by Walter Pater
Pater’s mother had died while he was at school at Canterbury. His aunt, an unmarried sister of his father, came to take charge of the family in her place. When Pater went up to Oxford, his aunt took his sisters to Heidelberg and Dresden, to complete their education, and it was there that Pater spent his long vacations. But he made no German acquaintances, and lived a life of quiet work and interior speculation; he did not even acquire a conversational knowledge of German. In 1869 he took a tour in Italy with Mr. Charles Lancelot Shadwell, his closest and most intimate friend. They visited Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence, and it was then that art became for him the chief preoccupation of his inner life.
Up till this time there is little hint of the line on which he was afterwards to develop. Such attempts as he had made in the direction of literary expression were mostly destroyed by himself at a later date; the only thing which survives is a curious little study called Diaphaneitè, which is dated July 1864, and is now included in the Miscellaneous Studies. This was written as a paper to be read aloud to a small society called the “Old Mortality,” of which he was a member, and to which many remarkable men belonged. The germ of his later writings can here be clearly discerned, but there is a certain dry compression about the little essay which is very unlike the later ornate manner. It is crammed almost too full of thought, and the evolution has a certain uneasiness arising from the omission of easy transitions. In the essay Pater endeavours to indicate a certain type of character presenting neither breadth nor colour, but a narrow and potent sincerity.
“That fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point.”
“It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may have for or against its own special scheme of life.”
“Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest one’s own confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission from without of light that is not yet inward.”
In such strict compressed sentences Pater traces his ideal of intellectual and moral sincerity; but the value of the paper is that, in the first place, it shows a power of acute and subtle psychological analysis, and in the second place it expresses with difficult wistfulness the ideal with which the young student meant to approach the world. To that ideal he was unfailingly true. He meant to know, to weigh, to consider; not to see things through the eyes of others, but to follow step by step the golden clue that ran for him through the darkness. It indicates a fearlessness, an independence of mind, which few achieve so early, and which fewer still have the patience to follow out.
In these years Pater’s chief interest, apart from his prescribed work, was in philosophy, which naturally led him to the study of German authors; and here he fell under the influence of Goethe. Goethe came to be for Pater the “true illustration of the speculative temper,”
“one to whom every moment of life brought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.”
It is necessary to bear in mind that there were two distinct strains in Pater’s mind: there was on the one hand a strong impulse towards transcendental philosophy, a desire to discern as far as possible the absolute principles of life and being. He hankered after a certain clearness of view, a theory which could explain for him the strange confusion of the intellectual life, where so many currents of the human spirit seem not so much to blend, as to check and oppose each other. The human mind seems to be haunted by a conception of ultimate truth, and to deal in intuitions which appear to hint at a possible solution; but the higher in the scale of perception that a mind is, the more complex are the influences which seem to distract it.
On the other hand there was a strong attraction to precise and definite types of beauty. Pater was checked in his metaphysical researches by his acute sense of the relativity of thought, by his apprehension of the sacredness of beauty, by his deep sensitiveness to art. What he longed for was a reasonable formula, which, could connect the two, which could make him feel that the same law was at work both in the region of beauty and in the region of philosophical truth. “It is no vague scholastic abstraction,” he wrote, “that will satisfy the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that... colourless, formless, intangible being Plato put so high?”
The influence of his metaphysical studies is seen in his first published writing, a fragment on Coleridge, considered as a philosopher, which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1866. This was afterwards reprinted in the Appreciations in 1889, with a passage added on the poetry of Coleridge, which he had contributed, in 1883, as a biographical introduction to the selections from the poet in Ward’s English Poets.
The first part of this essay traces the retrograde character of the philosophy of Coleridge, his rebellion against the patient generalisation of the scientific method. There are flashes of acute criticism, as when he points out that the chief faults of Coleridge’s philosophical writings are in the first place their roughness, their lack of form; and in the second place the writer’s excess of seriousness, “a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner.”
No doubt the reason why Coleridge as a philosopher won such an influence in England was that he joined to a deep grasp of transcendental metaphysics a somewhat tame acceptance of the orthodox religious position. Here emerges the essential weakness of his philosophy. He accepted as reasonable assumptions the orthodox views of revealed religion. He made no attempt to treat in a critical spirit the sources through which this revelation was made; the result was that the religious writers of the day — and it must be borne in mind that the main current of intellectual interest was in Coleridge’s time religious rather than philosophical — welcomed Coleridge as a man who had sounded the depths of metaphysical and speculative inquiry, and had returned from his quest not a sceptic nor a rationalist, but a convinced Christian. After such a triumph for religious feeling, his lesser heterodoxies were eagerly forgiven.
Pater does not dwell upon this side of Coleridge’s influence; but there is no doubt that it deeply affected his own religious thought. He is believed at this time to have cherished the scheme of becoming a Unitarian minister; his metaphysical studies did not in fact destroy his strong religious instinct, but only drew him away for a time from the spell of association and tradition which the Church exercised over him, and to the domain of which he was eventually to return.
