OXFORD LIFE
The years that succeeded the first publication of the _Renaissance_
were not years of very strenuous literary work. Pater was at this
time holding the Tutorship of the College, as well as lecturing, and
the official business connected with the post was considerable. A
tutor is supposed to exert a general supervision over the work of
his pupils, to criticise their compositions and essays, and to keep
himself informed of their progress. It cannot be said that Pater’s
practical effectiveness was strong enough to equip him adequately for
the task. He received and criticised the essays; he responded with
cordial sympathy to any direct appeals for assistance; but a tutor,
to be effective, must have a power of shining, like the sun, upon the
eager and the reluctant, the grateful and the unthankful alike; some
pupils must be impulsively inspired; some delicately encouraged; some
ironically chastised; some few must, like the image of Democracy in
Tennyson’s poem, “toil onward, prick’d with goads and stings.”
Pater had little capacity for this kind of work—indeed, he did not
even conceive it to be his duty; but in any case the mere routine-work
was heavy. Moreover, he had to a certain extent come out of his shell,
enjoyed a good deal of quiet sociability, and gained a reputation as a
brilliant and paradoxical talker.
Meanwhile, as I have said, his literary output was small. His study of
“Wordsworth” (1874) is a very subtle piece of criticism. It is often
taken for granted that Wordsworth valued tranquillity above ardour,
and thus the essay is peculiarly felicitous in pointing out that not
mere contemplation, but _impassioned_ contemplation, was the underlying
purpose of the poet’s life. Pater shows that Wordsworth’s choice of
incidents and situations from common life was made “not for their
tameness, but for (their) passionate sincerity.” He indicates that the
reason why Wordsworth selected the homelier figures of the world for
his protagonists was that he might display “all the pathetic episodes
of their humble existence, their longing, their wonder at fortune,
their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of children, won so
hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their yearning towards each
other, in their darkened houses, or at their early toil.”
It is too customary with critics to draw a sharp line between
Wordsworth in his moments of inspired passion and Wordsworth in the
mood of solemn ineffectiveness; and thus those who write on Wordsworth
too often view his work with a certain impatience, as if by an effort
he could have criticised himself, and made a more emphatic selection of
his own writings. But Pater, though he echoes the wish that Wordsworth
could have been more severe in the matter of omission, shows the
essential unity of his work, arising from the deliberate passivity with
which he waited dutifully upon the gift of inspiration; and he compares
him beautifully to “one of those early Italian or Flemish painters,
who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed,
some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic
industry.”
In fact, Pater realised, perhaps unconsciously, that what Wordsworth
had written in the “Poet’s Epitaph” was as true of Wordsworth
himself;—“And you must love him, ere to you he will seem worthy of
your love”; and thus the spirit in which he deals with Wordsworth’s
work is one of a reverent tenderness, that cannot even bear to speak
with the least roughness or harshness of the writings of one so
sincere, so wise, so deep-hearted, even when engaged in the task of
producing arid and pompous couplets, or rubbing, as Matthew Arnold
says, like Indians in primeval forests, one dry stick upon another in
the hope of generating a flame.
Pater is particularly alive to Wordsworth’s deep sense of what may be
called the _admonitus locorum_, the local sanctities, the far-reaching
human associations with places, dealing with them largely, “till the
low walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full
of voices.”
Again, Pater skilfully divines Wordsworth’s peculiar power “of
realising, and conveying to the consciousness of the reader, abstract
and elementary impressions—silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness:
or, again, the whole complex sentiment of a particular place,
the abstract expression of desolation in the long white road, of
peacefulness in a particular folding of the hills.”
It is abundantly clear that, in the case of Wordsworth, Pater felt
himself drawing near to a highly congenial personality. He speaks in
another essay of the poet’s “flawless temperament, his fine mountain
atmosphere of mind.” The dignity, the seriousness, the quietness, the
impassioned quality of the poet’s life made a strong appeal to him,
and not less the high purpose to which he dedicated his whole life:
the rendering and interpreting of beautiful impressions, the desire
to impart to others what gave him joy and tranquillity; and thus the
whole essay is redolent of a sort of trustful affection, the mood in
which a man speaks simply and sincerely of a point of view which he
instinctively admires, a character that is very dear to his heart.
Pater goes, indeed, so far as to say in a later essay that a careful
reading of Wordsworth is probably the very best thing that can be
found to counteract the faults and offences of our busy and restless
generation, as helping to remind us, “amid the enormous expansion of
all that is material and mechanical in life, of the essential value,
the permanent ends, of life itself.”
