LONDON LIFE
In 1885, the year of the publication of _Marius_, Pater made a change
in his environment; he took a house in London, No. 12, Earl’s Terrace,
Kensington, near Holland House, which he held for eight years. This
change of residence was dictated both by a desire for change, and
by the feeling that the wider circle and more varied influences of
London would lend him a larger and more vivid stimulus. He still
resided during the term at Brasenose, and lived in London mostly in
the vacations. Those who visited him in London were struck by the
extreme quiet and simplicity of the household arrangements. Pater went
a good deal into society, and enjoyed it greatly; but otherwise he
just pursued his ordinary routine of writing and working as he might
have done at Oxford. The London period was one of great interest and
enjoyment; he found a warm welcome awaiting him in literary, artistic,
and social circles; he made many new friends, and expanded in many
directions.
In London, as at Oxford, there was never the least personal luxury
in Pater’s _ménage_, though there was quiet and solid comfort. His
official income and the receipts from his books were practically all
that he had to depend upon. He was fond of travelling, to the very end
of his life, both in France and Italy. He generally went abroad for
five or six weeks, and always with his sisters. He liked the movement,
the gaiety, the greater _épanouissement_ of France. He threw himself
with a deep appreciation into all that he saw, and entered, as may be
seen from his writings, with a sympathetic intensity into the spirit
of the buildings, the sculpture, the pictures, the landscapes that he
saw. He used also to tire himself, on these occasions, with excess of
walking, his only form of exercise. But still, his enjoyment of travel
maybe best tested by the fact that his favourite tonic for the slight
weariness, resulting perhaps from the emotional reaction, which he
experienced for a day or two after his return from a tour, was to plan
a scheme of travel for the following year.
The years that followed were the most fruitful years of Pater’s life.
The reception of _Marius_ had been both respectful and enthusiastic; it
had lifted its author into a position in the very front rank of English
prose-writers. And then, too, the strain of the continuous work was
lifted off his shoulders, and he was able with renewed zest to take up
some of the many subjects which in the course of those laborious years
had appealed to him as congenial. He had faithfully and religiously
eschewed the temptation to pursue them, subordinating all vagrant
fancies to his central theme; he could now expatiate freely; moreover
he had found, in the course of his work, if not fluency, at all events
a pleasurable flow of appropriate if characteristic language. He began
to contribute reviews to the _Guardian_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Pall
Mall Gazette_. Some twenty of these reviews have been identified,
and nine reviews which appeared in the _Guardian_ have been since
reprinted, privately in 1896, and latterly published 1901.
These reviews are not of very great intrinsic value; but evidently
considerable time has been spent upon them; the book with which they
deal has been carefully read, and a delicate appreciation composed.
What strikes one most in reading them is, in the first place, a marked
tenderness for the feelings of the author whom he is reviewing,
and a great and princely generosity of praise. There seems to be
no severity about Pater; and he enters into the intentions of the
writer with a great catholicity of sympathy. There is also visible a
certain irresponsible enjoyment about the tone of the reviews, as if
with anonymity he had put on a certain gaiety to which in his public
appearances he felt bound to be a stranger.
Of course no great originality is to be expected in these compositions.
Thus reviewing three editions of Wordsworth in the _Guardian_ of
February 27, 1889, he does not hesitate to use many of his own
deliberate dicta from the “Wordsworth” essay which had appeared in
the _Fortnightly_ in 1874, and was to be reprinted in the same year
in which he wrote the review in question (1889), in _Appreciations_.
Perhaps the review of _Robert Elsmere_ (_Guardian_, March 28, 1888)
reveals most plainly the almost childlike delight which Pater could
take in the _motif_ and characters of a story which one would have
thought would not have been by any means congenial to him.
Pater’s chief critical work in 1886 was the essay on Sir Thomas
Browne, to be published afterwards in the _Appreciations_ of 1889.
