by Walter Pater
In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way from pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the essayists of 1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they have been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is exact, truthful, and imaginative:
Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still be sitting at their street door, though therby they offer Age to Scorn . . .
and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and commonplace:
With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. . . .
It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which includes Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the contemporary dilemma — that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.
The Biographies
Pater, c. 1901
WALTER PATER by A. C. Benson
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE
CHAPTER II. EARLY WRITINGS
CHAPTER III. OXFORD LIFE
CHAPTER IV. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
CHAPTER V. LONDON LIFE
CHAPTER VI. LATER WRITINGS
CHAPTER VII. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925) was an English essayist, poet, author and academic.
PREFACE
IN the absence of any official biography of Walter Pater, it has been necessary to collect information as to the events of his life from his relatives and friends. My thanks are due, in the first place, to Miss Pater and Miss Clara Pater, his sisters, who have given me the most kind and courteous assistance throughout; to Dr. Shadwell, Provost of Oriel, Pater’s oldest friend and literary executor, of whose sympathy and interest it is impossible to speak too gratefully; to Dr. Bussell, Vice-Principal of Brasenose, who has communicated to me many important particulars; to Mr. Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen; to Dr. Daniel, Provost of Worcester, and Mrs. Daniel; to Mr. Basil Champneys; to Mr. Humphry Ward, formerly Fellow of Brasenose; to Mr. Douglas Ainslie; to Miss Paget (Vernon Lee), and others who have put their recollections at my disposal; to Mr. Edmund Gosse, who has permitted me to use his published materials; to Mr. Howard Sturgis and Mr. C. Fairfax Murray for careful criticism; to Miss Beatrice Layman, who has given me invaluable help in verification and correction.
The books and articles which I have consulted, and to some of which reference is made in the following pages, are the original editions of Pater’s volumes, of various dates, and the Collected Edition of his works, edited by Dr. Shadwell, 1902-1904 (Macmillan and Co.); Essays from the Guardian, privately printed in 1896, and since published 1901 (Macmillan and Co.); A Short History of Modem English Literature, 1898 (Heinemann); Critical Kit-Kats, 1896 (Heinemann), and an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1895 (Smith, Elder, and Co.), by Mr. Edmund Gosse; Walter Pater, by Mr. Ferris Greenslet, in the Contemporary Men of Letter Series, 1904 (Heinemann); an essay, Walter Pater, in Studies in Prose and Verse, by Mr. Arthur Symons, 1904 (J. M. Dent); and an article in the Fortnightly Review, “The Work of Mr. Pater,” by Lionel Johnson, September 1894 (Chapman and Hall).
A. C. B.
CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE
VERY little is recorded and still less is known about the pedigree of Pater. It is only in the main line of families that are established in ancestral estates, and whose home is inherited by a succession of heirs, that family traditions are apt to accumulate.
The name Pater is uncommon in England, and not at all uncommon in Holland, the Dutch frequently latinising their names; this, and the fact that a Dutch Admiral of that name settled in England at the time of William of Orange, made some members of the Pater family think they were originally of Dutch extraction; but this has never been verified. In a journey through Holland, Walter Pater was much interested in a picture at Amsterdam, by Van der Heist, of archers, with a tablet giving the names of the winners in a contest of skill; at the top of the list stands the name Pater.
The forefathers of Walter Pater were living at Weston-Underwood, near Olney in Buckinghamshire, the home of Cowper, in the eighteenth century, and some verses in the handwriting of the poet were preserved by their descendants. One of the Olney Paters emigrated to America; and here Richard Glode Pater, the father of Walter Pater, was born. Early in the nineteenth century the household returned to England, settling at Shadwell, between Wapping and Stepney; and here Richard Pater practised medicine, careless of money and success alike, a man of unobtrusive benevolence, labouring at the relief of suffering among poor people, who often could not afford to pay for his advice. Here he married a Miss Hill: four children were born to him, two sons, of whom the elder, William Thompson Pater, became a doctor and died in 1887, and two daughters. Walter Horatio Pater was born in 1839, on August 4th. Dr. Richard Pater died so early that his famous son could hardly remember him. After his death the household moved to Enfield, and here at an old house, now demolished, with a big garden, in the neighbourhood of Chase Side, the children were brought up. This quiet life was varied by visits to a place called Fish Hall, near Hadlow in Kent, the residence of Walter Pater’s cousin and godmother, Mrs. Walter May.
