LATER WRITINGS
All this time Pater was engaged upon a great work, which was destined
never to be finished. _Gaston de Latour_ was embarked upon soon after
the completion of _Marius_. Five chapters appeared in _Macmillan’s
Magazine_ in the course of 1888. A sixth chapter appeared in the
_Fortnightly Review_ in the next year under the title of “Giordano
Bruno,” and various other unfinished fragments remain. The chapter
called “Shadows of Events” is the only one of these which has been
included in the 1902 volume. In the case of a writer as sedulous, as
eager for perfection, as Pater it is right to withhold the incomplete
fragments. He seems for some cause to have abandoned the book in
dissatisfaction. We may speculate as to the cause of this. I am myself
disposed to think that he found the historical setting too complicated
and the canvas too much crowded. As the story advances the personality
seems to ebb out of the figure of the hero, and he becomes a mere
mirror of events and other personalities. The influences, too, that
are brought to bear on him are of so complicated a nature that his
development seems hampered rather than enlarged. No doubt Pater felt
that the book was not exhibiting his own best qualities of workmanship;
and there is a growing weariness visible, as if he felt that he was
failing to cope with the pressure of historical experience that was
closing in upon the central figure.
It may here be said that Pater’s best work is that which is built up
delicately and imaginatively out of shadowy hints of events and slender
records. His power lay in filling in, heightening, and enriching faint
outlines, not in selecting typical touches from great masses of detail.
He felt, and rightly, that he had mistaken his capacity. The period he
had chosen, the struggle of Huguenots and Catholics, is crowded with
salient figures, but to treat it romantically, the tact, the swift
intuition, of such a writer as Walter Scott was needed, sketching in
broad washes and bold strokes; not the patient and accumulative toil of
a minute and delicate writer like Pater.
The story opens beautifully enough. The boy Gaston lives the quiet
life of the country at the old house of Deux-manoirs in La Beauce, the
central corn-land of France, with the dim shape of the great church of
Chartres visible, like a ship under press of canvas, on the low horizon.
Gaston is of the same type as Marius—innocent, serious, devout,
keenly sensitive to impressions of beauty. We see him first taking
upon himself the vows of the ecclesiastical life, “duly arrayed for
dedication, with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice
folded over his left shoulder,” in the dark glowing church.
Somehow the figure fails to appeal to us. We feel—could Pater have
felt the same?—that we are but meeting Marius over again in altered
circumstances.
Yet the description of the Office, sung in the presence of the courtly
and vivacious Bishop of Chartres, is full of beauty:—
“It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty
way—_Mirabilia testimonia tua!_ In psalm and antiphon,
inexhaustibly fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that
undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of
men’s lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the
divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only
watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there
was the sheep astray, _sicut ovis quae periit_—the physical world;
with its lusty ministers, at work, or sleeping for a while amid
the stubble, their faces upturned to the August sun—the world so
importunately visible, intruding a little way, with its floating
odours, in that semicircle of heat across the old over-written
pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries within.”
The quiet life of the Manor is broken shortly afterwards by a sudden
visit of the young King Charles the Ninth, who enters from a hunting
expedition, and “with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the
place” utters a shrill strain of half-religious oaths. Pale, with an
ivory whiteness, vivacious, unbalanced, the young king feels the charm
of the place, touches a lute, talks of verses, and scratches a stanza
of his own with a diamond upon a window-pane.
As Gaston lives on his quiet life in a disturbed and alarmed country
his reflective nature begins to open. “In a sudden tremor of an aged
voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the
tacit observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream
of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world.”
He goes on to join the episcopal household of Chartres as a page,
in the company of other noble youths. He makes friends; books and
talk—“the brilliant surface of the untried world”—confront him; but
his own calm instinct, his tranquillising sense of religion, provide
the necessary balance. He takes three chosen companions home with him
to spend the hot bright weeks of the summer; and here, through the
poems of Ronsard, the infection of the living and breathing spirit of
the modern poetry, near, actual, tangible like the faces of flowers,
seizes upon him.
“Never before had words, single words, meant so much. What
expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to
music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and
it was the lark’s voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity
lent itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very
hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome
fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the
personal ornaments, of the people on the highway.” “Here was a
discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed
in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative
regeneration of the world.”
In this excited mood he rides with his companions to the Priory, not
far away, of which Ronsard was the Prior, to see the great man himself.
And here Pater is at his best. They find the Prior himself digging in
his garden; they attend a solemnity in the church; they sup with the
poet, who, touched by the generous enthusiasm of the boys, abandons
himself to a sociable mood, shows them his treasures, his manuscripts,
his portraits. But Gaston finds that Ronsard has attained to no
serenity of spirit; his “roving, astonished eyes” reveal him as “the
haggard soul of a haggard generation.”
Ronsard is sympathetically interested in the ardent spirit of the boy,
and gives him an introduction to the great Montaigne; whom he presently
goes to visit, in his château in Dordogne.
“It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea’s arms, amid the low
murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a
little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient
manor, deserted as the sea encroached—long ago, for the fig-trees
in the riven walls were tough and old.”
He finds the great man in his towered manor, with the view from the
roof of the rich noonday scenery. He feels after a few moments’ talk as
if he had known the genial philosopher all his life.
“In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive
all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of
motion, of thoughts in motion!”
“Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in
life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces
full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the
torrents.”
The portrait of this splendid human egotist is admirably touched,
with a wealth of subtle illustration from his writings. His deeply
sceptical spirit, his vivid agnosticism, confronted again and again
with hopeless mysteries, and yet for ever turning back upon the quest,
undaunted, unsated, absolutely sincere, admitting his own egotism with
frank humour—“in favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our private
confession, I confess myself in public.” And this outward egotism of
manner was but the symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism;—“I
have no other end in writing but to discover _myself_.”
Pater indicates, with perfect insight, the “broad, easy, indifferent”
passage of Montaigne through the world, his relish for meat and drink
and corporeal sensation; and yet, side by side with this, a curious,
superstitious, formal kind of piety, all springing from the same
worship for the whole of humanity. But after all, it was the sincerity
and tolerance of the man that was the charm, his quaint fancy, his rich
sympathy, his perfect comprehension; the influence that he exercised
was that of one who made no selection of moods and things, but tasted
all, enjoyed all.