The essay on “Charles Lamb” (1878) is another instance of Pater’s power
of selecting and emphasising the congenial elements of a character. It
is not the inconsequent, the reckless humour of Charles Lamb that Pater
values most, his power of pursuing a humorous image, of clinging to
it, as Lamb did among the rubs and adversities of the world, as a man
in a beating sea might cling to a spar for his life. Pater is rather
in love with the contrast of Lamb’s life, the tragic undercurrent of
fate, that ran like a dark stream below his lightness, his pathetic
merriment. He admires him as an artist first, because “in the making of
prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely
as Keats in the making of verse.” He values him for the “little arts
of happiness he is ready to teach to others,” for his deep and patient
friendships; he sees in him “a lover of household warmth everywhere,”
a collector of things which gain a colour for him “by the little
accidents which attest previous ownership.” He loves him because he
“has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of
very weak people, down to their little pathetic ‘gentilities,’ even;
while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost like
Shakespeare.” “Unoccupied,” he says, “as he might seem, with great
matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in
its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of
the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way
with a perfect understanding of it.” He realises, too, the fineness
and largeness of Lamb’s criticism; he says that when Lamb comments on
Shakespeare, he is like “a man who walks alone under a grand stormy
sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might
seem to be abroad upon the air”; and he does, too, full justice to
Lamb’s poetical appreciation of London. “Nowhere,” he says, in the
melodious concluding sentence, “is there so much difference (as in
London) between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together
more grandly ... the background of the great city, with its weighty
atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and
bleached stone steeples.”
Perhaps it may be thought that Pater’s judgment of Lamb is coloured by
too strong an infusion of his own personality, and that the Charles
Lamb of the essay is hardly recognisable, clothed, as he appears to
be, in his critic’s very wardrobe; that Pater puts aside certain broad
aspects of Lamb’s character as being less congenial to himself; but I
should rather myself feel that he has indeed passed behind the smiling
mask which Lamb often wore, or has, perhaps, persuaded him to doff it;
and that he has thus got nearer, in fact, to this melancholy loving
spirit, with its self-condemned indulgences, its vein of mockery, its
long spaces of dreariness, its acute sensibilities. Lamb, one feels,
was a pilgrim in hard places, and, like Bunyan’s pilgrims, caught
desperately at the fruits that hung over the wall to relieve his
sadness; and yet, in another mood, he was full of a tender quietism,
with a large and loving outlook upon humanity and life. Pater seems to
have come from reading Lamb like a friend who has been communing with
a friend. They have talked without affectation and without disguises;
and thus one feels that, though there has been, under the influence
of sympathy, a certain suppression or suspension of modes of speech,
of aspects of thought, that had a real bearing on Lamb’s character,
yet that Pater has seen the innermost heart of the man with the
insight that only affection can give, an insight which subtler and
harder critics seem to miss, even though the picture they may draw is
incontestably truer to detail.
Besides these two critical appreciations, Pater wrote at this time
a Shakespearian study, and the little essay on “Romanticism,” which
re-appeared in 1889 as the Postscript to _Appreciations_, which may be
shortly discussed here.
It has a high value. It is a careful attempt to find a definition for
the two terms _classical_ and _romantic_. Pater sees with perspicuous
clearness that one of the difficulties of finding a precise formula for
large terms, expressive of tendency, is the disentangling them from the
loose, conventional, and conversational sense that they come to bear.
Thus he says of the word _classical_, that “it has often been used in a
hard, and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and
accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never
have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or
old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories,
and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about
it—people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus
fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and
Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and
tame.”
He says that the charm of classical literature is the charm of the
“well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over and over
again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its
artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity.”
“It comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the
measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never
displease us.”
But the romantic spirit is that which craves for new motives, new
subjects of interest, new modifications of style: its essence is the
addition of strangeness to beauty; its danger is to value what is
after all inartistic—anything that is bizarre, strained, exaggerated.
Pater contrasts Pope and Balzac as instances of the defects of the two
styles,—Pope’s lack of curiosity producing insipidity, and Balzac’s
excess of curiosity not being duly tempered with the desire of beauty;
and with singular felicity he selects the _Philoctetes_ of Sophocles
as a typically romantic book, but yet with all the tranquillity of the
classical spirit.
Pater shows that romanticism generally arises, as in France with
Rousseau, after a long period of stagnation and ennui. But after all
the essence of the situation lies in the fact that, as Stendhal says,
all good art was romantic in its day; and thus the charm of romanticism
is the charm of the spring, of the unfolding of new forms, and
strangely shaped flowers, and scented fruits; the charm of classicism
is the charm that creeps over the same landscape with the mellow
richness of autumn; and Pater sums up the whole subject by saying
that “in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school
of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike,
against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity
which is dead to form.”
The conclusion, then, for Pater is that our work should unite the true
qualities of both romanticism and classicalism; that it should be
fresh, new, spontaneous, and unconventional; decorous, but not hampered
by decorum; gaining soberness and richness from recognised methods and
due authority; but in the truest sense a development, neither a new
departure nor a servile imitation. We are not to think slightingly of
the old forms, or to neglect the hallowed influences of association;
authority must control the manner, vitality suggest the matter. And
in all this Pater is true to his creed, clinging as he did to the old
forms of melodies and enriching them with new harmonies. He is content,
indeed, to look backwards with reverent eyes upon the past; but he is
all alive with the problems of the present, the hopes of the future.
