by Walter Pater
That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth is of like stuff with the stars: — now the familiar knowledge of children — dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly exhilarating sense of enlargement in the intellectual, nay! the physical atmosphere. And his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that broader survey, which made the utmost one could ever know of the earth seem but a very little chapter in the endless history of God the Spirit, rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to evolve from matter new conditions. The immoveable earth, as we term it, beneath one’s feet! — Why, one almost felt the movement, the respiration, of God in it. And yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, in the prospect, the music! “The music of the spheres!” — he could listen to it in a perfection such as had never been conceded to Plato, to Pythagoras even. —
Veni, Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita,
Imple superna gratia,
Quae tu creasti pectora.+
Yes! The grand old Christian hymns, perhaps the grandest of them all, seemed to lend themselves in the chorus, to be deepened immeasurably under this new intention. It is not always, or often, that men’s abstract ideas penetrate the temperament, touch the animal spirits, affect conduct. It was what they did with Bruno. The ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe — infinite dust, in truth, starry as it may look to our terrestrial eyes — that prospect from which the mind of Pascal recoiled so painfully, induced in Bruno only the delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy, since every one of those infinite worlds must have its sympathetic inhabitants. Scruples of conscience, if he felt such, might well be pushed aside for the “excellency” of such knowledge as this. To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a kind of sullen ingratitude; — the one sin to believe, directly or indirectly, in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, as being implicitly a denial of the indwelling spirit. — A free spirit, certainly, as of old! 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. The world was even larger than youthful appetite, youthful capacity. Let theologian and every other theorist beware how he narrowed either. “The plurality of worlds!” — How petty in comparison seemed those sins, the purging of which was men’s chief motive in coming to places like this convent, whence Bruno, with vows broken, or for him obsolete, presently departed. A sonnet, expressive of the joy with which he returned to so much more than the liberty of ordinary men, does not suggest that he was driven from it. Though he must have seemed to those who surely had loved so loveable a creature there to be departing, like the “prodigal” of the Gospel, into the farthest of possible far countries, there is no proof of harsh treatment on their part, or even of an effort to detain him.
It happens most naturally of course that those who undergo the shock of spiritual or intellectual change sometimes fail to recognise their debt to the deserted cause: — How much of the heroism, or other high quality, of their rejection has really been the product of what they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk; and his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a religion; very new indeed, yet a religion. He came forth well-fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he had been played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum, everywhere he seemed to be but the instrument of some subtly materialised spiritual force, like that of the old Greek prophets, that “enthusiasm” he was inclined to set so high, or like impulsive Pentecostal fire. His hunger to know, fed dreamily enough at first within the convent walls, as he wandered over space and time, an indefatigable reader of books, would be fed physically now by ear and eye, by large matter-of-fact experience, as he journeys from university to university; less as a teacher than a courtier, a citizen of the world, a knight-errant of intellectual light. The philosophic need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing else, that whole age of the later Renaissance was invincibly young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world, ever renewing its youth, became the motive of a life as mobile, as ardent, as itself, of a continual journey, the venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever-new discoveries, of renewed conviction.
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world: — that must involve the alliance, the congruity, of all things with one another, of the teacher’s personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, of the spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance, great reinforcements of sympathy. In his own case, certainly, when Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were alike the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as that audience might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passing irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was become a visible person talking with you.
And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he presented himself to his audience in the comely Dominican habit. The reproachful eyes were to-day for the most part kindly observant, registering every detail of that singular company, all the physiognomic effects which come, by the way, on people, and, through them, on things, — the “shadows of ideas” in men’s faces — his own pleasantly expressive with them, in turn. De Umbris Idearum: it was the very title of his discourse. There was “heroic gaiety” there: only, as usual with gaiety, it made the passage of a peevish cloud seem all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, the face was one that looked, after all, made for suffering, — already half pleading, half defiant, as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair’s-breadth from its estimate of yourself.