Then follows the chapter called “Shadows of Events,” which it was
well to publish, but about which it is easy to comprehend Pater’s own
hesitation. It is a historical survey mainly, but the impression is
all clouded and blurred; one cannot help feeling that the one thing
lacking to Pater was the very largeness of tolerance which he described
so admiringly in Montaigne; certain characteristics, certain brilliant
points, attract him; but he cannot visualise what he does not admire.
The characters that play a large, robust, coarse, straightforward part
are all outside of him, incomprehensible, repellent. The types whom
Pater discerned so clearly were those who crept somewhat remotely,
spectatorially, even timidly, through the throng, who lived the
interior life of thought and speculation and appreciation, tasting the
finer savours; not those who strode out boldly, feeling the air of the
world their native air. Something of this melancholy aloofness was true
of Pater himself, and he draws near only to those in whom he discerns
something of the same wistful remoteness.
“Looking back afterwards,” says Pater of Gaston, “this singularly
self-possessed person had to confess that under (the) influence
(of the unsettled conditions of the age) he had lost for a while
the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real differences and
oppositions of things in that hotly-coloured world of Paris,—like
a shaken tapestry about him.”
The last phrase is exactly true of the chapter—it is a shaken
tapestry, a multitude of blurred heads and faces, confused gestures,
agitated forms.
And so we pass to the dignified banishment of Charles, and the
arrival of the new king; when across the story breaks the teaching of
Bruno—Pantheism, as it is named, “the vision of all things in God,” as
the end and aim of all metaphysical speculation.
Bruno, originally a Dominican monk, had conceived the idea of the
wholeness of life in a spiritual region.
“Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it
was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the
infinite relish of this ‘prodigal son’ of Dominic. God the Spirit
had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence,
impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of
absolute limitation. Touch! see! listen! eat freely of all the
trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the Lord God
literally everywhere!—here was the final counsel of perfection.”
What repels Gaston in the teaching of Bruno is the want of artistic
distinction and refinement about his theory. The instinct of the artist
was just that—to define, disentangle, discern, to distinguish between
“the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and
wrong in the matter of art.”
It is not clear then how the doctrine of Bruno or even of Montaigne
was to affect the spirit of Gaston. It is a case of a soul the very
breath of whose life was the arriving at canons of some kind, whose
most sacred duty appeared to be to select from the immense mass of
experience and material flung so prodigally down in the world, the
things that belonged to his peace. The difficulty is to comprehend
what was to be the issue. In the theory of Montaigne and Bruno alike,
Gaston is brought into contact with types essentially uncritical, and
one would suppose that they were intended to have an enlarging effect.
But the hint seems rather to be that they were to act in the opposite
direction, and to throw Gaston back upon the critical attitude, as the
one safeguard in the bewildering world.
One feels as though Pater had here essayed too large a task; that
he was, so to speak, preaching to himself the doctrine of robust
tolerance, of good-humoured sympathy with a more vivid and generous
life; and that he could not to his satisfaction depict the next
steps in the development because it was precisely the very type of
development of which he had had no personal experience.
Thus the book, from its very incompleteness, has the interest of being
again an intimate self-revelation. It stands like a great unfinished
canvas by a master of minute, imaginative, suggestive portraiture.
Only, one is tempted to wish that he had not given so much thought and
energy to so baffling a task—that he had constructed more of those
solitary figures which he had, as we know, in his mind, in which his
powers would have had their full scope, in which every delicate touch
would have told.
After the publication of the five chapters of _Gaston de Latour_, Pater
gave himself up to the composition of one of the most interesting of
all his productions.
The essay on “Style,” which appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ of
December 1888, and was prefixed to _Appreciations_ in 1889, is one
of Pater’s most elaborate and finished productions. It is indeed so
elaborate, so carefully wrought, it disdains so solemnly the devices
that bring lucidity, the way-posts and milestones of the road, that
in reading it one is apt to lose the sense of its structure, and not
to realise what a simple case he is presenting. Professor Seeley used
to enunciate the maxim to those whose essays he was criticising, “Let
the bones show!” Well, in Pater’s essay the bones do not show; not
only does the rounded flesh conceal them, but they are still further
disguised into a species of pontifical splendour by a rich and stiff
embroidered robe of language.
He begins by dismissing with a great subtlety of illustration the
ancient principle that a sharp distinction can be drawn between prose
and poetry, showing that it is not true that poetry differs only
from prose by the presence of metrical restraint; but that while a
severe logical structure must underlie poetry, prose can exhibit high
imaginative qualities; and that the real distinction in literature is
between the literature that is imaginative, and the literature that
attempts merely the transcription of fact. He points out that the
moment that argument passes from the mere presentation of a theorem and
becomes a personal appeal, that moment is the border-line crossed; and
that in the work of the historian the poetical element is to be found
in the personal element of selection which is bound to come in, and
which may then transform statement into art.
“Just in proportion,” he says, “as the writer’s aim, consciously
or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world,
not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist,
his work _fine_ art; and good art (as I hope ultimately to show)
in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense;
as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature also,
truth—truth to bare fact, there—is the essence of such artistic
quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft
at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run
only _fineness_ of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within.”
He goes on to say that imaginative prose is the special art of the
modern world, “an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,
descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.”
He then passes to the proposition that the art of the craftsman of
words must be essentially a scholarly art; that the best writer, “with
all the jealousy of a lover of words, will resist a constant tendency
on the part of the majority of those who use them to efface the
distinctions of language”; but there must be no hint of pedantry; the
tact of the great writer being employed in seeing what new words and
usages really enrich language and make it elastic and spontaneous, as
well as what additions merely debase it. And then, too, the word-artist
must employ “a self-restraint, a skilful economy of means”; every
sentence must have its precise relief, “the logically filled space
connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome.” He
must employ “honourable artifice” to produce a peculiar atmosphere;
and thus the perfect artist will be recognised by what he omits even
more than by what he retains. “For in truth all art does but consist
in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver
blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest
divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to
Michelangelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.”
The one essential thing, then, is “that architectural conception of
work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight
of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last
sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the
first.”
“All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity,
of the initiatory apprehension or view.” It must be composition, and
not loose accretion. The literary artist must leave off “not in
weariness and because he finds _himself_ at an end, but in all the
freshness of volition.”
He admits that there are instances of great writers who have been no
artists, who have written with a kind of unconscious tact; but he
maintains that one of the greatest pleasures of really good literature
is “in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure.”
He sums up this part of the subject by saying that all good literature
must be directed both by _mind_ and _soul_, the mind giving the logical
structure, the soul lending the personal appeal.