And thus the essay comes to have a direct value, because in it he
summarises and reflects, stating the truth positively, and not by
allusion and in allegories. It is in a sense one of the manifestoes
scattered through his writings; and it testifies to his belief, which
one might forget in his dwelling upon the old and the established,
that he was in heart upon the side of the new, the inquisitive,
the expansive; that his work indeed is only critical in form, but
essentially creative in spirit.
He wrote too, at this time, the essay on the “School of Giorgione,”
which was added to the _Renaissance_ essays in the third edition, and
which has already been discussed. But his main concern was with the
_Greek Studies_. “Demeter and Persephone” was delivered in the form
of two lectures at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1875 and
appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1876. In the same year and in
the same magazine appeared the “Dionysus.” As then the most solid and
vigorous sections of the _Greek Studies_ were the work of these years,
it will be better to speak of the book here, rather than at the date of
its eventual publication (1895).
I do not mean here to dwell at any great length upon the volume,
beautiful as the _Studies_ are, because they are so strongly
intermingled with the antiquarian and the scholarly element that
they require a familiarity with classical learning, a special
sort of initiation, to comprehend them. They are fully but not
heavily freighted with erudition, and testify to a long and patient
accumulation of facts and traditions. When the accumulation was
complete—and it must have been a task of great labour—the details
had to be touched as lightly and placed as expressively as possible.
And they thus stand as an excellent work of art, and testify to the
shaping into finished and balanced studies of a mass of technical and
professional material.
To indicate them briefly in detail, the first is a study of “Dionysus,”
which touches with innumerable mystical and poetical suggestions the
bright, gay, ruthless figure of the god, alive from head to foot,
thrilling with the joy of life and beauty, and, with a divinely
unassailed temperance of his own; as he passes lightly in his robe
of skins, poising his wand with the bare brown arm, carrying in his
hand the strange secret of the vine, its heady visions, its power of
overwhelming by a sort of resistless, poisonous energy the mortal
spirit, heightening and gilding on the one hand its bright fancies and
sparkling dreams into a sort of mysterious rapture, an inner careless
glee; and on the other hand sinking melancholy thoughts into an
abandoned and exaggerated grief, and at last merging both joy and grief
together into a deep stupor of mind and body. We Northerners, with
the inherited taste for potent and ardent beverages, as resources to
fight against our cheerless skies, our damp mists, our aching frosts,
enlightened, too, by the later researches of natural philosophers,
who have explained the magic of intoxication as a sort of unseemly
poisoning of mind and body alike, are apt to view the effects of wine
as an essentially grotesque and commonplace thing; we forget what
a mystery this fierce excitement, this strange imported ecstasy of
soul, the cloudy following lethargy might mean, would mean to those to
whom the whole of life was a commerce with the divine, and who felt
themselves surrounded by secret and unseen influences. And then, too,
we must bear in mind that tendency of personification which lay so
close to the heart of these old nations. With us it is all the other
way; we tend to refer all things to a vast unity of law, to prodigious
impersonal forces, thereby drawing, no doubt, nearer to truth, but
further and further away from the romance that appeals to simple minds.
Thus to the Greeks the worship of the grape was a discerning of “the
spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines.” The
rites of Dionysus were holy things, “breaths of remote nature ... the
pines, the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the strange
echoings and dying of sound on the heights.” Dionysus, thus, was a
spirit of fire and dew; of fire first:—
“And who,” says Pater, “that has rested a hand on the glittering
silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes of
sweetness are lying, does not feel this? It is out of the bitter
salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with the most
curious virtues.... In thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born,
the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of
all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense
blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English
gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the
leafless twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or
Aaron’s rod that budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when
Tannhäuser’s repentance is accepted.”
And then, too, Dionysus is born of the dew—of the freshness, the
solace, of liquid in a hot land.
“Think of the darkness of the well in the breathless court, with
the delicate ring of ferns kept alive just within the opening; of
the sound of the fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into
the houses of Venice, on summer mornings.”
It is this combining of symbolism that Pater believes to be so
characteristic of the Greek sentiment: “the religious imagination of
the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing
together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human
body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers.”
And with it all, in the conception of this mystical impassioned Deity,
goes a deep sadness, the sadness of one who is old though everlastingly
young, who has seen a thousand fair things fade, year after year, the
flowers withering in the sheltered places, the trees losing their
rich summer foliage; he has seen generation after generation arise in
grace and beauty, thirsting for life, coming with new wonder to taste
the sweet mysteries; and they too have gone; he knows the secrets of
the grave; he knows that though new life arises, the old life, the
old passionate identities, are not restored. He himself defies death
and the violence of traitorous people, infuriated by the sorrows that
follow so hard in the path of joy; he is slain, but arises again with
strength renewed and sadness increased; thus the vision glows, and
fades, and glows again.