Like nature, like nature in that opulent country of his birth which the “Nolan,” as he delighted to call himself, loved so well that, born wanderer as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and was hardly more fastidious in speech than the “asinine” vulgar he so deeply contemned. His rank, un-weeded eloquence, abounding in play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with here and there a shameless image, — the product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation — was akin to the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in such irregularities as manifest power. Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old pagan religion, and for the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of that age of the Renaissance. To excite, to surprise, to move men’s minds, like the volcanic earth as if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, to bring them to the birth, was after all the proper function of the teacher, however unusual it might seem in so ancient a university. “Fantastic!” — from first to last, that was the descriptive epithet; and the very word, carrying us to
Shakespeare, reminds one how characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre- eminently due to Italy. A man of books, he had yet so vivid a hold on people and things, that the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of his old readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than was then actually exposed by him; to be himself enjoying the fulness of a great outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the curiosity of the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you seemed to see that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified kindling from word to word. What Gaston then heard was, in truth, the first fervid expression of all those contending views out of which his written works would afterwards be compacted, of course with much loss of heat in the process. Satyric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+ insult, insolence, to what the old satyrs of fable embodied, — the volcanic South is kindly prolific of these, and Bruno abounded in mockery; though it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, for Plato’s genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harsh laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtly exterior, with mordant words, in unabashed criticism of all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the “Triumphant Beast,” the “installation of the ass,” shining even there amid the university folk, — those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them, however gravely, a worthless “parchment and paper” currency. In truth, Aristotle, the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending, as Bruno conceived, to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of things from the eyes of men. “Habit” — the last word of his practical philosophy — indolent habit! what would this mean, in the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which, because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them, are most opposed to the essential quickness and freedom of the spirit?
The Shadows of Ideas: De Umbris Idearum: such, in set terms, have been the subject of Bruno’s discourse, appropriately to the still only half emancipated intellect of his audience: — on approximations to truth: the divine imaginations, as seen, darkly, more bearably by weaker faculties, in words, in visible facts, in their shadows merely. According to the doctrine of “Indifference,” indeed, there would be no real distinction between substance and shadow. In regard to man’s feeble wit, however, varying degrees of knowledge constituted such a distinction. “Ideas, and Shadows of Ideas”: the phrase recurred often; and, as such mystic phrases will, fixed itself in Gaston’s fancy, though not quite according to the mind of the speaker; accommodated rather to the thoughts which just then preoccupied his own. As already in his life there had been the Shadows of Events, — the indirect yet fatal influence there of deeds in which he had no part, so now, for a time, he seemed to fall under the spell, the power, of the Shadows of Ideas, of Bruno’s Ideas; in other words, of those indirect suggestions, which, though no necessary part of, yet inevitably followed upon, his doctrines. What, for instance, might be the proper practical limitations of that telling theory of “the coincidence, the indifference, of opposites”?
To that true son of the Renaissance, in the light of his large, antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon some deeper and more radical antagonism, between two tendencies of men’s minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? Between Christ and the world, say! — Christ and the flesh! — or about that so very ancient antagonism between good and evil. Was there any place really left for imperfection, moral or otherwise, in a world, wherein the minutest atom, the lightest thought, could not escape from God’s presence? Who should note the crime, the sin, the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit, which was incapable of mis- shapen births? In proportion as man raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him, just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. There were no weeds, no “tares,” in the endless field. The truly illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would. Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had sometimes been the precept, which larger theories of “inspiration” had bequeathed to practice. “Of all the trees of the garden thou mayest freely eat! — If ye take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you! — And I think that I, too, have the spirit of God.”