He then diverges into an elaborate illustration drawn from the methods
of Flaubert, whose theory it was that though there might be a number
of ways of expressing a thought, yet that there was one perfect way,
if the artist could only find it, one unique word, one appropriate
epithet, phrase, sentence, paragraph, which alone could express the
vision within; and again he enforces his belief in the “special charm
in the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end.”
Truth, then, is the essential quality, truth of conception, truth
of expression; and style must be characteristic and expressive of
personality, and though taking its form from the conception, must take
its colour from the temperament; and indeed that it should do so, that
it should indicate the personal colour, is but another manifestation of
sincerity.
Thus it will be seen that whether art is good depends upon the soul of
the creator, whether it is great depends upon the mind; and then in
memorable words he adds that if art
“be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the
redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies
with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about
ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify
us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the
glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those
qualities I summed up as mind and soul—that colour and mystic
perfume, and that reasonable structure,—it has something of the
soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural
place, in the great structure of human life.”
I have dwelt at length on this essay, because in one sense it is the
summary of Pater’s artistic creed. It is perhaps the only direct and
personal revelation of his theory of his art; but it will be observed
throughout that he is speaking not to the outer circle, not even to
the critical reader; it is not a _concio ad populum_, but a _concio
ad clerum_. The audience whom he had in mind were the initiated, the
craftsmen; and the whole oration presupposes a species of mystical
apprehension of the work of the artist; hence comes his insistence on
the delight that arises from the sense of difficulties overcome, a
delight which only the artist who has striven much and failed often
can share. It is therefore a technical discourse; and dealing with it
from this point of view, it must be confessed that in two points it
falls short of perfect catholicity and reveals the personal bias. The
first of these is the point that has just been indicated, that from the
highest art of all, such as the art of Shakespeare and Virgil, Dante
and Homer, the sense of effort, of obstacles surmounted, disappears.
_Celare artem_, that is the triumph; that the thing should appear
simple, easy, inevitable. For in the pleasure that the artist takes
in seeing a difficulty successfully wrestled with and overcome, there
creeps in a certain self-consciousness, a species of gratified envy in
seeing that, supreme as the process is, the difficulty was there; the
absence, indeed, of this sense of effort is what keeps many critical
students of art away from the highest masterpieces, and allows them to
feel more at their ease in art where the mastery is not so complete.
But this is a condition that one desires to remove rather than to
emphasise; it is based on weakness and fallibility, rather than on
strength and confidence.
And the second point, which is allied closely to this, is that Pater
presses too heavily upon laboriousness in art at the expense of
ecstatic freedom; because though there are among the greatest artists
many instances of those who have attained supremacy by endless and
painstaking labour, yet, in the case of the best artists of all, they
seem to start at a point to which others may hardly attain, to be more
like the inheritors of perfect faculty than the laborious acquirers of
it. Writers like Scott and Thackeray, for instance, not to travel far
for instances, seem to have achieved, as Scott himself said, their best
results by a “hurried frankness” of execution, and to have produced by
a kind of instinct what others have to learn to produce by toil and
thought.
And thus it is that the essay, in its very incompleteness and
partiality of view, has an immense value as an autobiographical
document, and helps us, if it is the personality of Pater that we
desire to apprehend and penetrate, to draw closer to the real man, in
his strength and in his limitations, than any other extant writing; and
is indeed a piece of intimate self-revelation.
Moreover, the concluding paragraphs of the essay, the frank confession
of his belief, in words which his natural reticence make into what may
be carelessly regarded as a piece of tame and conventional rhetoric, in
the ultimate mission of art, have an intense and vital significance;
the increase of sympathy, the amelioration of suffering, the service
of humanity—these, then, were in his deliberate view the ends of art.
The very use, in the very crucial passage of the summary, of the vague
and trite phrase “the glory of God” as a motive for high art, has a
poignant emphasis: it reveals the very depth of the writer’s soul. He
of all men, at the very crisis of the enunciation of his creed, could
never have used such an expression unless it contained for him an
essential truth; and this single phrase bears eloquent testimony to the
fact that, below the aesthetic doctrine which he enunciated, lay an
ethical base of temperament, a moral foundation of duty and obedience
to the Creator and Father of men.
In the course of 1889—not a prolific year—“Hippolytus Veiled”
appeared in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, and “Giordano Bruno,” one of the
Chapters of _Gaston de Latour_, in the _Fortnightly_. Pater also
published the _Appreciations_—rather a made-up volume, one is forced
to reflect, the kind of book that is issued in response to the appeal
of a publisher. We have already discussed all the contents of the
volume, except the Shakespearian studies, three in number, of which
“Measure for Measure” had appeared in 1874, “Love’s Labours Lost” in
1878. “Shakespeare’s English Kings” had not appeared before, and was
the only new item in the volume. Two facts are noticeable about the
book. The essay on “Aesthetic Poetry,” written in 1868, reappeared
here, but was omitted in the later edition of 1890; and the study
called “Romanticism,” written in 1876, reappeared as a Postscript.
The Shakespearian studies do not demand any very close attention. In
the little essay on “Love’s Labours Lost” he points out that in the
play Shakespeare was dallying with Euphuism. “It is this foppery of
delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which
Shakespeare is occupied in ‘Love’s Labours Lost.’” But he points out,
too, that in dealing with a past age, one cannot afford to neglect a
study of its playthings: “For what is called fashion in these matters
occupies, in each age, much of the care of many of the most discerning
people, furnishing them with a kind of mirror of their real inward
refinements, and their capacity for selection. Such modes or fashions
are, at their best, an example of the artistic predominance of form
over matter; of the manner of the doing of it over the thing done; and
have a beauty of their own.” And this, he concludes, is the chief value
of the play.
In the essay on “Measure for Measure” he shows that the play is a
remodelling of an earlier and rougher composition; but he points out
that the value and significance of it is that Shakespeare works out of
it “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the
central expression of his moral judgments.” He says that we have in it
“a real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described
as _suggestive_, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated
hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader’s own half-developed
imaginings.” He notes the dark invasion of the shadow of death in the
play, death the “‘great disguiser,’ blanching the features of youth
and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its
disgraceful associations.” And further, he touches with exquisite skill
the way in which Shakespeare here brings out, by a sudden vignette,
a romantic picture of a scene; the episode of Mariana, “the moated
grange, with its dejected mistress, its long, listless, discontented
days, where we hear only the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the
midst of one of the loveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare’s
school, is the pleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant
places.” Not less delicate is the apprehension of the character of
Isabella, so tranquil, chaste, and sisterly at first, changed, by the
inrush of contending passions, in a moment, into something fierce,
vindictive, and tiger-like. He sums up his conclusion by saying that
the charm of the work is its underlying conception of morality, not
the morality which opposes a blunt and stubborn front to the delicate
activities of life, but the artistic morality that watches, judges,
values and appreciates, and is on the side of culture rather than on
the side of prejudice and rectitude.