It is in vain to ask ourselves whether the whole of this body of
symbolism was ever present in any mind or group of minds. That is not
the concern of Pater; his thought is rather to trace the many clear
streams that have ever flowed within the single channel. He gathers
the waters in a heap, as the prophet of old said. And the value of
the essay is that it reveals something of the freshness and richness
of the Greek mind, the exquisite power of seeing the beauty of sweet
and simple things, of interweaving them into joyful fancies, embodying
them into strange high-hearted tales; this tendency is the exact
opposite of our own Celtic tendency, which loses itself in a vague and
wistful melancholy in the thought of desolate spirits full of sorrow,
that find their natural home in the soft weeping world, the moors in
which the rain drops pitifully, the lonely hills. With the Greeks the
sense of presences behind life, hovering near, revealing themselves in
half-glimpses, took shape in the bright sparkling pageant of life—life
that is determined in its brief space to press out the most poignant
qualities of sorrow and laughter, of love and song.
In the “Bacchanals of Euripides” the same point is touched on a
different side; here we see the intoxicating sense of life and
spring, the tingling impulse of the dance, coming out in the group
of worshippers, the women who surround the woman-like god, touching
thought exclusively through the senses. To these was given to feel “the
presence of night, the expectation of morning, the nearness of wild,
unsophisticated, natural things—the echoes, the coolness, the noise of
frightened creatures as they climbed through the darkness, the sunrise
seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion, the bitterness of satiety,
the deep slumber which comes with the morning.”
Pater traces the plot of the strange beauty-haunted play, with its
grotesque episodes, such as the indignity of the Bacchic passion
seizing upon the old fatuous men, horribly renewing their youth in a
kind of shameless parody of childish merriment, up to the appalling
tragedy of the end, the doom of scepticism that yet involves a house
and a nation in speechless grief and horror.
In the “Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” which Pater said had been
the most laborious and difficult piece of work he had ever done, he
traces the complex shadowy legend from its early origins. The Mother of
Nature, with her power over the kindly fruits of the earth, is first
depicted; and then in the midst of her passionless content, her easy
benevolence, her daughter is snatched away to be queen among the dead;
the mother, in a sad indifference of grief, sets out stony-hearted on
the quest, sometimes blasting, sometimes blessing the earth through
which she passes, losing, in the stress of that bitter sorrow, the
balance of mind, the responsibility, which her influence had brought
her. Pater shows that behind all the brightness, the hopefulness, the
impassioned geniality of the Greek creed, there lay a shadow:—
“The ‘worship of sorrow,’ as Goethe called it, is sometimes
supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of the
Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion of mere
cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity,
conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous
activity. It helped to hide out of their sight those traces of
decay and weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally
shy, to keep them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy
places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle
age; and it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people
who, in truth, were never ‘sick or sorry.’ But this familiar view
of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of
what is known concerning it, and really involves a misconception,
akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic
spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had
dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing
all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of
difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps
somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art
and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none
but negative qualities; and the legend of Demeter and Persephone,
perhaps the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to
show that the ‘worship of sorrow’ was not without its function in
Greek religion; their legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful,
wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic
monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic
spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting
by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of
tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight
painful and strange.”
But perhaps the most important dictum which Pater lays down in the
essay is this—that “in the application of these theories, the student
of Greek religion must never forget that, after all, it is with poetry,
not with systematic theological belief or dogma, that he has to do.”
In the second part of the essay he traces the myth through its
treatment by many hands, the hands of poets, the hands of sculptors,
each adding something of their own restless and eager personality to
these figures of the “goddesses of the earth, akin to the influence of
cool places, quiet houses, subdued light, tranquillising voices.”
It is here that he conceives the secret to lie—that in the perceptions
of these old imaginings we may not only draw nearer to the heart of the
ancient world, but that they may bring us too, by sweet association
and delicate shadowy imagery, some uplifting and enlarging of our own
sympathies and hopes.
The “Hippolytus Veiled” (1889) is a much later work, but it will be
as well to treat of it here, though it belongs less to the stricter
archaeological studies, and more to the series of _Imaginary
Portraits_. Pater takes the old sad legend of Hippolytus, the child
of Theseus and an Amazon, the type of a stainless and almost froward
chastity, which brings with it the penalty of the scorning of divine
influence, of natural law; and embroiders out of it an elaborate
and beautiful story, heaped with rich and fervid accessories. He
points out first the exquisite finish, the clear-cut detail, which
characterises even the smallest and daintiest of Greek legends;
“the impression of Greece generally,” he says, is “but enhanced by
the littleness of the physical scene of events intellectually so
great—such a system of grand lines, restrained within so narrow a
compass, as in one of its fine coins.” And thus he illustrates that
salient characteristic of Greek life—the absence of centralisation,
the intensity with which so vivid a life burnt sharply at so many
provincial centres simultaneously. Then comes the story, the noble
child so carefully nurtured by the desolate sorrowing mother, acquiring
in and through her woe all the arts of simple seemly living, in order
that she may delicately nurture the child of her fall. Pater brings
the lonely cave-life before one—the wax-tapers, the hunger of the
boy so daintily satisfied, his eager prattling alertness, the joyful
days, overshadowed only by the thought that they were surely passing.
