by Walter Pater
The tale has a curious magic about it; but though Greek in outline, it is hardly Greek in quality, suffused as it is with a strange and wistful romance that is born of a later and more self-conscious age.
In the essays on the “Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” he touches on the possibilities of external influences, the hints from the East, from Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Cyprus, as forming possibly the seed of Greek art. But he points out truly that this art is all “emphatically autochthonous, as the Greeks said, new-born at home, by right of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over those mere elements, and touching them, above all, with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of man — the dignity of his soul and of his body — so that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers.”
And he points out, too, that we are apt to import too purely an intellectual element into our conceptions of Greek art, because we have to deal with it principally in the form of sculpture, the only product that remains to us in large measure, while their pictures, their metal work, their carvings, their embroideries, have suffered a natural decay. Pater deals first with the descriptions of ancient shields, and with the excavated treasures of Mycenae, and points out that this metal work, with its special cachet, “the seal of nearness to the workman’s hand,” and the Greek tendency to overlay stone as far as possible with metal, show that Greek art probably first displayed itself in this form, and was in reality the expression of an age of gold rather than of stone.
In the second essay he traces the growth of true sculpture, the gradual preference of marble as a medium for art, until the first school of sculptors appears at Sicyon, the chief seat in earliest days of Greek art. Here he depends mostly upon the authority of Pausanias; “our own fancy,” he says, “must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience of the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty notices — the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly.”
He shows that in the detachment of images from the walls and pillars behind them, Greek art was already liberated from its earlier Eastern associations, which worked only in reliefs and friezes; and then came the perception that sculpture was not to be a thing of mechanical and mathematical proportions, but the representation of a living organism with freedom of movement, full of the human soul, instead of a mere stiff attitude and a frozen gesture.
And then religion comes in to swell the richness of art, and the vague customs and traditions of the older days transform themselves into the breathing images of personal gods enshrined and enthroned.
The essay ends with an attempt to indicate the characteristics of the great school of Sicyon as represented by Canachus — a sculptor, it would seem, of deep religious feeling, and distinguished by that early stiff naïveté of work which indicates “a gravity, a discretion and reserve, the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the wealth and fulness of final mastery.”
In “The Marbles of Aegina” Pater discusses the quality of the beautiful group of sculpture discovered in 1811 in a ruined temple of Athene in a remote part of Aegina, and purchased for the Munich Gallery by King Louis I. of Bavaria. The interest of this group is that it seems the consummate flower of Dorian as opposed to Ionian art, dating probably from about the time of Marathon.
Pater skilfully contrasts the Ionian tendency of thought — the brilliant, diffused, undirected play of imagination, its restless versatility, its extreme individualism — with the Dorian influence of severe systematisation, the subordination of the individual to the state; the group has the characteristics of the purest Greek chivalry; he shows the “dry earnestness” of the craftsman, “with a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish painter,” and withal “his still youthful sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his art overcome.”
“In this monument,...” he says, “pensive and visionary as it may seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.”
In the last of the Studies, “The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” composed twenty years later than the earliest essays, Pater traces the effect of the athletic system of Greece upon their sculpture. The pride of health, of perfect agility, of graceful movement, all concentrated upon the end in view, the perfect balance of mind and body alike — these were the ends which that system had in view — how different from our own gloomy and commercial athletics!
The pride of the sculptor was to combine the mystery of motion and of rest, to seize a moment of intense energy— “the twinkling heel and ivory shoulder” of the runner, “the tense nerve and full-flushed vein,” and to set it for ever in the imperishable stillness of art. And further, behind the suppleness, the delicate muscularity, the unspoiled freshness, of youth, to imprint if possible the mark of true humanity upon those figures, the kind and simple heart, the modest smile, the stainless purity of soul. And again, in those funeral monuments of young creatures snatched away before their time, to comfort the mourner by some hint of the dignity, the tranquillising secret of death.
Pater takes the work of Myron and of Polycleitus as the perfect expression of humanity— “humanity, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure.”
“To have achieved just that,” he writes, “was the Greek’s truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development. He had been faithful, we cannot help saying... in the culture, the administration, of the visible world; and he merited, so we might go on to say — he merited Revelation, something which should solace his heart in the inevitable fading of that.”
It is here, perhaps, that the deepest value of these Studies lies. Pater penetrates by patient skill, by ardent sympathy, the glowing, simple, straightforward life of the old world, with its light-hearted mirth, its swift acquiescence in things as they are.
