandola,” and the “Poetry
of Michelangelo.” All these appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_. And
then in 1873 he produced his first book, _Studies in the History of the
Renaissance_, in which he included, together with those studies which
had previously been published, a Preface and a “Conclusion,” both of
which are of deep significance in studying the course of Pater’s mental
development, and three other essays: “Aucassin and Nicolette” (in later
editions named “Two Early French Stories”), “Luca della Robbia,” and
“Joachim du Bellay.” To these, in the third edition of the _Studies_
(1888), was added “The School of Giorgione,” which had appeared in the
_Fortnightly Review_ for October, 1877; while in the second edition of
the book, which came out in the same year (1877), the “Conclusion” was
omitted, but re-appeared with slight modifications in the third edition.
The essay on “Aesthetic Poetry” eventually appeared, as we have said,
in 1889 in _Appreciations_, but it was again omitted in the second
edition of that volume (1890), and does not appear in the complete
issue of his works.
I do not know what it was that made Pater withdraw the essay on
“Aesthetic Poetry,” written in 1868, from the later issue of
_Appreciations_. Probably some unfavourable or wounding criticism,
expressing a belief that he was closer to these exotic fancies
then he knew himself to be. It is a strange and somewhat dreamy
composition, rather a mystical meditation upon a phase of thought
than a disentangling of precise principles. He takes William Morris’s
_Defence of Guenevere_ as a text, saying that “the poem which gives its
name to the volume is a thing tormented and awry with passion ... and
the accent falls in strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great
cry.” He says that the secret of the enjoyment of this new poetry, with
the artificial, earthly paradise that it creates, is “that inversion
of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of
escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it
be merely simple and spontaneous.” He compares the movement with the
development of mystical religious literature, and defines the dangerous
emotionalism of the monastic form of life, when adopted by persons of
strongly sensuous temperament, saying that such natures learn from
religion “the art of directing towards an unseen object sentiments
whose natural direction is towards objects of sense.” “Here, under this
strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers
of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty,
somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through
them.”
One cannot help feeling that the above sentence may be the very
passage, from the air of strange passion which stirs in it, for which
the essay was condemned. Or again the following sentence: “He (Morris)
has diffused through ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ the maddening white glare
of the sun, and tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but
close down—the sorcerer’s moon, large and feverish. The colouring
is intricate and delirious, as of ‘scarlet lilies.’ The influence
of summer is like a poison in one’s blood, with a sudden bewildered
sickening of life and all things.” There is indeed a certain disorder
of the sense in this passage, the hint of a dangerous mood which seems
to grasp after strange delights and evil secrets, in a reckless and
haunted twilight. It is a veritable _fleur du mal_; and Pater, with his
strong instinct for restraint and austerity of expression, probably
felt that he was thus setting a perilous example of over-sensuous
imagery, and an exotic lusciousness of thought.
He goes on to say that in this poetry, life seems to break from
conventional things, and to realise experience, pleasure, and pain
alike, as new and startling things for which no poetry, no tradition,
no usage had prepared it. “Everywhere there is an impression of
surprise, as of people first waking from the golden age, at fire,
snow, wine, the touch of water as one swims, the salt taste of the
sea. And this simplicity at first hand is a strange contrast to the
sought-out simplicity of Wordsworth. Desire here is towards the body
of nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it.”
He shows that even Morris’s classical poems, such as _Jason_ and the
_Earthly Paradise_, are filled and saturated with the medieval spirit;
for it will be remembered that though the setting of the _Earthly
Paradise_ is primarily medieval, yet the point of the poem is that we
are supposed to be brought into contact with “a reserved fragment of
Greece, which by some divine good fortune lingers on in the western
sea into the Middle Age.” The pagan element, he points out, is “the
continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life,”
contrasting with the natural unspoiled joy in the beauty of the world.
Early as the essay is, in the date of its composition, one feels that
Pater, by omitting it from later editions, was deliberately retracing
his steps, conscious that he had turned aside, in writing it, into a
bypath of the spirit, and away from the more sober and serious ideal
of his life. Its strange beauty is undeniable; but in its omission we
see, as it were, a warning hand held up, indicating that not in this
luxurious gloom, this enervating atmosphere, are the true ends of the
spirit to be attained.
_The Studies in the History of the Renaissance_ deserve close
attention, in the first place for themselves, because of the
elaborateness of the art displayed, the critical subtlety with which
typical qualities are seized and interpreted. As the bee ranges over
flowers at will, and gathers a tiny draught of honey from each, which,
though appropriated, secreted, and reproduced, still bears the flavor
of the particular flower, whether of the garden violet or the wild
heather-bell, from which it was drawn, so these essays exhibit each
a characteristic savour of the art or the figure which furnished
them. They are no shallow or facile impressions, but bear the marks
of resolute compression and fine selection. But they are not mere
forms reflected in the mirror of a perceptive mind. They are in the
truest sense symbolical, charged to the brim with the personality of
the writer, and thus to be ranged with creative rather than critical
art. Those who cannot see with Pater’s eyes may look in vain, in
the writings or the pictures of which he speaks, for the mysterious
suggestiveness of line and colour which he discerns in them. They
have suffered in passing through the medium of his perception, like
the bones of the drowned king, “a sea-change into something rich and
strange”; they are like the face which he describes, into which the
soul with all its maladies had passed. It is hardly for us to estimate
the ethical significance of the attitude revealed. It must suffice to
say that in the hands of Pater these pictures out of the past have
been transmuted by a secret and deep current of emotion into something
behind and beyond the outer form. They are charged with dreams.
And in the second place they reveal, perhaps, the sincerest emotions
of a mind at its freshest and strongest. No considerations of prudence
or discretion influenced his thought. Pew writers perhaps preserve,
through fame and misunderstanding alike, so consistent, so individual
an attitude as Pater. But it must also be borne in mind that he was
deeply sensitive, and though he was deliberately and instinctively
sincere in all his work, yet in his later writings one feels that
criticism and even misrepresentation had an effect upon him. He
realised that there were certain veins of thought that were not
convenient; that the frank enunciation of principles evoked impatience
and even suspicion in the sturdy and breezy English mind. He held on
his way indeed, though with a certain sadness. But there is no touch
of that outer sadness in these first delicate and fanciful creations;
the sadness that breathes through them is the inner sadness, the veiled
melancholy that makes her sovereign shrine in the very temple of
delight. Here, too, may be seen the impassioned joy that is born of the
shock of exquisite impressions coming home to a nature that is widening
and deepening every hour.
The preface of the book strikes a firm note of personality. Pater
is here seen to be in strong revolt against the synthetic school of
art-criticism. The business of the aesthetic critic, he declares with
solemn earnestness, is not to attempt a definition of abstract beauty,
but to realise the relativity of beauty, and to discern the quality,
the virtue, of the best art of a writer or an artist. He explains
too his principle of selection, namely that while the interest of
the Renaissance is centred in Italy, its outer ripples, so to speak,
must be studied in French poetry as well as in the later German
manifestations of the same spirit.
There is an interesting passage, in the recent memoir of Lady Dilke,
about Pater’s _Renaissance_. It will be remembered that when the
book appeared she was the wife of Mark Pattison. She was then much
engaged in the practice of art-criticism, and reviewed the book with
some severity, as lacking in scientific exactness and in historical
perspective. She thought that Pater had isolated the movement from its
natural origins, and complained that he had treated the Renaissance
as “an air-plant, independent of the ordinary sources of nourishment
... a sentimental revolution having no relation to the actual
conditions of the world.” This criticism has a certain truth in it,
and gains interest from the fact that it probably to a certain extent
represents the mature judgment of Pattison himself. But it is based
on a misconception of the scope of the book, and is sufficiently
rebutted by the modest title of the volume, _Studies in the History of
the Renaissance_. The book, indeed, lays no claim to be an exhaustive
treatment of the movement. It is only a poetical and suggestive
interpretation of certain brilliant episodes, springing from deeper
causes which Pater made no attempt to indicate.
In the first essay, “Aucassin and Nicolette,” he points out that the
sweetness of the Renaissance is not only derived from the classical
world, but from the native outpouring of the spirit which showed itself
in ecclesiastical art and in native French poetry, and which prompted
and prepared the way for the enthusiastic return to classical art.
In “Pico della Mirandola” he traces the attempt to reconcile the
principles of Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece,
not by any historical or philosophical method, but by allegorical
interpretation, in the spirit of that “generous belief that nothing
which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose its
vitality.” He dwells with wistful delight upon the figure of this
graceful and precocious scholar, Pico, “Earl of Mirandola, and a great
Lord of Italy”—Pico, nurtured in the law, but restless and athirst,
with the eager and uncritical zest of the time, for philosophy, for
language, for religion, working, fitfully and brilliantly, in the hope
that some solution would be found to satisfy the yearnings of the soul,
some marvellous secret, which would in a moment gratify and harmonise
all curious and warring impulses. Pico, beloved of women, seemly and
gracious of mien, dying of fever at so early an age, and lying down
for his last rest in the grave habit of the Dominicans, mystical,
ardent, weary with the weariness that comes of so swift and perilous a
pilgrimage, is a type of beauty shadowed by doom, mortality undimmed by
age or disease, that appealed with passionate force to Pater’s mind.
In the essay on “Sandro Botticelli” he touches on the meditative
subtlety, the visionary melancholy of the painter, “the peculiar
sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely,
and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement
or loss about them—the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion
and energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs
through all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.”
He traces the strange mixture of idealism and realism which transfuses
Botticelli’s pictures, his men and women, “clothed sometimes by passion
with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually
by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.
His morality is all sympathy.” He confesses frankly that Botticelli
displays an incomplete grasp of the resources of art; but he indicates
with subtle perception the haunted and wistful spirit of the artist.
In the “Luca della Robbia” Pater traces very skilfully the attempt made
to unite the pleasure derivable from sculpture with the homely art of
pottery, the old-world modesty and seriousness and simplicity which put
out its strength to adorn and cultivate daily household life; and he
shows, too, the exquisite _intimité_ and the originality of the man,
which is so rarely exhibited in the white abstract art of sculpture.
The _motif_ of the “Poetry of Michelangelo” is best summed up in the
words which Pater uses as a recurrent phrase: _ex forti dulcedo_—out
of the strong came forth sweetness. He says:—
“The interest of Michelangelo’s poems is that they make us
spectators of this struggle; the struggle of a strong nature to
adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating passion,
which yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive, as Dante’s was.”
The essay beautifully contrasts the extremes of that volcanic nature,
the man who, as Raphael said, walked the streets of Rome like an
executioner, and who yet, at the other end of the scale, could
conceive and bring to perfection the exquisite sweetness, the almost
over-composed dignity, of the great _Pietà_. The essay abounds in
subtle and delicate characterisation of the manifestations of that
desirous, rugged, uncomforted nature. Thus, in speaking of the four
symbolical figures, _Night_, _Day_, _The Twilight_, _The Dawn_, which
adorn the sacristy of San Lorenzo, Pater says that the names assigned
them are far too precise.—
“They concentrate and express, less by way of definite conceptions
than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those
vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and
define themselves and fade again, whenever the thoughts try to fix
themselves with sincerity on the conditions and surroundings of the
disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come to the sacristy of
San Lorenzo for consolation; for seriousness, for solemnity, for
dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation. It is a
place neither of terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vague and
wistful speculation.”
Perhaps it may be said that in this essay Pater reveals an
over-subtlety of conception in his desire to substantiate the
contrast. There was an essential unity of character, of aim, about
Michelangelo; and the contrasts are merely the same intensity of mood
working in different regions, not a difference of mood. The chief
value of the essay lies in its lyrical fervour, in the poetical and
suggestive things that are said by the way.
The essay on “Leonardo da Vinci” is certainly the most brilliant of
all the essays, and contains elaborate passages which, for meditative
sublimity and exquisite phrasing, Pater never surpassed. The fitful,
mysterious, beauty-haunted nature of Leonardo, the stream of his life
broken into such various channels, his absorption, his remoteness,
passing “unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his
country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some
secret errand”—all this had a potent attraction for Pater. The essay
is a wonderful piece of constructive skill, interweaving as it does
all the salient features of the “legend” of Vasari with a perfect
illustrative felicity. But it is in the descriptive passages that
Pater touches the extreme of skill, as for instance in his description
of the sea-shore of the Saint Anne, “that delicate place, where the
wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and
the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the
rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine
as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places
far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of
_finesse_. Through Leonardo’s strange veil of sight things reach him
so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or
in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep
water.”
Though the celebrated passage which describes “La Gioconda” has been
abundantly quoted, it may here be given in full:—
“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are
come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought
out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell,
of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.
Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or
beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by
this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!
All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and
moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make
expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of
Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like
the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets
of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as
Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but
as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy
with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the
eyelids and the hands.”
Such writing as this has an undeniable magic about it; though its
vagueness is not wholly characteristic of Pater’s ordinary manner,
it is a wonderful achievement; it is more like a musical fantasia,
embodying hints and echoes, touching with life a store of reveries and
dreams, opening up strange avenues of dreamful thought, than a precise
description of any actual work of art. To say that Leonardo himself
would have disclaimed this interpretation of his picture is not to
dispel the beauty of the criticism; for the magical power of art is
its quickening spirit, its faculty of touching trains of thought that
run far beyond the visible and bounding horizon. It is possible, too,
to dislike the passage for its strong and luscious fragrance, its
overpowering sensuousness, to say that it is touched with decadence,
in its dwelling on the beauty of evil, made fair by remoteness; but
this is to take an ethical view of it, to foresee contingencies, to
apprehend the ultimate force of its appeal. As in all lofty art, the
beauty is inexplicable, the charm incommunicable; its sincerity, its
zest is apparent; and it can hardly be excelled as a typical instance
of the prose that is essentially poetical, in its liquid cadences,
its echoing rhythms. In any case, whether one feels the charm of the
passage or not, it must remain as perhaps the best instance of Pater’s
early mastery of his art, in its most elaborate and finished form.
The essay on the “School of Giorgione” is a later work (1877), but it
will be well to consider it here. It is an elaborate composition, and
shows a tendency to return to metaphysical speculation, or rather to
interfuse a metaphysical tinge into artistic perception. He lays down
the principle that the quality of the particular medium of a work of
art is what it is necessary to discern, and that it is a mistake to
blend the appeal of different methods of artistic expression. “All
art,” he says in an italicised sentence, showing that he is laying
it down as an established maxim, “_constantly aspires towards the
condition of music_,” because music is the only art which makes its
appeal through pure form, while all other art tends to have the motive
confused by the matter, by the subject which it aims at reproducing.
“Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed,” he adds, “is
the true type or measure of perfected art.”
The attitude of Giorgione, his distinctive quality, lies, according
to Pater, in the fact that “he is the inventor of _genre_, of those
easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor
of allegorical or historic teaching—little groups of real men and
women, amid congruous furniture or landscape—morsels of actual life,
conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they
come to seem like glimpses of life from afar.” But one of the chief
points of interest in the essay is that Pater devotes more space to his
perception of music than he does in any other place. Giorgione himself
was, according to traditions, an admirable musician, and musical scenes
are made the motive of many of his pictures, or of those attributed
to him: “music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled
with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running
water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments—people with
intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an
ingenious passage, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound,
the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on
a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely,
in the appetite for sweet sound—a momentary touch of an instrument in
the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar room, in a chance
company.”
But the essay is not perhaps quite as lucid as some of the earlier
work; the tendency to construct long involved sentences, full of
parentheses, is here apparent; it gives one the impression of a vague
musical modulation, which, beautiful in its changes, its relations,
lacks the crispness and certainty of precise form.
There remains the “Joachim du Bellay,” a slight essay where Pater
occupies himself with showing how Ronsard endeavoured to draw the
influence of the Italian renaissance in to enliven and deepen the
native Gothic material of French song, “gilding its surface with a
strange delightful foreign aspect, like a chance effect of light.”
He indicates how, in that transformation, the old French seriousness
disappeared, leaving nothing but “the elegance, the aerial touch, the
perfect manner” in the poets of Ronsard’s school, of whom Du Bellay was
the last. Du Bellay strove with all his might, as in the little tract,
_La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse_, “to adjust the
existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture,” “to
ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection.”
Pater traces the eagerness for word-music, the beginnings of _poésie
intime_, the poetry in which a writer strives to shape his innermost
moods or to take the world into his confidence. He illustrates Du
Bellay’s fondness for landscape: “a sudden light transfigures a trivial
thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the
barn door: a moment—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure
effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident
may happen again.”
The whole essay is in a lighter, a less serious tone, and dwells more
softly upon the surface of things; and thus gives a kind of relief,
a breathing space in the intense mood. One feels that some art went
to the careful placing of these essays; for we pass to the study on
“Winckelmann,” of which we have spoken at length, in which Pater found
a type by which he might reveal his own inner thought, the conversion
which he had experienced. And thus we come to the “Conclusion,” a most
elaborate texture of writing, made obscure by its compression, by its
effort to catch and render the most complicated effects of thought.
This “Conclusion” was omitted in the second edition of the book. Pater
says that he excluded it, “as I conceived it might possibly mislead
some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” He adds that
he made a few changes which brought it closer to his original meaning,
and that he had dealt more fully with the subject in _Marius the
Epicurean_.
The only substantial alterations in the essay are as follows. Pater
originally wrote:—
“High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy
and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the
‘enthusiasm of humanity.’”
This sentence became:—
“Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy
and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity,
disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.”
Again, in a passage dealing with the various ways of using life, so as
to fill it full of beautiful energy, he says that “the wisest” spend
it “in art and song.” In the later version he qualifies the words “the
wisest” by the addition of the phrase “at least among ‘the children of
this world.’”
The alterations do not appear at first sight to have any very great
significance; but Pater says that they brought out his original meaning
more clearly; and the very minuteness of the changes serves at least to
show his sense of the momentousness of phrases.
He traces, in a passage of rich and subtle complexity, the bewildering
effect upon the mind of the flood of external impressions; and compares
it with the thought that gradually emerges, as the spirit deals with
these impressions, of the loneliness, the solitude of personality; and
with the mystery of the movement of time, the flight of the actual
moment which is gone even while we try to apprehend it. He compares
the perception to “a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on
the stream” of sense; and goes on to indicate that the aim of the
perceptive mind should be to make the most of these fleeting moments,
to “be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital
forces unite in their purest energy.” “To burn always with this hard,
gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” “Not to
discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us,
is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.”
He goes on to say that to get as many pulsations into the brief
interval of life, is the one chance which is open to a man; and art, he
says, gives most of these, “for art comes to you professing frankly to
give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and
simply for those moments’ sake.”
The “Conclusion,” then, is a presentment of the purest and highest
Epicureanism, the Epicureanism that is a kind of creed, and realises
the duty and necessity of activity and energy, but in a world
of thought rather than of action. The peril of such a creed, of
which Pater became aware, is that it is in the first place purely
self-regarding, and in the second place that, stated in the form of
abstract principles, it affords no bulwark against the temptation to
sink from a pure and passionate beauty of perception into a grosser
indulgence in sensuous delights. The difficulty in the artistic, as in
the ethical scale, is to discern at what point the spirit begins to
yield to the lower impulse; when it deserts the asceticism, the purity,
the stainlessness of nature which alone can communicate that lucidity
of vision, that seriousness of purpose, that ordered simplicity of
life that is to be the characteristic of the nobler Epicureanism.
Not that Pater withdrew the “Conclusion,” because he mistrusted his own
principles; such principles as he held would tend to the refinement
and enlargement of the moral nature, by multiplying relationships,
by substituting sympathy for conscience, by admitting to the full
the loftier religious influences; and thus the self-absorption of
the artist would insensibly give place to a wider, more altruistic
absorption.
But Pater felt, no doubt, that having struck a sensuous note in his
essays, this statement of principles of artistic axioms lent itself
to misrepresentation; and nothing could more clearly prove the
affectionate considerateness of his nature, his desire for sympathy and
relationship, his tender care for those whom he loved in spirit, than
his fear of giving a wrong bias to their outlook. And thus the omission
has a biographical interest, as showing the first shadow of disapproval
falling on the sensitive mind, that disapproval which sometimes hung
like a cloud over Pater’s enjoyment of the world, though it never for
a moment diverted him from his serious and sustained purpose, as a
prophet of mysteries.
Pater’s art criticism was distinctly of a literary and traditional
type. He made little attempt to trace or weigh the extrinsic value of
works of art, or to discuss the subject from the archaeological or the
technical point of view. He accepted the traditional knowledge of the
period, made no artistic discoveries, settled no controverted points.
His concern was entirely with the artistic merits of a picture and
its poetical suggestiveness; his criticism, indeed, was of the type
which he defined in a review which he wrote many years afterwards for
the _Guardian_ as “imaginative criticism”—“that criticism which is
itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through
the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner
constitution of the producer, shaping his work;” and thus the errors
which he made, of which we may quote one or two examples, do not really
affect the value of his criticism very greatly.
To take his criticism of Leonardo. He was certainly wrong, for
instance, in his judgment of the Medusa picture. This is a picture
which shows strong traces both of classical and realistic influences.
The head is classical, the serpents are realistic. It is almost
certainly at least a century later than Leonardo’s period.
Again, the little head with the aureole of hair, which Pater had
engraved for a frontispiece to the _Renaissance_ as a genuine work
of Leonardo’s, is simply a school drawing, done under the influence,
perhaps under the supervision, of Leonardo, by a pupil, but certainly
not the work of the master’s hand.
He makes, too, the general mistake of treating Leonardo as a realist.
But there is no basis of truth in this. The influence of realism had
not begun to be felt at his date, or at all events in his work. The
studies, for instance, to which Pater alludes, as of various flowers,
of which there are a number of instances in the Windsor collection, are
not realistically treated, but conventionally, and with the influence
of tradition strongly marked in them.
Again it will be remembered how Pater speaks of the angel’s head,
which according to tradition Leonardo contributed to a picture of his
master, Verrocchio. He says that the head is still to be seen, “a
space of sunlight in the cold, laboured, old picture.” There are in
reality two heads in the picture, probably both by Leonardo, and one
curiously ill-drawn. But the picture is not cold and laboured; it is
simply unfinished, and not in a condition on which a judgment of its
possibilities could be passed.
In the essay on “Botticelli” he was on firmer ground. But the essay on
the “School of Giorgione” is perhaps the most typical instance. There
are only two Giorgiones which can be positively identified as his
from contemporary records. These are the picture known as “The Three
Philosophers,” or “The Chaldean Sages,” which is now supposed by some
critics to represent the arrival of Aeneas in Italy; and the picture
known as “The Stormy Landscape” in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice,
which is now sometimes called “Adrastus and Hypsipyle.” Then there is
the great Castelfranco altar-piece, which by tradition and internal
evidence may be held to be an indubitable Giorgione. Then there are
others with a reasonable degree of probability, such as the “Knight
in Armour” in the National Gallery, said to be a study for the figure
of S. Liberale in the Castelfranco altar-piece, an “Adoration of the
Shepherds,” belonging to Mr. Wentworth Beaumont, and two panels at
Florence, one representing an incident in the legendary childhood of
Moses, and the other “The Judgment of Solomon.” But “The Concert,” in
the Pitti, cannot be certainly attributed to Giorgione, and it may be
said that the more Pater had known about Giorgione, the less likely
would he have been to have attributed the picture to him. The truth is
that Giorgione is a somewhat legendary painter, and what work of his
is authentic is probably his later work. Art critics have of course
as far as possible to account for the existence of such a legend; but
the result is that in Pater’s hands, with the faulty and imperfect
knowledge that existed about Giorgione at the time when he wrote, the
subject is misconceived and exaggerated. There is, in the authentic
works of Giorgione, an almost entire want of dramatic unity. In “The
Stormy Landscape,” for instance, the figures of the mother with an
infant and the young knight have no connection with each other, and are
both entirely out of keeping with and unaffected by the scene, where
the storm is breaking in thunder and rain. So, too, in “The Judgment
of Solomon” panel there is no concentration of motive; each figure
is conceived separately, and there is no sort of attempt at dramatic
combination.
But when all this has been said, it really affects very little the
value of Pater’s work. After all, the pictures which he described
exist; the message which they held for his own spirit was generated by
the sight of them, and the poetical suggestiveness of his criticism is
full of vital force; he made no attempt to set misconception right,
to date pictures, or to alter their dates. He took them on trust;
and thus, though his judgments have no precise technical value, the
inspiration of his sympathetic emotion forfeits little or none of
its force by being expended on pictures which he did not attribute
correctly, and which it could not be expected that he should have so
attributed.
The publication of the _Renaissance_ was to be attended by important
results. It gave Pater a definite place in the literary and artistic
world. But it had a still deeper effect. The spirit of artistic revolt
was in the air. The writings of Ruskin, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites
may be taken as two salient instances in very different regions of
the rising tendency. What underlay the whole movement was a desire to
treat art seriously, and to give it its place in the economy of human
influences. Side by side with this was a strong vein of discontent
with established theories of religion, of education, of mental
cultivation. The younger generation was thrilled with a sense of high
artistic possibilities; it realised that there was a hidden treasure
of accumulated art, ancient and medieval, which remained as a living
monument of certain brilliant and glowing forces that seemed to have
become quiescent. It became aware that it was existing under cramped
conditions, in a comfortable barbarism, encompassed by strict and
respectable traditions, living a bourgeois kind of life, fettered by a
certain stupid grossness, a life that checked the free development of
the soul.
Pater’s suggestive and poetical treatment of medieval art fired a
train, and tended to liberate an explosive revolutionary force of
artistic feeling which manifested itself in intemperate extravagances
for which he was indeed in no sense responsible, but which could be to
a certain extent referred to his principles. Young men with vehement
impulses, with no experience of the world, no idea of the solid and
impenetrable weight of social traditions and prejudices, found in the
principles enunciated by Pater with so much recondite beauty, so much
magical charm, a new equation of values. Pater himself was to pay
dearly for his guileless sincerity, his frank confidence.
In 1877, the year in which the second edition of the _Renaissance_
was issued, appeared Mr. Mallock’s _New Republic_. It is a difficult
question to decide to what extent a satire of the kind is justifiable.
It was an extraordinarily suggestive and humorous book; and the
author would no doubt justly maintain that in Mr. Rose he was merely
parodying a type of the aesthetic school; but language was put into
Mr. Rose’s mouth which was obviously a faithful parody of Pater’s
style of writing, with an added touch of languor and extravagance.
The bitterness of the satire was increased by its being cast in a
conversational form, so that it would be concluded by those who did
not know Pater that his conversation in a mixed society was couched in
this exotic and affected vein, reaching a degree of grotesqueness on
the one hand and sensuousness on the other which was bound to produce
an unpleasant effect on the minds of readers. Mr. Rose is made to
discourse in public in a dreamy vein in a manner which draws from Lady
Ambrose, a conventional and worldly person, the comment that he always
speaks of every one “as if they had no clothes on.” But there are
more disagreeable innuendoes than that; and as it was inevitable from
the language employed that Mr. Rose should be identified with Pater,
it is hard to absolve the author from the charge of sacrificing the
scrupulous justice that should have been shown to an individual to the
desire for effectiveness and humour, though on the other hand an ample
excuse is afforded in the youthful ebullience of the book, written, it
is marvellous to reflect, when the author was still an undergraduate.
Pater had indeed laid himself in one sense open to the attack, by
committing to the impersonal medium of a book sentiments which could
be distorted into the sensuous creed of aesthetes; to satirise the
advanced type of the aesthetic school was perfectly fair, but it was
unduly harsh to cause an affected and almost licentious extravagance of
behaviour to be attributed to one whose private life and conversation
were of so sober and simple a character. It seems clear that the
satire caused Pater considerable distress. If he had been personally
vain or socially ambitious, it might have gratified him to be included
in so distinguished a company; but all this was entirely foreign to
his retired and studious habits; he did not at all desire to have a
mysterious and somewhat painful prestige thrust upon him; and though he
seldom if ever spoke of the subject even to his most intimate friends,
yet it is impossible not to realise that the satire must have caused
him sincere pain. It was in this mood that he said to Mr. Gosse, “I
wish they wouldn’t call me a ‘hedonist’; it produces such a bad effect
on the minds of people who don’t know Greek.” He felt that he had been
deliberately misrepresented, made unjustly notorious, and the sober and
strenuous ideal of his life cruelly obscured.
Although Pater had been a pupil of Jowett’s, and although there was
a _rapprochement_ in later life, when Jowett took occasion warmly
to congratulate Pater on his _Plato and Platonism_, there was a
misunderstanding of some kind which resulted in a dissidence between
them in the middle years. It has even been said that Jowett took up a
line of definite opposition to Pater, and used his influence to prevent
his obtaining University work and appointments. It is not impossible
that this was the case. Jowett, in spite of his genius, in spite of his
liberality of view and his deliberate tolerance, was undoubtedly an
opportunist. He was not exactly guided by the trend of public opinion,
but he took care not to back men or measures unless he would be likely
to have the support of a strong section of the community, or at least
conceived it probable that his line would eventually be endorsed by
public opinion. Thus his religious position was based not on the fact
that he wished to be in opposition to popular orthodoxy, but that he
followed an enlightened line, with a belief that, in the long-run, the
best intelligence of the country would adopt similar views. That this
is not an over-statement is clear from Jowett’s _Life_, where he is
revealed as a far more liberal, even destructive critic of popular
religion than he allowed to appear in either his writings or public
utterances.
Probably Jowett either identified Pater with the advanced aesthetic
school, or supposed that at all events his teaching was adapted to
strengthen a species of Hedonism, or modern Paganism, which was alien
to the spirit of the age. Or possibly he was alarmed at the mental
and moral attitude with which Pater was publicly credited, owing in
considerable measure to the appearance of the _New Republic_—in which
he himself was pilloried as the representative of advanced religious
liberalism—and thought that on public grounds he must combat the
accredited leaders of a movement which was certainly unfashionable, and
which was regarded with suspicion by men of practical minds. Whatever
his motives were, he certainly meant to make it plain that he did
not desire to see the supposed exponents of the aesthetic philosophy
holding office in the University.
One feels that Jowett, with his talent for frank remonstrance, had
better have employed direct rather than indirect methods; but the fact
remains that he not only disliked the tendency of Pater’s thought, but
endeavoured, by means that are invariably ineffectual, to subvert his
influence.
It is not difficult to arrive at Pater’s view of Jowett; he regarded
his qualities, both administrative and mental, with a considerable
degree of admiration. He half envied and was half amused by the skilful
way in which Jowett contrived, taught by adversity and opposition, to
harmonise advanced religious views with popular conceptions, and to
subordinate philosophical speculation to practical effectiveness. He
considered him an excellent specimen of the best kind of virtuous
sophist. A letter on the subject which he contributed in 1894 to the
_Life of Jowett_ is interesting.
Speaking of his own undergraduate days, he says that Jowett’s
generosity in the matter of giving undergraduates help and
encouragement in their work was unprecedented,
“on the part of one whose fame among the youth, though he was then
something of a recluse, was already established. Such fame rested
on his great originality as a writer and thinker. He seemed to have
taken the measure not merely of all opinions, but of all possible
ones, and to have put the last refinements on literary expression.
The charm of that was enhanced by a certain mystery about his own
philosophic and other opinions. You know at that time his writings
were thought by some to be obscure. These impressions of him had
been derived from his Essays on St. Paul’s Epistles, which at that
time were much read and pondered by the more intellectual sort of
undergraduates. When he lectured on Plato, it was a fascinating
thing to see those qualities as if in the act of creation, his
lectures being informal, unwritten, and seemingly unpremeditated,
but with many a long-remembered gem of expression, or delightfully
novel idea, which seemed to be lying in wait whenever, at a loss
for a moment in his somewhat hesitating discourse, he opened a book
of loose notes. They passed very soon into other note-books all
over the University; the larger part, but I think not all of them,
into his published introductions to the _Dialogues_. Ever since
I heard it, I have been longing to read a very dainty dialogue
on language, which formed one of his lectures, a sort of ‘New
Cratylus.’”
At the same time Pater had no sort of inner sympathy with Jowett’s
position as a priest of the Anglican Church, considering the opinions
on the subject of Christian doctrine which he held, or which Pater
believed him to hold. There is practically no doubt that in the review
of _Robert Elsmere_ which Pater contributed to the _Guardian_, he had
Jowett in his mind in the following passage:—
“Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought not to be
a clergyman of the Anglican Church. The priest is still, and will,
we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he
is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in
this doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in
it of those influences which make for faith. It is his triumph to
achieve as much faith as possible in an age of negation. Doubtless,
it is part of the ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain
safeguards, it should find room for latitudinarians even among its
clergy. Still, with these, as with all other genuine priests, it is
the positive not the negative result that justifies the position.
We have little patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on
nothing else than the difficulties of faith and the propriety of
concession to the opposite force.”
