"Their impatience," was the answer once given by Cardinal Newman to
the question, What is the chief fault of heresiarchs? In this category
Walter Pater never could have been included, for his life was a long
patience. As Newman sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so
Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought and expression, of
which his work is a supreme exemplar in modern English literature.
Flaubert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympathy, toiled no
harder for the perfect utterance of his ideas than did this retiring
Oxford man of letters. And, like his happy account of Raphael's growth,
Pater was himself a "genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek
scholarship into genius."
Walter Pater's intimate life was once almost legendary. We heard
more of him a quarter of a century ago than yesterday. This does not
mean that his vogue has declined; on the contrary, he is a force at
the present such as he never was either at Oxford or London. But
of the living man, notwithstanding his shyness, stray notes crept
into print. He wrote occasional reviews. He had disciples. He had
adversaries who deplored his--admittedly remote--immoral influence
upon impressionable, "slim, gilt souls"; he had critics who detected
the truffle of evil in savouring his exotic style. When he died,
in 1894, the air was cleared by his devoted friends, Edmund Gosse,
Lionel Johnson, William Sharp, Arthur Symons, and some of his Oxford
associates, Dr. Bussell and Mr. Shadwell. It was proved without a
possibility of doubt that the popular conception of the man was far
from the reality; that the real Pater was a plain liver and an austere
thinker; that he was not the impassive Mandarin of literature pictured
by some; that the hedonism, epicureanism, cyrenaicism of which he had
been vaguely accused had been a confounding of intellectual substances,
a slipshod method of thought he abhorred; that his entire career had
been spent in the pursuit of an æsthetic and moral perfection and its
embodiment in prose of a rarely individual and haunting music. Recall
his half-petulant, half-ironical exclamation of disgust to Mr. Gosse:
"I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'; it produces such a bad
effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." He would have
been quite in accord with Paul Bourget's dictum that "there is no such
thing as health, or the contrary, in the world of the soul"; Bourget,
who, lecturing later at Oxford, pronounced Walter Pater "un parfait
prosateur."
Despite the attempt to chain him to the chariots of the Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood, Pater, like Chopin, during the Romantic turmoil, stood
aloof from the heat and dust of its battles. He was at first deeply
influenced by Goethe and Ruskin, and was a friend of Swinburne's; he
wrote of the Morris poetry; but his was not the polemical cast of mind.
The love of spiritual combat, the holy zeal of John Henry Newman, of
Keble, of Hurrell Froude, were not in his bones. And so his scholar's
life, the measured existence of a recluse, was uneventful; but measured
by the results, what a vivid, intense, life it was. There is, however,
very little to tell of Walter Pater. His was the interior life. In his
books is his life--hasn't some one said that all great literature is
autobiographical?
There are articles by the late William Sharp and by George Moore. The
former in Some Personal Recollections of Walter Pater, written in 1894,
gave a vivid picture of the man, though it remained for Mr. Moore
to discover his ugly face and some peculiar minor characteristics.
Sharp met Pater in 1880 at the house of George T. Robinson, in Gower
Street, that delightful meeting-place of gifted people. Miss A.
Mary F. Robinson, now Mme. Duclaux, was the tutelary genius. She
introduced Sharp to Pater. The blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, was
of the party. Pater at that time was a man of medium height, stooping
slightly, heavily built, with a Dutch or Flemish cast of features, a
pale complexion, a heavy moustache--"a possible Bismarck, a Bismarck
who had become a dreamer," adds the keen observer. A friendship was
struck up between the pair. Pater came out of his shell, talked
wittily, paradoxically, and later at Oxford showed his youthful
admirer the poetic side of his singularly complex nature. There are
conversations recorded and letters printed which would have added to
the value of Mr. Benson's memoir.
Mr. Moore's recollections are slighter, though extremely engaging.
Above all, with his trained eye of a painter, he sketches for us
another view of Pater, one not quite so attractive. Mr. Moore saw a
very ugly man--"it was like looking at a leaden man, an uncouth figure,
badly moulded, moulded out of lead, a large, uncouth head, the head
of a clergyman,... a large, overarching skull, and small eyes; they
always seemed afraid of you, and they shifted quickly. There seemed
to be a want of candour in Pater's face,... an abnormal fear of his
listener and himself. There was little hair on the great skull, and his
skull and his eyes reminded me a little of the French poet Verlaine, a
sort of domesticated Verlaine, a Protestant Verlaine." His eyes were
green-gray, and in middle life he wore a brilliant apple-green tie and
the inevitable top-hat and frock coat of an urban Englishman. In one of
his early essays Max Beerbohm thus describes Pater: "a small, thick,
rock-faced man, whose top-hat and gloves of _bright_ dog skin struck
one of the many discords in that little city of learning and laughter.