The essay on “Shakespeare’s English Kings” (1889) is rather a slight
performance, and the analysis of a somewhat superficial kind. Pater,
for instance, almost fails to realise the magnificence of the
conception of Richard II., the tragedy of which consists in the fact
that, at a sudden crisis, a prompt force and vigour are demanded of a
ruler whose nature is full indeed of wise and fruitful thoughts, but
whose position calls for a bluff and cheerful energy, when all that he
can give is a subtle and contemplative philosophy. But he traces the
general motive finely:—
“No!” he says, “Shakespeare’s kings are not, nor are meant to be,
great men: rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon
greatness, with those pathetic results, the natural self-pity of
the weak heightened in them into irresistible appeal to others as
the net result of their royal prerogative. One after another, they
seem to lie composed in Shakespeare’s embalming pages, with just
that touch of nature about them, making the whole world akin.”
He ends by a subtle passage, not fully worked out, indicating that
as unity of impression in a work of art is its perfect virtue, and as
lyrical poetry is the best vehicle for such unity, then “a play attains
artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of
lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were still lying at the root of
it.”
In these Shakespearian studies, produced at points so far apart in
Pater’s life, the chief interest is that he should have approached
Shakespeare at all. It is after all another testimony to the width
and largeness of Shakespeare’s mind, that it should have forced an
expression of admiration from a spirit so introspective, so definite in
its range, so preoccupied with a theory, as Pater’s. Moreover, as we
have seen, dramatic art had little attraction for him. One feels that
he does not enter into the humanity, the profundity, of Shakespeare. He
is like a man who hovers about the thickets that lie on the verge of a
great forest, peeping into the glades, noting the bright flowers and
the sweet notes of hidden birds, but with little desire to thread the
wood or penetrate its haunted green heart.
The years 1890 and 1891 were not apparently very fruitful; indeed the
latter was one of the six, out of the twenty-nine years of Pater’s
literary life, in which he published nothing but a review or two; but
he was hard at work on his _Plato and Platonism_, which began to appear
in 1892.
“Prosper Mérimée” was written as a lecture in 1890, and thus belongs to
the last period of Pater’s work. He begins by a melancholy summary of
the century—Mérimée was born in 1803—a century of disillusionment,
in which the ancient landmarks had been removed, and men began to ask
themselves whether of all the ancient fabric of tradition, of thought,
of principles, there was anything certain at all. To make the best
of a changed world—that was the problem; and thus art and literature
would tend to become pastimes, fierce games born of a desperate sort of
make-believe, just to pass the time that remained. Whatever else was
uncertain, it was at least certain that life had somehow to be lived;
if the great old words like patriotism, virtue, honour, were mere
high-sounding names, and stood only for burnt-out illusions, at least
there was a space to be filled, before the dark hours came bringing
with them the ultimate certainty.
Prosper Mérimée, in Pater’s view, is the summary and type of these
tendencies. The world is utterly hollow to him; his cynicism is
complete and all-embracing. He is indifferent to ideas, to politics,
to art; but there still remains the vast and inconsequent spectacle
of human life to study, to amuse oneself with, to depict with a
contemptuous grace. History, artistically selected and displayed, is
perhaps the best distraction of all. History reveals, no doubt, little
but desperate and passionate illusions, but even so there is a narcotic
interest about the spectacle. Into this quarry of ancient materials
Mérimée flings himself with the zest and appetite of an energetic mind.
And so, too, there were similar possibilities of romance in the modern
world. Corsica, where the scene of _Colomba_ is laid, was a place still
full of primal, simple, passionate emotions—exaggerated, no doubt, and
unreasonable, but still unquestionably there. Even that morbid personal
pride with its passion for revenge, its view of life as a sacrifice to
honour, offers a stimulus to the imagination, though the terror of it
is free from all interfusion of pity.
Pater skilfully indicates the perfect art of Mérimée, the minute
proportion, the horror of all loose and otiose statement, issuing
in a style of which every part is closely tied with every other
part, and the end synchronises sharply with the conclusion of the
story; and further, he characterises the human charm of the _Lettres
à une Inconnue_, where the author seems surprised and baffled by
the unsuspected violence of his own emotion; the fine intellectual
companionship of which he is in search betraying him suddenly, like a
crust of ashes over a smouldering fire.
He concludes with an interesting passage which shows that
_impersonality_ was the aim of Mérimée’s art, so that his books stand
“as detached from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness
to their maker than if they were the work of another person.” The same
is true of his style—“the perfection of nobody’s style,” as Pater
cleverly calls it—“fastidiously in the fashion—an expert in all the
little, half-contemptuous elegances of which it is capable ... a nice
observer of all that is most conventional.”
And thus we see that the absence of soul, of subjectivity, of
peculiarities, is at once the weakness and the strength of Mérimée’s
work. It is all pure mind, and produces a singular harshness of ideal,
so that “there are masters of French prose whose art has begun where
the art of Mérimée leaves off.”
It is a fine piece of critical analysis, perhaps a little overstated,
but essentially true. Mérimée does not succeed quite to the extent
that Pater thinks in absolute self-effacement, but he has seen clearly
enough the spirit of the man; and though his exposition marches
somewhat relentlessly on, discarding such evidence as may tell against
his theory, yet he has somehow penetrated the secret of this brilliant
writer with his flawless polish, his inner hardness, as only a great
critic can.
Of the delivery of this lecture on Mérimée, the President of Magdalen
says:—
“A large audience, too large for the ugly and inconvenient Lecture
Room at the Taylorian, came to hear him. He seemed surprised and
overwhelmed. I don’t think he knew how much of a celebrity he was,
and he seemed a little frightened. He read his lecture in a low
monotonous voice.”
In the same year appeared the “Art Notes in North Italy.” It is what
it professes to be, a little study of certain Italian painters,
jottings from an artistic traveller’s diary, and deserves no special
consideration, excepting in so far as it reveals Pater’s preferences
and his method.