The truth is that the two temperaments were radically opposed, though
they had certain philosophical interests in common. At bottom Jowett
was a man of the world, and valued effectiveness above most qualities;
while Pater set no particular value upon administrative energy. Jowett
was indifferent to art, except in so far as it ministered to agreeable
social intercourse; with Pater art provided what were the deepest and
most sacred experiences of his life. Not until Pater became a growing
power in the literary and artistic world, not until it became clear
that he had no practical sympathy with the exponents of a bastard
aestheticism, did Jowett recognise the fame of his former pupil; and
as the respect of Jowett, when conceded to persons with whom he did
not agree, may be recognised as having a certain value of barometrical
indication, as reflecting the opinion of the world in a species of
enlightened mirror, we may consider that Jowett’s expressed admiration
of _Plato and Platonism_ was a belated admission that Pater had
indubitably attained to the eminence which the Professor of Greek had
long before prophesied for him.
CHAPTER III
OXFORD LIFE
The years that succeeded the first publication of the _Renaissance_
were not years of very strenuous literary work. Pater was at this
time holding the Tutorship of the College, as well as lecturing, and
the official business connected with the post was considerable. A
tutor is supposed to exert a general supervision over the work of
his pupils, to criticise their compositions and essays, and to keep
himself informed of their progress. It cannot be said that Pater’s
practical effectiveness was strong enough to equip him adequately for
the task. He received and criticised the essays; he responded with
cordial sympathy to any direct appeals for assistance; but a tutor,
to be effective, must have a power of shining, like the sun, upon the
eager and the reluctant, the grateful and the unthankful alike; some
pupils must be impulsively inspired; some delicately encouraged; some
ironically chastised; some few must, like the image of Democracy in
Tennyson’s poem, “toil onward, prick’d with goads and stings.”
Pater had little capacity for this kind of work—indeed, he did not
even conceive it to be his duty; but in any case the mere routine-work
was heavy. Moreover, he had to a certain extent come out of his shell,
enjoyed a good deal of quiet sociability, and gained a reputation as a
brilliant and paradoxical talker.
Meanwhile, as I have said, his literary output was small. His study of
“Wordsworth” (1874) is a very subtle piece of criticism. It is often
taken for granted that Wordsworth valued tranquillity above ardour,
and thus the essay is peculiarly felicitous in pointing out that not
mere contemplation, but _impassioned_ contemplation, was the underlying
purpose of the poet’s life. Pater shows that Wordsworth’s choice of
incidents and situations from common life was made “not for their
tameness, but for (their) passionate sincerity.” He indicates that the
reason why Wordsworth selected the homelier figures of the world for
his protagonists was that he might display “all the pathetic episodes
of their humble existence, their longing, their wonder at fortune,
their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of children, won so
hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their yearning towards each
other, in their darkened houses, or at their early toil.”
It is too customary with critics to draw a sharp line between
Wordsworth in his moments of inspired passion and Wordsworth in the
mood of solemn ineffectiveness; and thus those who write on Wordsworth
too often view his work with a certain impatience, as if by an effort
he could have criticised himself, and made a more emphatic selection of
his own writings. But Pater, though he echoes the wish that Wordsworth
could have been more severe in the matter of omission, shows the
essential unity of his work, arising from the deliberate passivity with
which he waited dutifully upon the gift of inspiration; and he compares
him beautifully to “one of those early Italian or Flemish painters,
who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed,
some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic
industry.”
In fact, Pater realised, perhaps unconsciously, that what Wordsworth
had written in the “Poet’s Epitaph” was as true of Wordsworth
himself;—“And you must love him, ere to you he will seem worthy of
your love”; and thus the spirit in which he deals with Wordsworth’s
work is one of a reverent tenderness, that cannot even bear to speak
with the least roughness or harshness of the writings of one so
sincere, so wise, so deep-hearted, even when engaged in the task of
producing arid and pompous couplets, or rubbing, as Matthew Arnold
says, like Indians in primeval forests, one dry stick upon another in
the hope of generating a flame.
Pater is particularly alive to Wordsworth’s deep sense of what may be
called the _admonitus locorum_, the local sanctities, the far-reaching
human associations with places, dealing with them largely, “till the
low walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full
of voices.”
Again, Pater skilfully divines Wordsworth’s peculiar power “of
realising, and conveying to the consciousness of the reader, abstract
and elementary impressions—silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness:
or, again, the whole complex sentiment of a particular place,
the abstract expression of desolation in the long white road, of
peacefulness in a particular folding of the hills.”
It is abundantly clear that, in the case of Wordsworth, Pater felt
himself drawing near to a highly congenial personality. He speaks in
another essay of the poet’s “flawless temperament, his fine mountain
atmosphere of mind.” The dignity, the seriousness, the quietness, the
impassioned quality of the poet’s life made a strong appeal to him,
and not less the high purpose to which he dedicated his whole life:
the rendering and interpreting of beautiful impressions, the desire
to impart to others what gave him joy and tranquillity; and thus the
whole essay is redolent of a sort of trustful affection, the mood in
which a man speaks simply and sincerely of a point of view which he
instinctively admires, a character that is very dear to his heart.
Pater goes, indeed, so far as to say in a later essay that a careful
reading of Wordsworth is probably the very best thing that can be
found to counteract the faults and offences of our busy and restless
generation, as helping to remind us, “amid the enormous expansion of
all that is material and mechanical in life, of the essential value,
the permanent ends, of life itself.”
The essay on “Charles Lamb” (1878) is another instance of Pater’s power
of selecting and emphasising the congenial elements of a character. It
is not the inconsequent, the reckless humour of Charles Lamb that Pater
values most, his power of pursuing a humorous image, of clinging to
it, as Lamb did among the rubs and adversities of the world, as a man
in a beating sea might cling to a spar for his life. Pater is rather
in love with the contrast of Lamb’s life, the tragic undercurrent of
fate, that ran like a dark stream below his lightness, his pathetic
merriment. He admires him as an artist first, because “in the making of
prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely
as Keats in the making of verse.” He values him for the “little arts
of happiness he is ready to teach to others,” for his deep and patient
friendships; he sees in him “a lover of household warmth everywhere,”
a collector of things which gain a colour for him “by the little
accidents which attest previous ownership.” He loves him because he
“has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of
very weak people, down to their little pathetic ‘gentilities,’ even;
while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like
Shakespeare.” “Unoccupied,” he says, “as he might seem, with great
matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in
its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of
the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way
with a perfect understanding of it.” He realises, too, the fineness
and largeness of Lamb’s criticism; he says that when Lamb comments on
Shakespeare, he is like “a man who walks alone under a grand stormy
sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might
seem to be abroad upon the air”; and he does, too, full justice to
Lamb’s poetical appreciation of London. “Nowhere,” he says, in the
melodious concluding sentence, “is there so much difference (as in
London) between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together
more grandly ... the background of the great city, with its weighty
atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and
bleached stone steeples.”
Perhaps it may be thought that Pater’s judgment of Lamb is coloured by
too strong an infusion of his own personality, and that the Charles
Lamb of the essay is hardly recognisable, clothed, as he appears to
be, in his critic’s very wardrobe; that Pater puts aside certain broad
aspects of Lamb’s character as being less congenial to himself; but I
should rather myself feel that he has indeed passed behind the smiling
mask which Lamb often wore, or has, perhaps, persuaded him to doff it;
and that he has thus got nearer, in fact, to this melancholy loving
spirit, with its self-condemned indulgences, its vein of mockery, its
long spaces of dreariness, its acute sensibilities. Lamb, one feels,
was a pilgrim in hard places, and, like Bunyan’s pilgrims, caught
desperately at the fruits that hung over the wall to relieve his
sadness; and yet, in another mood, he was full of a tender quietism,
with a large and loving outlook upon humanity and life. Pater seems to
have come from reading Lamb like a friend who has been communing with
a friend. They have talked without affectation and without disguises;
and thus one feels that, though there has been, under the influence
of sympathy, a certain suppression or suspension of modes of speech,
of aspects of thought, that had a real bearing on Lamb’s character,
yet that Pater has seen the innermost heart of the man with the
insight that only affection can give, an insight which subtler and
harder critics seem to miss, even though the picture they may draw is
incontestably truer to detail.
Besides these two critical appreciations, Pater wrote at this time
a Shakespearian study, and the little essay on “Romanticism,” which
re-appeared in 1889 as the Postscript to _Appreciations_, which may be
shortly discussed here.
It has a high value. It is a careful attempt to find a definition for
the two terms _classical_ and _romantic_. Pater sees with perspicuous
clearness that one of the difficulties of finding a precise formula for
large terms, expressive of tendency, is the disentangling them from the
loose, conventional, and conversational sense that they come to bear.
Thus he says of the word _classical_, that “it has often been used in a
hard, and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and
accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never
have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or
old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories,
and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about
it—people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus
fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and
Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and
tame.”
He says that the charm of classical literature is the charm of the
“well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over and over
again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its
artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity.”
“It comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the
measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never
displease us.”
But the romantic spirit is that which craves for new motives, new
subjects of interest, new modifications of style: its essence is the
addition of strangeness to beauty; its danger is to value what is
after all inartistic—anything that is bizarre, strained, exaggerated.
Pater contrasts Pope and Balzac as instances of the defects of the two
styles,—Pope’s lack of curiosity producing insipidity, and Balzac’s
excess of curiosity not being duly tempered with the desire of beauty;
and with singular felicity he selects the _Philoctetes_ of Sophocles
as a typically romantic book, but yet with all the tranquillity of the
classical spirit.
Pater shows that romanticism generally arises, as in France with
Rousseau, after a long period of stagnation and ennui. But after all
the essence of the situation lies in the fact that, as Stendhal says,
all good art was romantic in its day; and thus the charm of romanticism
is the charm of the spring, of the unfolding of new forms, and
strangely shaped flowers, and scented fruits; the charm of classicism
is the charm that creeps over the same landscape with the mellow
richness of autumn; and Pater sums up the whole subject by saying
that “in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school
of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike,
against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity
which is dead to form.”
The conclusion, then, for Pater is that our work should unite the true
qualities of both romanticism and classicalism; that it should be
fresh, new, spontaneous, and unconventional; decorous, but not hampered
by decorum; gaining soberness and richness from recognised methods and
due authority; but in the truest sense a development, neither a new
departure nor a servile imitation. We are not to think slightingly of
the old forms, or to neglect the hallowed influences of association;
authority must control the manner, vitality suggest the matter. And
in all this Pater is true to his creed, clinging as he did to the old
forms of melodies and enriching them with new harmonies. He is content,
indeed, to look backwards with reverent eyes upon the past; but he is
all alive with the problems of the present, the hopes of the future.
And thus the essay comes to have a direct value, because in it he
summarises and reflects, stating the truth positively, and not by
allusion and in allegories. It is in a sense one of the manifestoes
scattered through his writings; and it testifies to his belief, which
one might forget in his dwelling upon the old and the established,
that he was in heart upon the side of the new, the inquisitive,
the expansive; that his work indeed is only critical in form, but
essentially creative in spirit.
He wrote too, at this time, the essay on the “School of Giorgione,”
which was added to the _Renaissance_ essays in the third edition, and
which has already been discussed. But his main concern was with the
_Greek Studies_. “Demeter and Persephone” was delivered in the form
of two lectures at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1875 and
appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1876. In the same year and in
the same magazine appeared the “Dionysus.” As then the most solid and
vigorous sections of the _Greek Studies_ were the work of these years,
it will be better to speak of the book here, rather than at the date of
its eventual publication (1895).
I do not mean here to dwell at any great length upon the volume,
beautiful as the _Studies_ are, because they are so strongly
intermingled with the antiquarian and the scholarly element that
they require a familiarity with classical learning, a special
sort of initiation, to comprehend them. They are fully but not
heavily freighted with erudition, and testify to a long and patient
accumulation of facts and traditions. When the accumulation was
complete—and it must have been a task of great labour—the details
had to be touched as lightly and placed as expressively as possible.
And they thus stand as an excellent work of art, and testify to the
shaping into finished and balanced studies of a mass of technical and
professional material.
To indicate them briefly in detail, the first is a study of “Dionysus,”
which touches with innumerable mystical and poetical suggestions the
bright, gay, ruthless figure of the god, alive from head to foot,
thrilling with the joy of life and beauty, and, with a divinely
unassailed temperance of his own; as he passes lightly in his robe
of skins, poising his wand with the bare brown arm, carrying in his
hand the strange secret of the vine, its heady visions, its power of
overwhelming by a sort of resistless, poisonous energy the mortal
spirit, heightening and gilding on the one hand its bright fancies and
sparkling dreams into a sort of mysterious rapture, an inner careless
glee; and on the other hand sinking melancholy thoughts into an
abandoned and exaggerated grief, and at last merging both joy and grief
together into a deep stupor of mind and body. We Northerners, with
the inherited taste for potent and ardent beverages, as resources to
fight against our cheerless skies, our damp mists, our aching frosts,
enlightened, too, by the later researches of natural philosophers,
who have explained the magic of intoxication as a sort of unseemly
poisoning of mind and body alike, are apt to view the effects of wine
as an essentially grotesque and commonplace thing; we forget what
a mystery this fierce excitement, this strange imported ecstasy of
soul, the cloudy following lethargy might mean, would mean to those to
whom the whole of life was a commerce with the divine, and who felt
themselves surrounded by secret and unseen influences. And then, too,
we must bear in mind that tendency of personification which lay so
close to the heart of these old nations. With us it is all the other
way; we tend to refer all things to a vast unity of law, to prodigious
impersonal forces, thereby drawing, no doubt, nearer to truth, but
further and further away from the romance that appeals to simple minds.
Thus to the Greeks the worship of the grape was a discerning of “the
spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines.” The
rites of Dionysus were holy things, “breaths of remote nature ... the
pines, the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the strange
echoings and dying of sound on the heights.” Dionysus, thus, was a
spirit of fire and dew; of fire first:—
“And who,” says Pater, “that has rested a hand on the glittering
silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes of
sweetness are lying, does not feel this? It is out of the bitter
salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with the most
curious virtues.... In thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born,
the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of
all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense
blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English
gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the
leafless twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or
Aaron’s rod that budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when
Tannhäuser’s repentance is accepted.”
And then, too, Dionysus is born of the dew—of the freshness, the
solace, of liquid in a hot land.
“Think of the darkness of the well in the breathless court, with
the delicate ring of ferns kept alive just within the opening; of
the sound of the fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into
the houses of Venice, on summer mornings.”
It is this combining of symbolism that Pater believes to be so
characteristic of the Greek sentiment: “the religious imagination of
the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing
together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human
body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers.”
And with it all, in the conception of this mystical impassioned Deity,
goes a deep sadness, the sadness of one who is old though everlastingly
young, who has seen a thousand fair things fade, year after year, the
flowers withering in the sheltered places, the trees losing their
rich summer foliage; he has seen generation after generation arise in
grace and beauty, thirsting for life, coming with new wonder to taste
the sweet mysteries; and they too have gone; he knows the secrets of
the grave; he knows that though new life arises, the old life, the
old passionate identities, are not restored. He himself defies death
and the violence of traitorous people, infuriated by the sorrows that
follow so hard in the path of joy; he is slain, but arises again with
strength renewed and sadness increased; thus the vision glows, and
fades, and glows again.
It is in vain to ask ourselves whether the whole of this body of
symbolism was ever present in any mind or group of minds. That is not
the concern of Pater; his thought is rather to trace the many clear
streams that have ever flowed within the single channel. He gathers
the waters in a heap, as the prophet of old said. And the value of
the essay is that it reveals something of the freshness and richness
of the Greek mind, the exquisite power of seeing the beauty of sweet
and simple things, of interweaving them into joyful fancies, embodying
them into strange high-hearted tales; this tendency is the exact
opposite of our own Celtic tendency, which loses itself in a vague and
wistful melancholy in the thought of desolate spirits full of sorrow,
that find their natural home in the soft weeping world, the moors in
which the rain drops pitifully, the lonely hills. With the Greeks the
sense of presences behind life, hovering near, revealing themselves in
half-glimpses, took shape in the bright sparkling pageant of life—life
that is determined in its brief space to press out the most poignant
qualities of sorrow and laughter, of love and song.
In the “Bacchanals of Euripides” the same point is touched on a
different side; here we see the intoxicating sense of life and
spring, the tingling impulse of the dance, coming out in the group
of worshippers, the women who surround the woman-like god, touching
thought exclusively through the senses. To these was given to feel “the
presence of night, the expectation of morning, the nearness of wild,
unsophisticated, natural things—the echoes, the coolness, the noise of
frightened creatures as they climbed through the darkness, the sunrise
seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion, the bitterness of satiety,
the deep slumber which comes with the morning.”
Pater traces the plot of the strange beauty-haunted play, with its
grotesque episodes, such as the indignity of the Bacchic passion
seizing upon the old fatuous men, horribly renewing their youth in a
kind of shameless parody of childish merriment, up to the appalling
tragedy of the end, the doom of scepticism that yet involves a house
and a nation in speechless grief and horror.
In the “Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” which Pater said had been
the most laborious and difficult piece of work he had ever done, he
traces the complex shadowy legend from its early origins. The Mother of
Nature, with her power over the kindly fruits of the earth, is first
depicted; and then in the midst of her passionless content, her easy
benevolence, her daughter is snatched away to be queen among the dead;
the mother, in a sad indifference of grief, sets out stony-hearted on
the quest, sometimes blasting, sometimes blessing the earth through
which she passes, losing, in the stress of that bitter sorrow, the
balance of mind, the responsibility, which her influence had brought
her. Pater shows that behind all the brightness, the hopefulness, the
impassioned geniality of the Greek creed, there lay a shadow:—
“The ‘worship of sorrow,’ as Goethe called it, is sometimes
supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of the
Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion of mere
cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity,
conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous
activity. It helped to hide out of their sight those traces of
decay and weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally
shy, to keep them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy
places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle
age; and it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people
who, in truth, were never ‘sick or sorry.’ But this familiar view
of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of
what is known concerning it, and really involves a misconception,
akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic
spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had
dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing
all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of
difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps
somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art
and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none
but negative qualities; and the legend of Demeter and Persephone,
perhaps the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to
show that the ‘worship of sorrow’ was not without its function in
Greek religion; their legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful,
wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic
monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic
spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting
by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of
tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight
painful and strange.”
But perhaps the most important dictum which Pater lays down in the
essay is this—that “in the application of these theories, the student
of Greek religion must never forget that, after all, it is with poetry,
not with systematic theological belief or dogma, that he has to do.”
In the second part of the essay he traces the myth through its
treatment by many hands, the hands of poets, the hands of sculptors,
each adding something of their own restless and eager personality to
these figures of the “goddesses of the earth, akin to the influence of
cool places, quiet houses, subdued light, tranquillising voices.”
It is here that he conceives the secret to lie—that in the perceptions
of these old imaginings we may not only draw nearer to the heart of the
ancient world, but that they may bring us too, by sweet association
and delicate shadowy imagery, some uplifting and enlarging of our own
sympathies and hopes.
The “Hippolytus Veiled” (1889) is a much later work, but it will be
as well to treat of it here, though it belongs less to the stricter
archaeological studies, and more to the series of _Imaginary
Portraits_. Pater takes the old sad legend of Hippolytus, the child
of Theseus and an Amazon, the type of a stainless and almost froward
chastity, which brings with it the penalty of the scorning of divine
influence, of natural law; and embroiders out of it an elaborate
and beautiful story, heaped with rich and fervid accessories. He
points out first the exquisite finish, the clear-cut detail, which
characterises even the smallest and daintiest of Greek legends;
“the impression of Greece generally,” he says, is “but enhanced by
the littleness of the physical scene of events intellectually so
great—such a system of grand lines, restrained within so narrow a
compass, as in one of its fine coins.” And thus he illustrates that
salient characteristic of Greek life—the absence of centralisation,
the intensity with which so vivid a life burnt sharply at so many
provincial centres simultaneously. Then comes the story, the noble
child so carefully nurtured by the desolate sorrowing mother, acquiring
in and through her woe all the arts of simple seemly living, in order
that she may delicately nurture the child of her fall. Pater brings
the lonely cave-life before one—the wax-tapers, the hunger of the
boy so daintily satisfied, his eager prattling alertness, the joyful
days, overshadowed only by the thought that they were surely passing.
Then the boy passes on to the greater world, becomes renowned in all
manly exercises, but keeps his purity unsullied, even in the perfumed
chambers of the palace, face to face with the feverish desire of the
shameless Phaedra. “He had a marvellous air of discretion about him, as
of one never to be caught unaware, as if he never could be anything but
like water from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morning, or the
beams of the morning star turned to human flesh.” Repulsed and mad with
jealous shame, Phaedra whispers the traitorous tale to Theseus, who
utters a curse upon the boy, so that he falls into a wasting sickness.
Even so the gods are merciful; he struggles back to life, to lose
it again before the wrath of Poseidon, or even perhaps of Aphrodite
herself, as he drives his chariot along the shore. The earth rocks, a
great wave whitens on the beach; the horses plunge and start, and he is
buffeted to death among the sea-boulders and the crawling brine.
The tale has a curious magic about it; but though Greek in outline,
it is hardly Greek in quality, suffused as it is with a strange and
wistful romance that is born of a later and more self-conscious age.
In the essays on the “Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” he touches on the
possibilities of external influences, the hints from the East, from
Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Cyprus, as forming possibly
the seed of Greek art. But he points out truly that this art is all
“emphatically _autochthonous_, as the Greeks said, new-born at home,
by right of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over those mere
elements, and touching them, above all, with a wonderful sense of the
nature and destiny of man—the dignity of his soul and of his body—so
that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers.”
And he points out, too, that we are apt to import too purely an
intellectual element into our conceptions of Greek art, because we have
to deal with it principally in the form of sculpture, the only product
that remains to us in large measure, while their pictures, their metal
work, their carvings, their embroideries, have suffered a natural
decay. Pater deals first with the descriptions of ancient shields, and
with the excavated treasures of Mycenae, and points out that this metal
work, with its special _cachet_, “the seal of nearness to the workman’s
hand,” and the Greek tendency to overlay stone as far as possible with
metal, show that Greek art probably first displayed itself in this
form, and was in reality the expression of an age of gold rather than
of stone.
In the second essay he traces the growth of true sculpture, the gradual
preference of marble as a medium for art, until the first school of
sculptors appears at Sicyon, the chief seat in earliest days of Greek
art. Here he depends mostly upon the authority of Pausanias; “our own
fancy,” he says, “must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience
of the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty
notices—the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending
at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records,
somewhat uncertainly.”
He shows that in the detachment of images from the walls and pillars
behind them, Greek art was already liberated from its earlier Eastern
associations, which worked only in reliefs and friezes; and then came
the perception that sculpture was not to be a thing of mechanical and
mathematical proportions, but the representation of a living organism
with freedom of movement, full of the human soul, instead of a mere
stiff attitude and a frozen gesture.
And then religion comes in to swell the richness of art, and the vague
customs and traditions of the older days transform themselves into the
breathing images of personal gods enshrined and enthroned.
The essay ends with an attempt to indicate the characteristics of the
great school of Sicyon as represented by Canachus—a sculptor, it would
seem, of deep religious feeling, and distinguished by that early stiff
_naïveté_ of work which indicates “a gravity, a discretion and reserve,
the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the
wealth and fulness of final mastery.”
In “The Marbles of Aegina” Pater discusses the quality of the beautiful
group of sculpture discovered in 1811 in a ruined temple of Athene in
a remote part of Aegina, and purchased for the Munich Gallery by King
Louis I. of Bavaria. The interest of this group is that it seems the
consummate flower of Dorian as opposed to Ionian art, dating probably
from about the time of Marathon.
Pater skilfully contrasts the Ionian tendency of thought—the
brilliant, diffused, undirected play of imagination, its restless
versatility, its extreme individualism—with the Dorian influence of
severe systematisation, the subordination of the individual to the
state; the group has the characteristics of the purest Greek chivalry;
he shows the “dry earnestness” of the craftsman, “with a sort of hard
strength in detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that
of an early Flemish painter,” and withal “his still youthful sense of
pleasure in the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his
art overcome.”
“In this monument, ...” he says, “pensive and visionary as it may
seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer
or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of
things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is
as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.”
In the last of the _Studies_, “The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” composed
twenty years later than the earliest essays, Pater traces the effect
of the athletic system of Greece upon their sculpture. The pride of
health, of perfect agility, of graceful movement, all concentrated upon
the end in view, the perfect balance of mind and body alike—these were
the ends which that system had in view—how different from our own
gloomy and commercial athletics!
The pride of the sculptor was to combine the mystery of motion and
of rest, to seize a moment of intense energy—“the twinkling heel
and ivory shoulder” of the runner, “the tense nerve and full-flushed
vein,” and to set it for ever in the imperishable stillness of art. And
further, behind the suppleness, the delicate muscularity, the unspoiled
freshness, of youth, to imprint if possible the mark of true humanity
upon those figures, the kind and simple heart, the modest smile, the
stainless purity of soul. And again, in those funeral monuments of
young creatures snatched away before their time, to comfort the mourner
by some hint of the dignity, the tranquillising secret of death.
Pater takes the work of Myron and of Polycleitus as the perfect
expression of humanity—“humanity, with a glowing, yet restrained joy
and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it _is_ pure.”
“To have achieved just that,” he writes, “was the Greek’s truest
claim for furtherance in the main line of human development. He
had been faithful, we cannot help saying ... in the culture, the
administration, of the visible world; and he merited, so we might
go on to say—he merited Revelation, something which should solace
his heart in the inevitable fading of that.”
It is here, perhaps, that the deepest value of these _Studies_ lies.
Pater penetrates by patient skill, by ardent sympathy, the glowing,
simple, straightforward life of the old world, with its light-hearted
mirth, its swift acquiescence in things as they are.
But he realises throughout that it is over and gone; that we cannot
win it back; but that it may cheer and enlarge our view of life, our
admiration for those sunny spaces of history, if we can but apprehend
it; and that we may win from it some tranquillity, some brightness
of spirit, which may fall on our heavier hearts, our bewildered
sophisticated minds, like fresh winds blowing over the hills from the
gates of the morning. That it cannot wholly satisfy us he has no doubt;
but that it may enliven and widen our minds he is not less assured.
Up to this date Pater’s work had been critical; it has been pointed
out that it was never purely critical, but a species of poetical and
interpretative criticism, of a creative order, working upon slender
hints and employing artistic productions as texts and _motifs_ for
imaginative creation.
But he now began to feel the impulse to produce original creative work,
and to use his own impressions, his experiences, his speculations as
material for imaginative treatment.
His only critical work for the next three years consisted of the
Essay on “Charles Lamb” which we have already considered, a slight
Shakespearian essay on “Love’s Labours Lost,” and three of the _Greek
Studies_. But the year 1878 is memorable for the first appearance
of one of his most beautiful works, the one, in fact, which can
be recommended to any one unacquainted with Pater’s writings, as
exhibiting most fully his characteristic charm.
_The Child in the House_ is the sweetest and tenderest of all Pater’s
fancies, the work, we may say, where his art approached most nearly
to a kind of music. We have before indicated the autobiographical
vein of the piece, but it remains to say something of the art of the
essay, which is conceived in a certain golden mood of retrospect, and
makes an appeal to all who, however rarely, indulge a train of gentle
recollection. Such a mood is wrought in us by a sort of sudden charm;
the sight of old places where we have lived untroubled days brings it
back with a wistful swiftness, so that we feel a yearning desire, it
may be, for our own unstained past; we contrast what we are and what
we have become, with what we were and with what we might have been.
This mood, a sort of “death in life” as Tennyson says, may surprise
natures overlaid with conventionalism and even coarseness. It is one
of the commonest and most forcible, because truest, effects of pathos,
in books that aim at dramatic effect, when the crust of later careless
habit suddenly breaks, and the old clear stream of life seems to be
running there below all the while.
Such an experience may hold within it, even for the most worldly and
hardened minds, a hope of immortality, a hope of redemption. That
strange and yearning hunger of the heart for a purity, a simplicity,
which it once had, before the bitter root of evil sent up its poisonous
flowers into the soul, is one of the most primal emotions of nature. It
is in such a mood that a man is apt to feel most self-forgiving, most
self-pitying, because he feels that it is circumstance and seduction
of sense that have marred a nature that in itself desired purity and
simplicity. It is not perhaps the highest of emotions, because it is
a mood in which life would seem to hold no lessons but the lesson of
inevitable decline, ungenerous deterioration; but there is no denying
its strength, its sad charm.
In _The Child in the House_ we see a boy deeply sensitive to beautiful
impressions, to all the quiet joys, the little details of home: its
carved balusters and shadowy angles, its scents and sounds, its effects
of light and shade, and further abroad, the trees of the garden, the
hawthorn bush, with its “bleached and twisted trunk and branches” ...
with the fresh bloom—“a plumage of tender crimson fire out of the
heart of the dry wood”—the shops of the city hard by, the belfry with
its giddy winding stair,—“half, tint and trace and accident of homely
colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff,
floated thither from who knows how far.”
And then, too, we see the child’s love for the outward forms of
religion; “the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white
linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic
purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to
have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious
books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel
grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells
and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron’s vestment, sounding
sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place.”
Over this quiet and untroubled mood the shadow creeps. The boy begins
to feel the touch of sorrow, of loss, of bereavement—the shadow of
death. A cry heard on the stairs tells how the news of a death comes
home to an aged heart; the little household pet, the Angora cat,
sickens and dies, the tiny soul flickering away from the body; the
young starling is caught and caged, but the boy cannot resist the
cries of the mother-bird, the “sharp bound of the prisoner up to her
nestlings,” and lets the sorrowing creature go.
One realises with a painful intensity with what a shock of bewildered
emotion Pater must have realised as a child the first lessons of
mortality, “the contact,” as he wrote long afterwards, “of childhood
with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can
enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple,
pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.”
Yet in this region there falls a certain vein of what may be called
_macabre_, which might be thought morbid were it not obviously so
natural—a dwelling on the accidents of mortality, the gradations of
decay.
“He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as
spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and
his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the
lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s voices; and then
what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the
child’s flesh to violets in the turf above him.”
There is very little of human emotion in the vision; little dwelling
upon companionship and near affections and relationships; and this is
true to nature. The child whose nature is thus sensuously perceptive
is often so much taken up by mere impression, by the varied, the
enchanting outsides of things, the curious forms, the play of colour,
the ray of sunlight like gold-dust, the light cast up from the snow
upon the ceilings of rooms, that there is little leisure, little
energy, to give to the simple affections of life. In this the picture
is perfectly faithful; the writer, by a sincerity of retrospect, has
avoided the temptation to read into the childish spirit the emotions of
the expanding heart; it is all seen in the region of Maiden-sense, in
the desirable clear light of the early morning, before the passionate
impulses awake, before the intellect expands. Thus the pure art of the
conception lies in the picturing the perfect isolation of the childish
soul,—not a normal soul, it must be remembered,—though perhaps the
haunted emphasis of the style, its luxurious cadence, its mellowing of
outline, may tend to disguise from us how real and lifelike indeed, how
usual an experience, is being recorded.
And for the style itself, it is a perfect example of a kind of poetical
prose; there is no involution, no intricacy. The language is perfectly
simple; and though some may feel a lusciousness, an over-ripeness of
phrase, to predominate, yet the effect is perfectly deliberate, and it
is by the intention that we must judge it. It may be set in a paradise
of floating melodies in which the brisk, the joyful, the energetic may
be loath to linger; yet for all who love the half-lit regions of the
spirit, the meditative charm of things, _The Child in the House_ must
remain one of the purest pieces of word-melody in the language, and one
of the most delicate characterisations of a mood that comes to many and
always with a secret and wistful charm.
Before we speak of _Marius the Epicurean_, which began to absorb
Pater’s energies from 1878 onwards, it will be as well to trace the
slender thread of events. How uneventful his academical progress was
may be augured from the fact that the year 1880 was in some ways almost
the most momentous year of his life, because it was in the course
of it that Pater determined to resign the tutorship of the college.
This step meant a serious loss of income; but he was now embarked
upon the task of constructing _Marius_, and could no longer disguise
from himself the fact that writing was indubitably the most serious
preoccupation of his life. He saw that it was becoming impossible for
him to discharge the duties of the post adequately, and at the same
time carry on his literary work effectively. The governing body of the
college fully concurred in his decision; and though the incident at
first caused Pater some pain, realising, as he did, that the feeling
of the society did not endorse his own theory of the functions of the
tutorial office, yet he soon grew to perceive that his resignation
had been a blessing in disguise: it freed him from work which was not
particularly congenial, work which needed qualities, such as a brisk
directness of address, a good-humoured strictness, a businesslike
determination, which Pater had never even professed to possess. He
continued to lecture; but he was set free from the constant petty
inroads on his time, to which a college tutor is always liable, and
from perpetual small engagements and interruptions. It is a matter of
regret that Pater did not realise this earlier. He would both have
saved himself some chagrin, and he would have been able to give some of
his best and most vigorous years to what was after all the real work
of his life. There are, and always will be, abundance of effective
college tutors who could not write _Marius the Epicurean_; and, on the
other hand, it is not an agreeable or dignified thing for a great man
of letters, and a man, too, of a peculiarly sensitive temperament, to
discover that he has been holding a post which has not been regarded
as by any means appropriate to his disposition, and that his discharge
of its duties, though at the cost of much patient effort and constant
strain to himself, has not wholly satisfied his colleagues.
