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.