In this study the same principle of autobiographical selection comes
out which we see so constantly at work in Pater’s mind. The charm for
him in Browne is that whimsical mixture of scientific and poetical
elements, the ceremonious piety, the strong sensitiveness to the human
association of things, the thirst to record and express a point of
view. Again, what gives Pater a strong interest in Browne’s writings
is the fact that he exhibits at a remote point the evolution of native
English prose, that evolution which was distracted, we would believe,
by the wave of classicalism, the effect of the tide of the Renaissance,
which beat, belated and enfeebled, on our solitary shores. The invasion
of English prose by the wrong kind of classicalism, the sonorous
elaboration of Latinity instead of the lucid charm of native English,
deferred, no doubt, the development of natural English prose, though it
perhaps eventually ministered to its richness. Browne, like Montaigne
in France, is the type of the essayist, the writer whose object is not
the precise statement of a case, but the saturation of a subject in
his own personality. Such writing is often lacking in structure and
conception, but it has an indefinable charm. “It has,” writes Pater of
Browne’s style, “its garrulity, its various levels of painstaking, its
mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together with much, to
us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy summer afternoon
down at Norwich.” It is just that which is the charm; that it brings
before us the same elements that delight us in our own life, the
summer, the freshness of the open air, the pleasant house with its
gardens and studious chambers, together with a venerable setting which
does but heighten the sense that though philosophical, political, and
religious theories may have shifted and developed, the greater part
of men’s lives and joys are made up out of far simpler and commoner
elements, which hardly indeed change from century to century.
And then, too, there comes in the art of the psychologist, “to whom
all the world is but a spectacle in which nothing is really alien from
himself, who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great
and little among things that are at all, and whose half-pitying,
half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small
interests and traits of character in the things or the people around
him.”
The other points in which the character of Browne appealed strongly to
Pater are his emotional interest in ecclesiastical ceremony, which made
him rejoice in the return of the comely Anglican order to the Norwich
churches at the time of the Restoration, which caused him to weep
abundantly at the sight of solemn processions; and there is also the
vein of curious speculation about death, his anatomical and antiquarian
researches alike testifying to his preoccupation with the thought of
the mystery of decay and extinction of vital power; till his life
becomes, as Pater says humorously, “too like a lifelong following of
one’s own funeral.”
Pater brings out very clearly the fact that the _Religio Medici_ is
perhaps a misleading title. One would expect a treatise dealing with
scientific analysis, tending naturally to materialism and scepticism,
but struggling through and retaining a hold on religion, all the
stronger for the speculative temptations that would seem to block the
way. But Browne, says Pater, “in spite of his profession of boisterous
doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing
of the character of a concession.” He is a convinced Theist, and
a confirmed pietist. “The _Religio Medici_ is a contribution, not
to faith, but to piety; a refinement and correction, such as piety
often stands in need of; a help, not so much to religious belief in a
world of doubt, as to the maintenance of the religious mood amid the
interests of a secular calling.” He goes further, indeed, and shows
that it is only Browne’s method, not his mind, that is scientific.
“What he is busy in the record of, are matters more or less of the
nature of caprices; as if things, after all, were significant of their
higher verity only at random, and in a sort of surprises, like music
in old instruments suddenly touched into sound by a wandering finger,
among the lumber of people’s houses.”
And thus, though Browne is in a sense an investigator, he misses the
conclusion to which his investigations are tending; because he does not
really seek to arrive at a conclusion, but only to harmonise facts, as
he investigates them, with a conclusion which he has inherited rather
than drawn.
Of the essay on “Feuillet’s _La Morte_,” the work of the same year,
it is unnecessary to speak. It is a mere review, full of copious
quotation, with a slender trickle of exposition; Pater neither
philosophises nor evolves principles; he merely analyses the story;
indeed, it is rather a problem why he eventually included this study
in the _Appreciations_ at all; it is significant only of a certain
catholicity of taste, and bears but few traces of his own temperament.