On the other hand, lecturing was always a congenial task to Pater. He
spent much time and thought upon his lectures, and prepared them with
such thoroughness and care, that he tended to over-elaborate them, thus
impairing their value as orally delivered discourses, intended for
immediate comprehension.
Mr. Humphry Ward writes:—
“I became a Fellow of Brasenose early in 1869, and for the next
three years saw Pater almost daily. The common stories of him, at
Tutors’ meetings, scholarship elections, etc., are not far from
the truth. He saw that other people were better fitted than he to
arrange details; but he did the work assigned to him very well, and
with much labour. The only time I remember seeing him really angry
was one night in Common Room when X., an elderly man and a former
tutor, not overburdened with ideals, made some cutting remark about
the short hours and light work of modern lecturers. Pater, who had
by that time had some five years’ experience, and whose lectures
(over the heads of most men) were crammed with thought and work,
‘let himself go’ in a series of the most bitter repartees about the
perfunctory stuff of the older time, the shams, conventions, and
orthodox impostures of X. and his contemporaries. Relations between
them were afterwards strained.”
In one college office, however, which Pater held until his death, he
took great delight. The post of Dean is an almost honorary one, and the
only official duty attached to it is that of presenting men for their
degrees; but it gives the holder a dignified stall, that on the extreme
right, on the _decani_ side, next to the altar, a stall dignified by a
special canopy and an exalted desk. Pater never failed to occupy his
stall both on Sunday morning and evening; and he was a strong advocate
for the Sunday services being compulsory. He said with truth that there
were many men who would be glad to have the habit of attending, but
who would fail to attend, especially on Sunday mornings, partly from
the attraction of breakfast parties, or possibly from pure indolence,
unless there was a rule of attendance. As a matter of fact attendance
was made a matter of individual taste, but Pater continued to deplore
it.
The service at Brasenose retains several peculiar little ceremonies;
the candles are lit at celebrations. The Junior Fellows bring in the
elements with solemnity from the anti-chapel. When the procession
leaves the altar, the dignitaries who carry the alms and the vessels
bow at the lectern to the altar, and to the Principal as they pass his
stall. The Vice-Principal bows to the altar on leaving his stall, and
to the Principal as he passes out. These little observances, dating
from Laudian, or even pre-Reformation times, were very congenial to
Pater; and it was always observed that though kneeling was painful to
him, he always remained on his knees, in an attitude of deep reverence,
during the whole administration of the Sacrament. Indeed his reverent
and absorbed appearance in chapel will be long remembered by those
to whom he was a familiar figure. His large pale face, his heavy
moustache and firm chin, his stoop, his eyes cast down on his book
in a veritable _custodia oculorum_—all this was deeply impressive,
and truly reflected the solemn preoccupation which he felt. It is
characteristic of him that he used to regret that the ardour with which
the undergraduates sang the Psalms abated in the _Magnificat_, which to
him was the Song of Songs.
One of the very few pieces of writing composed during the years devoted
to _Marius_ was the little Essay on “Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” This was
written in 1883, not long after the poet’s death, and is perhaps tinged
with a memorial respect. Yet it is a subtle piece of praise, in which
at the same time Pater seems delicately to weigh and test the author he
is discussing; but one cannot help feeling that the innermost world of
mystical passion in which Rossetti lived was as a locked and darkened
chamber to Pater. He can look into it, he can admire the accessories
of the scene, he can analyse, he can even sympathise to a degree; but
it was after all to Pater an unnatural region; the heated atmosphere
of passion, the supreme significance of love, being foreign and
almost antipathetic to Pater’s serious and sober view of intellectual
tranquillity. To be intellectually and perceptively impassioned indeed
he desired; but the physical ardours of love, the longing for enamoured
possession—with this Pater had nothing in common.
He divined the truth indeed by a sort of analogy of sympathy.
“To Rossetti,” he wrote, “life is a crisis at every moment. A
sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man’s
everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a
singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite
to him.”
And again:—
“For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,
swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,
mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great
undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a
world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those
affections—of the great love so determined; its casuistries,
its languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or
unfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it
looks, as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow
of them: all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a
deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse.”
This is ingenious enough, though it is hard to see exactly what Pater
meant by the “casuistry,” the “philosophical” vein of Rossetti.
Rossetti rather seems to feel, to state the problem, with the solution
of which philosophical minds might concern themselves. Thus he
affords plentiful matter for philosophical speculation, but without
philosophical intention; and indeed the deep-seated impatience of
Rossetti’s nature had very little that was akin to the philosophical
spirit. He felt the mystery, which is the basis of all philosophy,
deeply; but it was to him a baffling, a despairing mystery; not an
attractive mystery, supremely worth disentangling.
And thus it is that Pater chooses as the typical instance of Rossetti’s
work the single composition which he says he would select if he had to
name one to a reader desiring to make acquaintance with him for the
first time—_The King’s Tragedy_, a ballad which is hardly typical of
Rossetti at all, a piece of somewhat languid unemotional workmanship;
with an excellence of its own indeed, but not even touched with the
inner spirit of Rossetti’s work. The reason of this is that Pater,
admiring with a deep respect and regard the attitude of Rossetti to
art, but yet not entering into his inner mood, found the restraint,
the directness, the absence of exotic suggestiveness displayed in this
poem more congenial to him; and thus the essay remains rather a _tour
de force_ than a sympathetic appreciation; he was surveying Rossetti
from the outside, not, as in the writers whom he himself selected to
deal with, from the inside. Pater in his critical work bears always,
like the angel of the Revelation, a golden reed to measure the city;
but in this particular essay it is a piece of measuring and no more;
and nothing could more clearly show the impersonal, the intellectual
trend of Pater’s temperament than his comparative failure to accompany
Rossetti into the penetralia of his beauty-haunted and beauty-tortured
spirit.
CHAPTER IV
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
When or how Pater began to form the design of _Marius the Epicurean_
is not known. I cannot help doubting whether it was at first intended
to be so large a work. His method of working was so elaborate, so
deliberate, that he preferred shorter studies, episodes rather than
continuous narrative. The year 1878 had been a more or less busy year.
_The Child in the House_ had appeared, and he had written three other
studies; but he fell into a long silence. In 1879 nothing appeared from
his pen. In 1880 two short Greek Studies were all that he published;
in 1881 and 1882 he published nothing; in 1883 came the little study
of Rossetti, published as an introduction in Ward’s _English Poets_.
In 1884 he published nothing; and at last in 1885 appeared _Marius
the Epicurean_. It may be said that he gave up six years of his life,
when his mental powers were at their strongest, to the preparation of
this great book. He felt the strain imposed upon him by the size of
the conception very severely; moreover, he realised that to execute a
subject on so large a scale was not wholly consonant with the bent of
his mind; thus he wrote to Miss Paget (Vernon Lee) in July 1883:—
“I have hopes of completing one half of my present chief work—an
Imaginary Portrait of a peculiar type of mind in the time of
Marcus Aurelius, by the end of this vacation.... I am wishing to
get the whole completed, as I have visions of many smaller pieces
of work, the composition of which would be actually pleasanter
to me. However, I regard this present matter as a sort of duty.
For you know I think that there is a ... sort of religious phase
possible for the modern mind, the conditions of which phase it is
the main object of my design to convey.”
So few personal hints are preserved of Pater’s feelings about any of
his works that this statement, made in the very throes of his labour,
has a peculiar interest.
The motive of _Marius_ is the tracing of the history of a highly
intellectual nature, with a deep religious bias, through various stages
of philosophy to the threshold of Christianity; for it is impossible
to resist the conviction that Marius, dying technically a Christian,
his last moments soothed with Christian rites, would, if the creator of
the book had decided to prolong his progress, have become a professed
Christian.
Before we examine the book in detail we may briefly indicate the
stages through which Marius passes. The first part traces his boyhood
and school life, and shows him, so to speak, in the orthodox stage,
accepting without question and with deep devotion the old native
religion of his land; in his school days comes the mental awakening,
and the birth of philosophical speculation. In the second part Marius
takes his bearings, and becomes an intellectual Epicurean, of the
Cyrenaic school. He goes to Rome, and joins the Imperial household
as secretary to the Emperor Aurelius; and thus the Stoic position is
brought before him in its most attractive form. In the third part
Marius learns the inadequacy of his Cyrenaic philosophy, and begins to
see that there is an isolation and a lack of sympathy in his position.
He feels, too, the incompleteness of the Stoical system; and realises
the need of a vital faith in some unseen and guiding power to preserve
the serenity of mind which he desires. At the end of this part Marius
is a Theist; at this point some unrecorded years are supposed to
elapse. In the fourth part Marius is brought into direct contact with
Christianity, but the appeal that it makes to him is mainly aesthetic;
yet the faith in an unseen power comes nearer as the shadow of death
begins to fall.
The background, carefully selected by Pater for the story to enact
itself in, is the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a skilfully
chosen period, when philosophy was fashionable, and when a liberal
toleration was extended to Christianity; so that the development of
Marius’ philosophical and religious position takes place equably and
naturally, without the severe strain which a period of barbarism or
persecution might have put upon it.
It may also be observed that the story, though in a sense romantic, is
free from emotional incidents. Two friendships play their part in the
development of Marius; but there is no hint from first to last of the
distracting emotion of love. With the exception of the faint picture
of his mother in the opening of the book, transitory glimpses of the
Empress Faustina and of the Christian widow Cecilia, there is an entire
absence of the feminine element.
The book bears from first to last a strong personal, almost
autobiographical, impress; but at the same time it may be said that it
is essentially a learned book; the local colour, the archaeological
element, is very closely studied, and used, as was ever Pater’s way,
in no pedantic fashion, but fused with a perfect naturalism into the
story. It is probably, however, true to say that the fact that Pater’s
knowledge of Italy was to a great extent superficial helped him to make
his picture so clear and vivid; he was always at his best when he was
amplifying slender hints and recollected glimpses. Too great a wealth
of detailed materials tended, as we shall have occasion to observe in
a later book, _Gaston de Latour_, to blur the sharp outline and to
interfere with lucid execution.
The workmanship of the book is from first to last perfect; if there
is a fault, and it may be fairly reckoned a fault, it lies in the
introduction of certain rather over-lengthy episodes of translated or
adapted passages, such as the story of Cupid and Psyche out of the
_Golden Book of Apuleius_, the discourses of the Emperor Aurelius, and
the conversation between Lucian and Hermotimus in the fourth part.
In themselves they are models of literary grace; but in a connected
narrative they are rather as wide trenches dug across the reader’s
path. They are felicitous indeed, and in a sense apposite; but just as
in the _Arabian Nights_ the device of story within story, like those
nests of enamelled Indian boxes, causes a reluctant suspension of
thought, so it may be said in _Marius_ that the holding up of the main
interest by the introduction of pieces of work on so minute a scale is
not justified. It is as though pilgrims on a river, who desire above
all things to complete their journey, should be compelled to traverse
and explore a backwater, where no amount of beautiful detail reconciles
them to the temporary abandonment of their original quest.
The art of the writer is perhaps most manifest in the first part, in
which there is a delighted, a luxurious zest, hardly maintained in the
same evenness throughout. Indeed, in spite of the size of the whole
conception, and the perfect craftsmanship displayed, one is tempted to
believe that Pater’s real strength was the strength of the essayist
rather than of the narrator; a belief in which, as we have seen, he
himself concurred.
In the first part is brought out with exquisite grace the life of
the old Roman villa, buried in the remote countryside, near the sea:
the name of the place is White-nights (_Ad Vigilias Albas_). It is
half-farm, half-villa; here the lonely boy grows up, with his widowed
mother, whose life is but a life of shadowy sentiment consecrated to
the memory of the dead.
“The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its
dainty landscape—the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted
snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour with its
freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of
_Venus Speciosa_ on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves
of white breakers.... The air there had always a motion in it, and
drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the
house.”
There is a beautiful passage about the boy’s simple pursuits:—
“The ramble to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses
and wild lavender, and delightful signs, one after another—the
abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild
birds—that one was approaching the sea; the long summer-day of
idleness among its vague scents and sounds.”
The house itself has the perfect Italian charm:—
“Lying away from the white road, at the point where it began to
decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of
pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age ... beyond the gates,
was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous
villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet
of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles.
Here and there the marble plates had slipped from their places,
where the delicate weeds had forced their way.”
The boy grows up in an intense meditative cloistered mood, with a
scrupulous conscience carefully fostered by his mother. “A white bird,
she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry
in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like
that!” There is a traditional, inherited priesthood in the family, and
the boy has a deep liturgical and ritual preoccupation; he is happiest
in sacred places, and is conscious all his life, even in the midst of
worldly distractions, of “a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the
conduct of life.” Perhaps it may be said that the ritual element, the
pleasure in processions, and ordered hymns, and ceremonies and symbols
is a little over-weighted. There is a sense of unreality, a lack of
lifelikeness, about the dramatic intentness with which the functions
described are carried out; the devout temper of the central figure, of
Marius himself, is too definitely presupposed in the worshippers. We
shall have occasion to advert to this point again; but in this first
part the spectacle of the religious ceremonies so tenderly and quaintly
described gives one the feeling that one is watching the movements of
the well-drilled _supers_ of a play, rather than the unconstrained
movement of actual life.
The boy’s religious sense is deepened by a visit that he pays, for
the sake of curing a boyish ailment, to a neighbouring temple of
Aesculapius, where he listens to the mystical discourse of a young
priest. He is shown through a sliding panel a retired long-drawn
valley, lit with sunlight and closed by a misty mountain, which gives
him a strong sense of the unsuspected presence of the unseen in life.
His mother dies; and he himself goes to Pisa to school, where he lives
a somewhat isolated life, with dreams of literary fame.
“While all the heart (of his fellow-scholars) was in their limited
boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already entertaining
himself, very pleasurably meditative, with the tiny drama in action
before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger
contest, and already with an implicit epicureanism.”
His view of life is coloured by an intense boyish attachment to a
school friend Flavian, a wayward, self-absorbed, brilliant boy,
with a strong taste for euphuistic literature, and of sceptical
tendency. Flavian’s life is already tainted by sensuality: “How often,
afterwards, did evil things present themselves in malign association
with the memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of borrowed
sanction and charm in its natural grace!” But Marius by a certain
coldness and fastidiousness of temperament preserves his purity
untouched. And Marius here learns his first lessons in Epicureanism of
the higher kind. “He was acquiring what it is the chief function of
all higher education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the
ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday
life—of so exclusively living in them—that the unadorned remainder
of it, the mere drift or _débris_ of our days, comes to be as though
it were not.” But it was not the prescribed studies of the school that
gave him his hints of beauty. “If our modern education, in its better
efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of idealising power, it
does so (though dealing mainly, as its professed instruments, with the
most select and ideal remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant
reading; and thus it happened also, long ago, with Marius and his
friend.”
Then comes Marius’ literary training in association with Flavian. He
learns to appreciate the delicate manipulation of words, the sharp
impression, the exclusion of all “that was but middling, tame, or only
half-true,” the refinement of what is already refined, the fastidious
correctness of form, the principle that “to know when one’s self is
interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.” And
this brings Marius to the knowledge of the necessity of scrupulous
independence in literary taste.
“It was a principle, the forcible apprehension of which made
him jealous and fastidious in the selection of his intellectual
food; often listless while others read or gazed diligently; never
pretending to be moved out of mere complaisance to other people’s
emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulous literary
sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demand for
a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personal
intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved
his euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.”
Then comes the sudden death of Flavian, in a fever; and his end is told
with apathetic intensity which makes it one of the strongest passages
in the book. Flavian is writing a poem, and struggles to continue his
work through the slow progress of decay. In this beautiful passage one
entirely false note is struck; and it has a special interest because
it is the only moment at which the narrative form is interrupted for
a moment by the dramatic. Marius lies down beside his dying friend,
heedless of possible contagion, to try and communicate some warmth
to the shivering frame. In the morning Flavian’s delirious anguish
ceases with a revival of mental clearness. “‘Is it a comfort,’ Marius
whispered then, ‘that I shall often come and weep over you?’—‘Not
unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!’” It is certain that this
effort to sum up a thought, which might have been present in Marius’
mind, in definite words is an artistic mistake. If any confession of
the terrible consciousness that death was at hand was to be made, it
was for Flavian to confess it; and Flavian’s own answer is equally
untrue to nature.
And so with the death of Flavian the first part closes in desolation.
The death of his friend is the event which, at the beginning of the
second part, flings Marius into philosophical speculation. “To Marius
... the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing
less than the soul’s extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the
fire among those still beloved ashes.” Thus he is confronted in the
sternest and saddest way with the mystery of death: and the thought
comes home to him that he must at all costs realise the significance
of life, and how he must play his part in the days that remain before
he too passes into shadow and silence; the religion of his childhood
deserts him; and he is forced to turn to the “honest action of his own
untroubled, unassisted intelligence.”
He secluded himself in a severe intellectual meditation, becoming
something of a mystery to his fellows. He was reading, “for the most
part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what
might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence,
which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.”
He studies Heraclitus, and learns to mistrust habitual impressions and
uncorrected sensation, and to discern the movement in things of “the
sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason.”
He accepts the canon that the individual must be to himself the measure
of all things, and resolves to limit his researches to what immediately
interests him, resting peacefully in a profound ignorance of all
beside. “He would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow
its due weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in
the conditions of man’s life.” And here he fell under the dominion of
Aristippus of Cyrene, who was the first to translate the abstractions
of metaphysics into a practical sentiment. He, too, was more than
half an agnostic; but instead of his agnosticism leading to a languid
enervation, it led rather to a perpetual and inextinguishable thirst
for experience.
“What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of the happiest
temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the most
depressing of theories”; and the practical conclusion he arrived at
was that self-culture was probably the best solution, the impulse
to “adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls,
and whatever our souls touch upon—these wonderful bodies, these
material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together
for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the
intercourse of society.”
Aristippus, indeed, became to Marius a master of decorous and
high-minded living. Metaphysic, as described by Michelet, “the art of
bewildering oneself methodically,” he must spend little time upon that.
“Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical
ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed,” and
to acquire this, to regard life as the end of life, the only way was
through “insight, through culture, into all that the present moment
holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.”
The pursuit of vivid sensations and intellectual apprehensions must
be his work, until such a manner of life, by its effort to live days
“lovely and pleasant,” might become a kind of hidden mystic religion.
But there was no touch of hedonism in this:—
“Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and ‘insight’ as conducting to
that fulness—energy, variety, and choice of experience, including
noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite
old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral
life ... whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic,
impassioned, ideal: from these the ‘new Cyrenaicism’ of Marius took
its criterion of values.”
This would involve “a life of industry, of industrious study, only
possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and
soul.”
Marius then, with his creed formulated, at nineteen years of age,
sets out for Rome, where he has an old family mansion, to become the
amanuensis of the Emperor. There is a beautiful description of his
journey: how the sun went down “though there was still a glow along the
road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were still awake about
the crumbling gray heights of an old temple.”
On the journey he meets the young Christian knight, Cornelius. And
it must be here confessed that the youthful soldier of the Imperial
guard, with his gilded armour, his blithe manliness, his sense of
secret serenity, is one of the least convincing figures of the book.
To put it in the plainest way possible, there is an indefinable taint
of priggishness about Cornelius, and Pater in vain labours to create a
charm about him. To weave such a charm the elaborate narrative style
is inadequate; one gets no glimpse into the blithe and serene mind
of Cornelius; he is “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly
null”—no touch of humanity ever comes to relieve his statuesque pose,
and one wearies of his golden armour and his handsome face. Nothing
but dramatic art, such as the art of Scott, could have given Cornelius
attractiveness; and even he would have been baffled by the sober
perfection of the young knight. One longs that he should lose his
temper, make some human mistake, exhibit some trace of emotion or even
frailty; but he takes instead his icy shining way through the story,
and the heart never desires to follow him.
Then comes Marius’ first sight of Rome, his realisation of the fact
that it was, beside being a city of palaces, become the romantic home
of the most restless religious instinct, of the wildest superstition.
Religions were draining into Rome, as the rivers into the sea. In the
midst moved the stately figure of the Stoic Emperor, whom Marius first
sees in a religious procession, and whose calm face, with its prominent
eyes demurely downcast, but yet “broadly and benignantly observant,”
candid gaze, and ascetic air, as though “the flesh had scarcely been
an equal gainer with the spirit,” impressed him profoundly. With him
walked the goodly, comely, sensual Lucius Verus, the other Augustus,
with his “strange capacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a
masterly grace.” Then follows the Emperor’s discourse on the Vanity of
Human Ambitions, delivered in the Senate, a skilful cento of aphorisms
taken from the _Meditations_, and finally Marius’ introduction to the
Imperial household, his sight of Faustina the Empress, Fronto the
philosopher, and the Emperor himself. He sees, too, a gladiatorial
show, at which the Emperor sits impassibly, writing and reading, and
wonders at the tolerance, “which seemed to Marius to mark Aurelius as
his inferior now and for ever on the question of righteousness; to set
them on opposite sides, in some great conflict.”
It may be freely confessed that Pater does contrive, by pathetic
and emotional touches, to bring out with wonderful vividness the
human charm of the Emperor, his deep patience, his fatigue, his
affectionateness, his devotion to duty. He and Flavian remain as the
two vital figures of the book, apart from the hero himself; and it may
be held a true triumph of a species of historical art to have evolved
so real, so dignified, so intensely vivid a figure out of the somewhat
chilly abstractedness that had hitherto surrounded the philosophic Lord
of legions, the Stoic master of the world.
In the third part of _Marius_, which is much shorter than any of the
other parts, the revelation grows more distinct. Marius, overcome with
doubt as to whether his new intellectual scheme can be harmonised with
the old serious morality of his childhood, hears a discourse by Fronto
on the question of morals.
“He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in search after
some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed to Marius
to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of motive to
an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life, determined
partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened self-interest
or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere fear of
penalties.... How tenderly—more tenderly than many stricter
souls—he might yield himself to kindly instinct! What fineness of
charity in passing judgment on others! What an exquisite conscience
of other men’s susceptibilities! He knows for how much the manner,
because the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes
beyond most people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging,
instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess rights. He
conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call them by that
name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may have no
suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a way
of his own.”
And then the orator proceeds to sketch a kind of universal
commonwealth, a heavenly citizenship, in which all men should realise
their position, their duty; and Marius falls to wondering whether
there could be any such inner community of humanity, wider than even
the community of nationality, and with a larger patriotism, with an
aristocracy of elect spirits, an ever-widening example, and a comely
order of its own. He realises that his Cyrenaicism is after all but
an enthusiasm characteristic of youth, almost a fanaticism, and that
something wider, larger, more impersonal is needed, as life goes on. He
realised that in his first philosophy there had been “some cramping,
narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own nature,” and that
he had paid a great price “in the sacrifice of a thousand possible
sympathies” for the intense personal appreciation of the beauty of the
moment. It was a narrow perfection that he had been aiming at after
all, the perfection of “capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical
impressions, of an imaginative sympathy.” But he had rejected the
wider, the more venerable system of religious sentiments and ideas,
which had grown up in the vast field of human experience. And thus
he saw that he could not stay where he was; that he must recognise
not only his own personal point of view, but the wider community of
humanity.
In this frame of mind Marius has a memorable interview with the
Emperor, who, in order to raise funds for the war, has determined
to sell by public auction the accumulated treasures of the Imperial
palace, and is feeling with an austere joy the pleasure of a deep
philosophical detachment from the world. Marius sees that this kind of
renunciation, a renunciation of the very things of the purest quality
of beauty that his philosophy had taught him to value, may bring with
it a loftier and simpler kind of joy than even the sober and refined
enjoyment of them. Aurelius, with a supreme sense of duty, is about to
plunge into the uncongenial labours of a great campaign, and Marius
sees that in the selfless surrender to what appears the Divine will
lay his true generosity of soul. He sees that one of the strongest
features of the Emperor’s character is the union of intellectual
independence with a tender sympathy for all the manifestations of the
popular religious sense, realising, as he does, that men must reach
their ideal by very different paths. Marius finds, among the Emperor’s
papers committed to him, a document, a species of diary, full of the
most intimate self-communings. And in spite of the magnificence of
character, the resolute determination, the amazing generosity there
revealed, there is a note of heaviness. He sees how “the forced and
yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after
all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight
upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no
real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.” The cheerfulness
of demeanour, indeed, to which the Emperor had attained, was not a
spontaneous joy breaking out from an inner source of happy faith,
but a practised, a deliberate attitude, attained by a rigorous
self-restraint. Marius thinks of Cornelius, whose cheerfulness seems
of a totally different kind, “united with the bold recognition of
evil as a fact in the world,” yet he sees or suspects in Cornelius an
irrepressible and impassioned hopefulness. He finds it necessary to
go to Praeneste, where the Emperor is staying for a few days with his
younger children, and arrives to find the little Annius Verus dying;
and here comes one of the beautiful touches through which one comes so
close to the humanity of Aurelius:—
“He saw the emperor carry the child away—quite conscious at last,
but with a touching expression ... of weakness and defeat—pressed
close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing
only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure
distress.”
And so the Emperor sets out on the campaign from which he has reason
to think that he may never return. The pageantry of his departure,
the magnificent armour that he wears, are in strange contrast to the
face of Aurelius, “with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an
expression of positive suffering.” He departs, and Marius returns
to his musings; but in a lonely ride into the Sabine Hills he has a
strange uplifting of spirit, in which he feels that behind all the
complexity of life, “behind the veil of a mechanical and material
order, but only just behind it,” there moves a guide, a heavenly
friend, ever at his side, to whom he is perhaps dearer than even to
himself, a Father of Men.
Marius felt that after the realisation of this possibility, his life
could never be quite the same again, and that only in the light of this
hope could he apprehend the secret of the lonely pilgrimage upon which
he seemed to be bound.
Some time is now supposed to elapse, and in the fourth part Marius
comes upon the scene again at a banquet at which the young Commodus
is present, and also the great Apuleius, with whom Marius has a few
moments of private conversation. Apuleius unfolds to his companion
his belief in a kind of middle order of beings, between man and God,
by whom the prayers and aspirations of humanity can be carried and
interpreted to God. It is, indeed, the doctrine of the ministry of
angels which is thus foreshadowed; and the effect on Marius is to give
a heightened sense of unreality to the world in which he moves; and it
is at this juncture that he visits with Cornelius the villa of Cecilia,
and is deeply impressed with the order, the industry, the joyful peace
of the household. Cornelius takes his friend through a garden and
into the old catacomb of the Cecilii, where Marius sees the graves of
Christians, and reads with a strange thrill of spirit the touching
and inspiring inscriptions on their tombs, that seem to exorcise the
terrors of death by a serene and lively hope. The fresh and cool
sensation of peace with which the whole surroundings are invested is to
Marius like a window opened from a hot and fragrant room into the dawn
of some other morning. Here, he fancied, might be the cure, the anodyne
for the deep sorrowfulness of spirit under which he seemed to have been
always labouring. He began to discern the source of that untroubled
serenity, that quiet happiness of which he had always been conscious
in his friend. The Christian ideal of that period, during the peace
of the Antonines, had lent itself to the harmonious development of
human nature, in a due proportion, rather than to the idea of ascetic
self-sacrifice; and the divine urbanity and moderation of this secluded
household exercised a strong spell over the sensuous temperament of
Marius.
But here there creeps in the intense liturgical and ritual
preoccupation of the author. Marius goes to find Cornelius at the
Cecilian villa, and becomes by accident the spectator of a solemn
celebration of the Eucharistic mystery.
The description of the service is exquisitely, almost lusciously
rendered; it satisfies Marius’ deep instinct for worship to the
uttermost. But here the reader cannot help feeling a lack of
proportion; the sensuous element triumphs over the intellectual. The
choir of children, the white-robed youths, the bishop himself, “moving
the hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious power
... or chanting in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of
the rite,” have a certain unreality about them, an impossible peace,
an almost mawkishness of conception. It seems, perhaps, a hard and
unsympathic criticism to make of a passage into which so much tender
idealism has passed, but there is a taint as of the Sunday-school type
about the incident, which not even its elaborate art can surmount.
One feels in a false atmosphere, an atmosphere which is not only
unrealisable but actually undesirable. It lacks the salt of humanity,
and is touched with the unalloyed meekness which the manly heart,
however tender, however responsive, does not really wish to enforce.
The narrative then passes with a singular abruptness back to Marius’
literary preoccupations; and the intrusion of this chapter at this
point may be held to be one of the few artistic mistakes of the book.
It interrupts the progress, as if by a whimsical diversion, at a
crucial point; it introduces the figure of the satirist Lucian, and
relates a conversation with Hermotimus, a beautiful thing in itself,
but with no real bearing on the development of the central theme.
The upshot of the talk, which is in itself a delicious Platonic
dialogue, full of humour and fancy, is that there is no certain
criterion of philosophical ideas, but that the adoption of any form
of philosophical belief is dictated by a preference and an instinct
in the disciple; Lucian, employing a species of Socratic questioning,
extinguishes, by a sort of affectionate and tender scepticism, the
burning enthusiasm of the boy’s ardent philosophy. The real gist of
the chapter lies in the sight which Marius has as he returns to Rome
of a wayside crucifix; and the echoes of the conversation take shape
in his mind, making him reflect whether it were possible that Love
“in the greatness of his strength” could condescend to sustain Love
“fainting by the road.” It is just a hint, like a ray of light through
a half-opened door.
There follow passages of a diary of Marius with many vignettes of small
sorrowful and loving things; a racehorse led to death, a crippled child
at play with his sister, a boy, the son of a labourer, waiting with
his father’s dinner, and gazing “with a sorrowful distaste for the din
and dirt” at the brick-kiln where his father is at work. The _motif_
of the chapter is that an enlarged charity, a passionate sympathy with
humanity, so apt to be excluded by a philosophical system, contains
perhaps a truer estimate of the secret of life.
“A protest comes, out of the very depths of man’s radically
hopeless condition in the world.... Dared one hope that there is a
heart, even as ours ... a heart even as mine, behind this vain show
of things!”
And now again Marius goes to the house of Cecilia, and sees the
burial of a child; he notes that not even the intensity of human
grief which the household feels and manifests in its stifled sobbing,
its unrestrained tears, can do away with “the habitual gleam of joy,
the placid satisfaction” of spirit. At the service is read aloud an
epistle speaking of martyrdoms in Gaul, of Blandina and Ponticus,
bringing to Marius the sense of the “strange new heroism,” uplifting
sorrow out of the region of “private regret,” which seems to be
appearing in the world.
Marius sees the return of the Emperor in triumph; and he is filled
with a sense of sickening reaction at the sight of the captives in
the procession, and at the fact that one of so lofty a spirit as
the Emperor can fall so low as to take his place in the midst of so
barbarous a ceremony. “Aurelius himself seemed to have undergone the
world’s coinage, and fallen to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity
no longer golden.” And thus at that moment the vital failure of the
philosophical attitude reveals itself to Marius; he sets out to revisit
his old home, with a shadow of approaching disaster upon him. He opens
the old mausoleum of the house, and the thought that he may be the last
of his race, blending with a passionate tenderness for the past, his
father, his ancestry, induces him to bury all the remains of the dead
deep below the ground.
“He himself watched the work, early and late; coming on the last
day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last touches,
while the workmen were absent; one young lad only, finally
smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness
with which Marius flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with
the dark mould.”
And now the end comes with a certain unexpectedness. Marius, reflecting
on his own life, sees that though with a natural bent for adventure and
action, all his progress has been inward and meditative, always aiming
at detachment rather than at the intermingling of himself with the
current.
The death that follows was no doubt designed by the author to have
something tragic and what may be called almost sensational about
it, to relieve by contrast the contemplative texture of the work.
Cornelius finds Marius in depression and weariness at White-nights,
and contrasting sadly his own languor of spirit with the irrepressible
youth of the other.
They set off for Rome. The plague is ravaging the land, and this,
together with a shock of earthquake, loosens the superstitions of the
natives; an attack is made on a body of Christians who are praying
by the grave of the martyr Hyacinthus. Blood is shed, and the group,
including Cornelius and Marius, are arrested and sent for trial to the
chief town of the district. Marius, in obedience to a sudden instinct,
procures the liberation of Cornelius by bribing the guards, explaining
to Cornelius that he is allowed to depart to procure the means of
legal defence. The first feeling of Marius as he sees Cornelius depart
is a kind of innocent pride that he, who had always believed himself
to lack the heroic temper, could thus display a sudden courage. But
a mood of dark melancholy follows; he foresees that he will suffer
the death of a common felon, without even the Christian consolation
of the martyr’s example. The hardships of the march bring on a fever,
and Marius is abandoned by the guard as a dying man in a little hill
village. At first the rest and quiet relieve his tortured mind, and
he is filled with a sense of gratitude to the unseen Friend who has
guarded him through his long journey, and draws near in faith to the
crucified Jesus. In this half-peaceful mood he finds himself able to
think of death with an intense and reverent curiosity, as of a door
through which he must pass to his further pilgrimage. And then the
weariness comes back tenfold as death draws near; the Christians of
the place surround his bed, and hearing of the deed he has done in
saving Cornelius, administer the last rites, the consecrated bread, the
holy oil; and when all is over bury him with the accustomed prayers,
and with an added joy, holding him to have been a martyr indeed.
