by Walter Pater
Though the celebrated passage which describes “La Gioconda” has been abundantly quoted, it may here be given in full: —
“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”
Such writing as this has an undeniable magic about it; though its vagueness is not wholly characteristic of Pater’s ordinary manner, it is a wonderful achievement; it is more like a musical fantasia, embodying hints and echoes, touching with life a store of reveries and dreams, opening up strange avenues of dreamful thought, than a precise description of any actual work of art. To say that Leonardo himself would have disclaimed this interpretation of his picture is not to dispel the beauty of the criticism; for the magical power of art is its quickening spirit, its faculty of touching trains of thought that run far beyond the visible and bounding horizon. It is possible, too, to dislike the passage for its strong and luscious fragrance, its overpowering sensuousness, to say that it is touched with decadence, in its dwelling on the beauty of evil, made fair by remoteness; but this is to take an ethical view of it, to foresee contingencies, to apprehend the ultimate force of its appeal. As in all lofty art, the beauty is inexplicable, the charm incommunicable; its sincerity, its zest is apparent; and it can hardly be excelled as a typical instance of the prose that is essentially poetical, in its liquid cadences, its echoing rhythms. In any case, whether one feels the charm of the passage or not, it must remain as perhaps the best instance of Pater’s early mastery of his art, in its most elaborate and finished form.
The essay on the “School of Giorgione” is a later work (1877), but it will be well to consider it here. It is an elaborate composition, and shows a tendency to return to metaphysical speculation, or rather to interfuse a metaphysical tinge into artistic perception. He lays down the principle that the quality of the particular medium of a work of art is what it is necessary to discern, and that it is a mistake to blend the appeal of different methods of artistic expression. “All art,” he says in an italicised sentence, showing that he is laying it down as an established maxim, “constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” because music is the only art which makes its appeal through pure form, while all other art tends to have the motive confused by the matter, by the subject which it aims at reproducing. “Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed,” he adds, “is the true type or measure of perfected art.”
The attitude of Giorgione, his distinctive quality, lies, according to Pater, in the fact that “he is the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching — little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape — morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar.” But one of the chief points of interest in the essay is that Pater devotes more space to his perception of music than he does in any other place. Giorgione himself was, according to traditions, an admirable musician, and musical scenes are made the motive of many of his pictures, or of those attributed to him: “music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments — people with intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet sound — a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.”
But the essay is not perhaps quite as lucid as some of the earlier work; the tendency to construct long involved sentences, full of parentheses, is here apparent; it gives one the impression of a vague musical modulation, which, beautiful in its changes, its relations, lacks the crispness and certainty of precise form.
There remains the “Joachim du Bellay,” a slight essay where Pater occupies himself with showing how Ronsard endeavoured to draw the influence of the Italian renaissance in to enliven and deepen the native Gothic material of French song, “gilding its surface with a strange delightful foreign aspect, like a chance effect of light.” He indicates how, in that transformation, the old French seriousness disappeared, leaving nothing but “the elegance, the aërial touch, the perfect manner” in the poets of Ronsard’s school, of whom Du Bellay was the last. Du Bellay strove with all his might, as in the little tract, La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, “to adjust the existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture,” “to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection.” Pater traces the eagerness for word-music, the beginnings of poésie intime, the poetry in which a writer strives to shape his innermost moods or to take the world into his confidence. He illustrates Du Bellay’s fondness for landscape: “a sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment — and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.”
The whole essay is in a lighter, a less serious tone, and dwells more softly upon the surface of things; and thus gives a kind of relief, a breathing space in the intense mood. One feels that some art went to the careful placing of these essays; for we pass to the study on “Winckelmann,” of which we have spoken at length, in which Pater found a type by which he might reveal his own inner thought, the conversion which he had experienced. And thus we come to the “Conclusion,” a most elaborate texture of writing, made obscure by its compression, by its effort to catch and render the most complicated effects of thought. This “Conclusion” was omitted in the second edition of the book. Pater says that he excluded it, “as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” He adds that he made a few changes which brought it closer to his original meaning, and that he had dealt more fully with the subject in Marius the Epicurean.