The serried bristles of his mustachio made for him a false-military
air." Pater is said to have come of Dutch stock. Mr. Benson declares
that it has not been proved. He had the amiable fancy that he may
have had in his veins some of the blood of Jean Baptiste Pater, the
painter. His father was born in New York. He went to England, and near
London in 1839 Walter Horatio, his second son, was born. To The Child
in the House and Emerald Uthwart, both "imaginary portraits," we may
go for the early life of Pater, as Marius is the idealized record of
his young manhood. When a child he was fond of playing Bishop, and
the bent of his mind was churchly, further fostered by his sojourn at
Canterbury. He matriculated at Oxford in 1858 as a commoner of Queen's
College, where he was graduated after being coached by Jowett, who
said to his pupil, "I think you have a mind that will come to great
eminence." Years afterward the Master of Balliol seems to have changed
his opinion, possibly urged thereto by the parody of Pater as Mr. Rose
by Mr. Mallock in The New Republic. Jowett spoke of Pater as "the
demoralizing moralizer," while Mr. Freeman could see naught in him but
"the mere conjurer of words and phrases." Others have denounced his
"pulpy magnificence of style," and Max Beerbohm declared that Pater
wrote English as if it were a dead language; possibly an Irish echo
of Pater's own assertion that English should be written as a learned
language.
He became a Fellow of Brasenose, and Oxford--with the exception of
a few years spent in London, and his regular annual summer visits
to Italy, France, and Germany, where he took long walks and studied
the churches and art galleries--became his home. Contradictory
legends still float in the air regarding his absorbed demeanour, his
extreme sociability, his companionable humour, his chilly manner,
his charming home, his barely furnished room, with the bowl of dried
rose leaves; his sympathies, antipathies, nervousness, and baldness,
and, like Baudelaire, of his love of cats, and a host of mutually
exclusive qualities. Mr. Zangwill relates that he told Pater he had
discovered a pun in one of his essays. Thereat, great embarrassment on
Pater's part. Symons, who knew him intimately, tells of his reading
the dictionary--that "pianoforte of writers," as Mr. Walter Raleigh
cleverly names it--for the opposite reason that Gautier did, i.e.,
that he might learn what words to avoid. Another time Symons asked him
the meaning of a terrible sentence, Ruskinian in length and involution.
Pater carefully scanned the page, and after a few minutes said with
a sigh of relief: "Ah, I see the printer has omitted a dash." Yet,
with all this meticulous precision, Pater was a man with an individual
style, and not a mere stylist. What he said was of more importance than
the saying of it.
The portraits of Pater are, so his friends declare, unlike him. He had
irregular features, and his jaw was prognathic; but there was great
variety of expression, and the eyes, set deeply in the head, glowed
with a jewelled fire when he was deeply aroused. In Mr. Greenslet's
wholly admirable appreciation, there is a portrait executed by the
unfortunate Simeon Solomon, and dated 1872. There is in Mosher's
edition of the Guardian Essays a copy of Will Rothenstein's study,
a characteristic piece of work, though Mr. Benson says it is not
considered a resemblance. And I have a picture, a half-tone, from some
magazine, the original evidently photographic, that shows a Pater much
more powerful in expression than the others, and without a hint of the
ambiguous that lurks in Rothenstein's drawing and Moore's pen portrait.
Pater never married. Like Newman, he had a talent for friendship. As
with Newman, Keble, that beautiful soul, made a deep impression on him,
and, again like Newman, to use his own words, he went his way "like one
on a secret errand."
And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a certain occasion advised
Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless
would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. Pater is a
dangerous guide for students. This theme of style, so admirably
vivified in Mr. Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare during
the days when Pater was slowly producing one book every few years--he
wrote five in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two a year,
thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The principal
accusation brought against the Pater method of work and the Pater
style is that it is lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase,
"it is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, appears not
more than a half dozen times in its full flowering during the course
of a century. The French write all but faultless prose. To match
Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go to Ruskin, Pater, and
Newman. When we say: "Let us write simple, straightforward English,"
we are setting a standard that has been reached of late years only by
Thackeray, Newman, and few besides. There are as many victims of the
"natural English" formula as there are of the artificial formula of a
Pater or a Stevenson. The former write careless, flabby, colourless,
undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the
vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the _cliché_ is king
of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine
writing," are more easily detected.
Now, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural" style.
Even Newman confesses to laborious days, though he wrote with the idea
uppermost, and with no thought of the style. Renan, perfect master,
disliked the idea of teaching "style"--as if it could be taught!--yet
he worked over his manuscripts. We all know the Flaubert case. With
Pater one must not rush to the conclusion that because he produced
slowly and with infinite pains, he was all artificiality. Prose for
him was a fine art. He would no more have used a phrase coined by
another man than he would have worn his hat. He embroidered upon the
canvas of his ideas the grave and lovely phrases we envy and admire.