Such is the progress of this melancholy and meditative soul, to whom
even youth had hardly been a season of joy, so oppressed was it by the
sad malady of thought.
It is difficult to treat so intimate a memorial of a personality in a
critical spirit; and we may say at once that to deal with a book that
is so sacred a document in the spirit of finding fault with it for not
being other than it is, is wholly out of place. It may be said to have
nothing heroic about it, but to be almost purely spectatorial. It may
be easily labelled introspective, even morbid; but it is of the very
essence of the book that it is designed to trace the story of a soul to
which the ordinary sources of happiness are denied, and to which, from
temperament and instinct, the whole of life is a species of struggle,
an attempt to gain serenity and liberty by facing the darkest problems
candidly and courageously, rather than by trying to drown the mournful
questionings of the mind in the tide of life and activity. What we have
to do is, granted the type and the conception, to see how near the
execution comes to the idea which inspired it.
It will be seen that the book is to a certain extent the history of
a noble failure; Marius’ attempt to arrive, by his own unassisted
strength, by a firm and candid judgment, at a solution for life, breaks
down at every point. He falls back in a kind of weariness upon the old
religious intuitions that had been his joy in boyhood. He learns that
not in isolation, not in self-sufficiency, does the soul draw near
to the apprehension of the truth, but in enlarged sympathy, in the
sense of comradeship, in the perhaps anthropomorphic instinct of the
Fatherhood, the brotherhood of God. It is a passionate protest not only
against materialism, but against the intellectual ideal too; it is a
no less passionate pronouncement of the demand of the individual to be
satisfied and convinced, within his brief span of life, of the truth
that he desires and needs.
But the weakness of the case is, that instead of emphasising the power
of sympathy, the Christian conception of Love, which differentiates
Christianity from all other religious systems, Marius is after all
converted, or brought near to the threshold of the faith, more by its
sensuous appeal, its liturgical solemnities; the element, that is to
say, which Christianity has in common with all religions, and which
is essentially human in character. And more than that, even the very
peace which Marius discerns in Christianity is the old philosophical
peace over again. What attracts Marius in the Christian spirit is
its serenity and its detachment, not its vision of the corporateness
of humanity and the supreme tie of perfect love. This element is
introduced, indeed, but fitfully, and as if by a sense of historical
fidelity, rather than from any personal conviction of its supreme
vitality. With all its candid effort the spirit of the writer could not
disentangle itself from the sense of personal isolation, of personal
independence; there is no sense of union with God: the soul and its
creator, however near they draw in a species of divine sympathy, are
always treated of as severely apart and separate. The mystical union of
the personality with God is outside the writer’s ken; the obedience of
the human will to the divine, rather than the identification of the
two, is the end to which he moves; and this perhaps accounts for the
drawing of the line at the point which leaves Marius still outside the
fold, because one feels that the author himself hardly dared to attempt
to put into words what lay inside.
And now, as our chief concern is with the literary art of the book, we
may turn to consider its main characteristics.
“Though the manner of his work,” says Pater, speaking of Marius,
“was changed formally from poetry to prose, he remained, and
must always be, of the poetic temper: by which, I mean, among
other things, that quite independently of the general habit of
that pensive age he lived much, and as it were by system, in
reminiscence.”
This is true of the book itself: we cannot say that it is all
reminiscence, but it is all bound up with reminiscence. The author
makes little attempt to deal with the fresh atmosphere, the sharp
detail of the present; still less to throw himself forward into the
glowing idealization of the future; the whole book is that of a man
looking back, the outlines of what he sees all mellowed and rounded
in a sort of golden haze of pensive light. And it is thus essentially
poetical. The carefully studied archaeology of the book is never
insisted upon, but only used as contributing a picturesque and hinted
background; but it is poetical in the sense that there is no attempt
at definite or scientific statement—even the abstrusest doctrines
of philosophy, as well as the intricate details of the setting, are
all touched with a personal appeal. Nothing is presented in its own
dry light; it is all coloured, tinged, transformed by the mind of the
writer, it all ministers to his mood.
The one artistic fault of the book is, as we have said, the
introduction of alien episodes, of actual documents into the imaginary
fabric; and these give the effect, so to speak, of pictures hung upon
a tapestry. The style is of course entirely individual; it is a style
of which Pater was the inventor; it is not only easy to imitate, but it
is almost impossible, if one studies it closely, not to fall into the
very mannerisms of the writer. Of course it is easy to say that it is
languid, highly perfumed, luscious, over-ripe; but here again we fall
into the error of analysing the essential quality, and disapproving of
it. It cannot be pretended that it is brisk, lucid, or lively; there is
nothing of “sonorous metal, blowing martial sounds,” about it; rather
it winds like a cloud of smoke on a still day, hanging in fine-drawn
veils and aerial weft. It is intensely deliberate, self-conscious,
mannerised. Its fault is to fall into involved sentences, with long
parentheses and melodious cadences. It never trips or leaps or runs;
but always moves like a slow pontifical procession, stiff-robed,
mystical, and profound. It never aims at crisp precision, but rather at
a subtle refinement, a mysterious grace.
Its finest art is displayed in an economy of impression, whose very
severity ends in a suggestiveness of picture which is attained, not
by elaborate description, but by haunted glimpses of beauty. These
touches of perfect loveliness relieve the graver analysis with a
sudden sense of coolness and repose, as a student may look up from a
book into a sunny garden, and find in the golden light some hallowing,
some confirmation of the inner mood. And the most severe passages of
philosophical writing are again lit up by exquisite similes or still
more delicate metaphors, in which the whole sentence seems steeped and
stained, as with the juice of a berry shut in upon the page.
Thus he writes:—
“He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant motion
of things—the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of
ambitious systems, in the stream around him, the first source, the
ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of sight, must count with
him as but a dim problem.... He might reserve it as a fine, high,
visionary consideration, very remote upon the intellectual ladder,
just at the point, indeed, where that ladder seemed to pass into
the clouds, but for which there was certainly no time left just now
by his eager interest in the real objects so close to him, on the
lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground.”
No one can say that these sentences are obvious, clear, sharply cut.
But they are full of a poetical suggestiveness, and sparkle with hidden
lights like opalescent gems.
Indeed, the writing of Pater may best be compared to the opal. It has
not the clear facets, the limpid colour of the unclouded gem; but it
is iridescent, rounded, shot with flashing lights and suffused with a
milky mist of which one can hardly say whether it be near or far. It is
this strange sense of depth, so inherent in a cloudy gem, that it gives
one. One can measure to a millimetre the actual bulk of the jewel; but
within that limit, what spent lights gleam, what misty textures roll!
it is like a little coloured eyehole, through which one can discern the
orbits of pale stars, the swimming vapors of some uncreated world.
But the fact is that most of the objections that can be urged against
_Marius_ are _prima facie_ objections; it is criticised mostly for not
possessing qualities that it was not meant to have; it stands as one
of the great works of art of which it may be said that the execution
comes very near to the intention. Possibly Pater himself did not
feel it to be so; he said once humorously to a friend that he would
like to give him a copy of the second edition, because the first was
“so very rough.” That is a criticism which could have entered into
no mind except the author’s own. It remains a monument of sustained
dignity and mellifluous precision. The style of it is absolutely
distinctive and entirely new: the thing had never been done before;
it is a revelation of the possibilities of poetical prose which the
English language contains. The fact that it is not difficult to imitate
is in its favour rather than otherwise, because the same is true of
all great masters of individual style. But the feat was to discern
and then to display a new capacity in English prose. It might have
been said with truth that, before the advent of Pater, English prose
could display qualities of lucidity, vigor, force; that it could lend
itself to stately rhetoric and even glowing ornament; but it had never
before exhibited the characteristic of seductive grace. And yet this
was effected by Pater by the pure instinct for what was beautiful and
melodious; he has no special preference for either the use of Saxon
terms or for more elaborate Latinisms. He uses both impartially. Indeed
his use of short, crisp, emphatic, homely words side by side with
rotund, sonorous classicalities is one of the charms of the style. He
never hesitates to employ technical, metaphysical language, but he
contrives to fuse the whole into a singular unity; it is not even a
fair criticism to say that his language is not natural, for there are
many sentences of an almost childish _naïveté_. The only thing of which
one is almost invariably conscious is of the art employed, and thus
the writings of Pater appeal more, perhaps, to the craftsman than to
the ordinary reader, because of the constantly delightful sense of
difficulties overcome and crooked places made straight. There will, of
course, always be people who will feel a sense of constraint, a lack of
freedom. But those who feel the charm, will rightly discern in Marius
the true impassioned poetical quality, guided and enforced by severe
economy and delicate taste.
But however much we may analyse the characteristics of the style,
its inversions, its cadences, its peculiar use of metaphor, its
accumulation of delicate touches, its swift pictorial quality, we
cannot penetrate its secret any more than we can penetrate the secret
of the painter or the musician. Unity, due subordination, clearness
of conception, subtle correspondence of language to emotion, these
were the qualities which Pater used by a sort of fine native instinct.
It is the natural consequence of our type of classical education,
which encourages imitation rather than originality, and submission to
authority rather than individual expansion, that we fail to do justice
to such an achievement as Pater’s. We need not look upon his work as
containing a finality of expression, we need not desire that he should
originate a school of similar writers, but we may recognise gratefully
the fact that he discovered and exhibited a new possibility in the
composition of English prose.
CHAPTER V
LONDON LIFE
In 1885, the year of the publication of _Marius_, Pater made a change
in his environment; he took a house in London, No. 12, Earl’s Terrace,
Kensington, near Holland House, which he held for eight years. This
change of residence was dictated both by a desire for change, and
by the feeling that the wider circle and more varied influences of
London would lend him a larger and more vivid stimulus. He still
resided during the term at Brasenose, and lived in London mostly in
the vacations. Those who visited him in London were struck by the
extreme quiet and simplicity of the household arrangements. Pater went
a good deal into society, and enjoyed it greatly; but otherwise he
just pursued his ordinary routine of writing and working as he might
have done at Oxford. The London period was one of great interest and
enjoyment; he found a warm welcome awaiting him in literary, artistic,
and social circles; he made many new friends, and expanded in many
directions.
In London, as at Oxford, there was never the least personal luxury
in Pater’s _ménage_, though there was quiet and solid comfort. His
official income and the receipts from his books were practically all
that he had to depend upon. He was fond of travelling, to the very end
of his life, both in France and Italy. He generally went abroad for
five or six weeks, and always with his sisters. He liked the movement,
the gaiety, the greater _épanouissement_ of France. He threw himself
with a deep appreciation into all that he saw, and entered, as may be
seen from his writings, with a sympathetic intensity into the spirit
of the buildings, the sculpture, the pictures, the landscapes that he
saw. He used also to tire himself, on these occasions, with excess of
walking, his only form of exercise. But still, his enjoyment of travel
maybe best tested by the fact that his favourite tonic for the slight
weariness, resulting perhaps from the emotional reaction, which he
experienced for a day or two after his return from a tour, was to plan
a scheme of travel for the following year.
The years that followed were the most fruitful years of Pater’s life.
The reception of _Marius_ had been both respectful and enthusiastic; it
had lifted its author into a position in the very front rank of English
prose-writers. And then, too, the strain of the continuous work was
lifted off his shoulders, and he was able with renewed zest to take up
some of the many subjects which in the course of those laborious years
had appealed to him as congenial. He had faithfully and religiously
eschewed the temptation to pursue them, subordinating all vagrant
fancies to his central theme; he could now expatiate freely; moreover
he had found, in the course of his work, if not fluency, at all events
a pleasurable flow of appropriate if characteristic language. He began
to contribute reviews to the _Guardian_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Pall
Mall Gazette_. Some twenty of these reviews have been identified,
and nine reviews which appeared in the _Guardian_ have been since
reprinted, privately in 1896, and latterly published 1901.
These reviews are not of very great intrinsic value; but evidently
considerable time has been spent upon them; the book with which they
deal has been carefully read, and a delicate appreciation composed.
What strikes one most in reading them is, in the first place, a marked
tenderness for the feelings of the author whom he is reviewing,
and a great and princely generosity of praise. There seems to be
no severity about Pater; and he enters into the intentions of the
writer with a great catholicity of sympathy. There is also visible a
certain irresponsible enjoyment about the tone of the reviews, as if
with anonymity he had put on a certain gaiety to which in his public
appearances he felt bound to be a stranger.
Of course no great originality is to be expected in these compositions.
Thus reviewing three editions of Wordsworth in the _Guardian_ of
February 27, 1889, he does not hesitate to use many of his own
deliberate dicta from the “Wordsworth” essay which had appeared in
the _Fortnightly_ in 1874, and was to be reprinted in the same year
in which he wrote the review in question (1889), in _Appreciations_.
Perhaps the review of _Robert Elsmere_ (_Guardian_, March 28, 1888)
reveals most plainly the almost childlike delight which Pater could
take in the _motif_ and characters of a story which one would have
thought would not have been by any means congenial to him.
Pater’s chief critical work in 1886 was the essay on Sir Thomas
Browne, to be published afterwards in the _Appreciations_ of 1889.
In this study the same principle of autobiographical selection comes
out which we see so constantly at work in Pater’s mind. The charm for
him in Browne is that whimsical mixture of scientific and poetical
elements, the ceremonious piety, the strong sensitiveness to the human
association of things, the thirst to record and express a point of
view. Again, what gives Pater a strong interest in Browne’s writings
is the fact that he exhibits at a remote point the evolution of native
English prose, that evolution which was distracted, we would believe,
by the wave of classicalism, the effect of the tide of the Renaissance,
which beat, belated and enfeebled, on our solitary shores. The invasion
of English prose by the wrong kind of classicalism, the sonorous
elaboration of Latinity instead of the lucid charm of native English,
deferred, no doubt, the development of natural English prose, though it
perhaps eventually ministered to its richness. Browne, like Montaigne
in France, is the type of the essayist, the writer whose object is not
the precise statement of a case, but the saturation of a subject in
his own personality. Such writing is often lacking in structure and
conception, but it has an indefinable charm. “It has,” writes Pater of
Browne’s style, “its garrulity, its various levels of painstaking, its
mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together with much, to
us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy summer afternoon
down at Norwich.” It is just that which is the charm; that it brings
before us the same elements that delight us in our own life, the
summer, the freshness of the open air, the pleasant house with its
gardens and studious chambers, together with a venerable setting which
does but heighten the sense that though philosophical, political, and
religious theories may have shifted and developed, the greater part
of men’s lives and joys are made up out of far simpler and commoner
elements, which hardly indeed change from century to century.
And then, too, there comes in the art of the psychologist, “to whom
all the world is but a spectacle in which nothing is really alien from
himself, who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great
and little among things that are at all, and whose half-pitying,
half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small
interests and traits of character in the things or the people around
him.”
The other points in which the character of Browne appealed strongly to
Pater are his emotional interest in ecclesiastical ceremony, which made
him rejoice in the return of the comely Anglican order to the Norwich
churches at the time of the Restoration, which caused him to weep
abundantly at the sight of solemn processions; and there is also the
vein of curious speculation about death, his anatomical and antiquarian
researches alike testifying to his preoccupation with the thought of
the mystery of decay and extinction of vital power; till his life
becomes, as Pater says humorously, “too like a lifelong following of
one’s own funeral.”
Pater brings out very clearly the fact that the _Religio Medici_ is
perhaps a misleading title. One would expect a treatise dealing with
scientific analysis, tending naturally to materialism and scepticism,
but struggling through and retaining a hold on religion, all the
stronger for the speculative temptations that would seem to block the
way. But Browne, says Pater, “in spite of his profession of boisterous
doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing
of the character of a concession.” He is a convinced Theist, and
a confirmed pietist. “The _Religio Medici_ is a contribution, not
to faith, but to piety; a refinement and correction, such as piety
often stands in need of; a help, not so much to religious belief in a
world of doubt, as to the maintenance of the religious mood amid the
interests of a secular calling.” He goes further, indeed, and shows
that it is only Browne’s method, not his mind, that is scientific.
“What he is busy in the record of, are matters more or less of the
nature of caprices; as if things, after all, were significant of their
higher verity only at random, and in a sort of surprises, like music
in old instruments suddenly touched into sound by a wandering finger,
among the lumber of people’s houses.”
And thus, though Browne is in a sense an investigator, he misses the
conclusion to which his investigations are tending; because he does not
really seek to arrive at a conclusion, but only to harmonise facts, as
he investigates them, with a conclusion which he has inherited rather
than drawn.
Of the essay on “Feuillet’s _La Morte_,” the work of the same year,
it is unnecessary to speak. It is a mere review, full of copious
quotation, with a slender trickle of exposition; Pater neither
philosophises nor evolves principles; he merely analyses the story;
indeed, it is rather a problem why he eventually included this study
in the _Appreciations_ at all; it is significant only of a certain
catholicity of taste, and bears but few traces of his own temperament.
But Pater was now hard at work on an interesting series of experiments
of a kind that he may be held to have originated. These are the
_Imaginary Portraits_, of which the first, “A Prince of Court
Painters,” was written in 1885, as soon as _Marius_ was off his
hands; two others followed in 1886—“Sebastian van Storck” and “Denys
l’Auxerrois”—and a fourth in 1887, “Duke Carl of Rosenmold.” But
beside these four, which compose the volume known as _Imaginary
Portraits_, there were several others which may be referred to the same
class. “The Child in the House,” which has been already treated of, is
one. “Hippolytus Veiled,” the work of 1889, is another, which has been
dealt with among the _Greek Studies_, with which he included it. He
told Mr. Arthur Symons at the end of his life that he intended to bring
out a new volume of _Imaginary Portraits_. “Apollo in Picardy,” the
work of 1893, was to have been included, as well as “Emerald Uthwart”
(1892), of which we have spoken. He added that he meant to write one on
the picture by Moroni known as _The Tailor_, which he thought a very
fine and dignified figure. He would make him, he said, a Burgomaster.
Mr. Ainslie says that he had in his mind Count Raymond of Toulouse as
another possible subject.
Pater’s method was to take some romantic figure which attracted his
attention, to form a conception of the temperament of the man, and
study his environment as far as possible. He then would amplify the
details, working in historical hints; or else, as in the case of “Denys
l’Auxerrois,” it would be a pure fantasy, suggested by some trace of a
peculiar mind revealed in the architecture or sculpture of a particular
building.
This was perhaps the most congenial field for a temperament like
Pater’s, that was imaginative rather than creative, that needed a
definite _motif_ to set his imagination at work.
Thus in the _Imaginary Portraits_ Pater gave himself up to the
luxurious pleasure of evolving fantasies arising from some biographical
hint, some piece of unnamed art; some type of character that he
conceived. They are true creations, worked out in a sober pictorial
manner. But they make it abundantly clear that he had not the dramatic
gift; there is no attempt at devising the play of situations, no
contrast of character. The backgrounds, both of people and of
landscape, are finely indicated; but the interest in each concentrates
upon a single figure, and they are told in a species of dreamy
recitative.
“A Prince of Court Painters” is the story of Antony Watteau told in the
home-keeping journal of a girl of his own age, daughter of a craftsman
of Valenciennes, who perhaps loves him, though with the reticence so
characteristic of the author this only emerges in a shadowy hint here
and there. The journal is extraordinarily graceful, and exhibits, to
give it verisimilitude, many French turns of expression and phrase, as
though it had been originally conceived in French; but the whole lacks
vital truth; there is too much philosophy of a hinted kind, too much
criticism; the omission, for instance, of a dozen deliberate phrases
indicating the supposed sex of the writer, might convert the whole into
the work of a pensive man. There is little sentiment or emotion, though
it is faintly illuminated as by a setting sun with a tender aloofness,
a spectacular dreamfulness—a beautiful quality and finely conceived,
but yet with little hold on nature.
There is a characteristic thread of personal interest interwoven with
the story. The girl who writes the journal is the sister of Jean
Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau; and the artistic progress of
her brother, his enthusiastic admiration for his master, his patient
development, which is sharply contrasted with the fitful and restless
energy of Watteau, plays a real though a secondary part in the study.
It is also highly characteristic of Pater’s reticent delicacy that,
though he liked to fancy the painter a collateral member of his own
family, the actual name of Pater is never introduced into the piece,
the brother figuring throughout simply as Jean Baptiste.
But there is an abundance of fine criticism both of life and art in the
whole picture. Could the charm of Watteau be more delicately captured
than in the following passage?—
“And at last one has actual sight of his work—what it is. He
has brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish
here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That
charming _Noblesse_—can it be really so distinguished to the
minutest point, so naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade,
playing the drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons
have upon them, not less than the landscape he composes, and
among the accidents of which they group themselves with such a
perfect fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain
upon anything real. For their framework they have around them
a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which those
moss-grown balusters, _termes_, statues, fountains, are really
but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons,
I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, ‘The evening
will be a wet one.’ The storm is always brooding through the massy
splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns,
where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular
trees themselves will hardly outlast another generation.”
Throughout the whole of the study, as one might expect, the personality
of Pater emerges in little dicta and comments. “Alas!” writes the
girl, “How little peace have his great successes given him; how little
of that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true
dignity of character.”
The interest, then, of this little study lies not so much in itself,
as in the fact that it is from the creative point of view the most
ambitious, the most deliberately dramatic, of Pater’s writings. He
attempted to throw himself into a French mood, and in this he has
partially succeeded; and into the mood of a quiet girl of the bourgeois
class; and here he must be held to have failed. Perhaps it revealed to
him his own limitations, his own strength. For he wisely wrote no more
in this manner.
In “Denys l’Auxerrois” we have one of the most fantastic of all Pater’s
writings; indeed, in this strange combination of the horrible and the
beautiful, there is something almost unbalanced, something that reminds
one of the rich madness of Blake; as if the mind, though kept in
artistic check, had flung itself riotously over the line that divides
imagination from insanity; the fancy seems to struggle and trample with
a strange self-born fury, as though it had taken the bit in its teeth,
and was with difficulty overmastered. The essay begins soberly enough
with a vein of quiet reminiscence of travel; the writer is supposed
to see some tapestries at a priest’s house representing a series of
strange experiences; and it is upon this that the story is based. Denys
of Auxerre, a love-child, comes among the craftsmen of the place, like
a pagan god incarnate, and fills them, like Dionysus, with a species
of Bacchic fury. This idea, the reappearance of pagan deities, had a
strong fascination for Pater’s mind.
The curious and contradictory traits of the character of the boy,
gentleness side by side with cruelty, wild courage shadowed by
unreasonable terrors, his unaccountable appearances and disappearances,
his mysterious gifts of presage and inspiration, are all subtly
indicated.
“Long before it came he could detect the scent of rain from afar,
and would climb with delight to the great scaffolding on the
unfinished tower to watch its coming over the thirsty vine-land,
till it rattled on the great tiled roof of the church below; and
then, throwing off his mantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely,
clinging firmly against the tempestuous wind among the carved
imageries of dark stone.”
A climax of horror is reached when a search is made for the buried
body of a patron saint of the church, till, in the uncertain light of
morning, the coffin is found and opened, and the bishop with his gloved
hands draws out the shrouded shrunken form. At this Denys has an access
of terror, and rolls in a fit upon the grass. But he recovers himself,
and though by this time suspected of sorcery, he gives much anxious
care to the setting up of the great organ of the church.
“The carpenters, under his instruction, set up the great wooden
passages for the thunder; while the little pipes of pasteboard
simulated the sound of the human voice singing to the victorious
notes of the long metal trumpets.”
At last he ventures to appear in public at a pageant. The haircloth he
wears scratches his lips and makes them bleed, and at the sight, an
unholy fury fills the crowd. He is literally torn in pieces.
“The soul of Denys was already at rest, as his body, now borne
along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn
at last limb from limb. The men stuck little shreds of his flesh,
or, failing that, of his torn raiment, into their caps; the women
lending their long hairpins for the purpose.”
In such a passage as this the horror passes beyond the range of perfect
art; and the shadow is heightened by the natural tranquillity and
austerity of the writer. One cannot help feeling that Pater was here
overpowered by his conception, and that he allowed to escape him, for
almost the only time in his writings, a kind of almost animal zest
in blood and carnage. There is no lack of what is commonly called
power, but there is a lack of the restraint which as a rule Pater
so diligently preached. It reminds one of the tale of Tod Lapraik in
_Catriona_, where the staid and smiling weaver dances alone in a hollow
of the rocks in the black glory of his heart; or of the still more grim
story of Kipling, where the veil that separates the man from the brute
is twitched aside, and the unhappy wretch, intoxicated by a bestial
instinct, asks eagerly for raw meat, and rolls and digs in the earth
beneath the dark shrubs of the garden.
“Sebastian van Storck” is an astonishing contrast to the last. The
_motif_ of the essay is devotion to the purest and most abstract
reason. Sebastian is a young Hollander, the son of a Burgomaster of
wealth and high social position. The young Sebastian, a graceful
finished nature, but with a strain of phthisis in his constitution,
is a lonely, isolated young man, out of sympathy with the rich,
phlegmatic, easy life which surrounds him, who is drawn into a track of
abstract intellectual speculation, partly by a certain mortal coldness
of temperament, and partly by a clear and logical faculty of thought.
He becomes interested in the philosophy of the young Spinoza, who is a
friend and contemporary, and he sets out upon a chilly pilgrimage of
thought with a kind of intellectual disinterestedness, till he arrives
at the conclusion that the only use to make of life is to cultivate
a severe detachment from all its interests and ties. His view of God
becomes ever colder and more impersonal.
“For him, that one abstract being was as the pallid Arctic sun,
disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacier, a barren
and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had been
frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was
‘equilibrium,’ the void, the _tabula rasa_, into which, through
all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are
but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And,
himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the
clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect
to be ‘loved in return.’”
The crisis comes by his being almost drawn into a marriage with a
beautiful girl of his own circle. He has to a certain extent submitted
to her charm, and the betrothal is looked upon as an event daily to be
expected. The girl herself falls under the spell of Sebastian’s beauty
and fascination; and at a social gathering at which the friends of both
expect and desire the pledge to be given and accepted, she betrays a
certain innocent coquetry, which in Sebastian’s tense mood acts like
water dashed in his face. He is filled with a sharp disgust and flies
from home, taking refuge in a lonely manor-house, the property of his
family. A spell of stormy weather succeeds and the land is inundated.
When at last it is possible to reach the lonely house through the
raging flood Sebastian is found dead, having apparently lost his life
in saving a child, who is discovered unhurt wrapped in Sebastian’s furs.
Pater seems in this essay to have endeavoured, we will not say to
enforce the dangers of the intellectual pursuit of abstraction, for the
picture has hardly an ethical motive, but to depict in neutral tints
the natural course of the quest of pure reason. It is a melancholy
essay. Sebastian seems to suffocate under warmth and light; and the
whole sketch has something of the frozen silence, the mute impassivity,
of the stiffened leafless earth. It is more like a piece of cold and
colourless sculpture than a picture; and the contrast of the stainless
icy figure of the victim of thought thrown into relief by the warm,
fire-lit, comfortable indoor world, peopled with types of indolent and
contented materialists, is skilfully enough wrought. But the subtle
beauty of the treatment does not remove a certain inner dreariness of
thought, and the central figure seems to shiver underneath the rich
robe draped about it.
“Duke Carl of Rosenmold” is an eighteenth-century study of a very
different temperament. He is the heir of an aged Grand-Duke, and
is full to the brim of enthusiasm for art, music, literature, and
nature. But just as Sebastian van Storck was the victim of an excess
of intellectual power, so Duke Carl is the victim of its defect. His
soul is in revolt against stolid German heaviness; he is a typical
figure of the spirit of the Renaissance, all athirst for beauty and
novelty. But his temperament is whimsical and unbalanced; he has little
originality or lucidity of thought; he falls under the spell of all
that is rococo, and mistakes novelty for energy; he takes up each new
interest with eager zest, but too soon tires of it; to relieve the
dreariness of satiety in the search for new sensations, he causes his
death to be announced and is present in disguise at his own funeral.
Here he parts company with soundness of mind, and in his rebellion
against all that is conventional he mistakes the true stuff out of
which unconventionality is made. The true creative genius, to use a
metaphor, accepts the conventions of the age as a sort of necessary
frame to impulse, and troubles his head little about it; his concern is
with the picture itself, how to make it perfectly sincere, perfectly
impressive. But Duke Carl’s originality is vitiated by the desire to
startle and surprise timid natures, and to have his originality admired
or at least recognised. His grandfather abdicates, and soon after dies,
and Duke Carl’s mind, which has been distracted for a while by foreign
travel, becomes set upon marriage with a peasant girl, partly from real
affection, partly from a desire to do the unexpected thing. His end
is somewhat mysterious; he arranges to meet his betrothed in a lonely
stronghold, and falls a victim to an armed invasion. Contrary to his
habit, instead of letting the story speak for itself, Pater appends
a conclusion in which he says that his object has been to sketch a
precursor of what may be called the German Renaissance, of Lessing
and Herder, leading on to Goethe. But the interest remains psychical
rather than historical. The duke is a type of those natures who,
with an intense susceptibility to artistic influences, have no real
force of character or conception in the background, and fall victims
to a neurotic desire, which approaches near to vulgarity, to cause
a commotion among stolid and commonplace persons, because they are
conscious of their inability, from want of real intellectual energy, to
impress or influence the higher natures.
The whole volume, then, is based on an idea of intellectual and
artistic revolt; each of the four types depicted, Watteau, Denys,
Sebastian, and Duke Carl, is a creature born out of due time,
and suffering from the isolation that necessarily comes from the
consciousness of being out of sympathy with one’s environment. In
all four there is a vein of physical malady. Watteau and Sebastian
are phthisical, and Denys and Duke Carl are of unbalanced mind. This
tendency to dwell on what is diseased and abnormal has a curious
psychological interest; and it will be observed, too, that all the four
figures depicted are youthful heroes, endowed with charm and beauty,
but all overshadowed by a presage of death. There is thus something of
the _macabre_, the decadent element, about the book.
It will be as well here to consider the two other Imaginary Portraits,
“Emerald Uthwart” (1892) and “Apollo in Picardy” (1893), because,
though of slightly later date, they in reality belong to the same
series.
“Apollo in Picardy” is one of the purest pieces of fantasy that Pater
ever composed. In its _motif_ it much resembles “Denys l’Auxerrois,”
the conception being that of a reincarnation of a sort of pagan spirit,
perhaps a fallen deity, in the midst of a monastic world.
Prior Saint-Jean, bred as a monk, is occupied in middle age in the
composition of an abstruse book of astronomy and music, dry and
scientific enough. He is sent, being in indifferent health, down to
the Grange of the monastery, to superintend the building of a great
monastic barn. He takes with him a novice named Hyacinth, the pet of
the community, neat, serviceable, frank, boyish. The first evening
after their arrival the Prior goes into the granary, and finds there
asleep among the fleeces a young serf of the monastery, a youth of
extraordinary beauty, with a strange harp lying beside him. The Prior
mutters a collect, conscious of a certain unholy charm, and goes softly
away. The next day he finds the serf waiting upon them. The great barn
is built, and a series of mysterious and inexplicable circumstances
occurs. The serf seems to inspire a sort of wild gaiety, a spontaneous
art, into the builders, and manifests, too, an almost Satanical
strength.
The boy Hyacinth finds this strange creature a delightful playmate; and
yet there is a bewildering mixture of charm and cruelty about him. The
wild creatures of the forest will come at his call; he will play with
them, and when tired of play will pierce them with an arrow or snap
their fragile backs. Yet they nestle to him to die in his arms.
Sometimes the cruelty breaks out in horrible ways. One evening the
great pigeon-house is invaded by some creature unknown, which destroys
the birds wholesale, leaving their bodies ruthlessly rent and torn. Yet
next day the serf comes weeping to the mass; the chapel is found to be
strangely decked with exotic flowers, and the serf himself joins with
his harp in the canticles, drawing the rough voices to a silvery music.
The Prior feels the magical influences of the place slowly involving
him. He turns to his book, but there seems a madness in his brain.
Instead of penning dry scientific discussions, he finds himself
impelled against his will to crowd strange drawings and illuminations
into his book, “winged flowers, or stars with human limbs and faces,
still intruding themselves, or mere notes of light and darkness from
the actual horizon.”
He comes to again and again from his wild work with a shock of terror
and disgust. The boy Hyacinth becomes terrified at the Prior’s strange
illusions, his loss of memory, his feverish periods of what seems such
unhallowed work. But one hot, breathless evening he is drawn to play
again with the serf, whom he begins to mistrust. They play with an
ancient quoit, which is turned up from a grave. Stript to the skin, in
wild excitement, they play late into the night, till the quoit flung by
the serf, whether by accident or a sudden bloody impulse none knows,
crashes into the boy’s brain, and leaves him dead on the turf.