Then the boy passes on to the greater world, becomes renowned in all
manly exercises, but keeps his purity unsullied, even in the perfumed
chambers of the palace, face to face with the feverish desire of the
shameless Phaedra. “He had a marvellous air of discretion about him, as
of one never to be caught unaware, as if he never could be anything but
like water from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morning, or the
beams of the morning star turned to human flesh.” Repulsed and mad with
jealous shame, Phaedra whispers the traitorous tale to Theseus, who
utters a curse upon the boy, so that he falls into a wasting sickness.
Even so the gods are merciful; he struggles back to life, to lose
it again before the wrath of Poseidon, or even perhaps of Aphrodite
herself, as he drives his chariot along the shore. The earth rocks, a
great wave whitens on the beach; the horses plunge and start, and he is
buffeted to death among the sea-boulders and the crawling brine.
The tale has a curious magic about it; but though Greek in outline,
it is hardly Greek in quality, suffused as it is with a strange and
wistful romance that is born of a later and more self-conscious age.
In the essays on the “Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” he touches on the
possibilities of external influences, the hints from the East, from
Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Cyprus, as forming possibly
the seed of Greek art. But he points out truly that this art is all
“emphatically _autochthonous_, as the Greeks said, new-born at home,
by right of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over those mere
elements, and touching them, above all, with a wonderful sense of the
nature and destiny of man—the dignity of his soul and of his body—so
that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers.”
And he points out, too, that we are apt to import too purely an
intellectual element into our conceptions of Greek art, because we have
to deal with it principally in the form of sculpture, the only product
that remains to us in large measure, while their pictures, their metal
work, their carvings, their embroideries, have suffered a natural
decay. Pater deals first with the descriptions of ancient shields, and
with the excavated treasures of Mycenae, and points out that this metal
work, with its special _cachet_, “the seal of nearness to the workman’s
hand,” and the Greek tendency to overlay stone as far as possible with
metal, show that Greek art probably first displayed itself in this
form, and was in reality the expression of an age of gold rather than
of stone.
In the second essay he traces the growth of true sculpture, the gradual
preference of marble as a medium for art, until the first school of
sculptors appears at Sicyon, the chief seat in earliest days of Greek
art. Here he depends mostly upon the authority of Pausanias; “our own
fancy,” he says, “must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience
of the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty
notices—the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending
at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records,
somewhat uncertainly.”
He shows that in the detachment of images from the walls and pillars
behind them, Greek art was already liberated from its earlier Eastern
associations, which worked only in reliefs and friezes; and then came
the perception that sculpture was not to be a thing of mechanical and
mathematical proportions, but the representation of a living organism
with freedom of movement, full of the human soul, instead of a mere
stiff attitude and a frozen gesture.
And then religion comes in to swell the richness of art, and the vague
customs and traditions of the older days transform themselves into the
breathing images of personal gods enshrined and enthroned.
The essay ends with an attempt to indicate the characteristics of the
great school of Sicyon as represented by Canachus—a sculptor, it would
seem, of deep religious feeling, and distinguished by that early stiff
_naïveté_ of work which indicates “a gravity, a discretion and reserve,
the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the
wealth and fulness of final mastery.”
In “The Marbles of Aegina” Pater discusses the quality of the beautiful
group of sculpture discovered in 1811 in a ruined temple of Athene in
a remote part of Aegina, and purchased for the Munich Gallery by King
Louis I. of Bavaria. The interest of this group is that it seems the
consummate flower of Dorian as opposed to Ionian art, dating probably
from about the time of Marathon.
Pater skilfully contrasts the Ionian tendency of thought—the
brilliant, diffused, undirected play of imagination, its restless
versatility, its extreme individualism—with the Dorian influence of
severe systematisation, the subordination of the individual to the
state; the group has the characteristics of the purest Greek chivalry;
he shows the “dry earnestness” of the craftsman, “with a sort of hard
strength in detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that
of an early Flemish painter,” and withal “his still youthful sense of
pleasure in the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his
art overcome.”
“In this monument, ...” he says, “pensive and visionary as it may
seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer
or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of
things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is
as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.”
In the last of the _Studies_, “The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” composed
twenty years later than the earliest essays, Pater traces the effect
of the athletic system of Greece upon their sculpture. The pride of
health, of perfect agility, of graceful movement, all concentrated upon
the end in view, the perfect balance of mind and body alike—these were
the ends which that system had in view—how different from our own
gloomy and commercial athletics!