But Pater was now hard at work on an interesting series of experiments
of a kind that he may be held to have originated. These are the
_Imaginary Portraits_, of which the first, “A Prince of Court
Painters,” was written in 1885, as soon as _Marius_ was off his
hands; two others followed in 1886—“Sebastian van Storck” and “Denys
l’Auxerrois”—and a fourth in 1887, “Duke Carl of Rosenmold.” But
beside these four, which compose the volume known as _Imaginary
Portraits_, there were several others which may be referred to the same
class. “The Child in the House,” which has been already treated of, is
one. “Hippolytus Veiled,” the work of 1889, is another, which has been
dealt with among the _Greek Studies_, with which he included it. He
told Mr. Arthur Symons at the end of his life that he intended to bring
out a new volume of _Imaginary Portraits_. “Apollo in Picardy,” the
work of 1893, was to have been included, as well as “Emerald Uthwart”
(1892), of which we have spoken. He added that he meant to write one on
the picture by Moroni known as _The Tailor_, which he thought a very
fine and dignified figure. He would make him, he said, a Burgomaster.
Mr. Ainslie says that he had in his mind Count Raymond of Toulouse as
another possible subject.
Pater’s method was to take some romantic figure which attracted his
attention, to form a conception of the temperament of the man, and
study his environment as far as possible. He then would amplify the
details, working in historical hints; or else, as in the case of “Denys
l’Auxerrois,” it would be a pure fantasy, suggested by some trace of a
peculiar mind revealed in the architecture or sculpture of a particular
building.
This was perhaps the most congenial field for a temperament like
Pater’s, that was imaginative rather than creative, that needed a
definite _motif_ to set his imagination at work.
Thus in the _Imaginary Portraits_ Pater gave himself up to the
luxurious pleasure of evolving fantasies arising from some biographical
hint, some piece of unnamed art; some type of character that he
conceived. They are true creations, worked out in a sober pictorial
manner. But they make it abundantly clear that he had not the dramatic
gift; there is no attempt at devising the play of situations, no
contrast of character. The backgrounds, both of people and of
landscape, are finely indicated; but the interest in each concentrates
upon a single figure, and they are told in a species of dreamy
recitative.
“A Prince of Court Painters” is the story of Antony Watteau told in the
home-keeping journal of a girl of his own age, daughter of a craftsman
of Valenciennes, who perhaps loves him, though with the reticence so
characteristic of the author this only emerges in a shadowy hint here
and there. The journal is extraordinarily graceful, and exhibits, to
give it verisimilitude, many French turns of expression and phrase, as
though it had been originally conceived in French; but the whole lacks
vital truth; there is too much philosophy of a hinted kind, too much
criticism; the omission, for instance, of a dozen deliberate phrases
indicating the supposed sex of the writer, might convert the whole into
the work of a pensive man. There is little sentiment or emotion, though
it is faintly illuminated as by a setting sun with a tender aloofness,
a spectacular dreamfulness—a beautiful quality and finely conceived,
but yet with little hold on nature.
There is a characteristic thread of personal interest interwoven with
the story. The girl who writes the journal is the sister of Jean
Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau; and the artistic progress of
her brother, his enthusiastic admiration for his master, his patient
development, which is sharply contrasted with the fitful and restless
energy of Watteau, plays a real though a secondary part in the study.
It is also highly characteristic of Pater’s reticent delicacy that,
though he liked to fancy the painter a collateral member of his own
family, the actual name of Pater is never introduced into the piece,
the brother figuring throughout simply as Jean Baptiste.
But there is an abundance of fine criticism both of life and art in the
whole picture. Could the charm of Watteau be more delicately captured
than in the following passage?—
“And at last one has actual sight of his work—what it is. He
has brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish
here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That
charming _Noblesse_—can it be really so distinguished to the
minutest point, so naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade,
playing the drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons
have upon them, not less than the landscape he composes, and
among the accidents of which they group themselves with such a
perfect fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain
upon anything real. For their framework they have around them
a veritable architecture—a tree-architecture—to which those
moss-grown balusters, _termes_, statues, fountains, are really
but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons,
I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, ‘The evening
will be a wet one.’ The storm is always brooding through the massy
splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns,
where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular
trees themselves will hardly outlast another generation.”
Throughout the whole of the study, as one might expect, the personality
of Pater emerges in little dicta and comments. “Alas!” writes the
girl, “How little peace have his great successes given him; how little
of that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true
dignity of character.”