The serf flies; the Prior falls under suspicion of the murder, but is
claimed by the monastic authorities and confined as obviously insane.
He spends long hours gazing out of the windows, weeping, uttering
strange words; till at last his senses return to him, but he dies just
as his release is permitted.
The study is full of beauty from end to end, beauty and strangeness
side by side. Yet it is hard not to feel a sort of distempered, almost
riotous, fancy at work under it all, and there is a cloistered horror
about it, that reminds one of the old monastic legend of the monk who
goes late into the dark church to recover a volume that he had left
there, and finds a strange merry thing, in the habit of a priest,
leaping all alone in unholy mirth before the altar.
It may be said that this is exactly the effect which the writer
intended to produce, and the art is manifest. But for all that there
is a species of uncanny terror which invests the tale; not the terror
which may involve the narrative of one who has seen strange things and
records them faithfully, but the terror with which one might watch a
magician trafficking in breathless secrets, with a certain dark power
of using energies which seem to menace alike serenity and virtue.
“Emerald Uthwart” is a little fantasy written in 1892. The incidents
related are simple enough, and yet in a way sensational. Emerald is
the son of an ancient English family, brought up in an old Sussex
home, long the property of his ancestors, people of an unemphatic
type. “Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their
woods, noiselessly deciduous.” He goes to school, contrary to the
tradition of the family, and the scene of his education is laid at
what is obviously the King’s School, Canterbury. Here he forms a great
friendship with a boy a little older than himself, James Stokes; they
go on to Oxford together, get commissions in the army, in consequence
of the breaking out afresh of a war, the scene of which is laid in
Flanders. They are kept waiting before a beleaguered town; James Stokes
conceives a plan of entering the town with a few men on an expedition
the object of which is obscure. They enter the town, secure their
prize—a weather-beaten flag—and issue out again to find that the army
has moved on; they rejoin their regiment, are tried by court-martial,
and condemned to death. They are led out to execution, and when James
Stokes has been shot, the scene being described with a grim realism,
it is announced that Emerald’s sentence has been commuted into one
of degradation and dismissal. This is carried out; he wanders about
in want and wretchedness, but finally makes his way home, where he
eventually dies, after a lingering illness of four years, from an old
wound, aggravated by hardship and mental suffering. Just before the end
his case is brought before the military authorities, and he receives an
offer of a commission. The story ends by a somewhat terrible extract
supposed to be from a surgeon’s diary, who removes the ball from the
wound.
The _motif_ of the story is to depict a certain type of Englishman,
a type of decorous submissiveness. But the interest of the type lies
rather in the attempt that is made to represent it in a character of
great modesty and simplicity, but with a high natural charm both of
manner and physical appearance.
The weakness of the conception may be said to lie in the fact, that
apart from this external and physical charm the character is rather
essentially uninteresting—unambitious and demure—a Spartan, not an
Athenian type.
It was probably Pater’s object to depict the Spartan element of
public-school education; and it is here that the main interest of the
sketch lies.
“In fact,” he says, “by one of our wise English compromises, we
still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lesson in attention
and patience, at the least. Nay! by a double compromise, with
delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach them their
pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-towers,
amid the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the
discipline, of monasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the
English have never wholly lost an early inclination.... The result
of our older method has had its value so far, at least, say! for
the careful aesthetic observer. It is of such diagonal influences,
through complication of influence, that expression comes, in life,
in our culture, in the very faces of men and boys—of these boys.
Nothing could better harmonise present with past than the sight
of them just here, as they shout at their games, or recite their
lessons, overarched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to
church meekly, into the seats occupied by the young monks before
them.”
But there is a certain want of naturalness about the conception. The
picture of James Stokes descanting to his friend on minute points of
meaning in Homer, in Virgil, lacks reality. Emerald himself, after
being punished by the headmaster, stands up and says, “And now, sir,
that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my fault.” Not
so do English boys behave! And it is just here, in these rare touches
of attempted drama, that Pater’s art invariably breaks down. He was
aware that his own instinct was not dramatic. He wrote (August 9, 1891)
to a friend, Mr. Douglas Ainslie, thanking him for a copy of a play
which Mr. Ainslie had published, saying that he would read it with
interest, but adding “the dramatic form of literature is not what I
usually turn to with most readiness.”
Submissiveness, he says, was the key of Uthwart’s character: “it had
the force of genius with him”; he entered into his work with serious
obedience, but feeling that the perception of great literature was
something unattainable by himself; religion too, “its high claims, to
which no one could be equal; its reproaches”—he felt it all to be
immeasurable, “surely not meant for the like of him.” He is always
“repressible, self-restrained, always concurring with the influence,
the claim upon him, the rebuke, of others.” He attracts the notice
of strangers by his unconscious grace and healthy beauty; he is
surprised at the charm he exerts on others, never elated by it, nor
presuming upon it. And no doubt it is the intention of the piece to
show how his one violation of duty, his single deviation from strict
military obedience, brought with it ruin and death—so apparently
disproportionate a punishment. But he takes his degradation with the
same humble submissiveness, and it is in the same spirit that he meets
his death, not repining nor complaining, but simply as the orders
of some superior power, whom he is to obey unflinchingly by a sort
of sacred instinct. The purpose of the piece, then, is to draw out
the beauty of the obedient character, a soldierlike simplicity and
tranquillity. It is hardly necessary to add that the accessories are
exquisitely finished; the old house, with its scented flower-beds and
venerable chambers; the ancient stately school, with the Cathedral to
which it is attached; but in this one essay it may be said that the
simplicity of the motive does not wholly harmonise with the delicacy of
the setting. The thought is tinged and coloured by being seen through
a somewhat self-conscious and sensuous medium. One cannot help feeling
that Emerald would have disliked being regarded in this light, being
made a picture of; that is perhaps no reason why it should not be
attempted, but it militates against the success of the story, because
one feels that Emerald is caught like a butterfly, in the gauzy meshes
of a net, and is being too intimately, too tenderly scrutinised, when
he is made for the free air and the sun.
And, artistically speaking, one cannot help regarding the extract with
which the story ends as a blot. The operation for the removal of the
ball, the replacing of the body in the coffin, with “the peak of the
handsome nose remaining visible among the flowers”—one feels this to
be a harsh realism, with an almost morbid dwelling upon the accidents
of mortality, which does a certain violence to the whole conception.
Thus, though there are passages in “Emerald Uthwart” which must always
rank high among the achievements of Pater, it is impossible to resist
the feeling that in this painful story he was attempting effects to
which his art could not rise.
It is not, I think, fanciful to interpret this selection of types in
the light of Pater’s own life, the half-lit atmosphere in which he
deliberately or perhaps temperamentally moved. They are the work of
a melancholy introspective mind, dwelling wistfully upon the outer
beauty of the world, but with a deeper current of mournful amazement
at the brevity and the mystery of it all. No doubt Pater, too, felt
his own isolation heavily rather than acutely. Did he belong, one can
imagine his asking himself, in spirit, to the earlier, more fragrant,
more insouciant time, when men were less shadowed by the complexity
of thought and the inherited conscience of the ages? Or did he belong
to some future outburst of simpler, more liberal joy, to a time when
the heavy commercialism of England, its conventional politics, its
moral confusion, its mercantile view of education, should be leavened
by beauty and sincere joy? Whichever it was, he had fallen on evil
days. Oxford itself, that should have been the home of intellectual
and artistic speculation, was crowded by a younger generation, whose
idea of a University was a place where, among social and athletic
delights, it was possible to defer for a time the necessity of
adopting practical life. The older men, those who were accepted by the
academical world as men of leading, were too often men of bursarial
minds, who loved business and organisation better than intellectual
freedom. Even the keener spirits, both among the younger and the older
men, were of the dry and rigid type, believing in accuracy more than
ideas, in definite accumulation more than intellectual enjoyment.
In this atmosphere Pater felt himself misunderstood and decried.
The daring and indiscreet impulses of youth had died away, and his
unconventionalism had cost him dear. What wonder that his thoughts took
on a melancholy tinge, and that he recurred in mind to the thought of
figures whose unlikeness to those about them, in spite of the fine
daring, the beautiful impulses of their nature, had brought them
dissatisfaction and disaster and even death!
CHAPTER VI
LATER WRITINGS
All this time Pater was engaged upon a great work, which was destined
never to be finished. _Gaston de Latour_ was embarked upon soon after
the completion of _Marius_. Five chapters appeared in _Macmillan’s
Magazine_ in the course of 1888. A sixth chapter appeared in the
_Fortnightly Review_ in the next year under the title of “Giordano
Bruno,” and various other unfinished fragments remain. The chapter
called “Shadows of Events” is the only one of these which has been
included in the 1902 volume. In the case of a writer as sedulous, as
eager for perfection, as Pater it is right to withhold the incomplete
fragments. He seems for some cause to have abandoned the book in
dissatisfaction. We may speculate as to the cause of this. I am myself
disposed to think that he found the historical setting too complicated
and the canvas too much crowded. As the story advances the personality
seems to ebb out of the figure of the hero, and he becomes a mere
mirror of events and other personalities. The influences, too, that
are brought to bear on him are of so complicated a nature that his
development seems hampered rather than enlarged. No doubt Pater felt
that the book was not exhibiting his own best qualities of workmanship;
and there is a growing weariness visible, as if he felt that he was
failing to cope with the pressure of historical experience that was
closing in upon the central figure.
It may here be said that Pater’s best work is that which is built up
delicately and imaginatively out of shadowy hints of events and slender
records. His power lay in filling in, heightening, and enriching faint
outlines, not in selecting typical touches from great masses of detail.
He felt, and rightly, that he had mistaken his capacity. The period he
had chosen, the struggle of Huguenots and Catholics, is crowded with
salient figures, but to treat it romantically, the tact, the swift
intuition, of such a writer as Walter Scott was needed, sketching in
broad washes and bold strokes; not the patient and accumulative toil of
a minute and delicate writer like Pater.
The story opens beautifully enough. The boy Gaston lives the quiet
life of the country at the old house of Deux-manoirs in La Beauce, the
central corn-land of France, with the dim shape of the great church of
Chartres visible, like a ship under press of canvas, on the low horizon.
Gaston is of the same type as Marius—innocent, serious, devout,
keenly sensitive to impressions of beauty. We see him first taking
upon himself the vows of the ecclesiastical life, “duly arrayed for
dedication, with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice
folded over his left shoulder,” in the dark glowing church.
Somehow the figure fails to appeal to us. We feel—could Pater have
felt the same?—that we are but meeting Marius over again in altered
circumstances.
Yet the description of the Office, sung in the presence of the courtly
and vivacious Bishop of Chartres, is full of beauty:—
“It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty
way—_Mirabilia testimonia tua!_ In psalm and antiphon,
inexhaustibly fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that
undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of
men’s lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the
divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only
watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there
was the sheep astray, _sicut ovis quae periit_—the physical world;
with its lusty ministers, at work, or sleeping for a while amid
the stubble, their faces upturned to the August sun—the world so
importunately visible, intruding a little way, with its floating
odours, in that semicircle of heat across the old over-written
pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries within.”
The quiet life of the Manor is broken shortly afterwards by a sudden
visit of the young King Charles the Ninth, who enters from a hunting
expedition, and “with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the
place” utters a shrill strain of half-religious oaths. Pale, with an
ivory whiteness, vivacious, unbalanced, the young king feels the charm
of the place, touches a lute, talks of verses, and scratches a stanza
of his own with a diamond upon a window-pane.
As Gaston lives on his quiet life in a disturbed and alarmed country
his reflective nature begins to open. “In a sudden tremor of an aged
voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the
tacit observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream
of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world.”
He goes on to join the episcopal household of Chartres as a page,
in the company of other noble youths. He makes friends; books and
talk—“the brilliant surface of the untried world”—confront him; but
his own calm instinct, his tranquillising sense of religion, provide
the necessary balance. He takes three chosen companions home with him
to spend the hot bright weeks of the summer; and here, through the
poems of Ronsard, the infection of the living and breathing spirit of
the modern poetry, near, actual, tangible like the faces of flowers,
seizes upon him.
“Never before had words, single words, meant so much. What
expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to
music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and
it was the lark’s voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity
lent itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very
hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome
fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the
personal ornaments, of the people on the highway.” “Here was a
discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed
in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative
regeneration of the world.”
In this excited mood he rides with his companions to the Priory, not
far away, of which Ronsard was the Prior, to see the great man himself.
And here Pater is at his best. They find the Prior himself digging in
his garden; they attend a solemnity in the church; they sup with the
poet, who, touched by the generous enthusiasm of the boys, abandons
himself to a sociable mood, shows them his treasures, his manuscripts,
his portraits. But Gaston finds that Ronsard has attained to no
serenity of spirit; his “roving, astonished eyes” reveal him as “the
haggard soul of a haggard generation.”
Ronsard is sympathetically interested in the ardent spirit of the boy,
and gives him an introduction to the great Montaigne; whom he presently
goes to visit, in his château in Dordogne.
“It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea’s arms, amid the low
murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a
little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient
manor, deserted as the sea encroached—long ago, for the fig-trees
in the riven walls were tough and old.”
He finds the great man in his towered manor, with the view from the
roof of the rich noonday scenery. He feels after a few moments’ talk as
if he had known the genial philosopher all his life.
“In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive
all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of
motion, of thoughts in motion!”
“Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in
life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces
full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the
torrents.”
The portrait of this splendid human egotist is admirably touched,
with a wealth of subtle illustration from his writings. His deeply
sceptical spirit, his vivid agnosticism, confronted again and again
with hopeless mysteries, and yet for ever turning back upon the quest,
undaunted, unsated, absolutely sincere, admitting his own egotism with
frank humour—“in favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our private
confession, I confess myself in public.” And this outward egotism of
manner was but the symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism;—“I
have no other end in writing but to discover _myself_.”
Pater indicates, with perfect insight, the “broad, easy, indifferent”
passage of Montaigne through the world, his relish for meat and drink
and corporeal sensation; and yet, side by side with this, a curious,
superstitious, formal kind of piety, all springing from the same
worship for the whole of humanity. But after all, it was the sincerity
and tolerance of the man that was the charm, his quaint fancy, his rich
sympathy, his perfect comprehension; the influence that he exercised
was that of one who made no selection of moods and things, but tasted
all, enjoyed all.
Then follows the chapter called “Shadows of Events,” which it was
well to publish, but about which it is easy to comprehend Pater’s own
hesitation. It is a historical survey mainly, but the impression is
all clouded and blurred; one cannot help feeling that the one thing
lacking to Pater was the very largeness of tolerance which he described
so admiringly in Montaigne; certain characteristics, certain brilliant
points, attract him; but he cannot visualise what he does not admire.
The characters that play a large, robust, coarse, straightforward part
are all outside of him, incomprehensible, repellent. The types whom
Pater discerned so clearly were those who crept somewhat remotely,
spectatorially, even timidly, through the throng, who lived the
interior life of thought and speculation and appreciation, tasting the
finer savours; not those who strode out boldly, feeling the air of the
world their native air. Something of this melancholy aloofness was true
of Pater himself, and he draws near only to those in whom he discerns
something of the same wistful remoteness.
“Looking back afterwards,” says Pater of Gaston, “this singularly
self-possessed person had to confess that under (the) influence
(of the unsettled conditions of the age) he had lost for a while
the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real differences and
oppositions of things in that hotly-coloured world of Paris,—like
a shaken tapestry about him.”
The last phrase is exactly true of the chapter—it is a shaken
tapestry, a multitude of blurred heads and faces, confused gestures,
agitated forms.
And so we pass to the dignified banishment of Charles, and the
arrival of the new king; when across the story breaks the teaching of
Bruno—Pantheism, as it is named, “the vision of all things in God,” as
the end and aim of all metaphysical speculation.
Bruno, originally a Dominican monk, had conceived the idea of the
wholeness of life in a spiritual region.
“Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it
was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the
infinite relish of this ‘prodigal son’ of Dominic. God the Spirit
had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence,
impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of
absolute limitation. Touch! see! listen! eat freely of all the
trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the Lord God
literally everywhere!—here was the final counsel of perfection.”
What repels Gaston in the teaching of Bruno is the want of artistic
distinction and refinement about his theory. The instinct of the artist
was just that—to define, disentangle, discern, to distinguish between
“the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and
wrong in the matter of art.”
It is not clear then how the doctrine of Bruno or even of Montaigne
was to affect the spirit of Gaston. It is a case of a soul the very
breath of whose life was the arriving at canons of some kind, whose
most sacred duty appeared to be to select from the immense mass of
experience and material flung so prodigally down in the world, the
things that belonged to his peace. The difficulty is to comprehend
what was to be the issue. In the theory of Montaigne and Bruno alike,
Gaston is brought into contact with types essentially uncritical, and
one would suppose that they were intended to have an enlarging effect.
But the hint seems rather to be that they were to act in the opposite
direction, and to throw Gaston back upon the critical attitude, as the
one safeguard in the bewildering world.
One feels as though Pater had here essayed too large a task; that
he was, so to speak, preaching to himself the doctrine of robust
tolerance, of good-humoured sympathy with a more vivid and generous
life; and that he could not to his satisfaction depict the next
steps in the development because it was precisely the very type of
development of which he had had no personal experience.
Thus the book, from its very incompleteness, has the interest of being
again an intimate self-revelation. It stands like a great unfinished
canvas by a master of minute, imaginative, suggestive portraiture.
Only, one is tempted to wish that he had not given so much thought and
energy to so baffling a task—that he had constructed more of those
solitary figures which he had, as we know, in his mind, in which his
powers would have had their full scope, in which every delicate touch
would have told.
After the publication of the five chapters of _Gaston de Latour_, Pater
gave himself up to the composition of one of the most interesting of
all his productions.
The essay on “Style,” which appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ of
December 1888, and was prefixed to _Appreciations_ in 1889, is one
of Pater’s most elaborate and finished productions. It is indeed so
elaborate, so carefully wrought, it disdains so solemnly the devices
that bring lucidity, the way-posts and milestones of the road, that
in reading it one is apt to lose the sense of its structure, and not
to realise what a simple case he is presenting. Professor Seeley used
to enunciate the maxim to those whose essays he was criticising, “Let
the bones show!” Well, in Pater’s essay the bones do not show; not
only does the rounded flesh conceal them, but they are still further
disguised into a species of pontifical splendour by a rich and stiff
embroidered robe of language.
He begins by dismissing with a great subtlety of illustration the
ancient principle that a sharp distinction can be drawn between prose
and poetry, showing that it is not true that poetry differs only
from prose by the presence of metrical restraint; but that while a
severe logical structure must underlie poetry, prose can exhibit high
imaginative qualities; and that the real distinction in literature is
between the literature that is imaginative, and the literature that
attempts merely the transcription of fact. He points out that the
moment that argument passes from the mere presentation of a theorem and
becomes a personal appeal, that moment is the border-line crossed; and
that in the work of the historian the poetical element is to be found
in the personal element of selection which is bound to come in, and
which may then transform statement into art.
“Just in proportion,” he says, “as the writer’s aim, consciously
or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world,
not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist,
his work _fine_ art; and good art (as I hope ultimately to show)
in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense;
as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature also,
truth—truth to bare fact, there—is the essence of such artistic
quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft
at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run
only _fineness_ of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within.”
He goes on to say that imaginative prose is the special art of the
modern world, “an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,
descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.”
He then passes to the proposition that the art of the craftsman of
words must be essentially a scholarly art; that the best writer, “with
all the jealousy of a lover of words, will resist a constant tendency
on the part of the majority of those who use them to efface the
distinctions of language”; but there must be no hint of pedantry; the
tact of the great writer being employed in seeing what new words and
usages really enrich language and make it elastic and spontaneous, as
well as what additions merely debase it. And then, too, the word-artist
must employ “a self-restraint, a skilful economy of means”; every
sentence must have its precise relief, “the logically filled space
connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome.” He
must employ “honourable artifice” to produce a peculiar atmosphere;
and thus the perfect artist will be recognised by what he omits even
more than by what he retains. “For in truth all art does but consist
in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver
blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest
divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to
Michelangelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.”
The one essential thing, then, is “that architectural conception of
work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight
of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last
sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the
first.”
“All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity,
of the initiatory apprehension or view.” It must be composition, and
not loose accretion. The literary artist must leave off “not in
weariness and because he finds _himself_ at an end, but in all the
freshness of volition.”
He admits that there are instances of great writers who have been no
artists, who have written with a kind of unconscious tact; but he
maintains that one of the greatest pleasures of really good literature
is “in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure.”
He sums up this part of the subject by saying that all good literature
must be directed both by _mind_ and _soul_, the mind giving the logical
structure, the soul lending the personal appeal.
He then diverges into an elaborate illustration drawn from the methods
of Flaubert, whose theory it was that though there might be a number
of ways of expressing a thought, yet that there was one perfect way,
if the artist could only find it, one unique word, one appropriate
epithet, phrase, sentence, paragraph, which alone could express the
vision within; and again he enforces his belief in the “special charm
in the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end.”
Truth, then, is the essential quality, truth of conception, truth
of expression; and style must be characteristic and expressive of
personality, and though taking its form from the conception, must take
its colour from the temperament; and indeed that it should do so, that
it should indicate the personal colour, is but another manifestation of
sincerity.
Thus it will be seen that whether art is good depends upon the soul of
the creator, whether it is great depends upon the mind; and then in
memorable words he adds that if art
“be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the
redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies
with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about
ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify
us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the
glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those
qualities I summed up as mind and soul—that colour and mystic
perfume, and that reasonable structure,—it has something of the
soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural
place, in the great structure of human life.”
I have dwelt at length on this essay, because in one sense it is the
summary of Pater’s artistic creed. It is perhaps the only direct and
personal revelation of his theory of his art; but it will be observed
throughout that he is speaking not to the outer circle, not even to
the critical reader; it is not a _concio ad populum_, but a _concio
ad clerum_. The audience whom he had in mind were the initiated, the
craftsmen; and the whole oration presupposes a species of mystical
apprehension of the work of the artist; hence comes his insistence on
the delight that arises from the sense of difficulties overcome, a
delight which only the artist who has striven much and failed often
can share. It is therefore a technical discourse; and dealing with it
from this point of view, it must be confessed that in two points it
falls short of perfect catholicity and reveals the personal bias. The
first of these is the point that has just been indicated, that from the
highest art of all, such as the art of Shakespeare and Virgil, Dante
and Homer, the sense of effort, of obstacles surmounted, disappears.
_Celare artem_, that is the triumph; that the thing should appear
simple, easy, inevitable. For in the pleasure that the artist takes
in seeing a difficulty successfully wrestled with and overcome, there
creeps in a certain self-consciousness, a species of gratified envy in
seeing that, supreme as the process is, the difficulty was there; the
absence, indeed, of this sense of effort is what keeps many critical
students of art away from the highest masterpieces, and allows them to
feel more at their ease in art where the mastery is not so complete.
But this is a condition that one desires to remove rather than to
emphasise; it is based on weakness and fallibility, rather than on
strength and confidence.
And the second point, which is allied closely to this, is that Pater
presses too heavily upon laboriousness in art at the expense of
ecstatic freedom; because though there are among the greatest artists
many instances of those who have attained supremacy by endless and
painstaking labour, yet, in the case of the best artists of all, they
seem to start at a point to which others may hardly attain, to be more
like the inheritors of perfect faculty than the laborious acquirers of
it. Writers like Scott and Thackeray, for instance, not to travel far
for instances, seem to have achieved, as Scott himself said, their best
results by a “hurried frankness” of execution, and to have produced by
a kind of instinct what others have to learn to produce by toil and
thought.
And thus it is that the essay, in its very incompleteness and
partiality of view, has an immense value as an autobiographical
document, and helps us, if it is the personality of Pater that we
desire to apprehend and penetrate, to draw closer to the real man, in
his strength and in his limitations, than any other extant writing; and
is indeed a piece of intimate self-revelation.
Moreover, the concluding paragraphs of the essay, the frank confession
of his belief, in words which his natural reticence make into what may
be carelessly regarded as a piece of tame and conventional rhetoric, in
the ultimate mission of art, have an intense and vital significance;
the increase of sympathy, the amelioration of suffering, the service
of humanity—these, then, were in his deliberate view the ends of art.
The very use, in the very crucial passage of the summary, of the vague
and trite phrase “the glory of God” as a motive for high art, has a
poignant emphasis: it reveals the very depth of the writer’s soul. He
of all men, at the very crisis of the enunciation of his creed, could
never have used such an expression unless it contained for him an
essential truth; and this single phrase bears eloquent testimony to the
fact that, below the aesthetic doctrine which he enunciated, lay an
ethical base of temperament, a moral foundation of duty and obedience
to the Creator and Father of men.
In the course of 1889—not a prolific year—“Hippolytus Veiled”
appeared in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, and “Giordano Bruno,” one of the
Chapters of _Gaston de Latour_, in the _Fortnightly_. Pater also
published the _Appreciations_—rather a made-up volume, one is forced
to reflect, the kind of book that is issued in response to the appeal
of a publisher. We have already discussed all the contents of the
volume, except the Shakespearian studies, three in number, of which
“Measure for Measure” had appeared in 1874, “Love’s Labours Lost” in
1878. “Shakespeare’s English Kings” had not appeared before, and was
the only new item in the volume. Two facts are noticeable about the
book. The essay on “Aesthetic Poetry,” written in 1868, reappeared
here, but was omitted in the later edition of 1890; and the study
called “Romanticism,” written in 1876, reappeared as a Postscript.
The Shakespearian studies do not demand any very close attention. In
the little essay on “Love’s Labours Lost” he points out that in the
play Shakespeare was dallying with Euphuism. “It is this foppery of
delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which
Shakespeare is occupied in ‘Love’s Labours Lost.’” But he points out,
too, that in dealing with a past age, one cannot afford to neglect a
study of its playthings: “For what is called fashion in these matters
occupies, in each age, much of the care of many of the most discerning
people, furnishing them with a kind of mirror of their real inward
refinements, and their capacity for selection. Such modes or fashions
are, at their best, an example of the artistic predominance of form
over matter; of the manner of the doing of it over the thing done; and
have a beauty of their own.” And this, he concludes, is the chief value
of the play.
In the essay on “Measure for Measure” he shows that the play is a
remodelling of an earlier and rougher composition; but he points out
that the value and significance of it is that Shakespeare works out of
it “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the
central expression of his moral judgments.” He says that we have in it
“a real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described
as _suggestive_, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated
hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader’s own half-developed
imaginings.” He notes the dark invasion of the shadow of death in the
play, death the “‘great disguiser,’ blanching the features of youth
and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its
disgraceful associations.” And further, he touches with exquisite skill
the way in which Shakespeare here brings out, by a sudden vignette,
a romantic picture of a scene; the episode of Mariana, “the moated
grange, with its dejected mistress, its long, listless, discontented
days, where we hear only the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the
midst of one of the loveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare’s
school, is the pleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant
places.” Not less delicate is the apprehension of the character of
Isabella, so tranquil, chaste, and sisterly at first, changed, by the
inrush of contending passions, in a moment, into something fierce,
vindictive, and tiger-like. He sums up his conclusion by saying that
the charm of the work is its underlying conception of morality, not
the morality which opposes a blunt and stubborn front to the delicate
activities of life, but the artistic morality that watches, judges,
values and appreciates, and is on the side of culture rather than on
the side of prejudice and rectitude.
The essay on “Shakespeare’s English Kings” (1889) is rather a slight
performance, and the analysis of a somewhat superficial kind. Pater,
for instance, almost fails to realise the magnificence of the
conception of Richard II., the tragedy of which consists in the fact
that, at a sudden crisis, a prompt force and vigour are demanded of a
ruler whose nature is full indeed of wise and fruitful thoughts, but
whose position calls for a bluff and cheerful energy, when all that he
can give is a subtle and contemplative philosophy. But he traces the
general motive finely:—
“No!” he says, “Shakespeare’s kings are not, nor are meant to be,
great men: rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon
greatness, with those pathetic results, the natural self-pity of
the weak heightened in them into irresistible appeal to others as
the net result of their royal prerogative. One after another, they
seem to lie composed in Shakespeare’s embalming pages, with just
that touch of nature about them, making the whole world akin.”
He ends by a subtle passage, not fully worked out, indicating that
as unity of impression in a work of art is its perfect virtue, and as
lyrical poetry is the best vehicle for such unity, then “a play attains
artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of
lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were still lying at the root of
it.”
In these Shakespearian studies, produced at points so far apart in
Pater’s life, the chief interest is that he should have approached
Shakespeare at all. It is after all another testimony to the width
and largeness of Shakespeare’s mind, that it should have forced an
expression of admiration from a spirit so introspective, so definite in
its range, so preoccupied with a theory, as Pater’s. Moreover, as we
have seen, dramatic art had little attraction for him. One feels that
he does not enter into the humanity, the profundity, of Shakespeare. He
is like a man who hovers about the thickets that lie on the verge of a
great forest, peeping into the glades, noting the bright flowers and
the sweet notes of hidden birds, but with little desire to thread the
wood or penetrate its haunted green heart.
The years 1890 and 1891 were not apparently very fruitful; indeed the
latter was one of the six, out of the twenty-nine years of Pater’s
literary life, in which he published nothing but a review or two; but
he was hard at work on his _Plato and Platonism_, which began to appear
in 1892.
“Prosper Mérimée” was written as a lecture in 1890, and thus belongs to
the last period of Pater’s work. He begins by a melancholy summary of
the century—Mérimée was born in 1803—a century of disillusionment,
in which the ancient landmarks had been removed, and men began to ask
themselves whether of all the ancient fabric of tradition, of thought,
of principles, there was anything certain at all. To make the best
of a changed world—that was the problem; and thus art and literature
would tend to become pastimes, fierce games born of a desperate sort of
make-believe, just to pass the time that remained. Whatever else was
uncertain, it was at least certain that life had somehow to be lived;
if the great old words like patriotism, virtue, honour, were mere
high-sounding names, and stood only for burnt-out illusions, at least
there was a space to be filled, before the dark hours came bringing
with them the ultimate certainty.
Prosper Mérimée, in Pater’s view, is the summary and type of these
tendencies. The world is utterly hollow to him; his cynicism is
complete and all-embracing. He is indifferent to ideas, to politics,
to art; but there still remains the vast and inconsequent spectacle
of human life to study, to amuse oneself with, to depict with a
contemptuous grace. History, artistically selected and displayed, is
perhaps the best distraction of all. History reveals, no doubt, little
but desperate and passionate illusions, but even so there is a narcotic
interest about the spectacle. Into this quarry of ancient materials
Mérimée flings himself with the zest and appetite of an energetic mind.
And so, too, there were similar possibilities of romance in the modern
world. Corsica, where the scene of _Colomba_ is laid, was a place still
full of primal, simple, passionate emotions—exaggerated, no doubt, and
unreasonable, but still unquestionably there. Even that morbid personal
pride with its passion for revenge, its view of life as a sacrifice to
honour, offers a stimulus to the imagination, though the terror of it
is free from all interfusion of pity.
Pater skilfully indicates the perfect art of Mérimée, the minute
proportion, the horror of all loose and otiose statement, issuing
in a style of which every part is closely tied with every other
part, and the end synchronises sharply with the conclusion of the
story; and further, he characterises the human charm of the _Lettres
à une Inconnue_, where the author seems surprised and baffled by
the unsuspected violence of his own emotion; the fine intellectual
companionship of which he is in search betraying him suddenly, like a
crust of ashes over a smouldering fire.
He concludes with an interesting passage which shows that
_impersonality_ was the aim of Mérimée’s art, so that his books stand
“as detached from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness
to their maker than if they were the work of another person.” The same
is true of his style—“the perfection of nobody’s style,” as Pater
cleverly calls it—“fastidiously in the fashion—an expert in all the
little, half-contemptuous elegances of which it is capable ... a nice
observer of all that is most conventional.”
And thus we see that the absence of soul, of subjectivity, of
peculiarities, is at once the weakness and the strength of Mérimée’s
work. It is all pure mind, and produces a singular harshness of ideal,
so that “there are masters of French prose whose art has begun where
the art of Mérimée leaves off.”
It is a fine piece of critical analysis, perhaps a little overstated,
but essentially true. Mérimée does not succeed quite to the extent
that Pater thinks in absolute self-effacement, but he has seen clearly
enough the spirit of the man; and though his exposition marches
somewhat relentlessly on, discarding such evidence as may tell against
his theory, yet he has somehow penetrated the secret of this brilliant
writer with his flawless polish, his inner hardness, as only a great
critic can.
Of the delivery of this lecture on Mérimée, the President of Magdalen
says:—
“A large audience, too large for the ugly and inconvenient Lecture
Room at the Taylorian, came to hear him. He seemed surprised and
overwhelmed. I don’t think he knew how much of a celebrity he was,
and he seemed a little frightened. He read his lecture in a low
monotonous voice.”