The essay on Coleridge is mainly interesting, not for its substance, subtle as it is, but for the fact that it reveals the beginnings of Pater’s style. It is clear that he is struggling hard with the German influence; the terminology is technical, and a vague and dreamy emotion seems to be moving somewhat stiffly in the grip of metaphysical ideas; the sentences are long and involved, and there is a great lack of lucidity of construction, combined with a precision of expression, that produces a blurred and bewildering effect upon the mind.
It is impossible to believe that one who, like Pater, felt so strongly the sensuous influence of external beauty in art and nature, can have lingered long among abstractions. He never lost his interest in philosophy, but it became for him not so much a region into which he escaped from the actual world, as a region in which he could bring into line the vague suggestions of beauty and the laws of pure thought. He felt that beauty, while it haunted him, also distracted him; and while he could not resist its appeal to his emotional nature, he longed to be able to stand above it as well, and to see how it harmonised with more abstract conceptions; to arrive, indeed, at a certain serenity and tranquillity of thought, in which the perception of beauty might set, as it were, a sweet and solemn descant to the reasonable and sustained melody of the intellectual ideal.
Contact with practical life, together with his first sight of Italian art, turned
Pater’s thoughts gradually away from metaphysical speculation; and the final conversion came in his discovery of Otto Jahn’s Life of Winckelmann, which opened to him a new prospect. The teaching of Goethe had begun to seem too passionate, too sensual; the idealism of Ruskin degenerated too much into sentiment, and forfeited balance and restraint; Hegel and Schelling were too remote from life, with all its colour, all its echoes; but in Winckelmann he found one who could devote himself to the passionate contemplation of beauty, without any taint or grossness of sense; who was penetrated by fiery emotion, but without any dalliance with feminine sentiment; whose sensitiveness was preternaturally acute, while his conception was cool and firm. Here, then, he discovered, or appeared to himself to discover, a region in which beauty and philosophy might unite in a high impassioned mood of sustained intellectual emotion.
Brasenose College, with which Pater’s life was to be identified, is one of the sternest and severest in aspect of Oxford colleges. It has no grove or pleasaunce to frame its sombre antiquity in a setting of colour and tender freshness. Its black and blistered front looks out on a little piazza occupied by the stately mouldering dome of the Radcliffe Library; beyond is the solid front of Hertford, and the quaint pseudo-Gothic court of All Souls. To the north lies a dark lane, over the venerable wall of which looms the huge chestnut of Exeter, full in spring of stiff white spires of heavy-scented bloom. To the south a dignified modern wing, built long after Pater’s election, overlooks the bustling High Street. To the west the college lies back to back with the gloomy and austere courts of Lincoln. There is no sense of space, of leisureliness, of ornament, about the place; it rather looks like a fortress of study.
You enter the first court by a gateway under a tower. The interior of the buildings is still more sombre, with the smoke-stained walls and gables of friable stone. The Hall is on the south side, a lofty, dark-panelled place, with some good portraits. Beyond the Hall on the first floor is the Common-room, whither the Fellows adjourn after Hall, and which by day answers the purpose of a club-room. This is also an ample panelled chamber, with an air about it of grave and solid comfort.
The further court, to the south, which is entered by a flagged arched passage under the southern wing of the first court, is an irregular place, having been of late years considerably extended. The Chapel at once attracts the eye. It is a Renaissance building, of the same crumbling Headington stone, with broad classical pilasters, and windows of a clumsy Gothic tracery. The designer appears to have wished the tone to be classical, with a Gothic flavour. The very incongruity has a certain sober charm. A beautiful Renaissance porch admits to the ante-chapel; a fine classical screen of dark wood, with large smooth columns, supports an organ, into the carved woodwork of which are worked gilded swans and peacocks. There is a noble classical western window, under which is set the memorial to Pater. This is not wholly satisfactory, looking like a little tray of coins. It has four medallions — Leonardo, Michel Angelo, Dante, and Plato — with a fifth in the centre containing a has-relief of Pater’s head; but the expression is irritable and the chin is exaggeratedly protruded. The mottoes above and below, in uncial Greek, are beautiful and appropriate: ΩΟ ΦΙΛΟΘΟΦΙΑβ OYOHO THO ΜΕΓΙΟΤΗΟ MOYCIKHO (since philosophy is the greatest music) above; and OCA ECTIN ΑΛΗΘΗ OOA CEMNA OOA ΑΓΑΘΑ below (whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are holy, whatsoever things are pure).
The interior of the chapel has the same simple gravity. There is a plain marble reredos; the stall-work is Jacobean of dark wood, the heavy cornice and the balls which serve for poppy-heads being conspicuous. There is a great brazen chandelier and a noble eagle lectern. The roof, taken from the destroyed chapel of St. Mary’s College, which stood on the site now occupied by Frewin Hall, is of a rich Gothic, brightly painted. The east window is a fine piece of classical glass, but there are some poor ecclesiastical windows at the side; of which it may be recorded that when the question of replacing them was mooted, Pater said that he would not have them removed, as they provided a document of taste. The velvet cushions, the tall prayer-books, give a dignified eighteenth-century air to the whole.