The interest, then, of this little study lies not so much in itself,
as in the fact that it is from the creative point of view the most
ambitious, the most deliberately dramatic, of Pater’s writings. He
attempted to throw himself into a French mood, and in this he has
partially succeeded; and into the mood of a quiet girl of the bourgeois
class; and here he must be held to have failed. Perhaps it revealed to
him his own limitations, his own strength. For he wisely wrote no more
in this manner.
In “Denys l’Auxerrois” we have one of the most fantastic of all Pater’s
writings; indeed, in this strange combination of the horrible and the
beautiful, there is something almost unbalanced, something that reminds
one of the rich madness of Blake; as if the mind, though kept in
artistic check, had flung itself riotously over the line that divides
imagination from insanity; the fancy seems to struggle and trample with
a strange self-born fury, as though it had taken the bit in its teeth,
and was with difficulty overmastered. The essay begins soberly enough
with a vein of quiet reminiscence of travel; the writer is supposed
to see some tapestries at a priest’s house representing a series of
strange experiences; and it is upon this that the story is based. Denys
of Auxerre, a love-child, comes among the craftsmen of the place, like
a pagan god incarnate, and fills them, like Dionysus, with a species
of Bacchic fury. This idea, the reappearance of pagan deities, had a
strong fascination for Pater’s mind.
The curious and contradictory traits of the character of the boy,
gentleness side by side with cruelty, wild courage shadowed by
unreasonable terrors, his unaccountable appearances and disappearances,
his mysterious gifts of presage and inspiration, are all subtly
indicated.
“Long before it came he could detect the scent of rain from afar,
and would climb with delight to the great scaffolding on the
unfinished tower to watch its coming over the thirsty vine-land,
till it rattled on the great tiled roof of the church below; and
then, throwing off his mantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely,
clinging firmly against the tempestuous wind among the carved
imageries of dark stone.”
A climax of horror is reached when a search is made for the buried
body of a patron saint of the church, till, in the uncertain light of
morning, the coffin is found and opened, and the bishop with his gloved
hands draws out the shrouded shrunken form. At this Denys has an access
of terror, and rolls in a fit upon the grass. But he recovers himself,
and though by this time suspected of sorcery, he gives much anxious
care to the setting up of the great organ of the church.
“The carpenters, under his instruction, set up the great wooden
passages for the thunder; while the little pipes of pasteboard
simulated the sound of the human voice singing to the victorious
notes of the long metal trumpets.”
At last he ventures to appear in public at a pageant. The haircloth he
wears scratches his lips and makes them bleed, and at the sight, an
unholy fury fills the crowd. He is literally torn in pieces.
“The soul of Denys was already at rest, as his body, now borne
along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn
at last limb from limb. The men stuck little shreds of his flesh,
or, failing that, of his torn raiment, into their caps; the women
lending their long hairpins for the purpose.”
In such a passage as this the horror passes beyond the range of perfect
art; and the shadow is heightened by the natural tranquillity and
austerity of the writer. One cannot help feeling that Pater was here
overpowered by his conception, and that he allowed to escape him, for
almost the only time in his writings, a kind of almost animal zest
in blood and carnage. There is no lack of what is commonly called
power, but there is a lack of the restraint which as a rule Pater
so diligently preached. It reminds one of the tale of Tod Lapraik in
_Catriona_, where the staid and smiling weaver dances alone in a hollow
of the rocks in the black glory of his heart; or of the still more grim
story of Kipling, where the veil that separates the man from the brute
is twitched aside, and the unhappy wretch, intoxicated by a bestial
instinct, asks eagerly for raw meat, and rolls and digs in the earth
beneath the dark shrubs of the garden.
“Sebastian van Storck” is an astonishing contrast to the last. The
_motif_ of the essay is devotion to the purest and most abstract
reason. Sebastian is a young Hollander, the son of a Burgomaster of
wealth and high social position. The young Sebastian, a graceful
finished nature, but with a strain of phthisis in his constitution,
is a lonely, isolated young man, out of sympathy with the rich,
phlegmatic, easy life which surrounds him, who is drawn into a track of
abstract intellectual speculation, partly by a certain mortal coldness
of temperament, and partly by a clear and logical faculty of thought.