In the same year appeared the “Art Notes in North Italy.” It is what
it professes to be, a little study of certain Italian painters,
jottings from an artistic traveller’s diary, and deserves no special
consideration, excepting in so far as it reveals Pater’s preferences
and his method.
In 1892, besides the first chapters of _Plato and Platonism_, and an
ingenious and beautiful essay on the study of Dante, written as an
introduction to Mr. C. L. Shadwell’s translation of the _Purgatory_,
Pater published, in successive numbers of the _New Review_, “Emerald
Uthwart,” which has been considered among the _Imaginary Portraits_.
In the same year the essay on “Raphael” was written, as a lecture,
and it thus differs in style to a certain extent from the more
deliberate literary works, though less, perhaps, in the case of Pater
than would be the case with many writers. But he certainly aimed at
producing something which should be capable of being apprehended by an
interested listener on a first hearing; there is less concentration,
less ornament, less economy of effect, than in the more deliberate
writings. The essay presupposes a certain knowledge of the subject, and
aims at bringing out the central motif of the life of the great painter
relieved against a somewhat shadowy and allusive background of events.
But the central thought is not lacking in clearness.
“By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he
produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the
suavity of his life, some would add in the ‘opportunity’ of his
early death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness,
of the good fortune, of genius.” This is an admirable summary; and
he adds that upon a careful examination of his works “we shall find
even his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable
from his own patient disposal of the means at hand.” He goes on
to show that the supreme charm of Raphael’s nature was in his
teachableness, his prompt assimilation of influences, his essential
humility and tranquillity; that his genius was not a vivid, tortured
thing, like a lightning-flash, with prodigious efforts long matured
in the womb of the cloud, with intervals of despairing silence
and ineffectiveness—but a tranquil, equable progress: “genius by
accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius.”
Pater says, indeed, that Raphael may be held to be the supreme
example of the truth of the beatitude that the meek shall inherit the
earth. He traces the steps of this progress. He shows him stainless,
unruffled, untainted by the restlessness of the age that flowered in
sin, and yet able by a supreme insight to transfer the hinted presence
of fantastic evil into his pictures; he shows his gradual mastery of
dramatic intensity, till he could concentrate the whole of a picture
on one point, subordinate the whole scene to some central and poignant
emotion. And he brings out, too, with great skill, that Raphael was
always in his own thought a learner, with no desperate prejudice
for originality, always open to influence, yet transfiguring and
transmuting influence into higher and higher conceptions of his own. At
last he brings him to Rome, where his life seems “as we read of it,
hasty and perplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always
to be completed, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a
world of breathless competition, amid a great company of spectators,
for great rewards.” Among these mighty tasks stands foremost his
divergence into architecture, appointed, as he was, to succeed Bramante
as architect of St. Peter’s. But all through shines out the unspoilt
nature, making its charm felt upon artists and courtiers alike, the
same unhasting, unresting diligence, the same smiling youthfulness of
demeanour.
He shows the mental force of Raphael’s conceptions, his unequalled
power of apprehending and transmitting to others complex and difficult
ideas with a real philosophical grasp, yet for all his technique, all
his wealth of antiquarian knowledge, never losing sight of essential
beauty and peace. Pater instances as the supremely salient instance
of his art the Ansidei or Blenheim Madonna, now in the National
Gallery. It is not impossible that he was guided in this selection
by a consideration for those whose opportunities for acquainting
themselves with Raphael’s art were bound to be limited. “I find there,”
he says, “at first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in
a proposition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the understanding,
in the economy with which he has reduced his material to the simplest
terms, has disentangled and detached its various elements.” “Keep
them to that picture,” he adds, “as the embodied formula of Raphael’s
genius.” The conclusion of the essay comes rather suddenly, and he sums
up the purpose of Raphael’s life in the phrase, “I am utterly purposed
that I will not offend.” It is this balance of temperament, this steady
deliberate bias to perfect purity, that is the note of his life. He is
the Galahad of art, and might say with Galahad—
“My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.”
The essay is thus a careful and sympathetic attempt to give to learners
a lucid introduction to the art of Raphael. But it differs from his
own chosen subjects, and is therefore less characteristic of Pater as
a writer than much of his work—in that there is no attempt at tracing
the recondite, the suggestive element, in the work of Raphael. He
intermingles little of his own preference, his own personality, with
the verdict; but it is still deeply characteristic of Pater in another
region of his mind, of the patient sympathy which he was always ready
to give, of his desire to meet others halfway, not to mystify or to
bewilder the half-cultivated learner, whose zeal perhaps may outrun his
critical knowledge, with more remote considerations, but to draw the
rays into a single bright focus, rather than, as Pater so often did,
resolve the single ray into rainbow tints and prismatic refractions.
Here, then, at least, we see Pater in the light of the educator,
the scribe, the expounder of mysteries, rather than as the hieratic
presenter of the deeper symbol.
_Plato and Platonism_, certain chapters of which appeared in 1892,
was eventually published in 1893, and thus was the main and serious
occupation of Pater’s last years. He placed the book at the head of
his own writings. A friend once asked him whether he thought that
_The Renaissance_ or _Marius_ was his best book. “Oh, no,” he said,
“neither. If there is anything of mine that has a chance of surviving,
I should say it was my _Plato_.”
I do not propose here to discuss the accuracy and the justice of
his picture of the Platonic philosophy, or how far it harmonises
with received conceptions. There are points, for instance, in his
presentment of the Platonic doctrine, with which it is easy to
disagree; I merely intend to indicate the conception which Pater formed
and expressed, the angle at which the idea impinged upon his own mind.
He intended it primarily to be a useful book, an educational work. He
says in his preface that his aim was to interest young students of
philosophy; and he says at the outset of the book, “The business of
the young scholar ... in reading Plato, is not to take his side in a
controversy, to adopt or refute Plato’s opinions, to modify, or make
apology for, what may seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to
furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction
of his own. His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict
indifference, the mental process there, as he might witness a game
of skill.” His own object, therefore, in the book is not primarily
philosophical; it is rather critical and historical—to put Plato in
his proper place and to see the relation which he bore to his age.
Indeed it would be misleading to speak of Pater as a philosopher in the
technical sense of the word, namely, as one who publishes systematic
or consecutive thoughts upon the ultimate nature of things. Pater
was merely philosophically cultured, and the most we can say of his
philosophy is that his mental attitude is to a considerable extent
determined by his interest in the study of philosophical opinions.
He was, then, a philosopher in the sense that Ruskin, for instance,
was not a philosopher; but Pater would not be accepted among critical
writers as a philosopher in the technical sense.
It was ingeniously said of Pater, that he was a philosopher who had
gone to Italy by mistake instead of to Germany. There is a real truth
in this epigram. He had a deep-seated sense of the mysterious inner
relation of things, an intense desire to discern and disentangle the
bare essential motives of life; but instead of attacking this in the
region of pure and abstract thought, he touched it through the sense
of beauty. It was beauty that seemed to him the most characteristic,
the most significant thing in the world, that beauty touched with
strangeness of which he so seriously spoke; and his preoccupation was
to penetrate the strangeness, to trace the mystery back to primal
emotion, while he watched, with the intensest eagerness and the most
sacred thrill, the rich accumulation of beauty, apprehended and
expressed by so many personalities, such varied natures, which the
human race acquired and made its own, leaving its fine creations to
exist as monuments of its currents and movements, like the weed-fringed
posts that mark the sea-channel over the estuary’s sands; while they
gathered year by year the added beauty of age and association, yet
never losing the pathos, the heart-hunger, the unfulfilled desire, that
hangs like a sweet and penetrating aroma round the beautiful things
that men have made and loved, and have been forced to leave behind
them. The passionate desire to create and express, followed by the
consecration of sorrow and darkness, these two strains mingled for
Pater into a strain of high solemnity and pathetic sweetness.
But he can hardly be said to have had any philosophical system, just
as he himself believed Plato to have had none. Plato’s writings
represented to Pater an atmosphere, not a defined creed. Pater was
rather a psychologist, and it was through the effect of metaphysical
ideas upon personality that he approached philosophy. He was not an
abstract thinker; he says, indeed, plainly, “Of course we are not
naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards,
the abstract as such.... We cannot love or live upon _genus_ and
_species_, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies,
need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses.” But his psychology
gave him the power of making metaphysics real to people who are not
naturally metaphysical, by touching them with a personal appeal, and
showing their ethical significance; he translates the pure thought of
abstract thinkers into artistic and ethical values. It is interesting,
for instance, to contrast his development with the development of such
a man as Henry Sidgwick. Both were saved by the uneventful course of
academic life from the pressure of hard facts and of social problems.
Both began with a metaphysical and a literary bias; but Henry Sidgwick
was fitted for abstract speculation, and the literary and artistic
interests of his life tended to diminish; whereas in Pater’s case
the literary and artistic interests developed, and subordinated his
metaphysical interests to his artistic prepossessions.
In _Plato and Platonism_, then, Pater is absorbed in the task of
bringing out the personality of Plato. This he does with singular
skill. He shows that Plato was not an originator of philosophical
thought; that it is the form and not the matter that is new; and
that his charm lies in his romantic realism, his love of modest and
ingenuous youth, his dramatic sense of character; so that, as Pater
says, he had a resemblance to Thackeray, and was fully equipped to
be a writer of noble fiction. He shows that Plato was in no sense a
doctrinaire, but held that ideas and notions are not the consequence of
reason but the cause of it. That they are there to be discovered, not
non-existent and capable of being originated; he shows how Plato, in
the _Republic_, was presenting philosophy as an essentially practical
thing, a thing to mould life and conduct, an escape from the evils
of the world—a religion, in fact, and not a philosophical system.
Philosophy is, according to Plato, to teach us how to cultivate the
qualities by which we can obtain a mastery over ourselves, how to
arrive at a kind of musical proportion, the subordination of the parts
to the whole. “It is life itself,” he says, “action and character, he
proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience
of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above
all into its energetic or impassioned acts.”
Thus Plato, according to Pater, is an advocate of the _immutable_, of
law and principle. “Change is the irresistible law of our being....
Change, he protests, through the power of a true philosophy, shall not
be the law of our being.” He shows that Plato was by constitution an
emphatically sensuous nature, deeply sensible to impressions of beauty,
and to emotional relations with others; but that he regarded the appeal
of the senses as a species of moral education; that the philosophical
learner passed from the particular to the general, from the love of
precise and personal beauty, to the love of the central and inner
beauty.
And thus Plato is not so much a teacher as a noble and inspiriting
comrade; those who love Plato do not sit at his feet and absorb his
wisdom, but take service with him in his adventurous band, journeying
from the familiar scene and the beloved home to the remote and distant
mountains that close the horizon, but from which there may be a
prospect of hidden lands.
The whole book cannot be held to be exactly characteristic of Pater’s
deliberate style. It is composed not so much to embody his own dreams
as to make a personality, an age, a spirit, clear to younger minds;
but there is a sense of a delighted zest, a blithe freedom about it,
as though it were the work of a mind which had escaped from tyrannical
impulses and uneasy questionings into a gentle tranquillity of thought.
One feels that not only is the subject dear to him, but that those
whom he would address are also dear; there is thus an affectionate
solicitude, a buoyant easiness, about the book, as of a master speaking
simply and unconstrainedly among a band of eager and friendly pupils.
The book is full of echoes out of a well-filled mind, of Augustine and
Dante, of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Not only Plato himself, but the
other incidental figures are brilliantly touched. Socrates, himself
“rude and rough as some failure of his own old sculptor’s workshop,”
yet “everywhere, with what is like a physical passion for what _is_,
what is _true_—as one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly
concentration of soul on what God really made and meant us to know”; or
Pythagoras, that distant legendary figure, with his strange glimpses of
pre-existence, emerging as a brilliant, perhaps showy, personality, a
mysterious or mystical thaumaturge,—these are sharply and definitely
conceived.
Again, there is a beautiful chapter on Lacedaemon, and the decorous,
ordered, submissive system of the Dorians, which presented so strong
a contrast to the diffuse, unregulated, brilliant spirit of Ionian
communities. The Spartan theory of education, with its resemblance to
our own English system, developing the individual only in order to
subordinate him to the common welfare, repressing all eclectic, all
independent qualities, had a potent attraction for Pater’s mind, the
attraction that all systems have that promise tranquillity and settled
instincts as a reward for obedience, for a mind that desires guidance,
and to whom personal freedom has brought more anxiety than serenity.
The high value of this chapter is that it contrives to invest a system
which, barely and unsympathetically described, appears to be ineffably
dreary and unpicturesque, with the charm of cheerfulness and quietness
so characteristic of communities of a monastic order, a cheerfulness
which comes from the removal of personal responsibility, and the
substitution of unquestioning obedience—that highest of all luxuries
for indecisive and sensitive characters.
The book, then, is a beautiful thing, with a sense of recovered youth
blending with an older wisdom about it; a book admirably fitted to
attract and instruct an ingenuous mind; but lucid, interesting,
and gracious as it is, Pater does not here emerge as the _parfait
prosateur_, as Bourget called him; it was no doubt the delight of
feeling that in this book he had conferred a real educational benefit
upon those youthful spirits to whom his heart went out, that made him
rate the book so highly. He did not feel so sure whither the artistic
reveries, the metaphysical speculations, of his other works might
conduct them; but, for all that, criticism is right in setting a higher
value upon his more intimate self-revelations, upon the books in
which he uttered oracles, rather than on the book where he furthered
knowledge.
In the last year of Pater’s life he published one of the _Greek
Studies_—“The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” which we have already
considered, and two little sketches of travel—“Some Great Churches in
France,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ in March and June
of that year. “Notre-Dame d’Amiens” is a fine study of a great church,
dwelling on the lightness, the brightness, the “immense cheerfulness,”
of the building. The only very noteworthy passage is one in which he
contrasts Greek and Gothic architecture. He says that in Gothic art
“for the mere _melody_ of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were
of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got _harmony_,
the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the
same moment; and were gainers” ... “the vast complexity of the Gothic
style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the
expressiveness, the thousandfold influence, of the Catholic religion.”
Again in “Vézelay” (1894) we have a study in contrast, of a “majestic,
immoveable” church, which, with “its masses of almost unbroken masonry,
its _inertia_,” seems to have a certain kinship with imperial Rome. Its
almost savage character, he says, is hardly relieved by a great band of
energetic, realistic, coarsely executed sculpture, in which demons make
merry over the punishment of wickedness: “Bold, crude, original, the
work indicates delight in the power of reproducing fact, curiosity in
it, but little or no sense of beauty.”
But the end was at hand, although there was no hint or foreshadowing
of it. Never had Pater been more tranquil, serene, contented, than in
these last months. Increasing years, without diminishing strength,
concentration, or intellectual force, had brought him nothing but
what was good; the respect, the regard, the devotion, of friends; the
consciousness that he had now a perfect control of his art and its
resources. He had many designs and schemes for books that should be
written, and there seemed no reason why he should not have many years
before him of simple life and congenial activity; and so we come to his
last utterance.
The essay on “Pascal” has a deep significance among the writings of
Pater; it contains, thinly veiled under the guise of criticism, some
of his deepest thoughts on the great mystery of life—freewill and
necessity—and his views of orthodox theology. It is true that he is
nominally justifying Pascal and confuting the Jesuits; but there is
a passionate earnestness about his line of argument which shows only
too clearly that he was doing what it suited his natural reticence to
do—fighting like Teucer under the shield of Ajax, and taking a part,
an eager part, in the controversy between Liberalism and Authority.
Moreover, it is his last work; the work on which he was engaged in the
last hours of his life; the essay, indeed, never received the last
touches of that careful hand, and though substantially complete, it
breaks off in the middle of a sentence. This fact—that it was his last
deliberate utterance—gives it a special significance; even before he
had said his last word on the mystery of life, he knew all that there
is to know.
To take the theological side of the essay first, speaking of Pascal’s
half-contemptuous attempts to arrive at the true definition of
theological phrases, Pater thus comments upon the situation:—
“Pascal’s charges are those which may seem to lie ready to
hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought
and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are
professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which
terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity
with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the
strange vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.”
“The sin of the Jesuits,” he says, “is above all that sin,
unpardonable with men of the world _sans peur et sans reproche_,
of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may
be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially
little people when they interfere in great matters—faults
promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and
children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be saved in
some easy way, quite other than Pascal’s high, fine, chivalrous way
of gaining salvation.”
In these words breathes the accent of the liberal spirit, the spirit
which dares to look close into great questions; declines to admit more
than it can prove, or at least infer; refuses, at whatever loss of
serenity, to formulate its hopes and desires as certainties.
The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is that grace is always
vouchsafed in sufficient measure to overcome temptation, if only the
spirit chooses to make use of it by the exercise of its free choice.
“This doctrine,” says Pater, “is certainly, to use the familiar
expression, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding
of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as assuming them to be,
what they really are, at the worst, God’s silly sheep.”
Pater goes on to say, with an outspokenness which is hardly
characteristic of him, that the very opposite doctrine, the Calvinistic
doctrine of election both to reprobation and to salvation, would seem
to be strikingly confirmed by our own experience. Pascal himself, a
visibly elect soul, acting as it were by a certain irresistible impulse
of holiness, is an instance in point.
He makes, of course, no attempt at the solution of the insoluble
difficulty. But nowhere else in the whole of his writings does he
touch on the great dilemma, namely, that our consciousness tells us we
are free, our reason that we are bound. He only surveys it from the
spectatorial point of view.
“Who,” he says, “on a survey of life from outside would willingly
lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, for which
the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our respective
points of view?”
But Pater leaves us in little doubt as to the side on which his own
heart was engaged. It is clear that he felt that we are not, when our
humanity is sifted to the very bottom, independent beings; we are
deeply involved and hampered; something outside of us and anterior to
us determines our bent, our very path.
This last deep utterance of Pater’s has a strange significance when
taken side by side with the fact so often stated that he was thinking
of the possibility of receiving Anglican ordination. There could not
possibly be a greater mistake than this supposition. Perhaps, indeed,
there was a region of his mind in which the idea appealed to him, but
deeper down, in a secret chamber of thought, which in his writings at
all events he did not often visit, lay that consciousness of the hard,
dark, bare truth which, if a man once truly apprehends, prevents him
from figuring as a partisan, except through a certain sophistry, on the
side of authoritative religion.
This is the truth, disguise it as we will, that religion in its purest
form is not a solution of the world’s mystery, but a working theory of
morals. For all religions, even Christianity itself, tend to depend
upon certain assumptions, such as the continuance, in some form or
other, of our personal identity after death, of which no scientific
evidence is forthcoming. We may assume it, yielding to a passionate
intuition, but nothing can prevent it from being an assumption, an
intuition, which may perhaps transcend reason, but cannot wholly
satisfy it. And thus, however impassioned, however transcendent that
intuition may be, there must always remain a certain element of doubt,
in all sincere minds, as to the absolute certainty of the assumption.
Thus there must lie, in all reasoning men’s hearts, a streak of
agnosticism. The triumph of faith can never, until faith melts into
certainty, be of the same quality as the triumph of reason; and it
is upon the proportion of doubt to faith in any man’s mind that his
religious attitude depends. There is little question as to which way
Pater’s sympathies and hopes inclined; but this essay clearly reveals
that the doubt was there.
He touches with deep sympathy the strange and sad withdrawal of Pascal
from the world; his attempt, under the pressure of a painful and
unmanning disease, to find solace in asceticism, renunciation, and
the practice of austere pieties; it seems strange to Pater to find
that Pascal never fell under the aesthetic charm of the rites of the
Catholic Church, but found “a certain weariness, a certain puerility,
a certain unprofitableness, in them.” “He seems,” he adds, “to have
little sense of the beauty of holiness,” but to be absorbed by a
“sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy.”
He treats of Pascal from the literary side, with a whole-hearted
admiration. He says that he made the French language “as if by a new
creation, what it has remained—a pattern of absolutely unencumbered
expressiveness.” He dwells on the fragrant charm, the naturalness, of
the _Letters_, proceeding from one who was hardly a student, knowing
but two or three great books. And the _Pensées_ he considers to be pure
inspirations “penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark.” How could the
_Pensées_ be more nobly summarised than as “those great fine sayings
which seem to betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow
places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one’s feet”? They seem
to him to combine faultless expression, perfect economy of statement,
marvellous suggestiveness, with a “somewhat Satanic intimacy” with the
weaknesses of the human heart.
What kept Pascal from scepticism, or, rather, what threw him into
religion, was a bewildered, a terrified apprehension of the strange
inconsistency of human nature, the blending of meanness and greatness
which everywhere appears.
We may consider this essay, then, as Pater’s most deliberate utterance
on ethical things. It reveals him, I think, as a deep though unwilling
sceptic; it shows a soul athirst yet unsatisfied; it shows that the
region of beauty, both in art and religion, in which he strove to live,
was but an outer paradise in which he found what peace he could; but in
the innermost shrine all is dark and still.
On leaving London, Pater had settled, in 1893, in a house in St.
Giles’, Oxford. It is a quiet house with a plastered front of some
antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left is
a little passage leading to the back of the house. The inner arch is
surmounted with a quaint carved face. Here he settled with his sisters
in great contentment.
The President of Magdalen, Mr. T. H. Warren, speaking of the later
Oxford days, writes:—
“One would have said that there was a kind of placid piety, an
inner content, which somehow manifested itself in him. He did
not talk a great deal, yet always enough. What I think struck me
most about him was a sort of gentleness in his whole manner, in
perception and predilection, almost at times a softness,—and
yet it was balanced by hardness of decision too. He was a very
familiar figure, with his pale face, strong jaw, heavy, chopped,
German-looking moustache, tall hat and apple-green tie. He was
often seen walking, and latterly he rather laboured in his
walk, which gave, rightly or wrongly, the idea of conscious or
half-conscious suffering.... At the Dante Society he did not say
much, but what always struck me was that he spoke with a certain
authority and a strong common sense; and, moreover, with what
appeared a personal and natural knowledge of what a poet or a
literary artist in his temperament and habits really is....
“It seemed to me that he cultivated a wise, grave passiveness, a
gentle susceptibility, a kind of soft impressionability; that he
tried to keep, and did keep, a sort of _bloom_ upon his mind. I
never remember a single unkind criticism or remark.... My opinion
of him is rather an impression than an opinion, and that is, I
think, what he would himself have wished—and what is fairest too.
“Can I put it in a few words? He expressed life for himself and
to others in terms of sensations, of impressions. These he might
analyse, combine, and re-combine, but together they formed his
working synthesis. I did not really know him in the earlier days,
when in his written work the sensuousness and the referability of
everything to sensation was so avowed. I only knew him well much
later when he had become a kind of quietist: what the real man was
I could not say.”
In the spring of 1894 Pater went to Glasgow to receive the honorary
degree of LL.D., a little piece of recognition which pleased him, and
took the opportunity of visiting some of the Northern Cathedrals.
In the summer of the same year he was for the first time in his
life seriously ill. He had an attack of rheumatic fever and was
confined to his bed. But he made an apparent recovery, and became
convalescent. He was allowed to leave his bed and come downstairs. He
was full of cheerfulness and interest, though he was feeling weak;
it is certain, however, that there was something organically wrong,
though he allowed himself, with the instinct of one who enjoyed the
ordinary routine of life to the full, and who was impatient of invalid
conditions, to resume his activities too soon. Still there seemed
no reason to suppose that he was acting imprudently. He was working
at the lecture on Pascal, which was to have been delivered in July,
when, in consequence of writing too near to an open window, he had an
attack of pleurisy, which still further reduced his strength. Again
he became convalescent, and left his room on July 29 without ill
effects. But on the morning of Monday, July 30, 1894, at ten o’clock,
on coming downstairs, he had a sudden attack of heart failure, and died
apparently without suffering. If he had lived five days longer he would
have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was buried in the Holywell
cemetery at Oxford, in the presence of many of his old friends. It is
melancholy to feel that in all probability his life might have been
prolonged for some years, if he had but realised how much reduced in
strength he was. But it was the happiest kind of end that could befall
a man of Pater’s sensitive and apprehensive temperament. He had always,
from his earliest years, been much preoccupied with the thought of
death, and even with the effort to reconcile himself to it. It was
strange and beautiful that it should, after all, have befallen him so
quietly and simply. He felt no shadow of death, no mournful forebodings
of mortality. He had won a secure fame, he was surrounded with respect
and affection, he had fulfilled in patience and with much quiet
happiness a great task; and so with no decay of faculty, no diminution
of zest and enthusiasm, no melancholy foreboding, death came to him as
a quiet friend and beckoned him smilingly away.
Yet as we realise that this wistful, this inquisitive spirit had indeed
drawn near to the gate, through which he had seen others pass, had
indeed endured the passage, upon the incidents and impressions of
which he had often meditated with an intense and reverent curiosity,
the imagination torments and perplexes itself with the wonder as to
what the end or the awakening may have been, whether indeed he ever
knew, in some moment of swimming gaze and darkened eyes, that he
should not return to life and daylight. We find our minds dwelling
upon the words with which he ended the finest of all his essays, that
on “Leonardo da Vinci,” written twenty-five years before. We lose
ourselves “in speculating how one who had been always so desirous of
beauty, but desired it always in such definite and precise forms, as
hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and
experienced the last curiosity.”
CHAPTER VII
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
In younger days Pater was refined and dignified in appearance; there is
an early photograph of him, shortly after he took his degree, with a
soft eye, a serious gentle look, with regular and rounded features.[2]
But this altered in later years; he became graver and heavier of
aspect, and his face took on a character that has been described as
“Japanese”; the pallor of his complexion, like old ivory, became more
marked; but his eyes were his most eloquent feature, of a light hazel
tint, almost grey-green, which lit up with an impressive light of
animation and kindness when he was moved.
[2] There is a portrait of him, a drawing by Simeon Solomon, made
in 1872, now in the possession of Mr. Herbert Horne. There is
also another drawing, a lithograph, by Mr. Rothenstein, included
in the Oxford Portraits. Neither of these is considered wholly
satisfactory by those who knew Pater best.
He was in later life slow of movement, bent, sad of aspect, except
when particularly stirred, and somewhat sedentary in appearance.
Yet he was broad-shouldered, strongly-built, sturdy, and gave an
impression of soundness, and even toughness of constitution. His great
pale face, with the strong lower jaw and carefully trimmed moustache,
gave him something of the air of a retired military man. There was an
impression sometimes of languor about him. He had to strangers, at
first sight, in later years, a fatigued, faded, lustreless air, as
of a caged creature. But this, I learn from those who knew him best,
was in reality a false impression. He was undoubtedly robust; he was a
patient, an unwearying traveller, often walking long distances without
fatigue, and bearing uncomplainingly the extreme of Italian heat.
But, like all impressionable, perceptive, artistic temperaments, his
physical strength was apt to ebb and flow with his inner mood; when
he was pleased, interested, delighted, he was also equable, animated,
alert. When he was aware that he was expected to fulfil anticipations,
conscious of social strain, uninterested, he became melancholy,
drooping, unstrung. To any one introduced to him for the first time he
at once gave the impression of great gentleness and sympathy. There was
nothing awe-inspiring about him but his reputation. His low deferential
voice, his shy smile, the delicate phrasing of his sentences, his
obvious interest in the temperament of his companion, gave the feeling
of great and sincere humility. He was, too, singularly easy and
accessible; he had no desire to keep a conversation in his own hands,
or to claim attention for his opinions. He had rather a delicate power
of encouraging confidence and frankness. One realised at once that one
was in the presence of a man of subtle sensibilities, anxious, not of
set purpose but from considerate instinct, to do the fullest justice to
the feelings of his companion, and to give him his undivided attention.
This came from a fine simplicity of nature, from a character that made
no egotistical demands; he seemed to expect and to require little from
life, but to be full of a quiet gratitude for such delight as came
naturally in his way.
He arrayed himself with scrupulous neatness, and always dressed for
Hall. He invariably wore a tall hat, and carried the neatest of
gold-topped umbrellas. His gait was peculiar: he had a slight stoop,
and dragged one foot slightly, advancing with a certain delicacy. He
disliked stopping to talk to people, and often was at some pains not
to appear to recognise them; he had a peculiar courteous gesture of
the hand, if recognition was inevitable, by which he paid a certain
tribute of courtesy, and yet contrived to indicate that he wished to
be unmolested. He was shy in large mixed assemblies, but his shyness
did not make him silent or abrupt. He was apt to talk, gently and
persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversation rather as a
shield against undue intimacy.
People on first meeting him were sometimes struck with the
extraordinary conventionality of his manners and conversation in
society; but this almost oppressive suavity melted into a gentle and
sympathetic kindness on further acquaintance. A friend, writing to Miss
Pater after her brother’s death, spoke of
“his kindness, his sweetness, his gentle and amiable wearing of all
his great gifts, his happy and gracious willingness to give all
around him the enjoyment of them.”
Another friend of his writes:—
“The only attitude I ever observed in Pater, the only mood I saw
him in, was a sort of weary courtesy with which he used to treat
me, with somehow a deep kindness shining through. It was as though
he would have liked to lavish sympathy and even affection, but
was frightened of the responsibility and unequal to the effort.
He seemed to me, if I may use an allegory, to point to a sack of
treasure, and say,—‘That is yours, if you like to take it; I am
only sorry that I am too tired myself to rise and place it in your
hands.’”
But, on the other hand, Dr. Bussell, the closest companion in the
later years, writes of the side of himself that Pater turned to the
nearer circle:—
“His ordinary talk ... was the happiest blending of seriousness and
mirth, of deep feeling and a sort of childlike glee in the varying
surfaces of things.”
This subdued air came to a certain extent from the circumstances of
his life, but still more from a deep-seated reclusiveness, rather
than humility of nature. Indeed, it may be said that, with all his
gentleness, he was not innately humble. What often appeared to
be humility was, in reality, an intense dislike of opposition. A
consciousness of antagonism irritated him so intensely, that he often
preferred to withdraw both what he had said and written, rather than
provoke contradiction and argument. It was not that he was diffident
about his intuitions; he was rather diffident about his power of
defending and recommending them. He was little inclined to dogmatise,
and realised most sympathetically the differences of temperament;
but the path which he had chosen was the only path for him; and
though he might seem to yield to argument and remonstrance, he was
never converted, except by reflection. He was probably never fully
appreciated at Oxford. Busy, effective, academical natures tended
to think of him as a secluded dreamer of dreams; his fame grew so
insensibly and secretly, and was, even so, confined so much to the
συνετοὶ, the connoisseurs, that there never came that revulsion of
feeling that has sometimes lifted a man suddenly on to a pinnacle of
unquestioned reputation. Moreover, it is fair to say that the air
of the Universities is not at the present moment favourable to the
pursuit of _belles lettres_ and artistic philosophies. The praise of
academical circles is reserved at the present time for people of
brisk bursarial and business qualifications, for men of high technical
accomplishment, for exact researchers, for effective teachers of
prescribed subjects, for men of acute and practical minds, rather than
for men of imaginative qualities. This is the natural price that must
be paid for the increased efficiency of our Universities, though it
may be regretted that they maintain so slight a hold upon the literary
influences of the day. The whole atmosphere is, in fact, sternly
critical, and the only work which is emphatically recognised and
approved is the work which makes definite and unquestionable additions
to the progress of exact sciences.
A genial epigrammatist once said that if a man desired to court
unpopularity in academical circles he had but to enjoy an outside
reputation, to write a good literary style, and to make it his business
to see something of undergraduates, to gain his end with entire
celerity.
There is some truth in the contention. The erudite world is apt to
think that a reputation acquired with the general public by literary
accomplishments is a second-rate sort of affair, and only to be
gained by those who are not sufficiently hard-headed and exact to win
academical repute. A man, too, who betrays an interest in the younger
members of the community is thought to be slightly abnormal, and either
to be actuated by a vague sentimentality, or else to be desirous of
receiving the admiration of immature minds, which he cannot win from
more mature intellects.
This atmosphere, these conditions, Pater accepted with the gentle
outward deference that was characteristic of him; he had no taste for
the warm luxuriance of coteries; he had no sort of desire to label with
contemptuous names those who must have appeared to him deaf and blind
to the subtle and beautiful effects that made the substance of his own
life.
It seemed a curious irony of fate which planted Pater in a college
which for years enjoyed a robust pre-eminence for athletic triumphs,
together with a reputation for wholesale turbulence. But it may be
said that such an atmosphere was not wholly uncongenial to Pater.
Though he had no sort of proficiency in athletics, and though he was
pre-eminently peaceable in disposition, he had, as I have said, a
genuine and deep admiration for strongly developed physical vigour,
while he had little of the sensitive disciplinary instinct that feels
the frank display of youthful ebullience a kind of slur upon the
privileges of constituted authority. No one was more anxious than
Pater, in a disciplinary crisis, to give a case a fair hearing, and to
condone as far as possible an outbreak that was thoughtless rather than
deliberate. In all cases where there was a question of the infliction
of punishment for some breach of discipline, Pater was always on the
side of mercy. And this was with no wish to preserve his own dignity
by temporising with the disorderly section. He was always a loyal
and faithful supporter of authority, while he was anxious that a
case should not be judged with the undue sternness that the sense of
outraged dignity tends to bring with it. As Dr. Bussell wrote:—
“Naturally inclined to a certain rigour in discipline, he was full
of excuse for individual cases; and regretted and thought over
stern measures more than most members of a governing body can
afford to do.”