But he realises throughout that it is over and gone; that we cannot win it back; but that it may cheer and enlarge our view of life, our admiration for those sunny spaces of history, if we can but apprehend it; and that we may win from it some tranquillity, some brightness of spirit, which may fall on our heavier hearts, our bewildered sophisticated minds, like fresh winds blowing over the hills from the gates of the morning. That it cannot wholly satisfy us he has no doubt; but that it may enliven and widen our minds he is not less assured.
Up to this date Pater’s work had been critical; it has been pointed out that it was never purely critical, but a species of poetical and interpretative criticism, of a creative order, working upon slender hints and employing artistic productions as texts and motifs for imaginative creation.
But he now began to feel the impulse to produce original creative work, and to use his own impressions, his experiences, his speculations as material for imaginative treatment.
His only critical work for the next three years consisted of the Essay on “Charles Lamb” which we have already considered, a slight Shakespearian essay on “Love’s Labours Lost,” and three of the Greek Studies. But the year 1878 is memorable for the first appearance of one of his most beautiful works, the one, in fact, which can be recommended to any one unacquainted with Pater’s writings, as exhibiting most fully his characteristic charm.
The Child in the House is the sweetest and tenderest of all Pater’s fancies, the work, we may say, where his art approached most nearly to a kind of music. We have before indicated the autobiographical vein of the piece, but it remains to say something of the art of the essay, which is conceived in a certain golden mood of retrospect, and makes an appeal to all who, however rarely, indulge a train of gentle recollection. Such a mood is wrought in us by a sort of sudden charm; the sight of old places where we have lived untroubled days brings
it back with a wistful swiftness, so that we feel a yearning desire, it may be, for our own unstained past; we contrast what we are and what we have become, with what we were and with what we might have been. This mood, a sort of “death in life” as Tennyson says, may surprise natures overlaid with conventionalism and even coarseness. It is one of the commonest and most forcible, because truest, effects of pathos, in books that aim at dramatic effect, when the crust of later careless habit suddenly breaks, and the old clear stream of life seems to be running there below all the while.
Such an experience may hold within it, even for the most worldly and hardened minds, a hope of immortality, a hope of redemption. That strange and yearning hunger of the heart for a purity, a simplicity, which it once had, before the bitter root of evil sent up its poisonous flowers into the soul, is one of the most primal emotions of nature. It is in such a mood that a man is apt to feel most self-forgiving, most self-pitying, because be feels that it is circumstance and seduction of sense that have marred a nature that in itself desired purity and simplicity. It is not perhaps the highest of emotions, because it is a mood in which life would seem to hold no lessons but the lesson of inevitable decline, ungenerous deterioration; but there is no denying its strength, its sad charm.
In The Child in the House we see a boy deeply sensitive to beautiful impressions, to all the quiet joys, the little details of home: its carved balusters and shadowy angles, its scents and sounds, its effects of light and shade, and further abroad, the trees of the garden, the hawthorn bush, with its “bleached and twisted trunk and branches”... with the fresh bloom— “a plumage of tender crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood” — the shops of the city hard by, the belfry with its giddy winding stair, “half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far.”
And then, too, we see the child’s love for the outward forms of religion; “the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron’s vestment, sounding sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place.”
Over this quiet and untroubled mood the shadow creeps. The boy begins to feel the touch of sorrow, of loss, of bereavement — the shadow of death. A cry heard on the stairs tells how the news of a death comes home to an aged heart; the little household pet, the Angora cat, sickens and dies, the tiny soul flickering away from the body; the young starling is caught and caged, but the boy cannot resist the cries of the mother-bird, the “sharp bound of the prisoner up to her nestlings,” and lets the sorrowing creature go.
One realises with a painful intensity with what a shock of bewildered emotion Pater must have realised as a child the first lessons of mortality, “the contact,” as he wrote long afterwards, “of childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.”
Yet in this region there falls a certain vein of what may be called macabre, which might be thought morbid were it not obviously so natural — a dwelling on the accidents of mortality, the gradations of decay.
“He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s voices; and then what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the child’s flesh to violets in the turf above him.”