The pride of the sculptor was to combine the mystery of motion and
of rest, to seize a moment of intense energy—“the twinkling heel
and ivory shoulder” of the runner, “the tense nerve and full-flushed
vein,” and to set it for ever in the imperishable stillness of art. And
further, behind the suppleness, the delicate muscularity, the unspoiled
freshness, of youth, to imprint if possible the mark of true humanity
upon those figures, the kind and simple heart, the modest smile, the
stainless purity of soul. And again, in those funeral monuments of
young creatures snatched away before their time, to comfort the mourner
by some hint of the dignity, the tranquillising secret of death.
Pater takes the work of Myron and of Polycleitus as the perfect
expression of humanity—“humanity, with a glowing, yet restrained joy
and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it _is_ pure.”
“To have achieved just that,” he writes, “was the Greek’s truest
claim for furtherance in the main line of human development. He
had been faithful, we cannot help saying ... in the culture, the
administration, of the visible world; and he merited, so we might
go on to say—he merited Revelation, something which should solace
his heart in the inevitable fading of that.”
It is here, perhaps, that the deepest value of these _Studies_ lies.
Pater penetrates by patient skill, by ardent sympathy, the glowing,
simple, straightforward life of the old world, with its light-hearted
mirth, its swift acquiescence in things as they are.
But he realises throughout that it is over and gone; that we cannot
win it back; but that it may cheer and enlarge our view of life, our
admiration for those sunny spaces of history, if we can but apprehend
it; and that we may win from it some tranquillity, some brightness
of spirit, which may fall on our heavier hearts, our bewildered
sophisticated minds, like fresh winds blowing over the hills from the
gates of the morning. That it cannot wholly satisfy us he has no doubt;
but that it may enliven and widen our minds he is not less assured.
Up to this date Pater’s work had been critical; it has been pointed
out that it was never purely critical, but a species of poetical and
interpretative criticism, of a creative order, working upon slender
hints and employing artistic productions as texts and _motifs_ for
imaginative creation.
But he now began to feel the impulse to produce original creative work,
and to use his own impressions, his experiences, his speculations as
material for imaginative treatment.
His only critical work for the next three years consisted of the
Essay on “Charles Lamb” which we have already considered, a slight
Shakespearian essay on “Love’s Labours Lost,” and three of the _Greek
Studies_. But the year 1878 is memorable for the first appearance
of one of his most beautiful works, the one, in fact, which can
be recommended to any one unacquainted with Pater’s writings, as
exhibiting most fully his characteristic charm.
_The Child in the House_ is the sweetest and tenderest of all Pater’s
fancies, the work, we may say, where his art approached most nearly
to a kind of music. We have before indicated the autobiographical
vein of the piece, but it remains to say something of the art of the
essay, which is conceived in a certain golden mood of retrospect, and
makes an appeal to all who, however rarely, indulge a train of gentle
recollection. Such a mood is wrought in us by a sort of sudden charm;
the sight of old places where we have lived untroubled days brings it
back with a wistful swiftness, so that we feel a yearning desire, it
may be, for our own unstained past; we contrast what we are and what
we have become, with what we were and with what we might have been.
This mood, a sort of “death in life” as Tennyson says, may surprise
natures overlaid with conventionalism and even coarseness. It is one
of the commonest and most forcible, because truest, effects of pathos,
in books that aim at dramatic effect, when the crust of later careless
habit suddenly breaks, and the old clear stream of life seems to be
running there below all the while.
Such an experience may hold within it, even for the most worldly and
hardened minds, a hope of immortality, a hope of redemption. That
strange and yearning hunger of the heart for a purity, a simplicity,
which it once had, before the bitter root of evil sent up its poisonous
flowers into the soul, is one of the most primal emotions of nature. It
is in such a mood that a man is apt to feel most self-forgiving, most
self-pitying, because he feels that it is circumstance and seduction
of sense that have marred a nature that in itself desired purity and
simplicity. It is not perhaps the highest of emotions, because it is
a mood in which life would seem to hold no lessons but the lesson of
inevitable decline, ungenerous deterioration; but there is no denying
its strength, its sad charm.
In _The Child in the House_ we see a boy deeply sensitive to beautiful
impressions, to all the quiet joys, the little details of home: its
carved balusters and shadowy angles, its scents and sounds, its effects
of light and shade, and further abroad, the trees of the garden, the
hawthorn bush, with its “bleached and twisted trunk and branches” ...
with the fresh bloom—“a plumage of tender crimson fire out of the
heart of the dry wood”—the shops of the city hard by, the belfry with
its giddy winding stair,—“half, tint and trace and accident of homely
colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff,
floated thither from who knows how far.”
And then, too, we see the child’s love for the outward forms of
religion; “the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white
linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic
purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to
have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious
books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel
grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells
and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron’s vestment, sounding
sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place.”
Over this quiet and untroubled mood the shadow creeps. The boy begins
to feel the touch of sorrow, of loss, of bereavement—the shadow of
death. A cry heard on the stairs tells how the news of a death comes
home to an aged heart; the little household pet, the Angora cat,
sickens and dies, the tiny soul flickering away from the body; the
young starling is caught and caged, but the boy cannot resist the
cries of the mother-bird, the “sharp bound of the prisoner up to her
nestlings,” and lets the sorrowing creature go.