He becomes interested in the philosophy of the young Spinoza, who is a
friend and contemporary, and he sets out upon a chilly pilgrimage of
thought with a kind of intellectual disinterestedness, till he arrives
at the conclusion that the only use to make of life is to cultivate
a severe detachment from all its interests and ties. His view of God
becomes ever colder and more impersonal.
“For him, that one abstract being was as the pallid Arctic sun,
disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacier, a barren
and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had been
frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was
‘equilibrium,’ the void, the _tabula rasa_, into which, through
all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are
but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And,
himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the
clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect
to be ‘loved in return.’”
The crisis comes by his being almost drawn into a marriage with a
beautiful girl of his own circle. He has to a certain extent submitted
to her charm, and the betrothal is looked upon as an event daily to be
expected. The girl herself falls under the spell of Sebastian’s beauty
and fascination; and at a social gathering at which the friends of both
expect and desire the pledge to be given and accepted, she betrays a
certain innocent coquetry, which in Sebastian’s tense mood acts like
water dashed in his face. He is filled with a sharp disgust and flies
from home, taking refuge in a lonely manor-house, the property of his
family. A spell of stormy weather succeeds and the land is inundated.
When at last it is possible to reach the lonely house through the
raging flood Sebastian is found dead, having apparently lost his life
in saving a child, who is discovered unhurt wrapped in Sebastian’s furs.
Pater seems in this essay to have endeavoured, we will not say to
enforce the dangers of the intellectual pursuit of abstraction, for the
picture has hardly an ethical motive, but to depict in neutral tints
the natural course of the quest of pure reason. It is a melancholy
essay. Sebastian seems to suffocate under warmth and light; and the
whole sketch has something of the frozen silence, the mute impassivity,
of the stiffened leafless earth. It is more like a piece of cold and
colourless sculpture than a picture; and the contrast of the stainless
icy figure of the victim of thought thrown into relief by the warm,
fire-lit, comfortable indoor world, peopled with types of indolent and
contented materialists, is skilfully enough wrought. But the subtle
beauty of the treatment does not remove a certain inner dreariness of
thought, and the central figure seems to shiver underneath the rich
robe draped about it.
“Duke Carl of Rosenmold” is an eighteenth-century study of a very
different temperament. He is the heir of an aged Grand-Duke, and
is full to the brim of enthusiasm for art, music, literature, and
nature. But just as Sebastian van Storck was the victim of an excess
of intellectual power, so Duke Carl is the victim of its defect. His
soul is in revolt against stolid German heaviness; he is a typical
figure of the spirit of the Renaissance, all athirst for beauty and
novelty. But his temperament is whimsical and unbalanced; he has little
originality or lucidity of thought; he falls under the spell of all
that is rococo, and mistakes novelty for energy; he takes up each new
interest with eager zest, but too soon tires of it; to relieve the
dreariness of satiety in the search for new sensations, he causes his
death to be announced and is present in disguise at his own funeral.
Here he parts company with soundness of mind, and in his rebellion
against all that is conventional he mistakes the true stuff out of
which unconventionality is made. The true creative genius, to use a
metaphor, accepts the conventions of the age as a sort of necessary
frame to impulse, and troubles his head little about it; his concern is
with the picture itself, how to make it perfectly sincere, perfectly
impressive. But Duke Carl’s originality is vitiated by the desire to
startle and surprise timid natures, and to have his originality admired
or at least recognised. His grandfather abdicates, and soon after dies,
and Duke Carl’s mind, which has been distracted for a while by foreign
travel, becomes set upon marriage with a peasant girl, partly from real
affection, partly from a desire to do the unexpected thing. His end
is somewhat mysterious; he arranges to meet his betrothed in a lonely
stronghold, and falls a victim to an armed invasion. Contrary to his
habit, instead of letting the story speak for itself, Pater appends
a conclusion in which he says that his object has been to sketch a
precursor of what may be called the German Renaissance, of Lessing
and Herder, leading on to Goethe. But the interest remains psychical
rather than historical. The duke is a type of those natures who,
with an intense susceptibility to artistic influences, have no real
force of character or conception in the background, and fall victims
to a neurotic desire, which approaches near to vulgarity, to cause
a commotion among stolid and commonplace persons, because they are
conscious of their inability, from want of real intellectual energy, to
impress or influence the higher natures.