It is stated in biographical notices of Pater that for some generations the sons of the family had been brought up as Catholics, the daughters as Anglicans. But this has been too much insisted upon; as a matter of fact the Roman Catholicism in the family was of late date. Walter Pater’s great-grandfather was a convert, having married a lady of great piety and sweetness, whose mother’s maiden name was Gage, belonging to an old Roman Catholic family in Suffolk. Richard Pater, Walter’s father, quitted the Roman Church before his marriage, and adopted no particular form of faith; and Walter Pater was brought up as an Anglican.
At the age of fourteen the boy was sent to the King’s School, Canterbury, where he seems to have been regarded at first as idle and backward; but be was popular in spite of an entire indifference to games. Not till he entered the sixth form did his intellectual ambition awaken.
It would be interesting to know something of the thoughts of this grave, silent, and friendly boy through the impressionable years; but, like many boys of ability, he was affected by a sensitive shyness, a reticence about his inner thoughts. Cheerful, lively, chattering children, who too often, alas! degenerate into the bores of later life, can generally talk easily and unaffectedly about their tastes and interests, and blithely reveal the slender sparkling stream of their thoughts. But with boys of perceptive and meditative temperaments it is
mostly far otherwise. They find themselves overmastered by feelings which they cannot express, and which they are ashamed of trying to express for fear of being thought eccentric. Pater was always apt to be reticent about his own interior feelings, and confided them only to the more impersonal medium of his writings. He had no taste at any time for indulging in reminiscence, and tended rather to be the recipient of other people’s thoughts, which he welcomed and interpreted with ready sympathy, than to be garrulous about the details of his own life, which, with characteristic humility, he was disposed to consider destitute of interest.
But one trait of character does undoubtedly emerge. He was instinctively inclined to a taste for symbolical ceremony of every kind. In the family circle he was fond of organising little processional pomps, in which the children were to move with decorous solemnity. He looked forward to taking orders in the Church of England; and this bias was strengthened by a visit he paid, as a little boy, to a house of some friends at Hursley. There he met Keble, who had a great devotion to children. Keble took a fancy to the quiet serious child, walked with him, and spoke with him of the religious life, in a way that made a deep impression on the boy’s mind, though they never met again.
There are two of Pater’s studies, The Child in the House and Emerald Uthwart, with, which it is obvious that a certain autobiographical thread is interwoven. But it is necessary to resist the temptation to take either of them as in any sense a literal representation of facts. Rather it may be said that Pater’s early years supplied him with a delicate background of reminiscence, upon which he embroidered a richer ornament of dreamful thought, using, in his own phrase, the finer sort of memory.
It is clear, however, that he was instinctively alive to impressions of sense, and that his mind was early at work observing and apprehending a certain quality in things perceived and heard, which he was afterwards to recognise as beauty. He had few outbursts of high spirits or unreasoning glee; it was rather a tranquil current of somewhat critical enjoyment; but he was sensitive to a whole troop of perceptions, of which the normal child would hardly be conscious — the coolness of dark rooms on hot summer days, the carelessly ordered garden, the branching trees, the small flowers, so bright of hue, so formal of shape, the subtle scents of the old house, the pot-pourri of the drawing-room, the aroma of old leather in the library; for it was about the house, the familiar rooms, that Pater’s memory persistently dwelt, rather than on the wider prospect of field and hill.
There is a beautiful and interesting passage in which Pater embalmed his view of the permanence of these early impressions: —
“The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as ‘with lead in the rock for eve,’ giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise.”
But he points out clearly enough that very little that is critical is intermingled with the perceptions of childhood: —
“It is false to suppose that a child’s sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life.”
There were two strains of sentiment which he discerned to have chiefly coloured his childish thoughts. One was “the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of things... marking early the activity in him of a more than customary sensuousness... which might lead him, one day, how far!”
And then, too, the sorrow and suffering of the world came home in dim glimpses to the child, as a thing which was inextricably intertwined with the life of men and animals alike. There was as yet no attempt to harmonise the two dominant strains of feeling; they were the two great facts for him — beauty and sorrow; they seemed so distinct from, so averse to each other, sorrow laying her pale hand so firmly on life, withering it at its very source, and striking from it what was lovely and delectable. And yet he noted the pathetic attempt of beauty to reassert itself, as in the violets which grew on the child’s grave, and drew their sweetness from sad mortality. And there came too the terror of death, the sad incidents of which imprint themselves with so sinister a horror on the tender mind. “At any time or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself.”