One realises with a painful intensity with what a shock of bewildered
emotion Pater must have realised as a child the first lessons of
mortality, “the contact,” as he wrote long afterwards, “of childhood
with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can
enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple,
pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.”
Yet in this region there falls a certain vein of what may be called
_macabre_, which might be thought morbid were it not obviously so
natural—a dwelling on the accidents of mortality, the gradations of
decay.
“He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as
spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and
his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the
lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s voices; and then
what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the
child’s flesh to violets in the turf above him.”
There is very little of human emotion in the vision; little dwelling
upon companionship and near affections and relationships; and this is
true to nature. The child whose nature is thus sensuously perceptive
is often so much taken up by mere impression, by the varied, the
enchanting outsides of things, the curious forms, the play of colour,
the ray of sunlight like gold-dust, the light cast up from the snow
upon the ceilings of rooms, that there is little leisure, little
energy, to give to the simple affections of life. In this the picture
is perfectly faithful; the writer, by a sincerity of retrospect, has
avoided the temptation to read into the childish spirit the emotions of
the expanding heart; it is all seen in the region of Maiden-sense, in
the desirable clear light of the early morning, before the passionate
impulses awake, before the intellect expands. Thus the pure art of the
conception lies in the picturing the perfect isolation of the childish
soul,—not a normal soul, it must be remembered,—though perhaps the
haunted emphasis of the style, its luxurious cadence, its mellowing of
outline, may tend to disguise from us how real and lifelike indeed, how
usual an experience, is being recorded.
And for the style itself, it is a perfect example of a kind of poetical
prose; there is no involution, no intricacy. The language is perfectly
simple; and though some may feel a lusciousness, an over-ripeness of
phrase, to predominate, yet the effect is perfectly deliberate, and it
is by the intention that we must judge it. It may be set in a paradise
of floating melodies in which the brisk, the joyful, the energetic may
be loath to linger; yet for all who love the half-lit regions of the
spirit, the meditative charm of things, _The Child in the House_ must
remain one of the purest pieces of word-melody in the language, and one
of the most delicate characterisations of a mood that comes to many and
always with a secret and wistful charm.
Before we speak of _Marius the Epicurean_, which began to absorb
Pater’s energies from 1878 onwards, it will be as well to trace the
slender thread of events. How uneventful his academical progress was
may be augured from the fact that the year 1880 was in some ways almost
the most momentous year of his life, because it was in the course
of it that Pater determined to resign the tutorship of the college.
This step meant a serious loss of income; but he was now embarked
upon the task of constructing _Marius_, and could no longer disguise
from himself the fact that writing was indubitably the most serious
preoccupation of his life. He saw that it was becoming impossible for
him to discharge the duties of the post adequately, and at the same
time carry on his literary work effectively. The governing body of the
college fully concurred in his decision; and though the incident at
first caused Pater some pain, realising, as he did, that the feeling
of the society did not endorse his own theory of the functions of the
tutorial office, yet he soon grew to perceive that his resignation
had been a blessing in disguise: it freed him from work which was not
particularly congenial, work which needed qualities, such as a brisk
directness of address, a good-humoured strictness, a businesslike
determination, which Pater had never even professed to possess. He
continued to lecture; but he was set free from the constant petty
inroads on his time, to which a college tutor is always liable, and
from perpetual small engagements and interruptions. It is a matter of
regret that Pater did not realise this earlier. He would both have
saved himself some chagrin, and he would have been able to give some of
his best and most vigorous years to what was after all the real work
of his life. There are, and always will be, abundance of effective
college tutors who could not write _Marius the Epicurean_; and, on the
other hand, it is not an agreeable or dignified thing for a great man
of letters, and a man, too, of a peculiarly sensitive temperament, to
discover that he has been holding a post which has not been regarded
as by any means appropriate to his disposition, and that his discharge
of its duties, though at the cost of much patient effort and constant
strain to himself, has not wholly satisfied his colleagues.
On the other hand, lecturing was always a congenial task to Pater. He
spent much time and thought upon his lectures, and prepared them with
such thoroughness and care, that he tended to over-elaborate them, thus
impairing their value as orally delivered discourses, intended for
immediate comprehension.
Mr. Humphry Ward writes:—
“I became a Fellow of Brasenose early in 1869, and for the next
three years saw Pater almost daily. The common stories of him, at
Tutors’ meetings, scholarship elections, etc., are not far from
the truth. He saw that other people were better fitted than he to
arrange details; but he did the work assigned to him very well, and
with much labour. The only time I remember seeing him really angry
was one night in Common Room when X., an elderly man and a former
tutor, not overburdened with ideals, made some cutting remark about
the short hours and light work of modern lecturers. Pater, who had
by that time had some five years’ experience, and whose lectures
(over the heads of most men) were crammed with thought and work,
‘let himself go’ in a series of the most bitter repartees about the
perfunctory stuff of the older time, the shams, conventions, and
orthodox impostures of X. and his contemporaries. Relations between
them were afterwards strained.”