Apocryphal stories are related of him, such as his excuse for the
rowdiness of undergraduates after Hall, that they reminded him of
playful young tigers that had just been fed; or his supposed remark
about bonfires in Brasenose quad, that he did not object to them
because they lighted up the spire of St. Mary’s so beautifully. These
were, of course, intended to represent the imperturbable search for
beautiful impressions in the most incongruous circumstances; but
they represent, too, a half-truth, namely, a real and vital charity
of nature, inclined to condone, and even to sympathise with, the
manifestations of natural feeling, however personally inconvenient.
Perhaps the playful irony, the light-handed humour, which was to Pater
a deliberate shield against the roughness of the world, tended to
obscure his deep seriousness of nature, his devotedly religious spirit.
He sympathised, it is true, with all humanity with a largeness which is
surprising in a man of such sensitive and secluded constitution. He had
a determination, remarkable in a man of delicate organisation, to see
the world as it really was, to admire what was vigorous and natural and
vital in it. He had no wish to create for himself an unreal paradise,
to suppose the world to be other than it appeared, or to drown the
insistent cries that reached him in a web of blurred impression or
uncertain sound. He admired what was joyful and brave and strong. Had
he been of a more alert physical constitution he would have thrown
himself, we may safely assert, into the pursuit of athletics ardently
and eagerly. As he could not, he contented himself with admiring
the youthful exuberance of activity, and, true to his nature, with
disentangling as far as he could the fibre of beauty which ran for him
through the universe. But in all this he was akin and not alien to the
insouciant and pleasure-loving spirit of youth.
He was by nature an extremely reticent man; he never seemed to think
that his ideas were likely to command attention or his personality to
cause interest. He wrote very few letters and never kept a diary. His
whole attitude to the world and its concerns was the attitude of a
spectator, and even his closest and nearest relationships with others
could not win him from his isolation; he could be kind, courteous,
considerate, and sincere; but he could not be intimate; he always
guarded his innermost heart.
He was very loath to express his own personal view of a matter,
especially if it involved taking any credit to himself. But a friend
remembers that he was once talking of the artistic perceptions of
Ruskin, and said suddenly with a show of impatience, “I cannot believe
that Ruskin saw more in the church of St. Mark than I do.”
His courteous deference, to both old and young alike, was very
remarkable. He would agree gently with the crudest expressions of
opinion, “No doubt! I had never thought of it in that light!” But he
could occasionally fire up when some deeply felt opinion of his own was
challenged. Mr. Ainslie remembers being in his company when some one
spoke disparagingly of Flaubert. He came suddenly out of his shell, and
spoke with great emotion and much wealth of illustration.
Though Pater was never unkind, he could give a pungent judgment on
occasions. The conversation, in his presence, had once turned upon H.
A. J. Munro, and a man was mentioned with whom Munro was intimate,
and with whom he often associated, who was distinguished rather for
a mundane interest in affairs and for a devotion to sociable and
convivial enjoyment than for any interest in literature or scholarship.
Surprise was expressed at this friendship. “I should not have thought
they had anything in common,” said one of those present. “Do you think
that is so?” said Pater. “I always felt that there was a good deal of
the _mahogany-table_ element in Munro.” This is a just judgment which,
though ironically expressed, exhibits a considerable penetration on the
part of Pater, in the case of a man of whom he knew but little.
He was extraordinarily loyal to his friends. He spoke once with great
gravity and seriousness of one whom he had known, whom he thought to be
drifting into dangerous courses, and expressed a deep desire to help
or warn him, or, at all events, to get a warning conveyed to him. His
confidant tells me that he never saw him so deeply moved and distressed
as on this occasion, as he tried to devise some way of bringing
conviction home to the unhappy object of his anxiety.
His tendency indeed was always to mitigate harsh judgments, to
appreciate the good points of those with whom he was brought into
contact. He had indeed a great eye for little individualities and
peculiarities, with a gentle enjoyment of the manifestation of foibles;
but it was always an indulgent and a tender attitude. And it may be
said that it is rare to find one so perceptive of the most delicate and
subtle shades of temperament, who was yet so uniformly charitable and
kind, so determined to see the best side of every one.
Pater kept himself severely aloof from the current thought of the day,
but with characteristic reticence never adopted the position of an
opponent. He took no interest in scientific movements or discoveries,
and merely left such questions alone.
In politics he was what may be called an old-fashioned Liberal. His
view of the scheme of Government, the movement of political forces
and economical problems, was dim. He took no real interest in such
matters, as lying outside of his circle. He rarely committed himself to
any statements on political matters; but he had a dislike to Napoleon
III., and once said with some animus, “I hope we shall soon arrive at
a time when no one will be so vulgar as to want to go and live at the
Tuileries.” His interest was all in detail and external values. “I am
quite tired,” he said once, “of hearing people for ever talking of the
causes which led to the French Revolution; I don’t want to know. I am
all for details. I want to know how people lived, what they wore, what
they looked like.”
He had no personal ambition, no desire for recognition. He never paid
visits, and took no trouble to make the acquaintance of literary men,
even at a time when his reputation would have secured him warm welcome
and distinguished respect. He stayed at Oxford because he thought
that the life there gave him the best opportunity of doing the quiet,
thorough work which he felt himself most capable of performing. He had
a deep sense of responsibility, though he did not willingly assume it,
and felt bound to exercise his special faculties to the uttermost, and
to give liberally of his sympathy.
It is clear that Pater changed very much as the years went on;
after his silent and reserved boyhood and youth, he had a period of
_épanouissement_, when the ideas that began to crowd thickly into
his mind produced a certain want of balance, a paradoxical daring
of speech, a certain recklessness of statement; this was no doubt
enhanced by the discovery that he could hold his own in a brilliant
society, that he had quick perceptions and conversational gifts;
and at this period he tasted the pleasures of effective talk, the
intellectual delight of the process which is best described by the old
homely proverb of saying Bo! to geese. In these days he desired to be
impressive rather than to be sympathetic; but as his character deepened
and widened, through perception and insight, through friendship and
misunderstanding alike, he reverted more to what was really the basis
of his character, the desire for simple and affectionate companionship.
He was condemned by temperament to a certain isolation; he was outside
the world and not of it. A happy marriage might have brought him more
into line with humanity; but his genius was for friendship rather than
for love, and his circumstances and environment were favourable to
celibacy; and thus he passed through life in a certain mystery, though
the secret is told for those who can read it in his writings. Art
demands certain sacrifices, and the price that an artist pays for the
sorrowful great gift is apt to be a heavy one. Pater paid it to the
full, and paid it ungrudgingly; he found, he followed his true life,
through dark and lonely windings; he emerged into the free air and the
sun, though he bore upon him the marks of the conflict; and his place
is with the sons of art who have used faithfully and joyfully the gift
committed to their keeping.
That the inner and deeper current of Pater’s thought was profoundly
serious is only too plain from his books; such humour as is here not
infrequently introduced is of a delicate kind, often almost mournfully
disguised; the same kind of humour that one may sometimes discern
in the glance of a sympathetic friend when some mirth-provoking
incident occurs at a solemn ceremony at which it is essential to
preserve a dignity of deportment. At such moments a look of silent
and rapturous appreciation may pass between two kindred spirits; such,
in its fineness and secrecy, is the humour of Pater’s writings, and
presupposes a sympathetic understanding between writer and reader.
Dr. Bussell, writing of the apparent contrast between the solemnity of
his writings and his demeanour to his closest friends, writes:—
“To a certain extent, but to a certain extent only, these
(writings) may be taken as an index to his character, as unveiling
the true man. But to those who knew him as he lived among us here,
they seemed a sort of disguise. There was the same tenderness, the
same tranquillising repose, about his conversation that we find
in his writings; the same carefulness in trifles, and exactness
of expression. But his written works betray little trace of that
childlike simplicity, that naïve joyousness, that never-wearying
pleasure in animals and their ways,—that grave yet half-amused
seriousness, also childlike, in which he met the events of the
daily routine.”
Those who did not know him personally have supposed him to be a man of
a strained and affected solemnity. The exact opposite was the truth.
Pater did not despise the day of small things. He loved easy talk and
simple laughter. He had a relish for small jokes. He loved plays that
made him laugh. Such performances as Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas were
his delight, and a friend who accompanied him to _Ruddigore_ said that
it was delightful to see the whole-hearted and childlike enjoyment to
which he surrendered himself. Mr. Gosse went with him to Mr. Pinero’s
_Magistrate_, and remembers him convulsed with overwhelming laughter.
In his own home he used to discourse with intense gravity, mingled
with great bursts of laughter, of the adventures of a set of entirely
fictitious relatives. Again, he took a delighted pleasure in the ways
and mannerisms of his acquaintances. Mr. Gosse remembers how admirably
he used to imitate Mark Pattison’s speech and peevish intonation.
This was best exemplified in the imaginary dialogue which Pater used
to render, supposed to take place between the Rector of Lincoln and a
burglar who had invaded his house: “I am a poor old man. Look at me,
you can see that I am a very poor man. Go across to Fowler—he is rich,
and all his plate is real. He is a very snug fellow, Fowler!” This
was a really admirably dramatic performance, so dramatic that Pater
appeared to be quite convinced of its truth.
Pater had an unceasing delight in watching the ways and habits of pet
animals. His own domestic cats, indeed, were kept and lovingly tended,
till from age and disease they had nearly lost all semblance to the
feline form. He was deeply conscious of the charm of seeing these
bright creatures so close at hand, with the extraordinary relation that
may exist, such perfect confidence, such unrestrained affection, while
yet there is no communication of thought, and so little comprehension
on either side of what is really passing in the mind. He was strangely
attracted by the mysterious tie, so close and, in a way, so intimate,
and yet with so little mutual understanding, and accompanied by such
isolation. He was particularly fond of cats, their dainty ways, their
graceful attitudes; and aware too of the refined selfishness, so
different from the eager desire to please of the dog; the cat, intent
on its own business, using human beings to minister to its needs,
making its own arrangements, giving or withholding its company, with
no idea of obedience or subservience or dependence; but just living
gracefully and indolently in the houses of men, because it suits its
convenience to do so. All this, together with its dramatic mystery,
its intent secretiveness, its whimsical mirth, its charming solemnity,
had an unfailing pleasure for Pater. He was always strangely drawn too,
with a mixture of curiosity and indignation, by the sight of those
collections of incongruous animals known as Happy Families that are to
be seen in gregarious resorts; he would linger about them, expressing
his indignation, yet always ending by contributing liberally to their
maintenance.
In conversation, especially in earlier days, Pater adopted a consistent
and deliberate irony of speech which was such as often to baffle
even his intimate friends. He delighted in paradox, and in a kind of
whimsical perversity. He would dwell upon the unessential attributes of
a scene, a personality, a book, when a serious judgment was desired.
And this, combined as it was with a serious, grave, and almost gloomy
manner, completed the mystification.
He was fond, as I have said, of insisting upon some altogether
unimportant detail on these occasions; he used to pretend that he shut
his eyes in crossing Switzerland, on his journeys to and from Italy, so
as not to see the “horrid pots of blue paint,” as he called the Swiss
lakes. He would profess himself unable to read the books of a person
whose name or personal appearance distressed him. The celebrated story,
which is widely current about him as to the examination in which he
took a part, is characteristic of the same mood. He was supposed to
have looked over a paper, but when the examiners met he seemed to have
kept no record of his impressions; to assist his recollection the names
of the candidates were read over, but he seemed to be unable to connect
any ideas with any of them until the name Sanctuary appeared, at which
he visibly brightened, and said that he was now sure he had looked
over the papers because he remembered that he liked the name.
Probably the habit arose from the fact that he was of a shy and
sensitive temperament, and that to give a real and serious opinion was
a trial to him. He disliked the possibility of dissent or disapproval,
and took refuge in this habit of irony, so as to baffle his hearers and
erect a sort of fence between them and his own personality.
But partly too he was undoubtedly aware, in his earlier days, that the
expectation of conversational _friandises_ amused and delighted his
hearers. He was rather the spoilt child of the intellectual circle in
which he lived, and it is held by some that he rather presumed on the
indulgence of his friends in this respect.
Mr. Basil Champneys, for instance, recollects how he was dining in
company with Pater at Professor Bywater’s, about the year 1875, with
a small party. The conversation turned on George Eliot, and Pater
announced that he did not think much of George Eliot as a writer. “It
is impossible,” he said, “to value a writer all of whose characters are
practically identical. What,” he said, “is Maggie Tulliver but Tito
in petticoats?” Such a criticism is of course purely perverse, and
contains no germ of critical seriousness.
The same tendency is reflected in the peevish monologue, attributed by
tradition to Mark Pattison, and often delightedly repeated by Pater
himself. The question of possible travelling-companions was being
discussed, when the Rector broke out with: “I would not travel with
Pater for anything! He would say the steamboat was not a steamboat, and
that Calais was not Calais!”
The example that he set was somewhat contagious. Those affected by it
became the most subjective of critics, and acquired the superficial
conversational method, which consisted in speaking of serious
things on social occasions as if they had no seriousness, and of
diligently searching for the ridiculous aspect that they could be
found to bear. There came a certain reaction at a later date against
this style of conversation, until the flippant treatment of topics,
however superficially amusing, came to be regarded with perhaps undue
impatience. But the fact remains that Pater was in ordinary talk,
through early years, _un vrai moqueur_, while the seriousness of his
demeanour lent a certain piquancy to his paradoxical talk which had a
distinct charm. In this respect, indeed, the caricature of Pater in the
pages of the _New Republic_ gives an entirely wrong impression. In the
_New Republic_ Mr. Rose is made to talk as though he were uttering his
secret thoughts, _dicenda tacenda locutus_, with entire indifference
to the tone of the audience that surrounded him. This is a hopeless
misconception of Pater’s ordinary ways.
There are two or three anecdotes which survive which aptly illustrate
the same tendency. I do not know to what extent these reminiscences are
coloured by the legendary element, but they are contemporary stories
which have survived, and are therefore worth repeating. He was asked,
for instance, whether he did not find his College work a great burden
to him. He replied with inimitable gravity, “Well, not so much as you
might think. The fact is that most of our men are fairly well-to-do,
and it is not necessary that they should learn very much. At some
Colleges I am told that certain of the young men have a genuine love
for learning; if that were so here, it would be quite too dreadful.”
He sighed, and looked sadly at his auditor.
On another occasion it is said that, when advising a man what to read
for Greats, Pater said: “I cannot advise you to read any special books;
the great thing is to read authors _whole_; read Plato _whole_; read
Kant _whole_; read Mill _whole_.”
Again, though the following is probably to be regarded as legendary,
it is said that he once, in a lecture, announced that in certain
aspects we might be justified in regarding religion as a beautiful
disease. This remark was quoted by an undergraduate to his parent with
the substitution of the word “loathsome” for “beautiful.” The parent
wrote indignantly to Pater to ask if it was right that such opinions
should be expressed by a tutor to undergraduates. Pater, according to
his own account, replied that he did not think he could have used the
word “loathsome.” He might, he said, have used the word “beautiful”—“a
beautiful disease.” “The parent,” he added, “expressed himself entirely
reassured and satisfied by the explanation.”[3]
[3] The origin of this story is no doubt to be found on page 217 of
the 1889 edition of the _Appreciations_, in the suppressed essay
on “Aesthetic Poetry.” “That monastic religion of the Middle Age
was, in fact, in many of its bearings, like a beautiful disease or
disorder of the senses.”
He went to see a rather elderly game of hockey played by middle-aged
performers, and, after a moment of silence, said softly to his
companion: “Come away; I think we ought to go on; it seems hardly fair
to look at them.”
But the habit of indulging in ironical or reckless paradox had its
dangerous side. There was at Oxford in the days of Pater’s early
residence a certain aesthetic movement, a species of renaissance,
in which the creed of beauty was strongly insisted upon. In some
members of the circle that was thus affected, this resulted in much
extravagance of thought; and in some it had even worse results in
loosening the principles of morality, and judging action by the canons
of what was held to be beautiful. It is a difficult subject to treat
discreetly, because the _epigoni_ of the school, in certain notorious
instances, ended in complete moral and social shipwreck. With the
extravagances and excesses of the school it is needless to say that
Pater, a man of scrupulous conscience and a high standard of moral
delicacy, had not the slightest sympathy; but his love of paradox,
his recklessness of irony, unquestionably led him to say things which
could be unhappily distorted and misapplied, and which, not in his own
case, but in the case of those who heard and exaggerated them, were
capable of being construed in a serious light, and the utterance of
which may be said to have justified both anxiety and distress. Here, as
elsewhere, the true Pater is to be seen in his writings, and not in his
ironical _dicta_. And any careful student of his deliberate thoughts
finds no difficulty in discerning the delicacy and the loftiness of
his view. He refused, it is true, to take a conventional view of the
principles of art; but though the essential purity of art can be
distorted into a wild appetite for beautiful impressions and sensual
experience, it can yet be safeguarded and kept in a high and austere
region, in which the lower impulse is entirely inconsistent with the
grave appreciation of beauty.
In the aesthetic movement, Pater concerned himself solely with
the doctrine; but at the same time it is undeniably true that the
leaders of a movement are always judged by the extravagances of their
followers; and the anxiety and even suspicion with which Pater’s
views were at one time regarded in Oxford, were due to the fact that
those with whom he was in a certain sense in sympathy on the higher
aesthetic grounds, applied the doctrine of beauty to a recklessness of
practice which Pater not only condemned, but the contemplation of which
both disgusted and appalled him. It is better to have no misconception
on this point. It is as unfair to think of Pater as in sympathy with
the decadent school, as it is to attribute to the original teachers
of Predestination the immoral distortion of the doctrines which
disgraced some of their fanatical sectaries. When the whole movement
has, so to speak, shaken down; when we can look dispassionately at the
part which the aesthetic school has played in the mental development
of the age, we shall be able, while we condemn whole-heartedly the
excesses of the advanced disciples, to discern the part that Pater and
the other leaders of the movement played in setting the deliberate
appreciation of beauty, the sedulous training of the perceptions in the
discrimination of the subtle effects of impassioned art, in its right
place among the forces which tend to the ennobling of human character
and temperament.
Having thus drawn out, as far as possible, what Pater’s ethical
creed was not, let us try to indicate the nature and movement of
his religious life. He began, it is plain, by feeling the strong
aesthetic attraction of the accessories of religion; probably he did
not disentangle the elements of religious faith from the effect which
great churches, solemn ceremonial, ecclesiastical music, and hieratic
pomp had upon his mind. As Jowett is once, in early days, reported to
have said to him somewhat irritably, at the close of a discussion,
“Mr. Pater, you seem to think that religion is all idolatry!” But as
soon as Pater plunged into the study of metaphysics, he found that
philosophy began to act as a solvent upon his creed; he still had a
bias towards the expression of religious truth; and his half-formed
idea of becoming a Unitarian minister, which, as I have said, was
suggested in all probability by the career of Coleridge, was the
outcome of this mood.
After this impulse, if it was ever so much as an impulse, died away, he
seems to have been content for some years to suspend his judgment. He
even, both in public and in private, used expressions which indicated
an attitude of definite hostility to the Christian position. He was
immersed in artistic conceptions, and in practical work; but as he
grew older the old associations began to reassert themselves; he
found, like so many people of speculative temperament, who set out on
a philosophical quest with an impatience of received traditions and
conventional opinion, that there was far more truth in the accumulated
treasures of human thought, simple and in many ways contradictory as
they appeared, than he had originally believed. As he wrote once, in
one of his reviews for the _Guardian_, “the religious, the Catholic,
ideal, ... the only mode of poetry realisable by the poor.”
He discovered afresh the tranquillising influence of a direct faith on
quiet people—of the type that he described in another review; speaking
of sacristans as “simple people coming and going there, devout, or
at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without
touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture
the most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
ecclesiastical life.” And thus the old quiet consecration of life by
faith, not very confident perhaps, hardly more than a sacred hope of
beautiful and tender possibilities, reasserted itself.
As Lady Dilke wrote of a talk with him in the later years:—
“Pater came and sate with me till dinner-time. We had been talking
before that on the exclusive cultivation of the memory in modern
teaching as tending to destroy the power of thought, by sacrificing
the attitude of meditation to that of perpetual apprehension. When
the others left we went on talking of the same matter, but on
different lines. Thence we came to how it might be possible, under
present conditions of belief, to bring people up not as beasts but
as men by the endeavour to train feeling and impart sentiments as
well as information. He looks for an accession of strength to the
Roman Church, and thinks that if it would abandon its folly in
political and social intrigue, and take up the attitude of a purely
spiritual power, it would be, if not the best thing that could
happen, at any rate better than the selfish vulgarity of the finite
aims and ends which stand in the place of an ideal in most lives
now. He has changed a great deal, as I should think for the better,
and is a stronger man.”
Pater spoke, indeed, as I conceive, very plainly in one place—the
review of _Robert Elsmere_—of what was the inner attitude of his
mind:—
“_Robert Elsmere_ was a type of a large class of minds which
cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical,
doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognise our doubts,
to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be
also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class
of minds which cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various
degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the
highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false,
unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make
allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and
with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject
of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the
world. The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to
hope and love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will
be, the nucleus of a Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of
philosophic uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of good
Christians, multitudes of worthy priests. They knit themselves to
believers, in various degrees, of all ages.”
And thus he came both to feel and to express a deep and sincere
sympathy with the Christian point of view; _Marius_ reveals most subtly
the closeness of this approximation; but it may be seen, in scattered
hints and touches, through all his later writings. Speaking, for
instance, of the death of Socrates he wrote that the “details, as one
cannot but observe in passing, which leave those famous hours, even for
purely human, or say! pagan dignity and tenderness, wholly incomparable
to one sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared.” A
friend of Pater’s tells me that the present Bishop of Birmingham,
Dr. Gore, went to the Brasenose Church Society to read a paper on
the Blessed Trinity, and was rather taken aback to find Pater in the
chair. “However, he proved to be an admirable chairman, directing
the discussion after the paper, and checking anything approaching
irreverence.”
He wrote Mrs. Humphry Ward a very interesting letter on December 23,
1885, on receiving from her as a Christmas gift her newly published
translation of _Amiel’s Journal_. After congratulating her on the
admirable literary grace of the translation, he continued:—
“I find a store of general interest in _Amiel_, (take at random,
_e.g._, the shrewd criticism of Quinet,) which must attract all
those who care for literature; while for the moralist and the
student of religion he presents the additional attraction of yet
another thoroughly original and individual witness to experiences
on the subject they care most for. For myself, I gather from your
well-meditated introduction, that I shall think, on finishing the
book, that there was still something _Amiel_ might have added to
those elements of natural religion, (so to call it, for want of
a better expression,) which he was able to accept, at times with
full belief, and always with the sort of hope which is a great
factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs, and the function in the
world, of the historic church, form just one of those obscure but
all-important possibilities, which the human mind is powerless
effectively to dismiss from itself; and might wisely accept, in the
first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which
Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any
ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of
assent we give to any assumption, in the strict and ultimate sense,
moral. The question whether those facts were real will, I think,
always continue to be what I should call one of the _natural_
questions of the human mind.”
In connection with this frame of mind we may quote an interesting
passage which occurs in the _Greek Studies_ (“The Bacchanals of
Euripides”). He is speaking of Euripides, at the end of a long life of
varied emotion and experience; he says:—
“Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood not
necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach
of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old)
accustomed ideas, conformable to a sort of common sense regarding
the unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man’s
allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ
from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or
ironical, but that he tends, in the sum of probabilities, to dwell
on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining
time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side of
things; and what is accustomed—what holds of familiar usage—comes
to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects; and the
well-known delineation of the vague country, in Homer or Hesiod,
one’s best attainable mental outfit, for the journey thither.”
This is no doubt a true picture of the writer’s own inner mood, a
forecast of the later years in which the excitement of the quest for
new ideas, new experiences, dies down; and a man begins to rediscover
for himself the humanity, the reality, of the old and constant stock
of mortal tradition; the thoughts that have tortured, comforted,
attracted, satisfied, the great company of mankind.
When he lived in London he was fond of attending St. Paul’s Cathedral,
St. Albans, Holborn, and other high Anglican Churches; and he was
sometimes seen at the Carmelites’ Church in Kensington; but there is
no sort of evidence that he had any thought of Anglican orders, or
that he was tending towards Roman Catholicism. He found in religion a
deep and tranquillising force, and recognised the religious instinct,
the intuitions of faith, as a Divine influence even more direct and
unquestionable than the artistic or the intellectual influence. And
thus we may think of him as one who, though his intellectual subtlety
prevented his aiming at any very precise definition of his creed,
was yet deeply penetrated by the perfect beauty and holiness of the
Christian ideal, and reposed in trembling faith on ‘the bosom of his
Father and his God.’
Much that is beside the mark has been written and said about Pater’s
precise habits of composition. The truth is that they were in no way
unusual. The common tradition is that he wrote words and sentences upon
cards, and then when he had accumulated a sufficient store, he dealt
them out as though he were playing a game of patience, and made them
into a species of mosaic. The real truth is much simpler. When he was
studying a subject he took abundance of notes, but instead of making
them in a note-book, he preferred slips of paper, for the greater
convenience of sorting them, and arranged them in order so that they
might illustrate the divisions of his subject.
Mr. Gosse, to whom was entrusted the task of deciphering the
fragmentary manuscript of the “Pascal,” gives one or two interesting
instances of these notes, most of which are of the nature of passing
thoughts, captured for future reference. One runs:—
“Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., belfries, solemn
night come in about the birds attracted by the Towers.”
And again:—
“? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, only _after_
the Fall?”
When he had arranged his notes he began to write on ruled paper,
leaving the alternate lines blank; and in these spaces he would insert
new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then the whole was re-copied,
again on alternate lines, which would again be filled; moreover, he
often had an essay at this stage set up at his own expense in print,
that he might better be able to judge of the effect; the same device
that Tennyson so often used.
The work of writing grew easier to him as time went on. “Ah! it is much
easier now,” he said to Mr. Gosse, near the end of his life. “If I live
long enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing.”
He was a regular rather than a hard worker. It was his habit for many
years to devote two or three hours of the morning to writing, and he
often wrote again for another hour in the afternoon. But he never
worked late at night; writing was to him an absorbing and at the same
time a fatiguing process, to be pursued temperately and quietly. Some
writers work for a time as though possessed, fall into a profound
exhaustion when a book is finished, and then lie fallow for a time.
Such was never Pater’s way. His writing was his central concern; he
loved it with an ever-growing love; it formed the staple employment of
his days; but his friends say that there never was a man who seemed to
be always so free from preoccupation, so ready to put his work aside,
and enter into conversation of the most trivial kind; there were no
furtive glances at the clock, none of the air of jealous if patient
resignation, no hunted sense of the desire to escape from interruption.
Again, too much emphasis has been laid upon the conscious fatigue
and exhaustion arising from his work. He was not, like Flaubert, the
racked and tortured medium of his thought. He was a man of low physical
vitality, and he would sometimes half-humorously lament the labour
that his work cost him. But the toil and the delight were inextricably
intermingled; such writing as Pater’s with its subtle distinctions,
its fine metaphors, its delicate effects, its haunted richness, its
remote images, its liquid cadences, could never have been produced
except by one who tasted to the full the artistic pleasure of elaborate
workmanship. And it is beyond all doubt that his work became to him in
increasing measure the mainspring of his life, a spring of the purest
joy.
One source of his concentrated strength was that he never wasted time
in experimental researches; he knew his own mind; he knew exactly what
interested him and the limitations of his taste; thus he confined his
ideals to a restricted circle, and though perhaps losing somewhat in
catholicity of thought, he gained astonishing depth and insight in
certain specified directions. But he made no parade of omniscience.
He used to say smilingly that it was such a relief to work hard at a
subject and then forget all about it.
One of Pater’s happiest accomplishments was his power of bringing up
in a few words a figure or a scene, beautiful in itself and charged
moreover with a further and remote significance, revealing as by
a sudden glimpse or hint some solemn thought enshrined within the
outer form. Thus he said once that churches where the Sacrament was
reserved gave one the sense of a house where a dead friend lies; and
again in a subtle allegory he touched the difference between Roman
Catholicism with all its rich fabric of association and tradition,
and Puritanism with its naked insistence on bare rectitude and rigid
conduct. Roman Catholicism, he said, was like a table draped in fair
linen, covered with lights and flowers and vessels of crystal and
silver; while Puritanism was like the same table, after it had been
cleared, serviceable enough, but without charm or grace. The essential
form present in both; but the one furnished with rich and dainty
accessories, the other unadorned and plain.
It may be said generally that richness under a severe restraint is the
principal characteristic of Pater’s style; but there are two or three
special small characteristics, almost amounting to mannerisms, which
may be noted in his writing. One is the natural result of his habit of
composition; it is of overloading his sentences, of introducing long
parentheses, of heaping fine detail together, which sometimes gives an
impression of over-luxuriousness. Here is a typical sentence, out of
one of the _Guardian Essays_, the review of Wordsworth:—
“An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving
leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by
some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills,
to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened
Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the
moods of men.”
This sentence has every charm except the charm of perfect lucidity. But
any one who enjoys the characteristic quality of Pater, will be able to
give its due value to the slight blurring of outline on which the charm
to a certain extent depends.
Again, he was fond of beginning a sentence with the emphatic phrase,
and thus inverting the clause. Where another writer would say, “That
tale of hours, the long chanted English service, develops patience,”
Pater wrote: “It develops patience—that tale of hours, the long
chanted English service.” And again: “Horace!—he was, had been always,
the idol of their school.” And again: “Submissiveness!—It had the
force of genius with Emerald Uthwart.” Such sentences, occurring as
a rule at the opening of a paragraph, are of constant occurrence. He
had a fondness for points of exclamation: “How wretched! how fine! how
inconceivably great and difficult!—not for him!” and his frequent
introduction of the word “say!” with its stop breaking the continuity
of the clause where an ordinary writer would use “for instance,” is a
favourite usage.
It is clear that he did not aim primarily at simplicity or lucidity.
His style was deliberately adopted and practised, and he was careful
to allow no influence whatever to interfere with it. He told Mr. Gosse
that he had read scarcely a chapter of Stevenson, and not a line of Mr.
Kipling.
“I feel, from what I hear about them,” he said, “that they are
strong; they might lead me out of my path. I want to go on writing
in my own way, good or bad. I should be afraid to read Kipling,
lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat down to
write.”
His view was that slipshod impressionism, rough, sketchy emphasis, was
the literary fault of the time which needed to be sternly resisted.
Writing of a serious kind, he felt, ought to be a strenuous, almost a
learned process. He wrote in one of the reviews he contributed to the
_Guardian_:—
“Well, the good quality of an age, the defect of which lies in
the direction of intellectual anarchy and confusion, may well be
eclecticism.... A busy age will hardly educate its writers in
correctness. Let its writers make time to write English more as a
learned language.”
This thought had its effect upon his writing, even when he was dealing
with the apprehension of the ordinary objects of sense and perception.
Great as was Pater’s appreciation of nature, and fine as was his
perception of the quality and beauty of landscape, it is almost
always through a medium of art that he beheld it. Nature is to him
always a setting, a background, subordinated to the human interest.
The thought that men had laboured, painfully or joyfully, over a
building, or a picture, or a book, invested the result with a certain
sacredness in his eyes. The nearer that outward things approached to
humanity, the more they appealed to Pater. The home, the house, the
room, its furniture and decoration, the garden, the pleasaunce, all
these were nearer to his heart than nature in her wilder and sterner
aspects, because the thought and hand of humanity had passed over
them, writing its care and its dreams legibly on cornice and lintel,
on panel and beam, on chest and press, on alley and bower, on border
and fountain. When, as in “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” or in “Sebastian
van Storck,” he describes the sunny vine-clad country, or the lonely
clump on the long hill that seems to summon the vagrant foot thither,
or the frozen lake with the fur-clad skaters moving to and fro, it is
always with a sense of how such scenes might have been painted. It was
always nature seen through the eye of the artist rather than in the
mind of the poet. There is little sense of expanse or largeness about
these natural touches; they are rather caught at salient points, in
glimpses and vignettes, grouped and isolated. It may be observed how
rarely he alludes to natural sounds; these visions seem to be seen
in a reflective silence, recorded and represented by the mind that
has stored itself full of minute pictorial impressions. Pater went
to nature, not in the spirit of Wordsworth, to exult in the freedom,
the width, the tenderness, the energy, the vastness of it all; but
rather as a great quarry of impressions, through which he walked with
a perceptive gaze, selecting and detaching striking and charming
effects, which could afterwards be renewed and meditated over in the
home-keeping mind. None of his direct nature-touches, beautiful as
they are, are penetrated with quite the same zest and emotion as his
descriptions of nature when represented by some master-hand. It was the
penetration of nature by human personality that gave it its value for
Pater, its significance; and thus it comes about that his descriptions
of scenes always seem, so to speak, to have a frame about them. He did
not, like a poet, desire to escape from man to nature; but rather to
suffuse nature at every point with humanity, to judge of it, to feel
its beauty, not as the direct expression of the mind of God, but as it
affected and appealed to man.