In 1892, besides the first chapters of _Plato and Platonism_, and an
ingenious and beautiful essay on the study of Dante, written as an
introduction to Mr. C. L. Shadwell’s translation of the _Purgatory_,
Pater published, in successive numbers of the _New Review_, “Emerald
Uthwart,” which has been considered among the _Imaginary Portraits_.
In the same year the essay on “Raphael” was written, as a lecture,
and it thus differs in style to a certain extent from the more
deliberate literary works, though less, perhaps, in the case of Pater
than would be the case with many writers. But he certainly aimed at
producing something which should be capable of being apprehended by an
interested listener on a first hearing; there is less concentration,
less ornament, less economy of effect, than in the more deliberate
writings. The essay presupposes a certain knowledge of the subject, and
aims at bringing out the central motif of the life of the great painter
relieved against a somewhat shadowy and allusive background of events.
But the central thought is not lacking in clearness.
“By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he
produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the
suavity of his life, some would add in the ‘opportunity’ of his
early death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness,
of the good fortune, of genius.” This is an admirable summary; and
he adds that upon a careful examination of his works “we shall find
even his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable
from his own patient disposal of the means at hand.” He goes on
to show that the supreme charm of Raphael’s nature was in his
teachableness, his prompt assimilation of influences, his essential
humility and tranquillity; that his genius was not a vivid, tortured
thing, like a lightning-flash, with prodigious efforts long matured
in the womb of the cloud, with intervals of despairing silence
and ineffectiveness—but a tranquil, equable progress: “genius by
accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius.”
Pater says, indeed, that Raphael may be held to be the supreme
example of the truth of the beatitude that the meek shall inherit the
earth. He traces the steps of this progress. He shows him stainless,
unruffled, untainted by the restlessness of the age that flowered in
sin, and yet able by a supreme insight to transfer the hinted presence
of fantastic evil into his pictures; he shows his gradual mastery of
dramatic intensity, till he could concentrate the whole of a picture
on one point, subordinate the whole scene to some central and poignant
emotion. And he brings out, too, with great skill, that Raphael was
always in his own thought a learner, with no desperate prejudice
for originality, always open to influence, yet transfiguring and
transmuting influence into higher and higher conceptions of his own. At
last he brings him to Rome, where his life seems “as we read of it,
hasty and perplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always
to be completed, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a
world of breathless competition, amid a great company of spectators,
for great rewards.” Among these mighty tasks stands foremost his
divergence into architecture, appointed, as he was, to succeed Bramante
as architect of St. Peter’s. But all through shines out the unspoilt
nature, making its charm felt upon artists and courtiers alike, the
same unhasting, unresting diligence, the same smiling youthfulness of
demeanour.
He shows the mental force of Raphael’s conceptions, his unequalled
power of apprehending and transmitting to others complex and difficult
ideas with a real philosophical grasp, yet for all his technique, all
his wealth of antiquarian knowledge, never losing sight of essential
beauty and peace. Pater instances as the supremely salient instance
of his art the Ansidei or Blenheim Madonna, now in the National
Gallery. It is not impossible that he was guided in this selection
by a consideration for those whose opportunities for acquainting
themselves with Raphael’s art were bound to be limited. “I find there,”
he says, “at first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in
a proposition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the understanding,
in the economy with which he has reduced his material to the simplest
terms, has disentangled and detached its various elements.” “Keep
them to that picture,” he adds, “as the embodied formula of Raphael’s
genius.” The conclusion of the essay comes rather suddenly, and he sums
up the purpose of Raphael’s life in the phrase, “I am utterly purposed
that I will not offend.” It is this balance of temperament, this steady
deliberate bias to perfect purity, that is the note of his life. He is
the Galahad of art, and might say with Galahad—
“My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.”
The essay is thus a careful and sympathetic attempt to give to learners
a lucid introduction to the art of Raphael. But it differs from his
own chosen subjects, and is therefore less characteristic of Pater as
a writer than much of his work—in that there is no attempt at tracing
the recondite, the suggestive element, in the work of Raphael. He
intermingles little of his own preference, his own personality, with
the verdict; but it is still deeply characteristic of Pater in another
region of his mind, of the patient sympathy which he was always ready
to give, of his desire to meet others halfway, not to mystify or to
bewilder the half-cultivated learner, whose zeal perhaps may outrun his
critical knowledge, with more remote considerations, but to draw the
rays into a single bright focus, rather than, as Pater so often did,
resolve the single ray into rainbow tints and prismatic refractions.
Here, then, at least, we see Pater in the light of the educator,
the scribe, the expounder of mysteries, rather than as the hieratic
presenter of the deeper symbol.
_Plato and Platonism_, certain chapters of which appeared in 1892,
was eventually published in 1893, and thus was the main and serious
occupation of Pater’s last years. He placed the book at the head of
his own writings. A friend once asked him whether he thought that
_The Renaissance_ or _Marius_ was his best book. “Oh, no,” he said,
“neither. If there is anything of mine that has a chance of surviving,
I should say it was my _Plato_.”
I do not propose here to discuss the accuracy and the justice of
his picture of the Platonic philosophy, or how far it harmonises
with received conceptions. There are points, for instance, in his
presentment of the Platonic doctrine, with which it is easy to
disagree; I merely intend to indicate the conception which Pater formed
and expressed, the angle at which the idea impinged upon his own mind.
He intended it primarily to be a useful book, an educational work. He
says in his preface that his aim was to interest young students of
philosophy; and he says at the outset of the book, “The business of
the young scholar ... in reading Plato, is not to take his side in a
controversy, to adopt or refute Plato’s opinions, to modify, or make
apology for, what may seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to
furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction
of his own. His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict
indifference, the mental process there, as he might witness a game
of skill.” His own object, therefore, in the book is not primarily
philosophical; it is rather critical and historical—to put Plato in
his proper place and to see the relation which he bore to his age.
Indeed it would be misleading to speak of Pater as a philosopher in the
technical sense of the word, namely, as one who publishes systematic
or consecutive thoughts upon the ultimate nature of things. Pater
was merely philosophically cultured, and the most we can say of his
philosophy is that his mental attitude is to a considerable extent
determined by his interest in the study of philosophical opinions.
He was, then, a philosopher in the sense that Ruskin, for instance,
was not a philosopher; but Pater would not be accepted among critical
writers as a philosopher in the technical sense.