In one college office, however, which Pater held until his death, he
took great delight. The post of Dean is an almost honorary one, and the
only official duty attached to it is that of presenting men for their
degrees; but it gives the holder a dignified stall, that on the extreme
right, on the _decani_ side, next to the altar, a stall dignified by a
special canopy and an exalted desk. Pater never failed to occupy his
stall both on Sunday morning and evening; and he was a strong advocate
for the Sunday services being compulsory. He said with truth that there
were many men who would be glad to have the habit of attending, but
who would fail to attend, especially on Sunday mornings, partly from
the attraction of breakfast parties, or possibly from pure indolence,
unless there was a rule of attendance. As a matter of fact attendance
was made a matter of individual taste, but Pater continued to deplore
it.
The service at Brasenose retains several peculiar little ceremonies;
the candles are lit at celebrations. The Junior Fellows bring in the
elements with solemnity from the anti-chapel. When the procession
leaves the altar, the dignitaries who carry the alms and the vessels
bow at the lectern to the altar, and to the Principal as they pass his
stall. The Vice-Principal bows to the altar on leaving his stall, and
to the Principal as he passes out. These little observances, dating
from Laudian, or even pre-Reformation times, were very congenial to
Pater; and it was always observed that though kneeling was painful to
him, he always remained on his knees, in an attitude of deep reverence,
during the whole administration of the Sacrament. Indeed his reverent
and absorbed appearance in chapel will be long remembered by those
to whom he was a familiar figure. His large pale face, his heavy
moustache and firm chin, his stoop, his eyes cast down on his book
in a veritable _custodia oculorum_—all this was deeply impressive,
and truly reflected the solemn preoccupation which he felt. It is
characteristic of him that he used to regret that the ardour with which
the undergraduates sang the Psalms abated in the _Magnificat_, which to
him was the Song of Songs.
One of the very few pieces of writing composed during the years devoted
to _Marius_ was the little Essay on “Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” This was
written in 1883, not long after the poet’s death, and is perhaps tinged
with a memorial respect. Yet it is a subtle piece of praise, in which
at the same time Pater seems delicately to weigh and test the author he
is discussing; but one cannot help feeling that the innermost world of
mystical passion in which Rossetti lived was as a locked and darkened
chamber to Pater. He can look into it, he can admire the accessories
of the scene, he can analyse, he can even sympathise to a degree; but
it was after all to Pater an unnatural region; the heated atmosphere
of passion, the supreme significance of love, being foreign and
almost antipathetic to Pater’s serious and sober view of intellectual
tranquillity. To be intellectually and perceptively impassioned indeed
he desired; but the physical ardours of love, the longing for enamoured
possession—with this Pater had nothing in common.
He divined the truth indeed by a sort of analogy of sympathy.
“To Rossetti,” he wrote, “life is a crisis at every moment. A
sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions of man’s
everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a
singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite
to him.”
And again:—
“For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,
swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,
mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great
undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a
world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those
affections—of the great love so determined; its casuistries,
its languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or
unfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it
looks, as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow
of them: all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a
deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse.”
This is ingenious enough, though it is hard to see exactly what Pater
meant by the “casuistry,” the “philosophical” vein of Rossetti.
Rossetti rather seems to feel, to state the problem, with the solution
of which philosophical minds might concern themselves. Thus he
affords plentiful matter for philosophical speculation, but without
philosophical intention; and indeed the deep-seated impatience of
Rossetti’s nature had very little that was akin to the philosophical
spirit. He felt the mystery, which is the basis of all philosophy,
deeply; but it was to him a baffling, a despairing mystery; not an
attractive mystery, supremely worth disentangling.
And thus it is that Pater chooses as the typical instance of Rossetti’s
work the single composition which he says he would select if he had to
name one to a reader desiring to make acquaintance with him for the
first time—_The King’s Tragedy_, a ballad which is hardly typical of
Rossetti at all, a piece of somewhat languid unemotional workmanship;
with an excellence of its own indeed, but not even touched with the
inner spirit of Rossetti’s work. The reason of this is that Pater,
admiring with a deep respect and regard the attitude of Rossetti to
art, but yet not entering into his inner mood, found the restraint,
the directness, the absence of exotic suggestiveness displayed in this
poem more congenial to him; and thus the essay remains rather a _tour
de force_ than a sympathetic appreciation; he was surveying Rossetti
from the outside, not, as in the writers whom he himself selected to
deal with, from the inside. Pater in his critical work bears always,
like the angel of the Revelation, a golden reed to measure the city;
but in this particular essay it is a piece of measuring and no more;
and nothing could more clearly show the impersonal, the intellectual
trend of Pater’s temperament than his comparative failure to accompany
Rossetti into the penetralia of his beauty-haunted and beauty-tortured
spirit.