These were the dreams of childhood, the unchecked visions of the sheltered and secluded home; at Canterbury came a wider, nobler, richer prospect of beauty. He found himself in that exquisite, irregular city, with its narrow streets; the mouldering gateways leading to the Close, where the huge Cathedral rises among a paradise of lawns and gardens; with the ancient clustering houses, of which some contain the gables and windows of the old monastic buildings, while some are mere centos of ancient stone, the ruins having been used for a quarry; some of mellow brick, with a comfortable Erastian air about them, speaking of the settled prosperity of eighteenth-century churchmanship; the whole tenderly harmonised by sun and rain into a picture of equable, dignified English life, so that wherever the eye turned, it fell upon some delicate vignette full of grace and colour.
It is of this period that Emerald Uthwart, that strange fanciful story, holds certain reminiscences, but reminiscences coloured and tranquillised by the backward-looking eye. “If at home there had been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone; the daring height, the daring severity, of the innumerable, long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic arch; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come from further than the light outside.”
But still it must be borne in mind that all this was rather perceived, noted, and accumulated in the boyish mind than expressed or even consciously felt. The scenes, the surroundings, of boyhood just inscribe themselves upon the mind, which seldom pauses to reflect or to criticise; it is long after, in maturity, with the wistful and tender sense of the past, that the recollection, tranquilly recalled, is tinged with poetry and sweetness. There was little consciousness in Pater’s boyish days of how deep these things were settling into his mind, and still less foreshadowing of the magic power that would enable him to recall and express them in melodious words. The only definite artistic influence under which he is known to have fallen in his school-days is the influence of Ruskin, whom he read as a boy of nineteen. It is possible to trace this influence in Pater’s mature style; there is something of the same glowing use of words, something of the same charming naïveté and transparency in the best passages of both; but whereas Buskin is remarkable for prodigality, Pater is remarkable for restraint; Buskin drew his vocabulary from a hundred sources, and sent it pouring down in a bright cascade, whereas Pater chose more and more to refine his use of words, to indicate rather than to describe. Buskin’s, in fact, is a natural style and Pater’s is an artificial one; but he undoubtedly received a strong impulse from Buskin in the direction of ornamental expression; and a still stronger impulse in the direction of turning a creative force into the criticism of beautiful things — a vein of subjective criticism, in fact.
In June 1858 Pater entered Queen’s College, Oxford. He was a commoner, but held an exhibition awarded him from Canterbury.
Queen’s College was founded in 1340 by Robert Eglesfield, a chaplai
n to Queen Philippa, who largely supplemented her priest’s endowment. The medieval buildings have entirely disappeared, and the college consists of a great Italian court, designed by Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, with a fine pillared screen dividing it from the High Street, and a smaller court behind. The Chapel is a stately classical building, designed by Wren himself, and considered by him one of his most successful works. It is rich with seventeenth-century glass by Van Linge, and dignified woodwork. The Library is a magnificent room, with much carving by Grinling Gibbons, certain panels of which are almost perfect examples of freedom of form with an underlying serenity of design. The lofty Hall might have come straight out of an Italian picture, and the mysterious gallery at the west end, opening by curtained porches on balconies of delicate ironwork, seems designed to be crowded by fantastic smiling persons in rich garments.
It was a definitely ecclesiastical foundation, and preserved a larger number of quaint names and symbolical customs than are preserved at other colleges; such as announcing dinner by the sound of the trumpet, and the retention of the name Taberdar for scholars. Pater lived a very secluded and unobtrusive life in the back quadrangle, associating with a few friends; he worked at classics with moderate diligence, amusing himself with metaphysics, which even in his school-days had begun to exercise an attraction over him. There is nothing which would lead one to suppose that his thoughts turned in the direction of either art or literature. It has been stated in some notices of his life that Jowett discovered Pater’s abilities, and gave him gratuitous teaching. From this it would seem to be inferred that Pater found a pecuniary difficulty in providing himself with adequate instruction, which was not the case. The explanation is simply that Jowett, as Professor of Greek, offered to look over the Greek compositions and essays of any members of his class who cared to submit them to him, and Pater took advantage, like many other men, of the offer. Jowett indeed divined a peculiar quality in Pater’s mind, saying to him one day, in one of those lean simple phrases that seem to have exercised so remarkably stimulating a power over his pupils’ minds, “I think you have a mind that will come to great eminence.” But Pater failed to do himself justice in his examinations, taking only a second-class in the Final Classical Schools in 1862. For a couple of years he lived in lodgings in High Street, and took pupils. In 1864 he was elected to a Fellowship at Brasenose, where he immediately went into residence.