_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.”