The whole volume, then, is based on an idea of intellectual and
artistic revolt; each of the four types depicted, Watteau, Denys,
Sebastian, and Duke Carl, is a creature born out of due time,
and suffering from the isolation that necessarily comes from the
consciousness of being out of sympathy with one’s environment. In
all four there is a vein of physical malady. Watteau and Sebastian
are phthisical, and Denys and Duke Carl are of unbalanced mind. This
tendency to dwell on what is diseased and abnormal has a curious
psychological interest; and it will be observed, too, that all the four
figures depicted are youthful heroes, endowed with charm and beauty,
but all overshadowed by a presage of death. There is thus something of
the _macabre_, the decadent element, about the book.
It will be as well here to consider the two other Imaginary Portraits,
“Emerald Uthwart” (1892) and “Apollo in Picardy” (1893), because,
though of slightly later date, they in reality belong to the same
series.
“Apollo in Picardy” is one of the purest pieces of fantasy that Pater
ever composed. In its _motif_ it much resembles “Denys l’Auxerrois,”
the conception being that of a reincarnation of a sort of pagan spirit,
perhaps a fallen deity, in the midst of a monastic world.
Prior Saint-Jean, bred as a monk, is occupied in middle age in the
composition of an abstruse book of astronomy and music, dry and
scientific enough. He is sent, being in indifferent health, down to
the Grange of the monastery, to superintend the building of a great
monastic barn. He takes with him a novice named Hyacinth, the pet of
the community, neat, serviceable, frank, boyish. The first evening
after their arrival the Prior goes into the granary, and finds there
asleep among the fleeces a young serf of the monastery, a youth of
extraordinary beauty, with a strange harp lying beside him. The Prior
mutters a collect, conscious of a certain unholy charm, and goes softly
away. The next day he finds the serf waiting upon them. The great barn
is built, and a series of mysterious and inexplicable circumstances
occurs. The serf seems to inspire a sort of wild gaiety, a spontaneous
art, into the builders, and manifests, too, an almost Satanical
strength.
The boy Hyacinth finds this strange creature a delightful playmate; and
yet there is a bewildering mixture of charm and cruelty about him. The
wild creatures of the forest will come at his call; he will play with
them, and when tired of play will pierce them with an arrow or snap
their fragile backs. Yet they nestle to him to die in his arms.
Sometimes the cruelty breaks out in horrible ways. One evening the
great pigeon-house is invaded by some creature unknown, which destroys
the birds wholesale, leaving their bodies ruthlessly rent and torn. Yet
next day the serf comes weeping to the mass; the chapel is found to be
strangely decked with exotic flowers, and the serf himself joins with
his harp in the canticles, drawing the rough voices to a silvery music.
The Prior feels the magical influences of the place slowly involving
him. He turns to his book, but there seems a madness in his brain.
Instead of penning dry scientific discussions, he finds himself
impelled against his will to crowd strange drawings and illuminations
into his book, “winged flowers, or stars with human limbs and faces,
still intruding themselves, or mere notes of light and darkness from
the actual horizon.”
He comes to again and again from his wild work with a shock of terror
and disgust. The boy Hyacinth becomes terrified at the Prior’s strange
illusions, his loss of memory, his feverish periods of what seems such
unhallowed work. But one hot, breathless evening he is drawn to play
again with the serf, whom he begins to mistrust. They play with an
ancient quoit, which is turned up from a grave. Stript to the skin, in
wild excitement, they play late into the night, till the quoit flung by
the serf, whether by accident or a sudden bloody impulse none knows,
crashes into the boy’s brain, and leaves him dead on the turf.
The serf flies; the Prior falls under suspicion of the murder, but is
claimed by the monastic authorities and confined as obviously insane.