There is very little of human emotion in the vision; little dwelling upon companionship and near affections and relationships; and this is true to nature. The child whose nature is thus sensuously perceptive is often so much taken up by mere impression, by the varied, the enchanting outsides of things, the curious forms, the play of colour, the ray of sunlight like golddust, the light cast up from the snow upon the ceilings of rooms, that there is little leisure, little energy, to give to the simple affections of life. In this the picture is perfectly faithful; the writer, by a sincerity of retrospect, has avoided the temptation to read into the childish spirit the emotions of the expanding heart; it is all seen in the region of Maiden-sense, in the desirable clear light of the early morning, before the passionate impulses awake, before the intellect expands. Thus the pure art of the conception lies in the picturing the perfect isolation of the childish soul, — not a normal soul, it must be remembered, — though perhaps the haunted emphasis of the style, its luxurious cadence, its mellowing of outline, may tend to disguise from us how real and lifelike indeed, how usual an experience, is being recorded.
And for the style itself, it is a perfect example of a kind of poetical prose; there is no involution, no intricacy. The language is perfectly simple; and though some may feel a lusciousness, an over-ripeness of phrase, to predominate, yet the effect is perfectly deliberate, and it is by the intention that we must judge it. It may be set in a paradise of floating melodies in which the brisk, the joyful, the energetic may be loath to linger; yet for all who love the half-lit regions of the spirit, the meditative charm of things, The Child in the House must remain one of the purest pieces of word-melody in the language, and one of the most delicate characterisations of a mood that comes to many and always with a secret and wistful charm.
Before we speak of Marius the Epicurean, which began to absorb Pater’s energies from 1878 onwards, it will be as well to trace the slender thread of events. How uneventful his academical progress was may be augured from the fact that the year 1880 was in some ways almost the most momentous year of his life, because it was in the course of it that Pater determined to resign the tutorship of the college. This step meant a serious loss of income; but he was now embarked upon the task of constructing Marius, and could no longer disguise from himself the fact that writing was indubitably the most serious preoccupation of his life. He saw that it was becoming impossible for him to discharge the duties of the post adequately, and at the same time carry on his literary work effectively. The governing body of the college fully concurred in his decision; and though the incident at first caused Pater some pain, realising, as he did, that the feeling of the society did not endorse his own theory of the functions of the tutorial office, yet he soon grew to perceive that his resignation had been a blessing in disguise: it freed him from work which was not particularly congenial, work which needed qualities, such as a brisk directness of address, a good-humoured strictness, a businesslike determination, which Pater had never even professed to possess. He continued to lecture; but he was set free from the constant petty inroads on his time, to which a college tutor is always liable, and from perpetual small engagements and interruptions. It is a matter of regret that Pater did not realise this earlier. He would both have saved himself some chagrin, and he would have been able to give some of his best and most vigorous years to what was after all the real work of his life. There are, and always will be, abundance of effective college tutors who could not write Marius the Epicurean; and, on the other hand, it is not an agreeable or dignified thing for a great man of letters, and a man, too, of a peculiarly sensitive temperament, to discover that he has been holding a post which has not been regarded as by any means appropriate to his disposition, and that his discharge of its duties, though at the cost of much patient effort and constant strain to himself, has not wholly satisfied his colleagues.
On the other hand, lecturing was always a congenial task to Pater. He spent much time and thought upon his lectures, and prepared them with such thoroughness and care, that he tended to over-elaborate them, thus impairing their value as orally delivered discourses, intended for immediate
comprehension.
Mr. Humphry Ward writes: —
“I became a Fellow of Brasenose early in 1869, and for the next three years saw Pater almost daily. The common stories of him, at Tutors’ meetings, scholarship elections, etc., are not far from the truth. He saw that other people were better fitted than he to arrange details; but he did the work assigned to him very well, and with much labour. The only time I remember seeing him really angry was one night in Common Room when X., an elderly man and a former tutor, not overburdened with ideals, made some cutting remark about the short hours and light work of modern lecturers. Pater, who had by that time had some five years’ experience, and whose lectures (over the heads of most men) were crammed with thought and work, ‘let himself go’ in a series of the most bitter repartees about the perfunctory stuff of the older time, the shams, conventions, and orthodox impostures of X. and his contemporaries. Relations between them were afterwards strained.”
In one college office, however, which Pater held until his death, he took great delight. The post of Dean is an almost honorary one, and the only official duty attached to it is that of presenting men for their degrees; but it gives the holder a dignified stall, that on the extreme right, on the decani side, next to the altar, a stall dignified by a special canopy and an exalted desk. Pater never failed to occupy his stall both on Sunday morning and evening; and he was a strong advocate for the Sunday services being compulsory. He said with truth that there were many men who would be glad to have the habit of attending, but who would fail to attend, especially on Sunday mornings, partly from the attraction of breakfast parties, or possibly from pure indolence, unless there was a rule of attendance. As a matter of fact attendance was made a matter of individual taste, but Pater continued to deplore it.