It was ingeniously said of Pater, that he was a philosopher who had
gone to Italy by mistake instead of to Germany. There is a real truth
in this epigram. He had a deep-seated sense of the mysterious inner
relation of things, an intense desire to discern and disentangle the
bare essential motives of life; but instead of attacking this in the
region of pure and abstract thought, he touched it through the sense
of beauty. It was beauty that seemed to him the most characteristic,
the most significant thing in the world, that beauty touched with
strangeness of which he so seriously spoke; and his preoccupation was
to penetrate the strangeness, to trace the mystery back to primal
emotion, while he watched, with the intensest eagerness and the most
sacred thrill, the rich accumulation of beauty, apprehended and
expressed by so many personalities, such varied natures, which the
human race acquired and made its own, leaving its fine creations to
exist as monuments of its currents and movements, like the weed-fringed
posts that mark the sea-channel over the estuary’s sands; while they
gathered year by year the added beauty of age and association, yet
never losing the pathos, the heart-hunger, the unfulfilled desire, that
hangs like a sweet and penetrating aroma round the beautiful things
that men have made and loved, and have been forced to leave behind
them. The passionate desire to create and express, followed by the
consecration of sorrow and darkness, these two strains mingled for
Pater into a strain of high solemnity and pathetic sweetness.
But he can hardly be said to have had any philosophical system, just
as he himself believed Plato to have had none. Plato’s writings
represented to Pater an atmosphere, not a defined creed. Pater was
rather a psychologist, and it was through the effect of metaphysical
ideas upon personality that he approached philosophy. He was not an
abstract thinker; he says, indeed, plainly, “Of course we are not
naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards,
the abstract as such.... We cannot love or live upon _genus_ and
_species_, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies,
need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses.” But his psychology
gave him the power of making metaphysics real to people who are not
naturally metaphysical, by touching them with a personal appeal, and
showing their ethical significance; he translates the pure thought of
abstract thinkers into artistic and ethical values. It is interesting,
for instance, to contrast his development with the development of such
a man as Henry Sidgwick. Both were saved by the uneventful course of
academic life from the pressure of hard facts and of social problems.
Both began with a metaphysical and a literary bias; but Henry Sidgwick
was fitted for abstract speculation, and the literary and artistic
interests of his life tended to diminish; whereas in Pater’s case
the literary and artistic interests developed, and subordinated his
metaphysical interests to his artistic prepossessions.
In _Plato and Platonism_, then, Pater is absorbed in the task of
bringing out the personality of Plato. This he does with singular
skill. He shows that Plato was not an originator of philosophical
thought; that it is the form and not the matter that is new; and
that his charm lies in his romantic realism, his love of modest and
ingenuous youth, his dramatic sense of character; so that, as Pater
says, he had a resemblance to Thackeray, and was fully equipped to
be a writer of noble fiction. He shows that Plato was in no sense a
doctrinaire, but held that ideas and notions are not the consequence of
reason but the cause of it. That they are there to be discovered, not
non-existent and capable of being originated; he shows how Plato, in
the _Republic_, was presenting philosophy as an essentially practical
thing, a thing to mould life and conduct, an escape from the evils
of the world—a religion, in fact, and not a philosophical system.
Philosophy is, according to Plato, to teach us how to cultivate the
qualities by which we can obtain a mastery over ourselves, how to
arrive at a kind of musical proportion, the subordination of the parts
to the whole. “It is life itself,” he says, “action and character, he
proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience
of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above
all into its energetic or impassioned acts.”
Thus Plato, according to Pater, is an advocate of the _immutable_, of
law and principle. “Change is the irresistible law of our being....
Change, he protests, through the power of a true philosophy, shall not
be the law of our being.” He shows that Plato was by constitution an
emphatically sensuous nature, deeply sensible to impressions of beauty,
and to emotional relations with others; but that he regarded the appeal
of the senses as a species of moral education; that the philosophical
learner passed from the particular to the general, from the love of
precise and personal beauty, to the love of the central and inner
beauty.
And thus Plato is not so much a teacher as a noble and inspiriting
comrade; those who love Plato do not sit at his feet and absorb his
wisdom, but take service with him in his adventurous band, journeying
from the familiar scene and the beloved home to the remote and distant
mountains that close the horizon, but from which there may be a
prospect of hidden lands.
The whole book cannot be held to be exactly characteristic of Pater’s
deliberate style. It is composed not so much to embody his own dreams
as to make a personality, an age, a spirit, clear to younger minds;
but there is a sense of a delighted zest, a blithe freedom about it,
as though it were the work of a mind which had escaped from tyrannical
impulses and uneasy questionings into a gentle tranquillity of thought.
One feels that not only is the subject dear to him, but that those
whom he would address are also dear; there is thus an affectionate
solicitude, a buoyant easiness, about the book, as of a master speaking
simply and unconstrainedly among a band of eager and friendly pupils.
The book is full of echoes out of a well-filled mind, of Augustine and
Dante, of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Not only Plato himself, but the
other incidental figures are brilliantly touched. Socrates, himself
“rude and rough as some failure of his own old sculptor’s workshop,”
yet “everywhere, with what is like a physical passion for what _is_,
what is _true_—as one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly
concentration of soul on what God really made and meant us to know”; or
Pythagoras, that distant legendary figure, with his strange glimpses of
pre-existence, emerging as a brilliant, perhaps showy, personality, a
mysterious or mystical thaumaturge,—these are sharply and definitely
conceived.
Again, there is a beautiful chapter on Lacedaemon, and the decorous,
ordered, submissive system of the Dorians, which presented so strong
a contrast to the diffuse, unregulated, brilliant spirit of Ionian
communities. The Spartan theory of education, with its resemblance to
our own English system, developing the individual only in order to
subordinate him to the common welfare, repressing all eclectic, all
independent qualities, had a potent attraction for Pater’s mind, the
attraction that all systems have that promise tranquillity and settled
instincts as a reward for obedience, for a mind that desires guidance,
and to whom personal freedom has brought more anxiety than serenity.
The high value of this chapter is that it contrives to invest a system
which, barely and unsympathetically described, appears to be ineffably
dreary and unpicturesque, with the charm of cheerfulness and quietness
so characteristic of communities of a monastic order, a cheerfulness
which comes from the removal of personal responsibility, and the
substitution of unquestioning obedience—that highest of all luxuries
for indecisive and sensitive characters.