He spends long hours gazing out of the windows, weeping, uttering
strange words; till at last his senses return to him, but he dies just
as his release is permitted.
The study is full of beauty from end to end, beauty and strangeness
side by side. Yet it is hard not to feel a sort of distempered, almost
riotous, fancy at work under it all, and there is a cloistered horror
about it, that reminds one of the old monastic legend of the monk who
goes late into the dark church to recover a volume that he had left
there, and finds a strange merry thing, in the habit of a priest,
leaping all alone in unholy mirth before the altar.
It may be said that this is exactly the effect which the writer
intended to produce, and the art is manifest. But for all that there
is a species of uncanny terror which invests the tale; not the terror
which may involve the narrative of one who has seen strange things and
records them faithfully, but the terror with which one might watch a
magician trafficking in breathless secrets, with a certain dark power
of using energies which seem to menace alike serenity and virtue.
“Emerald Uthwart” is a little fantasy written in 1892. The incidents
related are simple enough, and yet in a way sensational. Emerald is
the son of an ancient English family, brought up in an old Sussex
home, long the property of his ancestors, people of an unemphatic
type. “Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their
woods, noiselessly deciduous.” He goes to school, contrary to the
tradition of the family, and the scene of his education is laid at
what is obviously the King’s School, Canterbury. Here he forms a great
friendship with a boy a little older than himself, James Stokes; they
go on to Oxford together, get commissions in the army, in consequence
of the breaking out afresh of a war, the scene of which is laid in
Flanders. They are kept waiting before a beleaguered town; James Stokes
conceives a plan of entering the town with a few men on an expedition
the object of which is obscure. They enter the town, secure their
prize—a weather-beaten flag—and issue out again to find that the army
has moved on; they rejoin their regiment, are tried by court-martial,
and condemned to death. They are led out to execution, and when James
Stokes has been shot, the scene being described with a grim realism,
it is announced that Emerald’s sentence has been commuted into one
of degradation and dismissal. This is carried out; he wanders about
in want and wretchedness, but finally makes his way home, where he
eventually dies, after a lingering illness of four years, from an old
wound, aggravated by hardship and mental suffering. Just before the end
his case is brought before the military authorities, and he receives an
offer of a commission. The story ends by a somewhat terrible extract
supposed to be from a surgeon’s diary, who removes the ball from the
wound.
The _motif_ of the story is to depict a certain type of Englishman,
a type of decorous submissiveness. But the interest of the type lies
rather in the attempt that is made to represent it in a character of
great modesty and simplicity, but with a high natural charm both of
manner and physical appearance.
The weakness of the conception may be said to lie in the fact, that
apart from this external and physical charm the character is rather
essentially uninteresting—unambitious and demure—a Spartan, not an
Athenian type.
It was probably Pater’s object to depict the Spartan element of
public-school education; and it is here that the main interest of the
sketch lies.
“In fact,” he says, “by one of our wise English compromises, we
still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lesson in attention
and patience, at the least. Nay! by a double compromise, with
delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach them their
pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-towers,
amid the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the
discipline, of monasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the
English have never wholly lost an early inclination.... The result
of our older method has had its value so far, at least, say! for
the careful aesthetic observer. It is of such diagonal influences,
through complication of influence, that expression comes, in life,
in our culture, in the very faces of men and boys—of these boys.
Nothing could better harmonise present with past than the sight
of them just here, as they shout at their games, or recite their
lessons, overarched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to
church meekly, into the seats occupied by the young monks before
them.”
But there is a certain want of naturalness about the conception. The
picture of James Stokes descanting to his friend on minute points of
meaning in Homer, in Virgil, lacks reality. Emerald himself, after
being punished by the headmaster, stands up and says, “And now, sir,
that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my fault.” Not
so do English boys behave! And it is just here, in these rare touches
of attempted drama, that Pater’s art invariably breaks down. He was
aware that his own instinct was not dramatic. He wrote (August 9, 1891)
to a friend, Mr. Douglas Ainslie, thanking him for a copy of a play
which Mr. Ainslie had published, saying that he would read it with
interest, but adding “the dramatic form of literature is not what I
usually turn to with most readiness.”