Prose--"cette ancienne et très jalouse chose," as it was called by
Stéphane Mallarmé--was for Pater at once a pattern and a cadence,
a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid "poetic-prose," the
great stillness of his style--atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet
undertones--is always in the rhythm of prose. Speed is absent; the
_tempo_ is usually lenten; brilliance is not pursued; but there is
a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp and power. The sentences uncoil
their many-coloured lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal
imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that
occasionally confuses; for compensation we are given newly orchestrated
harmonies, as mordant, as salient, and as strange as some chords in
the music of Chopin, Debussy and Richard Strauss. Sane it always
is--simple seldom. And, as Symons observes: "Under the soft and musical
phrases an inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well.
Link is added silently but faultlessly to link; the argument marches,
carrying you with it, while you fancy you are only listening to the
music with which it keeps step." It is very personal, and while it
does not make melody for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the
idea it clothes. Read aloud Ruskin and then apply the same vocal
test--Flaubert's procedure--to Pater, and the magnificence of the
older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will
make it captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, more
subtle, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in
eloquence slightly muffled, his last manner hinted that he had sought
for newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, employing his own
words concerning another theme: "It is a beauty wrought from within,...
the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic
reveries and exquisite passions."
The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Browne's richer, there
are deeper organ tones in De Quincey's, Ruskin's excels in effects,
rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is subtler, more sinuous,
more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it
sometimes is, and its rich polyphony palls if you are not in the
mood; and in greater measure than the prose of the other masters,
for the world is older and Pater was weary of life. But a suggestion
of morbidity may be found in the writings of every great writer from
Plato to Dante, from Shakespeare to Goethe; it is the faint spice of
mortality that lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures.
Beautiful art has been challenged as corrupting. There may be a grain
of truth in the charge. But man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art
was invented to console, disquiet, and arouse him. Whenever a poet
appears he is straightway accused of tampering with the moral code;
it is mediocrity's mode of adjusting violent mental disproportions.
But persecution never harmed a genuine talent, and the accusations
against the art of Pater only provoked from him such beautiful books
as Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean, and Plato and Platonism.
Therefore let us be grateful to the memory of his enemies.
There is another Pater, a Pater far removed from the one who wove such
silken and coloured phrases. If he sometimes recalls Keats in the
rich texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Herbert
Spencer. There are early essays of his that are as cold, as logically
adamant, and as tortuous as sentences from the Synthetic Philosophy.
Pater was a metaphysician before he became an artist. Luckily for us,
his tendency to bald theorising was subdued by the broad humanism of
his temperament. There are not many "purple patches" in his prose,
"purple" in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no "fringes of the north
star" style, to use South's mocking expression. He never wrote in sheer
display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern
drama he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider
his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, setting aside
those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione,
and Botticelli. As Mr. Benson puts it, Pater was not a modern
scientific or archæological critic, but the fact that Morelli has
proved the Concert of Giorgione not to be by that master, or that Vinci
is not all Pater says he is, does not vitiate the essential values of
his criticism.
Like Maurice Barrès, Pater was an egoist of the higher type; he
seldom left the twilight of his _tour d'ivoire_; yet his work is
human and concrete to the core. Nothing interested him so much as the
human quality in art. This he ever sought to disengage. Pater was a
deeply religious nature _au fond_, perhaps addicted a trifle to moral
preciosity, and, as 'Mr. Greenslet says, a lyrical pantheist. His
essay on Pascal, without plumbing the ethical depths as does Leslie
Stephen's study of the same thinker, gives us a fair measure of his
own religious feelings. A pagan with Anatole France in his worship
of Greek art and literature, his profounder Northern temperament, a
Spartan temperament, strove for spiritual things, for the vision of
things behind the veil. The Paters had been Roman Catholic for many
generations; his father was not, and he was raised in the Church of
England. But the ritual of the older Church was for him a source of
delight and consolation. Mr. Benson deserves unstinted praise for his
denunciation of the pseudo-Paterians, the self-styled disciples, who,
totally misinterpreting Pater's pure philosophy of life, translated
the more ephemeral phases of his cyrenaicism into the grosser terms
of a gaudy æsthetic. These defections pained the thinker, whose
study of Plato had extorted praise from Jowett. He even withdrew the
much-admired conclusion of The Renaissance because of the wilful
misconstructions put upon it. He never achieved the ataraxia of his
beloved master. And Oxford was grudging of her favour to him long after
the world had acclaimed his genius. Sensitive he was, though Mr. Gosse
denies the stories of his suffering from harsh criticism; but there
were some forms of criticism that he could not overlook. Books like his
Plato and Marius the Epicurean were adequate answers to detractors.
Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work;
too much the artist for art's sake, he may never trouble the greater
currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers,
the critic whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer
of a polyphonic prose-music that recalls the performance of harmonious
adagio within the sonorous spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the
windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favourite contention
of his that all the arts constantly aspire toward the condition of
music. This idea is the keynote of his poetic scheme, the keynote of
Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius, carried
his life long "in his bosom across a crowded public place--his own
soul."