It might have been imagined that so deliberate and precise a craftsman,
with so definite a theory of his art, would perhaps have held on his
way producing his careful masterpieces, content to put it on record
that he had thought thus, and expressed it just so, content that the
beautiful thing should be formed and fashioned, and made available for
the use or delight of any that followed the same or a like path among
the things of the soul. One could have supposed Pater indifferent to
criticism and censure, deeming it enough not to be unfaithful to the
heavenly vision. For to him, doubtless, the first and chiefest pleasure
lay in the thrilling thought, that thought which sets the writer’s
spirit all aglow, leaping into the mind, as it does, with an almost
physical shock, and opening up a sudden vista of possibilities; as
when a man, walking in a wood, comes suddenly across a ride, and sees
the green space run to left and right, with its carpet of flowers, its
leafy walls. And next to that first and sacred joy came the delight of
the slow and careful conception, tracing the development, restricting
the ramification, foreseeing the proportion. Then followed the later
joy, the gradual embroidery of the austere outline, the laying of
thread by thread, of colour by colour; and then the final pleasure of
strict revision, of enriching the close texture, of strengthening the
languid cadence, of refining the refined epithet, the eagerness to
reach that impossible perfection that seemed to recede even as he drew
near.
Yet even to a craftsman thus wholeheartedly intent upon his work,
there is a satisfaction in publication which is like the framing of
a picture. The book with its white margins, its delicate sprinkling
of ornament, its headings and mottoes, all this is the symbol of
completion, of an end attained. There is a further delight still
in the possibility of becoming thus the companion of the imagined
reader; to be held in unknown hands and scanned by gentle eyes; to
appeal to kindred natures, kindly and generous persons; the thought
of this to one like Pater, who had found so many in the world whom
he could love, and to whom human relations had always so deep and
sacred a significance, was full of a potent attraction. But one
is perhaps surprised to learn that he was also deeply sensitive
to adverse criticism; that he felt about the harsh and summary
treatment of his books, especially when they were misrepresented or
misunderstood, something of what the old Psalmist felt, when he prayed
that his darling might be delivered from the power of the dog. There
were times when he suffered acutely from the attacks of critics,
as when the exquisite and elaborate Essay on “Style” was treated
as incomprehensible and affected; when he declared with desolate
conviction that his pleasure in writing was gone, and that he could
never resume his work. Only those nearest to him knew of these dark
moods of discouragement, because he was not one who took the world
into his confidence; indeed, to those who were without, his gentle and
equable manner seemed to bear witness to a tranquillity of mind, which
indeed he sedulously practised, although he never attained the deep
serenity of which he was in search.
It is a curious fact that Pater showed no precocious signs, in
boyhood and youth, of a desire to write. Those in whose blood stirs
the creative impulse, the literary energy, feel the thrill as a rule
very early, and cover paper diligently from their first years. But
Pater’s family cannot remember that he ever showed any particular
tendency to write. He never wrote poetry in childhood, except a few
humorous verses, long lost and forgotten; later on he made some
verse-translations from Goethe, Alfred de Musset, and the Greek
Anthology; and this abstention from the composition of verse is a
remarkable fact in the case of one whose prose is so essentially
poetical. It is common to differentiate the prose of poets, as in
the case of Dryden, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and others, from
the prose of those who have never attempted to write in verse; it is
thought that it has a greater precision, a sonorous richness, a more
vivid colouring. If Pater had ever practised the art of poetry, it
would be easy to point to his prose as a supreme instance of these
qualities, because, quite apart from its luxurious prodigality,
both of epithet and image, it has a strong, rhythmical, almost
metrical movement in places. But, as a matter of fact, his chief
characteristics, as a prose-writer, came to him late. As a rule, the
makers of gorgeous and exquisite prose have begun by erring on the
side of diffuseness and ornament, and have chastened their style into
due proportion and lucidity. But Pater’s earliest writings, which seem
to have been essays for Societies, have none of the later charm; they
tend to be austere, hard, and even dry. Neither did he arrive at his
plentiful and magnificent vocabulary, as some writers have done, by
the production of large masses of writing that never see the light, in
which their hand has learned firmness of outline, and their teeming
brain the power of summoning the supremely appropriate word from a
suspended cloud of more or less suitable language. His method was
far otherwise. At one time he applied himself daily for some months
to translating a page of Sainte-Beuve or Flaubert, and this seems to
have been his only exercise. His prose steadily grew in volume and
depth; and the one serious fault of his writing, the tendency that
his sentences have to become long and involved, did not diminish.
What he did gain as years went on was a refined and surprising power
over words, a power of condensing an elaborate effect into a single
haunting sentence which suggests rather than reveals. His work was
always the result of much patient and unseen labour; but though he
revised carefully and jealously enough in many cases, his richness
was not derived in reality so much from these stippled effects, as
from the fulness of mind out of which he wrote. Any one who has ever
gone over the same ground as Pater, and studied the same authorities,
will be amazed to find how conscientiously and diligently the material
has all been employed; not by elaborately amplifying detail, but by
condensing an abundance of scattered points into a single illuminating
hint, a poignant image, an apt illustration. He was entirely remote
from those easy superficial writers who generalise from insufficient
premises, and bridge the gaps in their knowledge by graceful fabrics of
words. All Pater’s work was strongly focussed; he drew the wandering
and scattered rays, as through a crystal lens, into a burning and
convergent point of light. Not to travel far for instances, the essay
on Leonardo is a perfect example of this. The writing is so delicate,
so apparently fanciful, that it is only through a careful study of
the available tradition that one comes to realise how minute is the
knowledge that furnishes out these gemmed and luminous sentences. It is
true that his knowledge is not pedantically applied, that he concerns
himself little with minute and technical questions of art-criticism;
but I conceive that Pater’s attempt was always to discern the inner
beauty, the essence of the thing; to disentangle the personality, the
humanity of the artist, rather than to classify or analyse the work.
And so it comes about that his art-criticism is essentially a creative
thing, that adds little to the historical aspect of the development
of art, and falls indeed at times into positive error; the training,
the severe observation, the cultivated instinct, is there, but it is
relegated, so to speak, to an ante-room, while the spirit is led to
apprehend something of the mysterious issues of art, initiated into the
secret appreciation of beauty, and drawn to worship in the darkened
innermost shrine. There is always something holy, even priestly, about
Pater’s attitude to art. It insists upon the initial critical training,
the necessity of ordered knowledge; but it leaves this far behind; it
passes beyond the nice apprehension of eye, the cultivated sense of
line and colour, the exact discrimination of style and medium, into a
remote and poetical region. Such secrets cannot be explained or even
analysed; they cannot be communicated to those that are without; they
must be emotionally and mystically apprehended, by the soul rather than
by the mind.
It was this secret vision, this inner enlightening, on which Pater
had set his heart, and which he sought for urgently and diligently.
He loved the symbol, not for itself alone, but for the majesty which
it contained, the hidden light which it guarded. It is in this region
alone that he seems to wear an absorbed and pontifical air, not
with the false sacerdotal desire to enhance personal impressiveness
and private dignity, through the ministry of divine powers and holy
secrets, but with the unconscious emotion of one whose eyes behold
great wonders enacting themselves upon the bodiless air, which the dull
and the contemptuous may not discern.
It remains to attempt to indicate Pater’s position in later English
literature, and his philosophy, or rather his point of view, by
summarising what has already, it is to be hoped, been made clear by
analysis.
In literature he practically struck out a new line. The tendency of
the best prose-writers of the century had been, as a rule, to employ
prose in a prosaic manner. Landor had aimed at a Greek austerity of
style. Macaulay had brought to perfection a bright hard-balanced
method of statement, like the blowing of sharp trumpets. This was
indeed the prose that had recommended itself to the taste of the early
Victorians; it was full of a certain sound and splendour; it rolled
along in a kind of impassioned magnificence; but the object of it was
to emphasise superficial points in an oratorical manner, to produce
a glittering panorama rich in detail; it made no appeal to the heart
or the spirit, awaking at best a kind of patriotic optimism, a serene
self-glorification.
Carlyle had written from the precisely opposite point of view; he was
overburdened with passionate metaphysics which he involved in a texture
of rugged Euphuism, intensely mannerised. But he had no catholicity of
grasp, and his picturesqueness had little subtlety or delicacy, because
his intense admiration for certain qualities and types blinded him to
finer shades of character. There was no restraint about his style,
and thus his enthusiasm turned to rant, his statement of preferences
degenerated into a species of frantic bombast.
With these Pater had nothing in common; the writers with whom he
is more nearly connected are Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Newman, and
Ruskin. He was akin to Charles Lamb in the delicacy of touch, the
subtle flavour of language; and still more in virtue of his tender
observation, his love of interior domestic life. He has a certain
nearness to De Quincey in the impassioned autobiographical tendency,
the fondness for retrospect, which Pater considered the characteristic
of the poetical temperament. He is akin to Newman in respect of the
restraint, the economy of effect, the perfect suavity of his work; but
none of these probably exerted any very direct influence upon him.
Ruskin perhaps alone of the later prose-writers had a permanent effect
on the style of Pater. He learnt from Ruskin to realise intensely the
suggestiveness of art, to pursue the subjective effect upon the mind of
the recipient; but though the rich and glowing style of Ruskin enlarged
the vocabulary of Pater, yet we can trace the time when he parted
company with him, and turned aside in the direction of repression
rather than volubility, of severity rather than prodigality.
It may be said, then, that Pater really struck out a new line in
English prose, working on the principles enunciated by Flaubert in a
widely different region. The essence of his attempt was to produce
prose that had never before been contemplated in English, full of
colour and melody, serious, exquisite, ornate. He devoted equal pains
both to construction and ornamentation. Whether he is simple and
stately, whether he is involved and intricate, he has the contrast
always in view. His object was that every sentence should be weighted,
charged with music, haunted with echoes; that it should charm and
suggest, rather than convince or state. The danger of the perfection to
which he attained is the danger of over-influence, seductive sweetness;
the value is to suggest the unexplored possibilities of English as a
vehicle for a kind of prose that is wholly and essentially poetical.
The triumph of his art is to be metrical without metre, rhythmical
without monotony. There will, of course, always be those whom this
honeyed, laboured cadence will affect painfully with a sense of
something stifling and over-perfumed; and, indeed, the merits of a work
of art can never be established by explanation or defended by argument;
but to such as can apprehend, feel, enjoy, there is the pleasure of
perfected art, of language that obeys and enriches the thought, of
calculated effect, of realisation, with a supreme felicity of the
intention of the writer.
One does not praise his works as the perfection of style; there is a
limpidity and lucidity of prose style—prose as used by Newman, by
Matthew Arnold, by Ruskin, in chastened moods,—to which no style that
depends upon elaborateness and artifice can attain; but it may fairly
be claimed for Pater that he realised his own conception of perfection.
The style is heavy with ornament, supple with artifice. It is not
so much a picture as an illumination. For sunlight there is stiff
burnished gold; it is full of gorgeous conceits, jewelled phrases; it
has no ease or simplicity; it is all calculated, wrought up, stippled;
but it must be considered from that point of view; it must be appraised
rather than criticised, accepted rather than judged.
To feel the charm it is necessary to be, to some extent, in sympathy
with the philosophy of Pater. We see in him a naturally sceptical
spirit, desiring to plunge beneath established systems and complacent
explanations; and this, in common with an intense sensibility to every
hint and intimation of beauty, apprehended in a serious and sober
spirit; not the spirit that desires to possess itself of the external
elements, but to penetrate the essential charm. Yet it is not the
patient and untroubled beauty of nature, of simple effects of sun
and shade, of great mountains, of wide plains, but of a remote and
symbolical beauty, seen by glimpses and in corners, of which he was in
search—beauty with which is mixed a certain strangeness and mystery,
that suggests an inner and a deeper principle behind, intermingled with
a sadness, a melancholy, that is itself akin to beauty.
There is always an interfusion of casuistical and metaphysical thought
with Pater’s apprehension of beauty; he seems to be ever desirous to
draw near to the frankness, the unashamed happiness, of the Greek
spirit, but to be for ever held back by a certain fence of scepticism,
a malady of thought.
Yet the beauty of which he takes account is essentially of a religious
kind; it draws the mind to the further issue, the inner spirit. All the
charm of ritual and ceremonial in worship has for Pater an indefinable
and constant attraction. He is for ever recurring to it, because it
seems to him to interpret and express an emotion, a need of the human
spirit, whose concern is to comprehend if it can what is the shadowy
figure, the mysterious will, that moves behind the world of sight and
sense.
We can trace the progress of thought in the case of Pater as clearly
as it is possible to trace the thought of any recent writer; though
reticent and even suavely ironical in talk, he was in his writings
at once self-centred and _intime_. His own emotions, his own
preoccupations, were absorbingly important to him; yet while he shrank
from giving them facile utterance, he was irresistibly impelled to
take the world into his confidence. He had none of the frank egotism
of Wordsworth, none of the complacent belief in the interest of his
revelations of himself; and yet there is no writer that speaks more
persistently and self-consciously of his own point of view. He made
little attempt to pass outside of it, and hardly disguised what he
would fain have concealed. The instinct, indeed, for expression
triumphs at every point over the instinct for reticence.
We see the silent, self-contained boyhood, the intellectual awakening,
the absorption in metaphysics, and their abandonment, the eager pursuit
of recondite beauty, that from the days of his maturity never left
him; we see in the candour, the urbanity, the delicate and gentle
outlook, the intellectual strenuousness, of his heroes a reflection
of his own personal ideal. We see how he was led to trust personal
intuitions rather than intellectual processes; to listen rather for
the simpler, sweeter message which comes from life, from experience,
from sympathy, than to obey the logical conclusions of reason, which
indeed arrives so soon at the consciousness of its own limitations; we
see that he determined that the function of reason was rather to keep
judgment suspended; that it should be applied as a solvent alike to
philosophical and religious systems; but that the spirit should not
thus be bound; that reason should indeed erect the framework of the
house, its walls and doorways—and that then its work was done; while
the spirit should dwell within, drawing its strength from the tender
observation of humanity, from humble service, from quiet companionship,
while it should all the time keep its eyes open to any faintest message
flashed from afar, whether it came through glance or word, through book
or picture, through charm of form or colour, from tower or tree, from
the clear freshness of the solitary dawn, or from the orange sunset
dying softly over wide, glimmering fields.
* * * * *
“Behold, this dreamer cometh!” So, with an envious contempt, the
petty-minded scheming brethren of the inspired child beloved of God
greeted him, as he came in unsuspecting innocence to join them in the
field. He was to learn, even in the tender days of boyhood, how heavy a
burden that secret knowledge was to be, that inheritance of the inner
and deeper sight which could pierce behind the veil of mortality. If
he could have foreseen the weary way he was to travel to the calm
and prosperous eminence of later years, would he not have hidden the
visions which he revealed so guilelessly? Not even the certainty of
the honour and comfort of the future would have made amends for the
loneliness, the malignity, of the labyrinth which he was so gently and
faithfully to thread. This power of inner sight, this perception of the
essence of things, must always, it seems, bring its possessor a certain
sadness, a certain isolation. The prosperous worldly spirits, that swim
so vigorously on the surface of things, have always a suspicion, a
jealousy, a contempt, for one who dives deeper and brings back tidings
of the strange secrets that the depth holds. But if such clear-sighted
spirits go tranquilly upon their way, and utter fearlessly the truth
they discern, though the way be difficult and arduous, the honour
comes at last, unsought, unprized. And it is well perhaps that the
conquest is so hard, because if the victory came at once, with it
would doubtless come the relish for the easy, the obvious triumph; but
by the time that it arrives, the pure spirit, chastened and refined,
has reached a region where the only pleasure that fame brings is the
knowledge that the truth has somewhat prevailed. There is no taint of
personal complacency, no luxurious yielding to lower satisfactions,
nothing but the unstained delight that the mystery, discerned and
interpreted, is bearing in other hearts its rich and reviving fruits.
Such is the life that I have attempted to depict. It is the life of
one who, through a dreamful and unpraised boyhood, through a silent
and undistinguished youth, gradually discerned a principle in things;
learned to see, with an impassioned zest, the truth that, in art
and life alike, the victory is with those who attain to a certain
patient and appreciative attitude of soul; who learn through careful
toil, through much sorting of accumulated thought and expression, to
discriminate between what is facile, impressive, specious, and what is
deep, permanent, sincere. No taste can of course be wholly catholic;
it is swayed by instinct, prepossession, and preference. But the point
is, in however limited a sphere, to be able to detect with unfailing
certainty the true quality of things.
He of whom we speak achieved this art of subtle discrimination, a
gift which is shared by dumb and learned connoisseurs; but above this
rise a few, who can not only by a trained instinct recognise what is
perfect, but who can express their methods and powers so that canons
and standards can be formed. Then to but one or two in a generation is
given a further gift: the creative, the poetical power to express in
language of high and haunting beauty the deepest mysteries of art; who
can not only praise in noble and inspiring terms the beautiful thing,
the exquisite work, the flashing thought, but can disentangle the very
essence of the secret, establish remote and subtle connections, and
open, if only for one glorious instant, a door into the inner shrine,
showing a vision of awful angels, bent on high service, interpreting
the loud crying of mysterious voices, echoing the rising strain that
fills the golden-roofed palace, and giving perhaps an awe-struck
glimpse of the presence that sits enthroned there.
But not always on these august heights does the haunted spirit dwell.
There is a spell unknown to those who live the eager life of affairs,
who dwell in crowded cities, or who carry the busy, scheming mind
abroad with them into lonelier places; the spell that broods over
the wooded valley with its hazel-hidden stream, where the bird sings
among the thickets; the spell that lies behind the dark tree-trunks of
the grove that bar the smouldering sunset with shafts of shade; that
trembles in the green twilight when the stars begin to glimmer, and the
winds are hushed. This too, and its appeal to the heart of man, the
tinge that it lends to his dreams, the passionate desire to record, to
represent, to give permanence of form, to the hurrying moment—all this
needs to be interpreted as well.
But here, to the true prophet of these mysteries, the thought that
must be caught and touched and given shape, is not so much the mystery
itself—for that is dark and not to be apprehended—but the thrill
which such visions have communicated to the hearts of other pilgrims,
who have fared eagerly and sadly through the world before us, and have
passed into the darkness, just leaving, in written signs and pictured
symbols, the traces of the passion, the desire, the yearning, that such
things have brought them. Such a task as this—this piecing together
of personality, this testing of recorded impressions, this imbuing of
ancient, half-faded dreams with the sanguine vitality, the eager hope,
of to-day, needs one who is not less a poet than a critic. The dreamer
that comes thus must not be absorbed in his own fruitful visions, but
must be able, by an energy of sympathy, a lucid purity of soul, to
enter no less eagerly into the dim and far-reaching visions of other
inspired spirits.
INDEX
A
Ainslie, Mr. Douglas, 21, 136, 185.
America, one of Olney Paters emigrate to, 1.
_Amiel’s Journal_ (trans. Mrs. H. Ward), 199–200.
Appleton, Dr. (editor of _Academy_), 21.
_Appreciations_, 12; 1st ed. (1889), 2nd ed. (1890), 33; 119, 122,
147—
“Aesthetic Poetry” (1868), 32, 33;
reappeared (1889 ed.), omitted (1890 ed.), 153.
“Charles Lamb,” 62–4, 78.
Coleridge, S. T., considered as a philosopher, 12–13.
“Feuillet’s _La Morte_,” 122.
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” (1898), 78, 153.
“Measure for Measure” (1874), 153, 154.
“Romanticism” (1876), 64–6, reappeared as postscript to (1889), 153.
“Shakespeare’s English Kings” (1889), 153,
superficial analysis of, 155–6.
“Sir Thomas Browne” (1886), 119–22.
“Style” (1888), 147–53, 209.
_Apuleius, Golden Book of_, 92.
Arnold, Miss Mary (Mrs. Humphry Ward), 21.
_Art, History of Ancient_ (Winckelmann), 29.
_Athenaeum_, 118.
Azay-le-Rideau, 32.
B
Brasenose College, description of, 15–17.
—— ancient ceremonies preserved at, 85.
“Bruno, Giordano” (_Gaston de Latour_), 140, 153.
Bussell, Dr. F. W., devoted companion to Pater, 21;
memorial sermon on, 24; 180–1, 183, 189.
Bywater, Prof. Ingram, 20, 192.
C
Caird, Dr. Edward, 20.
Canterbury, King’s School at, 2, 6, 134.
Capes, Mr. W. W., 20.
Carlyle, Thomas, 213.
Champneys, Mr. Basil, 21, 192.
_Child in the House, The._ See _Miscellaneous Studies_.
“Concert, The” (picture), 50.
Cowper, William, 1.
Creighton, Bishop, 21.
D
Daniel, Dr., 21.
—— Mrs., 21.
Dante (Prefatory Essay to Dr. C. L. Shadwell’s translation of), 159.
_Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, La_ (Du Bellay), 45.
_Dialogues_ (Jowett), 56.
_Dictionary of National Biography_, 19.
Dilke, Lady, 37, 198.
E
_Earthly Paradise, The_ (Morris), 35.
Education (English system compared with Spartan theory of), 167–8.
Eliot, George, 192.
_English Poets_ (Ward’s), 12.
F
_Fortnightly Review_, publication of essays in, 32–3; 67, 119, 140,
147, 153.
“France, Some Great Churches in,” 168–9.
G
Goethe, 11, 14, 29, 131.
Gore, Dr., 199.
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 21;
letter to, 32; 54, 189, 190, 202, 205.
_Greek Studies_ (1895)—
“Aegina, The Marbles of,” 76.
“Athletic Prizemen, The Age of,” 77, 168.
“Demeter and Persephone, The Myth of,” 71–2.
“Dionysus” (1876), 67–70.
“Euripides, The Bacchanals of,” 70–1, 200.
“Greek Sculpture, Beginnings of,” 74–6.
“Hippolytus Veiled” (1889), 73–4, 122, 153.
_Guardian_, 48, 57, 118, 119, 204, 206.
_Guenevere, Defence of_ (W. Morris), 33.
H
Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, 176.
Hursley, 4.
I
_Imaginary Portraits_, 73—
“Court Painters, A Prince of” (1885), 122.
Composition of, 124–5, 126.
“Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), 122, 123, 126–8, 131.
“Duke Carl of Rosenmold” (1887), 122, 130–1, 207.
“Sebastian van Storck” (1886), 122, 128–30, 131, 207.
Italy, 9–10, 32.
J
_Jason_ (William Morris), 35.
Johnson, Mr. Lionel, 21.
Jowett, Rev. Benjamin, 9;
his opinion of Pater’s ability, 54–5, 56, 57, 196–7;
_Life_ of, 54, 56.
K
Keble, John, 4.
_King’s Tragedy, The_ (Rossetti), 87.
Kipling, Rudyard, 205–6.
L
Lamb, Charles, 213.
_Latour, Gaston de_, 92, 140–7.
_Letters_ (Pascal), 173.
_Lettres à une Inconnue_ (Prosper Mérimée), 158.
M
_Macmillan’s Magazine_, 140, 153.
Mallock, Mr., 52.
_Marius the Epicurean_, 46, 82–3, 85–9;
autobiographical impression of, 91–115;
reception of, 118, 162, 199;
quoted, 93–9, 101–2, 104, 107, 108, 112, 114.
May, Mrs. Walter, 2.
_Miscellaneous Studies_, 10—
“Apollo in Picardy” (1893), 123, 132–4.
“Art Notes in North Italy,” 159.
_Child in the House, The_ (1898), 4, 5, 79–82, 89, 122.
_Diaphaneitè_ (1864), 10–11.
_Emerald Uthwart_ (1892), 4, 6, 123, 131, 134–9, 159.
“Notre-Dame d’Amiens,” 168–9.
“Pascal,” 169, 202.
“Prosper Mérimée” (1890), 156–9.
“Raphael,” 159–62.
“Vézelay” (1894), 169.
N
_New Republic_ (Mallock), 52–4; 55; 193.
_New Review_, 159.
_Nineteenth Century_, 168.
O
Olney, 1.
Oxford, 8, 17–19, 23, 138.
P
Paget, Miss (Vernon Lee), 89–90.
_Pall Mall Gazette_, 118.
Pater, Dr. Richard Glode (father), 1;
death of, 2.
—— Miss (sister), 180.
—— Mrs. (mother), 2;
death of, 9.
—— Walter Horatio, forefathers, 1–2;
father, 1;
birth, 2;
mother, 2, 9;
brothers and sisters, 2;
family removes to Enfield, 2;
visits to Fish Hall, 2;
goes to school at Canterbury, 2;
religion, 2, 4, 13;
religious doubts, 173–4,
life, 196–201;
love of symbolism, 3, 36, 85, 196;
reticence, 3, 185;
instinct for expression triumphs over instinct for reticence, 217;
desires to take Holy Orders, 3;
intellectual awakening, 3;
meets Keble, 4;
sensitive apprehension of beauty, 4, 6, 12, 14, 215–6;
seriousness, 164;
Ruskin’s influence, 7;
enters Queen’s College, Oxford, 8;
course of study, 8–9;
takes second-class in Final Classical Schools, 9;
vacations spent in Germany, 9;
tours in Italy, 9, 32;
elected to Fellowship at Brasenose, 9;
goes into residence, 9;
friends, 9–10, 20–1, 123,
their appreciation of, 180–1;
his loyalty to, 186, 192;
early work destroyed, 10;
member of ‘Old Mortality’ Society, 10;
ideal of intellectual and moral sincerity, 10–11;
interest in philosophy, 11, 14;
Influence of Goethe, 11, 14;
first published writing, 12;
beginning of work, 13;
description of college rooms, 17–9;
simplicity of tastes, 18, 19, 117, 179;
habits, 19–20;
as a friend, 19–22, 26;
dislike of responsibility, 23;
deep sense of, 187;
as lecturer, 20, 84;
as Tutor and Dean, 20, 23, 25, 59, 84;
takes house in Norham Gardens, 21;
attitude towards young men, 24–6;
compared to Telemachus, 26;
self-revelation in writings, 27, 170;
essays published in _Fortnightly Review_, 32;
first book produced, 32;
criticism of Morris’s “Defence of Guenevere,” 33–5;
consistency and individuality, 36;
revolt against synthetic school of art-criticism, 37;
perception of music, 44;
definition of success, 47;
art-criticism, 48–9;
a great critic, 158;
writes for _Guardian_, 48;
criticism of da Vinci, 49;
of Botticelli, 50;
style parodied, 52–4;
misunderstanding with Jowett, 54–5;
his view of Jowett, 55–8;
reputation as a talker, 59, 188, 193;
lectures on _Greek Studies_, 67,
publication of, 67–78;
work becomes creative rather than critical, 78;
appearance of “The Child in the House,” 79;
absorbed in _Marius_, 82;
resigns tutorship, 83;
physical appearance, 85, 178, 180;
method of criticism, 87–8,
of working, 89, 123–4;
_Marius_ published, 89,
letters to Miss Paget concerning, 89;
removes to London, 117;
resides at Brasenose during term, 117;
appreciation of France, 117–18;
most fruitful years, 118;
contributes to current journals, 118–19;
essay on Sir T. Browne, 119–22;
at work on _Imaginary Portraits_, 122,
intends to bring out new volume of, 123;
fantastic writing, 126–8,
lack of restraint in style of “Denys l’Auxerrois,” 128;
melancholy introspectiveness, 138–9;
engaged on _Gaston de Latour_, 140;
composition of essay on “Style,” 147;
summary of artistic creed, 151;
ethical base of temperament, 153,
view of end of art, 153,
of value of the play, 154;
skill in dealing with Shakespeare’s works, 154–5;
at work on _Plato and Platonism_, 156,
places this work at the head of his own writings, 162,
aim in, 163;
lectures on Mérimée, 159;
writes introduction to _Dante_, 159;
not a philosopher, 163–5,
epigram on, 164;
development contrasted with Henry Sidgwick’s, 165;
last utterance, 169;
deep significance of essay on “Pascal,” 169–72,
admiration for, 173;
summary of _Pensées_, 173;
settles at St. Giles’, Oxford, 174;
later days, 174–5;
receives Hon. Degree of LL.D., Glasgow, 175;
visits Northern cathedrals, 175;
first serious illness, 175;
recovery, subsequent relapse, death, 176;
buried at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, 176;
portraits of, 178;
physical strength varies with inner mood, 179;
sensibility, 179;
dress, 179–80;
shyness, 180;
dislike to opposition, 181;
lack of appreciation at Oxford, 181–2,
personal characteristics at, 183–4;
attitude towards the world, 185;
uniform kindness, 186;
aloofness from current thought, 186;
political views, 187;
reason for residence at Oxford, 187;
sacrifice to art, 188;
quality of humour, 188–91;
attracted by cats, 190–1;
as an examiner, 191–2;
anecdotes about, 193–4;
irony, 195;
views on principles of art, 195–6;
admiration for _Amiel’s Journal_, 199;
habits of composition, 201–6;
significant writing, 204;
principal characteristics of style, 204, 215;
typical sentence, 204–5;
did not read Stevenson or Kipling, 205–6;
always regards nature as a background, 206–7;
sensitiveness to adverse criticism, 209;
no precocious desire to write, 209–10;
abstains from verse composition, 210;
late development of style, 210–1;
attitude towards art, 212;
position in later English literature, 212–15;
writing contrasted with Carlyle’s, 213;
as a writer akin to Charles Lamb, 213;
a dreamer, 217–20.
Pater’s friends, 20, 21.
Pater, William Thompson (brother), 2.
Pattison, Mark (Rector of Lincoln), 21, 37, 190, 192.
_Pensées_ (Pascal), 173.
“Philosophers, The Three” (“The Chaldean Sages”), (picture), 50.
Plato, 165, 167.
_Plato and Platonism_, 20, 54, 58,
Jowett’s admiration of, 58;
began to appear (1892), 156; 159;
eventually published (1893), 162; 163–8.
Poe, E. A., criticism of, 23.
_Purgatory_ (C. L. Shadwell’s trans. of), 159.
Q
Queen’s College (Oxford), description of, 8.
R
_Renaissance, Studies in the History of the_ (with “Preface” and
“Conclusion”), 1st ed. (1873), 2nd and 3rd (1877), 32–3; 35,
36—
“Conclusion,” 45,
reason for exclusion from 2nd ed. of _Studies_, etc., 46, 47–8;
principle of selection explained, 37;
Lady Dilke’s criticism of, 37–8; 49–51, 52, 59, 162.
“Aucassin and Nicolette” (“Two Early French Stories”) (1873), 32–3,
38.
“Joachim du Bellay,” 33, 44–5.
“_Leonardo da Vinci, Notes on_” (1869), 32, 41, 42–3, 49, 177.
“Luca della Robbia,” 33, 39.
“Michelangelo, Poetry of,” 32, 39–40.
“Pico della Mirandola” (1871), 32, 38–9.
“Sandro Botticelli, A Fragment on,” 32, 39.
“School of Giorgione, The” (1877), 43–4, 50–1, 66.
“Winckelmann” (1866), 27–31, 45.
_Robert Elsmere_ (Mrs. H. Ward), 57,
review on, 119, 198–9.
“Rossetti, Dante Gabriel” (Ward’s _English Poets_), essay on, 86–7.
Ruskin, John, 7, 51, 163, 185, 214–15.
S
“Shadows of Events” (_Gaston de Latour_), 140.
Shadwell, 2.
Shadwell, Dr. Charles Lancelot (Pater’s lifelong friend), 9, 10 _n._;
as literary executor, 21.
“Solomon, The Judgment of” (picture), 51.
Stevenson, R. L., 205–6.
“Stormy Landscape, The” (“Adrastus and Hypsipyle”) (picture), 50, 51.
“Style,” see _Appreciations_.
Swinburne, Mr. A., 21.
Symons, Mr. Arthur, 21, 123.
T
_Tailor, The_ (Moroni’s), 123.
Telemachus, 26.
U
_Uthwart, Emerald_, see _Miscellaneous Studies_.
V
Verrocchio, 49.
W
Ward, Mr. Humphry, 18,
anecdote touching Pater’s lectures, 20;
Fellow of Brasenose, 21;
description of Pater, 22;
as tutor, 25;
spends summer vacation with, 26;
on Pater as a Fellow, 84, 199.
Warren, Mr. T. H., 21, 159, 174–5.
Watteau, Anthony, 124–5;
Pater’s most ambitious creation, 125, 131.
_Westminster Review_, first published writings in, 12.
_Winckelmann, Life of_ (Otto Jahn), 14.
“Winckelmann,” Pater’s study on, see _Renaissance_.
“Wordsworth,” Study of, 60–2;
review of, 119.
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