Submissiveness, he says, was the key of Uthwart’s character: “it had
the force of genius with him”; he entered into his work with serious
obedience, but feeling that the perception of great literature was
something unattainable by himself; religion too, “its high claims, to
which no one could be equal; its reproaches”—he felt it all to be
immeasurable, “surely not meant for the like of him.” He is always
“repressible, self-restrained, always concurring with the influence,
the claim upon him, the rebuke, of others.” He attracts the notice
of strangers by his unconscious grace and healthy beauty; he is
surprised at the charm he exerts on others, never elated by it, nor
presuming upon it. And no doubt it is the intention of the piece to
show how his one violation of duty, his single deviation from strict
military obedience, brought with it ruin and death—so apparently
disproportionate a punishment. But he takes his degradation with the
same humble submissiveness, and it is in the same spirit that he meets
his death, not repining nor complaining, but simply as the orders
of some superior power, whom he is to obey unflinchingly by a sort
of sacred instinct. The purpose of the piece, then, is to draw out
the beauty of the obedient character, a soldierlike simplicity and
tranquillity. It is hardly necessary to add that the accessories are
exquisitely finished; the old house, with its scented flower-beds and
venerable chambers; the ancient stately school, with the Cathedral to
which it is attached; but in this one essay it may be said that the
simplicity of the motive does not wholly harmonise with the delicacy of
the setting. The thought is tinged and coloured by being seen through
a somewhat self-conscious and sensuous medium. One cannot help feeling
that Emerald would have disliked being regarded in this light, being
made a picture of; that is perhaps no reason why it should not be
attempted, but it militates against the success of the story, because
one feels that Emerald is caught like a butterfly, in the gauzy meshes
of a net, and is being too intimately, too tenderly scrutinised, when
he is made for the free air and the sun.
And, artistically speaking, one cannot help regarding the extract with
which the story ends as a blot. The operation for the removal of the
ball, the replacing of the body in the coffin, with “the peak of the
handsome nose remaining visible among the flowers”—one feels this to
be a harsh realism, with an almost morbid dwelling upon the accidents
of mortality, which does a certain violence to the whole conception.
Thus, though there are passages in “Emerald Uthwart” which must always
rank high among the achievements of Pater, it is impossible to resist
the feeling that in this painful story he was attempting effects to
which his art could not rise.
It is not, I think, fanciful to interpret this selection of types in
the light of Pater’s own life, the half-lit atmosphere in which he
deliberately or perhaps temperamentally moved. They are the work of
a melancholy introspective mind, dwelling wistfully upon the outer
beauty of the world, but with a deeper current of mournful amazement
at the brevity and the mystery of it all. No doubt Pater, too, felt
his own isolation heavily rather than acutely. Did he belong, one can
imagine his asking himself, in spirit, to the earlier, more fragrant,
more insouciant time, when men were less shadowed by the complexity
of thought and the inherited conscience of the ages? Or did he belong
to some future outburst of simpler, more liberal joy, to a time when
the heavy commercialism of England, its conventional politics, its
moral confusion, its mercantile view of education, should be leavened
by beauty and sincere joy? Whichever it was, he had fallen on evil
days. Oxford itself, that should have been the home of intellectual
and artistic speculation, was crowded by a younger generation, whose
idea of a University was a place where, among social and athletic
delights, it was possible to defer for a time the necessity of
adopting practical life. The older men, those who were accepted by the
academical world as men of leading, were too often men of bursarial
minds, who loved business and organisation better than intellectual
freedom. Even the keener spirits, both among the younger and the older
men, were of the dry and rigid type, believing in accuracy more than
ideas, in definite accumulation more than intellectual enjoyment.
In this atmosphere Pater felt himself misunderstood and decried.
The daring and indiscreet impulses of youth had died away, and his
unconventionalism had cost him dear. What wonder that his thoughts took
on a melancholy tinge, and that he recurred in mind to the thought of
figures whose unlikeness to those about them, in spite of the fine
daring, the beautiful impulses of their nature, had brought them
dissatisfaction and disaster and even death!