Bruno, a citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its proper speculative limits. But a kind of secrecy, an ambiguous atmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and the doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters, the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel “reign of the spirit” — what it might actually be — would hardly fail to find in Bruno’s doctrines a method of turning poison into food, to live and thrive thereon; an art, to Paris, in the intellectual and moral condition of that day, hardly less opportune than had it related to physical poisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or practical equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in his very manner of speech, in that rank, un-weeded eloquence of his, which seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent alike, rather than to art, distinguishing, rejecting, refining. Commission and omission! sins of the former surely had the natural preference. And how would Paolo and Francesca have read this lesson? How would Henry, and Margaret of the “Memoirs,” and other susceptible persons then present, read it, especially if the opposition between practical good and evil traversed diametrically another distinction, the “opposed points” of which, to Gaston for instance, could never by any possibility become “indifferent,” — the distinction, namely, between the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and wrong in the matter of art?
NOTES:
132. From Aus der Harzreise, “Bergidylle 2”: “Tannenbaum, mit grünen Fingern,” Stanza 10
151. The beginning of a hymn used by the Catholic Church to commemorate solemn occasions. Dryden’s translation: “Creator Spirit, by whose aid / The world’s foundations first were laid, / Come visit every pious mind, Come pour Thy joys on human kind.”
157. Transliteration: hybris. Liddell and Scott definition: “wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength, passion, etc.”
THE END
The Non-Fiction
Pater’s father died while Walter was an infant and the family moved to Enfield, London. Walter attended Enfield Grammar School and was individually tutored by the headmaster.
Queen’s College, University of Oxford — Pater enrolled in 1858 and took a Second in literae humaniores in 1862.
STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE
As an undergraduate at Oxford, Pater was a “reading man”, with literary and philosophical interests beyond the prescribed texts. Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne were among his early favourite authors. Visiting his aunt and sisters in Germany during the vacations, he learned German and began to read Hegel and Teutonic philosophers. The scholar Benjamin Jowett was struck by his potential and offered to give him private lessons. However, in Jowett’s classes Pater was a disappointment, taking only a Second in literae humaniores in 1862. After graduating, he remained in Oxford and taught Classics and Philosophy to private students. His years of study and reading eventually rewarded him, when he was offered a classical fellowship in 1864 at Brasenose on the strength of his ability to teach modern German philosophy and he settled down to a university career.
The opportunities for wider study and teaching at Oxford, combined with formative visits to the Continent, particularly Italy, resulted in Pater’s fascination with literature and visual art. He started to write articles and criticism, beginning with an essay on the metaphysics of Coleridge, ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ contributed anonymously
in 1866 to the Westminster Review. A few months later his essay on Winckelmann (1867), an early expression of his intellectual and artistic idealism, appeared in the same review, followed by The Poems of William Morris (1868), expressing his admiration for romanticism. In the following years the Fortnightly Review printed his essays on Leonardo da Vinci (1869), Sandro Botticelli (1870) and Michelangelo (1871). These three works, along with other similar pieces, were collected in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), renamed in the second and later editions The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
The essay on Leonardo contains Pater’s celebrated reverie on the Mona Lisa, regarded by some as the most famous piece of writing about any picture in art history. The Botticelli essay was the first in English on the painter, contributing to the revival of interest in the artist. An essay on The School of Giorgione (Fortnightly Review, 1877), added to the third edition (1888), contains Pater’s much-quoted maxim “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (i.e. the arts seek to unify subject-matter and form, and music is the only art in which subject and form are seemingly one). The final paragraphs of the 1868 William Morris essay were reworked as the book’s ‘Conclusion’.
This brief ‘Conclusion’ was to be Pater’s most influential, yet controversial piece of writing. It argues that our physical lives are made up of scientific processes and elemental forces in perpetual motion, “renewed from moment to moment but parting sooner or later on their ways”. In the mind, claims Pater, “the whirlpool is still more rapid”: a drift of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, reduced to impressions “unstable, flickering, inconstant”, “ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality”; and “with the passage and dissolution of impressions... [there is a] continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves”. Since all is in flux, to get the most from life we must learn to discriminate through “sharp and eager observation”. "While all melts under our feet," Pater further explains, "we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, or work of the artist's hands. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us in the brilliancy of their gifts is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." The resulting "quickened, multiplied consciousness" counters our insecurity in the face of the flux.”