The only substantial alterations in the essay are as follows. Pater originally wrote: —
“High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’”
This sentence became: —
“Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.”
Again, in a passage dealing with the various ways of using life, so as to fill it full of beautiful energy, he says that “the wisest” spend it “in art and song.” In the later version he qu
alifies the words “the wisest” by the addition of the phrase “at least among ‘the children of this world.’”
The alterations do not appear at first sight to have any very great significance; but Pater says that they brought out his original meaning more clearly; and the very minuteness of the changes serves at least to show his sense of the momentousness of phrases.
He traces, in a passage of rich and subtle complexity, the bewildering effect upon the mind of the flood of external impressions; and compares it with the thought that gradually emerges, as the spirit deals with these impressions, of the loneliness, the solitude of personality; and with the mystery of the movement of time, the flight of the actual moment which is gone even while we try to apprehend it. He compares the perception to “a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream” of sense; and goes on to indicate that the aim of the perceptive mind should be to make the most of these fleeting moments, to “be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.”
“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”
“Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.”
He goes on to say that to get as many pulsations into the brief interval of life, is the one chance which is open to a man; and art, he says, gives most of these, “for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”
The “Conclusion,” then, is a presentment of the purest and highest Epicureanism, the Epicureanism that is a kind of creed, and realises the duty and necessity of activity and energy, but in a world of thought rather than of action. The peril of such a creed, of which Pater became aware, is that it is in the first place purely self-regarding, and in the second place that, stated in the form of abstract principles, it affords no bulwark against the temptation to sink from a pure and passionate beauty of perception into a grosser indulgence in sensuous delights. The difficulty in the artistic, as in the ethical scale, is to discern at what point the spirit begins to yield to the lower impulse; when it deserts the asceticism, the purity, the stainlessness of nature which alone can communicate that lucidity of vision, that seriousness of purpose, that ordered simplicity of life that is to be the characteristic of the nobler Epicureanism.
Not that Pater withdrew the “Conclusion,” because he mistrusted his own principles; such principles as he held would tend to the refinement and enlargement of the moral nature, by multiplying relationships, by substituting sympathy for conscience, by admitting to the full the loftier religious influences; and thus the self-absorption of the artist would insensibly give place to a wider, more altruistic absorption.
But Pater felt, no doubt, that having struck a sensuous note in his essays, this statement of principles of artistic axioms lent itself to misrepresentation; and nothing could more clearly prove the affectionate considerateness of his nature, his desire for sympathy and relationship, his tender care for those whom he loved in spirit, than his fear of giving a wrong bias to their outlook. And thus the omission has a biographical interest, as showing the first shadow of disapproval falling on the sensitive mind, that disapproval which sometimes hung like a cloud over Pater’s enjoyment of the world, though it never for a moment diverted him from his serious and sustained purpose, as a prophet of mysteries.
Pater’s art criticism was distinctly of a literary and traditional type. He made little attempt to trace or weigh the extrinsic value of works of art, or to discuss the subject from the archaeological or the technical point of view. He accepted the traditional knowledge of the period, made no artistic discoveries, settled no controverted points. His concern was entirely with the artistic merits of a picture and its poetical suggestiveness; his criticism, indeed, was of the type which he defined in a review which he wrote many years afterwards for the Guardian as “imaginative criticism”— “that criticism which is itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer, shaping his work;” and thus the errors which he made, of which we may quote one or two examples, do not really affect the value of his criticism very greatly.
To take his criticism of Leonardo. He was certainly wrong, for instance, in his judgment of the Medusa picture. This is a picture which shows strong traces both of classical and realistic influences. The head is classical, the serpents are realistic. It is almost certainly at least a century later than Leonardo’s period.
Again, the little head with the aureole of hair, which Pater had engraved for a frontispiece to the Renaissance as a genuine work of Leonardo’s, is simply a school drawing, done under the influence, perhaps under the supervision, of Leonardo, by a pupil, but certainly not the work of the master’s hand.