The book, then, is a beautiful thing, with a sense of recovered youth
blending with an older wisdom about it; a book admirably fitted to
attract and instruct an ingenuous mind; but lucid, interesting,
and gracious as it is, Pater does not here emerge as the _parfait
prosateur_, as Bourget called him; it was no doubt the delight of
feeling that in this book he had conferred a real educational benefit
upon those youthful spirits to whom his heart went out, that made him
rate the book so highly. He did not feel so sure whither the artistic
reveries, the metaphysical speculations, of his other works might
conduct them; but, for all that, criticism is right in setting a higher
value upon his more intimate self-revelations, upon the books in
which he uttered oracles, rather than on the book where he furthered
knowledge.
In the last year of Pater’s life he published one of the _Greek
Studies_—“The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” which we have already
considered, and two little sketches of travel—“Some Great Churches in
France,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ in March and June
of that year. “Notre-Dame d’Amiens” is a fine study of a great church,
dwelling on the lightness, the brightness, the “immense cheerfulness,”
of the building. The only very noteworthy passage is one in which he
contrasts Greek and Gothic architecture. He says that in Gothic art
“for the mere _melody_ of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were
of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got _harmony_,
the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the
same moment; and were gainers” ... “the vast complexity of the Gothic
style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the
expressiveness, the thousandfold influence, of the Catholic religion.”
Again in “Vézelay” (1894) we have a study in contrast, of a “majestic,
immoveable” church, which, with “its masses of almost unbroken masonry,
its _inertia_,” seems to have a certain kinship with imperial Rome. Its
almost savage character, he says, is hardly relieved by a great band of
energetic, realistic, coarsely executed sculpture, in which demons make
merry over the punishment of wickedness: “Bold, crude, original, the
work indicates delight in the power of reproducing fact, curiosity in
it, but little or no sense of beauty.”
But the end was at hand, although there was no hint or foreshadowing
of it. Never had Pater been more tranquil, serene, contented, than in
these last months. Increasing years, without diminishing strength,
concentration, or intellectual force, had brought him nothing but
what was good; the respect, the regard, the devotion, of friends; the
consciousness that he had now a perfect control of his art and its
resources. He had many designs and schemes for books that should be
written, and there seemed no reason why he should not have many years
before him of simple life and congenial activity; and so we come to his
last utterance.
The essay on “Pascal” has a deep significance among the writings of
Pater; it contains, thinly veiled under the guise of criticism, some
of his deepest thoughts on the great mystery of life—freewill and
necessity—and his views of orthodox theology. It is true that he is
nominally justifying Pascal and confuting the Jesuits; but there is
a passionate earnestness about his line of argument which shows only
too clearly that he was doing what it suited his natural reticence to
do—fighting like Teucer under the shield of Ajax, and taking a part,
an eager part, in the controversy between Liberalism and Authority.
Moreover, it is his last work; the work on which he was engaged in the
last hours of his life; the essay, indeed, never received the last
touches of that careful hand, and though substantially complete, it
breaks off in the middle of a sentence. This fact—that it was his last
deliberate utterance—gives it a special significance; even before he
had said his last word on the mystery of life, he knew all that there
is to know.
To take the theological side of the essay first, speaking of Pascal’s
half-contemptuous attempts to arrive at the true definition of
theological phrases, Pater thus comments upon the situation:—
“Pascal’s charges are those which may seem to lie ready to
hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought
and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are
professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which
terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity
with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the
strange vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.”
“The sin of the Jesuits,” he says, “is above all that sin,
unpardonable with men of the world _sans peur et sans reproche_,
of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may
be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially
little people when they interfere in great matters—faults
promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and
children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be saved in
some easy way, quite other than Pascal’s high, fine, chivalrous way
of gaining salvation.”
In these words breathes the accent of the liberal spirit, the spirit
which dares to look close into great questions; declines to admit more
than it can prove, or at least infer; refuses, at whatever loss of
serenity, to formulate its hopes and desires as certainties.
The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is that grace is always
vouchsafed in sufficient measure to overcome temptation, if only the
spirit chooses to make use of it by the exercise of its free choice.
“This doctrine,” says Pater, “is certainly, to use the familiar
expression, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding
of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as assuming them to be,
what they really are, at the worst, God’s silly sheep.”
Pater goes on to say, with an outspokenness which is hardly
characteristic of him, that the very opposite doctrine, the Calvinistic
doctrine of election both to reprobation and to salvation, would seem
to be strikingly confirmed by our own experience. Pascal himself, a
visibly elect soul, acting as it were by a certain irresistible impulse
of holiness, is an instance in point.
He makes, of course, no attempt at the solution of the insoluble
difficulty. But nowhere else in the whole of his writings does he
touch on the great dilemma, namely, that our consciousness tells us we
are free, our reason that we are bound. He only surveys it from the
spectatorial point of view.
“Who,” he says, “on a survey of life from outside would willingly
lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, for which
the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our respective
points of view?”
But Pater leaves us in little doubt as to the side on which his own
heart was engaged. It is clear that he felt that we are not, when our
humanity is sifted to the very bottom, independent beings; we are
deeply involved and hampered; something outside of us and anterior to
us determines our bent, our very path.
This last deep utterance of Pater’s has a strange significance when
taken side by side with the fact so often stated that he was thinking
of the possibility of receiving Anglican ordination. There could not
possibly be a greater mistake than this supposition. Perhaps, indeed,
there was a region of his mind in which the idea appealed to him, but
deeper down, in a secret chamber of thought, which in his writings at
all events he did not often visit, lay that consciousness of the hard,
dark, bare truth which, if a man once truly apprehends, prevents him
from figuring as a partisan, except through a certain sophistry, on the
side of authoritative religion.
This is the truth, disguise it as we will, that religion in its purest
form is not a solution of the world’s mystery, but a working theory of
morals. For all religions, even Christianity itself, tend to depend
upon certain assumptions, such as the continuance, in some form or
other, of our personal identity after death, of which no scientific
evidence is forthcoming. We may assume it, yielding to a passionate
intuition, but nothing can prevent it from being an assumption, an
intuition, which may perhaps transcend reason, but cannot wholly
satisfy it. And thus, however impassioned, however transcendent that
intuition may be, there must always remain a certain element of doubt,
in all sincere minds, as to the absolute certainty of the assumption.