There is something in these classical Oxford chapels which lends a curious and distinct savour to the offices of religion. It has been said that Gothic represents the aspiration of man to God, classical architecture the tabernacling of God with men. There is a species of truth in the statement. But it would perhaps be truer to say that in Gothic one sees the uncultivated instinct for beauty feeling its way out of barbarism into a certain ecclesiastical and traditional grace. But the classical enshrinement of religious worship seems to hint at a desire to bring the older and loftier triumphs of the human mind, the Greek and Roman spirit, into the service of the sanctuary. Gothic seems to depict the untutored spirit of man, nurtured on nature and religion, working out a wild and native grace in intricacy of tracery and ornament. But the classical setting brings with it a sober and settled air, a wider and larger range of human interests, a certain antiquity of mental culture.
Pater’s own rooms are approached by a staircase in the south-east corner of the first court, which leads to a little thick-walled panelled parlour, now white, then painted a delicate yellow, with black doors; an old-fashioned scroll round the mantelpiece was picked out in gold. The deeply recessed oriel window looks out upon the Radcliffe. Some trace of Pater’s dainty ways lingers in the pretty and fantastic ironwork of the doors, brought by him from Brittany. The room was always furnished with a certain seemly austerity and simplicity, never crowded with ornament. His only luxury was a bowl of dried rose-leaves. He had little desire to possess intrinsically valuable objects, and a few engravings served rather to remind him of the noble originals than to represent them. Thus there exists, now in the possession of the Principal of Brasenose, a little tray of copies of beautiful Greek coins, bearing large heads with smooth and liberal curves, and other dainty devices, on which Pater loved to feast his eyes. Mr. Humphry Ward writes: —
“I well remember my first visit to his rooms — small, freshly painted in greenish white, and hung with three or four line-engravings. All dons had line-engravings then, but they were all after Raphael. Pater had something more characteristic: the ‘Three Fates,’ attributed to M. Angelo; a head after Correggio; and I think something of Ingres — a new name to Oxford! The clean, clear table, the stained border round the matting and Eastern carpet, and the scanty, bright chintz curtains, were a novelty and a contrast to the oaken respectability and heaviness of all other dons’ rooms at that day. The effect was in keeping with his own clear-cut view of life, and made, in a small way, ‘the colours freshen on this threadbare world.’”
But there was no luxury, no sumptuousness, no seductiveness of comfort, about his surroundings. That might be left to those who misinterpreted him. To the serious student, pleasure and joy must always have a certain bracing austerity; might be sipped, perhaps, held up to the light, dwelt upon, but not plunged into nor rioted upon.
Out of the little panelled sitting-room opened a door, which led into a narrow passage full of cupboards, and admitted the occupant, by a low, ancient, stone-framed Gothic doorway, into a tiny slip of a bedroom, only a few feet wide. At one end a little window looked out into the court; at the other end was an odd projection, like a couple of steps, above the floor, forming the roof of the small cramped staircase below. Considerations of space were so exacting that the head of the bed had to rest, without legs, on the projection. The rest of the room only just admitted a chest of drawers and a simple toilet apparatus. In this miniature room Pater slept through the whole of his Oxford days. He went to bed early, but in later days was an indifferent sleeper, and to beguile the time before he could close his eyes, worked slowly through the Dictionary of National Biography, volume by volume. He had frequent opportunities of changing these rooms for a better set; but partly from economy, and partly from the extreme simplicity which characterised him, he preferred to stay. It is indeed almost inconceivable that a m
an engaged on literary work requiring such delicate concentration, should have lived so contentedly in rooms of such narrow resources. The little sitting-room gave straight upon the free air of the open passage. On a small square table his meals would be spread. His outer door was always open; he was always accessible, never seemed to be interrupted by any visitor, was never impatient, always courteous and deferential; rising from a little round table near the fire, in the middle of the most complicated sentence, the most elaborate piece of word-construction.
His habits were marked by the same ascetic simplicity. He never took afternoon tea, he never smoked. His meals were plain to austerity. But he took great pains with the little entertainments he gave, ordering every item and writing the menu-cards himself. The morning, he used to say, was the time for creation, the afternoon for correction. He did very little work in the evening. His habits were absolutely regular; few days were without their tale of quiet study. He concerned himself very little with college matters, though he held various college offices; he was at one time Tutor and at the end of his life Dean. He lectured to the passmen, and later gave public lectures, of which the volume Plato and Platonism was the fruit. One of his friends remembers attending these lectures: a number of undergraduates arrived, spread out their notebooks and prepared to take notes; but the attempt was soon abandoned, the lecturer reading, slowly and continuously, in a soft mellow voice, one carefully turned phrase after another. Mr. Humphry Ward writes: —