He makes, too, the general mistake of treating Leonardo as a realist. But there is no basis of truth in this. The influence of realism had not begun to be felt at his date, or at all events in his work. The studies, for instance, to which Pater alludes, as of various flowers, of which there are a number of instances in the Windsor collection, are not realistically treated, but conventionally, and with the influence of tradition strongly marked in them.
Again it will be remembered how Pater speaks of the angel’s head, which according to tradition Leonardo contributed to a picture of his master, Verrocchio. He says that the head is still to be seen, “a space of sunlight in the cold, laboured, old picture.” There are in reality two heads in the picture, probably both by Leonardo, and one curiously ill-drawn. But the picture is not cold and laboured; it is simply unfinished, and not in a condition on which a judgment of its possibilities could be passed.
In the essay on “Botticelli” he was on firmer ground. But the essay on the “School of Giorgione” is perhaps the most typical instance. There are only two Giorgiones which can be positively identified as his from contemporary records. These are the picture known as “The Three Philosophers,” or “The Chaldean Sages,” which is now supposed by some critics to represent the arrival of Aeneas in Italy; and the picture known as “The Stormy Landscape” in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, which is now sometimes called “Adrastus and Hypsipyle.” Then there is the great Castelfranco altar-piece, which by tradition and internal evidence may be held to be an indubitable Giorgione. Then there are others with a reasonable degree of probability, such as the “Knight in Armour” in the National Gallery, said to be a study for the figure of S. Liberale in the Castelfranco altar-piece, an “Adoration of the Shepherds,” belonging to Mr. Wentworth Beaumont, and two panels at Florence, one representing an incident in the legendary childhood of Moses, and the other “The Judgment of Solomon.” But “The Concert,” in the Pitti, cannot be certainly attributed to Giorgione, and it may be said that the more Pater had known about Giorgione, the less likely would he have been to have attributed the picture to him. The truth is that Giorgione is a somewhat legendary painter, and what work of his is authentic is probably his later work. Art critics have of course as far as possible to account for the existence of such a legend; but the result is that in Pater’s hands, with the faulty and imperfect knowledge that existed about Giorgione at the time when he wrote, the subject is misconceived and exaggerated. There is, in the authentic works of Giorgione, an almost entire want of dramatic unity. In “The Stormy Landscape,” for instance, the figures of the mother with an infant and the young knight have no connection with each other, and are both entirely out of keeping with and unaffected by the scene, where the storm is breaking in thunder and rain. So, too, in “The Judgment of Solomon” panel there is no concentration of motive; each figure is conceived separately, and there is no sort of attempt at dramatic combination.
But when all this has been said, it really affects very little the value of Pater’s work. After all, the pictures wh
ich he described exist; the message which they held for his own spirit was generated by the sight of them, and the poetical suggestiveness of his criticism is full of vital force; he made no attempt to set misconception right, to date pictures, or to alter their dates. He took them on trust; and thus, though his judgments have no precise technical value, the inspiration of his sympathetic emotion forfeits little or none of its force by being expended on pictures which he did not attribute correctly, and which it could not be expected that he should have so attributed.
The publication of the Renaissance was to be attended by important results. It gave Pater a definite place in the literary and artistic world. But it had a still deeper effect. The spirit of artistic revolt was in the air. The writings of Ruskin, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites may be taken as two salient instances in very different regions of the rising tendency. What underlay the whole movement was a desire to treat art seriously, and to give it its place in the economy of human influences. Side by side with this was a strong vein of discontent with established theories of religion, of education, of mental cultivation. The younger generation was thrilled with a sense of high artistic possibilities; it realised that there was a hidden treasure of accumulated art, ancient and medieval, which remained as a living monument of certain brilliant and glowing forces that seemed to have become quiescent. It became aware that it was existing under cramped conditions, in a comfortable barbarism, encompassed by strict and respectable traditions, living a bourgeois kind of life, fettered by a certain stupid grossness, a life that checked the free development of the soul.