Thus there must lie, in all reasoning men’s hearts, a streak of
agnosticism. The triumph of faith can never, until faith melts into
certainty, be of the same quality as the triumph of reason; and it
is upon the proportion of doubt to faith in any man’s mind that his
religious attitude depends. There is little question as to which way
Pater’s sympathies and hopes inclined; but this essay clearly reveals
that the doubt was there.
He touches with deep sympathy the strange and sad withdrawal of Pascal
from the world; his attempt, under the pressure of a painful and
unmanning disease, to find solace in asceticism, renunciation, and
the practice of austere pieties; it seems strange to Pater to find
that Pascal never fell under the aesthetic charm of the rites of the
Catholic Church, but found “a certain weariness, a certain puerility,
a certain unprofitableness, in them.” “He seems,” he adds, “to have
little sense of the beauty of holiness,” but to be absorbed by a
“sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy.”
He treats of Pascal from the literary side, with a whole-hearted
admiration. He says that he made the French language “as if by a new
creation, what it has remained—a pattern of absolutely unencumbered
expressiveness.” He dwells on the fragrant charm, the naturalness, of
the _Letters_, proceeding from one who was hardly a student, knowing
but two or three great books. And the _Pensées_ he considers to be pure
inspirations “penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark.” How could the
_Pensées_ be more nobly summarised than as “those great fine sayings
which seem to betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow
places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one’s feet”? They seem
to him to combine faultless expression, perfect economy of statement,
marvellous suggestiveness, with a “somewhat Satanic intimacy” with the
weaknesses of the human heart.
What kept Pascal from scepticism, or, rather, what threw him into
religion, was a bewildered, a terrified apprehension of the strange
inconsistency of human nature, the blending of meanness and greatness
which everywhere appears.
We may consider this essay, then, as Pater’s most deliberate utterance
on ethical things. It reveals him, I think, as a deep though unwilling
sceptic; it shows a soul athirst yet unsatisfied; it shows that the
region of beauty, both in art and religion, in which he strove to live,
was but an outer paradise in which he found what peace he could; but in
the innermost shrine all is dark and still.
On leaving London, Pater had settled, in 1893, in a house in St.
Giles’, Oxford. It is a quiet house with a plastered front of some
antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left is
a little passage leading to the back of the house. The inner arch is
surmounted with a quaint carved face. Here he settled with his sisters
in great contentment.
The President of Magdalen, Mr. T. H. Warren, speaking of the later
Oxford days, writes:—
“One would have said that there was a kind of placid piety, an
inner content, which somehow manifested itself in him. He did
not talk a great deal, yet always enough. What I think struck me
most about him was a sort of gentleness in his whole manner, in
perception and predilection, almost at times a softness,—and
yet it was balanced by hardness of decision too. He was a very
familiar figure, with his pale face, strong jaw, heavy, chopped,
German-looking moustache, tall hat and apple-green tie. He was
often seen walking, and latterly he rather laboured in his
walk, which gave, rightly or wrongly, the idea of conscious or
half-conscious suffering.... At the Dante Society he did not say
much, but what always struck me was that he spoke with a certain
authority and a strong common sense; and, moreover, with what
appeared a personal and natural knowledge of what a poet or a
literary artist in his temperament and habits really is....
“It seemed to me that he cultivated a wise, grave passiveness, a
gentle susceptibility, a kind of soft impressionability; that he
tried to keep, and did keep, a sort of _bloom_ upon his mind. I
never remember a single unkind criticism or remark.... My opinion
of him is rather an impression than an opinion, and that is, I
think, what he would himself have wished—and what is fairest too.
“Can I put it in a few words? He expressed life for himself and
to others in terms of sensations, of impressions. These he might
analyse, combine, and re-combine, but together they formed his
working synthesis. I did not really know him in the earlier days,
when in his written work the sensuousness and the referability of
everything to sensation was so avowed. I only knew him well much
later when he had become a kind of quietist: what the real man was
I could not say.”
In the spring of 1894 Pater went to Glasgow to receive the honorary
degree of LL.D., a little piece of recognition which pleased him, and
took the opportunity of visiting some of the Northern Cathedrals.
In the summer of the same year he was for the first time in his
life seriously ill. He had an attack of rheumatic fever and was
confined to his bed. But he made an apparent recovery, and became
convalescent. He was allowed to leave his bed and come downstairs. He
was full of cheerfulness and interest, though he was feeling weak;
it is certain, however, that there was something organically wrong,
though he allowed himself, with the instinct of one who enjoyed the
ordinary routine of life to the full, and who was impatient of invalid
conditions, to resume his activities too soon. Still there seemed
no reason to suppose that he was acting imprudently. He was working
at the lecture on Pascal, which was to have been delivered in July,
when, in consequence of writing too near to an open window, he had an
attack of pleurisy, which still further reduced his strength. Again
he became convalescent, and left his room on July 29 without ill
effects. But on the morning of Monday, July 30, 1894, at ten o’clock,
on coming downstairs, he had a sudden attack of heart failure, and died
apparently without suffering. If he had lived five days longer he would
have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was buried in the Holywell
cemetery at Oxford, in the presence of many of his old friends. It is
melancholy to feel that in all probability his life might have been
prolonged for some years, if he had but realised how much reduced in
strength he was. But it was the happiest kind of end that could befall
a man of Pater’s sensitive and apprehensive temperament. He had always,
from his earliest years, been much preoccupied with the thought of
death, and even with the effort to reconcile himself to it. It was
strange and beautiful that it should, after all, have befallen him so
quietly and simply. He felt no shadow of death, no mournful forebodings
of mortality. He had won a secure fame, he was surrounded with respect
and affection, he had fulfilled in patience and with much quiet
happiness a great task; and so with no decay of faculty, no diminution
of zest and enthusiasm, no melancholy foreboding, death came to him as
a quiet friend and beckoned him smilingly away.
Yet as we realise that this wistful, this inquisitive spirit had indeed
drawn near to the gate, through which he had seen others pass, had
indeed endured the passage, upon the incidents and impressions of
which he had often meditated with an intense and reverent curiosity,
the imagination torments and perplexes itself with the wonder as to
what the end or the awakening may have been, whether indeed he ever
knew, in some moment of swimming gaze and darkened eyes, that he
should not return to life and daylight. We find our minds dwelling
upon the words with which he ended the finest of all his essays, that
on “Leonardo da Vinci,” written twenty-five years before. We lose
ourselves “in speculating how one who had been always so desirous of
beauty, but desired it always in such definite and precise forms, as
hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and
experienced the last curiosity.”