by Walter Pater
And now again Marius goes to the house of Cecilia, and sees the burial of a child; he notes that not even the intensity of human grief which the household feels and manifests in its stifled sobbing, its unrestrained tears, can do away with “the habitual gleam of joy, the placid satisfaction” of spirit. At the service is read aloud an epistle speaking of martyrdoms in Gaul, of Blandina and Ponticus, bringing to Marius the sense of the “strange new heroism,” uplifting sorrow out of the region of “private regret,” which seems to be appearing in the world.
Marius sees the return of the Emperor in triumph; and he is filled with a sense of sickening reaction at the sight of the captives in the procession, and at the fact that one of so lofty a spirit as the Emperor can fall so low as to take his place in the midst of so barbarous a ceremony. “Aurelius himself seemed to have undergone the world’s coinage, and fallen to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity no longer golden.” And thus at that moment the vital failure of the philosophical attitude reveals itself to Marius; he sets out to revisit his old home, with a shadow of approaching disaster upon him. He opens the old mausoleum of the house, and the thought that he may be the last of his race, blending with a passionate tenderness for the past, his father, his ancestry, induces him to bury all the remains of the dead deep below the ground.
“He himself watched the work, early and late; coming on the last day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last touches, while the workmen were absent; one young lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness with which Marius flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.”
And now the end comes with a certain unexpectedness. Marius, reflecting on his own life, sees that though with a natural bent for adventure and action, all his progress has been inward and meditative, always aiming at detachment rather than at the intermingling of himself with the current.
The death that follows was no doubt designed by the author to have something tragic and what may be called almost sensational about it, to relieve by contrast the contemplative texture of the work. Cornelius finds Marius in depression and weariness at White-nights, and contrasting sadly his own languor of spirit with the irrepressible youth of the other.
They set off for Rome. The plague is ravaging the land, and this, together with a shock of earthquake, loosens the superstitions of the natives; an attack is made on a body of Christians who are praying by the grave of the martyr Hyacinthus. Blood is shed, and the group, including Cornelius and Marius, are arrested and sent for trial to the chief town of the district. Marius, in obedience to a sudden instinct, procures the liberation of Cornelius by bribing the guards, explaining to Cornelius that he is allowed to depart to procure the means of legal defence. The first feeling of Marius as he sees Cornelius depart is a kind of innocent pride that he, who had always believed himself to lack the heroic temper, could thus display a sudden courage. But a mood of dark melancholy follows; he foresees that he will suffer the death of a common felon, without even the Christian consolation of the martyr’s example. The hardships of the march bring on a fever, and Marius is abandoned by the guard as a dying man in a little hill village. At first the rest and quiet relieve his tortured mind, and he is filled with a sense of gratitude to the unseen Friend who has guarded him through his long journey, and draws near in faith to the crucified Jesus. In this half-peaceful mood he finds himself able to think of death with an intense and reverent curiosity, as of a door through which he must pass to his further pilgrimage. And then the weariness comes back tenfold as death draws near; the Christians of the place surround his bed, and hearing of the deed he has done in saving Cornelius, administer the last rites, the consecrated bread, the holy oil; and when all is over bury him with the accustomed prayers, and with an added joy, holding him to have been a martyr indeed.
Such is the progress of this melancholy and meditative soul, to whom even youth had hardly been a season of joy, so oppressed was it by the sad malady of thought.
It is difficult to treat so intimate a memorial of a personality in a critical spirit; and we may say at once that to deal with a book that is so sacred a document in the spirit of finding fault with it for not being other than it is, is wholly out of place. It may be said to have nothing heroic about it, but to be almost purely spectatorial. It may be easily labelled introspective, even morbid; but it is of the very essence of the book that it is designed to trace the story of a soul to which the ordinary sources of happiness are denied, and to which, from temperament and instinct, the whole of life is a species of struggle, an attempt to gain serenity and liberty by facing the darkest problems candidly and courageously, rather than by trying to drown the mournful questionings of the mind in the tide of life and activity. What we have to do is, granted the type and the conception, to see how near the execution comes to the idea which inspired it.
It will be seen that the book is to a certain extent the history of a noble failure; Marius’ attempt to arrive, by his own unassisted strength, by a firm and candid judgment, at a solution for life, breaks down at every point. He falls back in a kind of weariness upon the old religious intuitions that had been his joy in boyhood. He learns that not in isolation, not in self-sufficiency, does the soul draw near to the apprehension of the truth, but in enlarged sympathy, in the sense of comradeship, in the perhaps anthropomorphic instinct of the Fatherhood, the brotherhood of God. It is a passionate protest not only against materialism, but against the intellectual ideal too; it is a no less passionate pronouncement of the demand of the individual to be satisfied and convinced, within his brief span of life, of the truth that he desires and needs.
But the weakness of the case is, that instead of emphasising the power of sympathy, the Christian conception of Love, which differentiates Christianity from all other religious systems, Marius is after all converted, or brought near to the threshold of the faith, more by its sensuous appeal, its liturgical solemnities; the element, that is to say, which Christianity has in common with all religions, and which is essentially human in character. And more than that, even the very peace which Marius discerns in Christianity is the old philosophical peace over again. What attracts Marius in the Christian spirit is its serenity and its detachment, not its vision of the corporateness of humanity and the supreme tie of perfect love. This element is introduced, indeed, but fitfully, and as if by a sense of historical fidelity, rather than from any personal conviction of its supreme vitality. With all its candid effort the spirit of the writer could not disentangle itself from the sense of personal isolation, of personal independence; there is no sense of union with God: the soul and its creator, however near they draw in a species of divine sympathy, are always treated of as severely apart and separate. The mystical union of the personality with God is outside the writer’s ken; the obedience of the human will to the divine, rather than the identification of the two, is the end to which he moves; and this perhaps accounts for the drawing of the line at the point which leaves Marius still outside the fold, because one feels that the author himself hardly dared to attempt to put into words what lay inside.
And now, as our chief concern is with the literary art of the book, we may turn to consider its main characteristics.
“Though the manner of his work,” says Pater, speaking of Marius, “was changed formally from poetry to prose, he remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper: by which, I mean, among other things, that quite independently of the general habit of that pensive age he lived much, and as it were by system, in reminiscence.”
This is true of the book itself: we cannot say that it is all reminiscence, but it is all bound up with reminiscence. The author makes little attempt to deal with the fresh atmosphere, the sharp detail of the present; still less to throw himself forward into the glowing idealization of the future; the whole book is that of a man looking back, the outlines of what he sees all mellowed and rounded in a sort of golden haze of pensive light. And it is thus essentially poetical. The
carefully studied archaeology of the book is never insisted upon, but only used as contributing a picturesque and hinted background; but it is poetical in the sense that there is no attempt at definite or scientific statement — even the abstrusest doctrines of philosophy, as well as the intricate details of the setting, are all touched with a personal appeal. Nothing is presented in its own dry light; it is all coloured, tinged, transformed by the mind of the writer, it all ministers to his mood.
The one artistic fault of the book is, as we have said, the introduction of alien episodes, of actual documents into the imaginary fabric; and these give the effect, so to speak, of pictures hung upon a tapestry. The style is of course entirely individual; it is a style of which Pater was the inventor; it is not only easy to imitate, but it is almost impossible, if one studies it closely, not to fall into the very mannerisms of the writer. Of course it is easy to say that it is languid, highly perfumed, luscious, over-ripe; but here again we fall into the error of analysing the essential quality, and disapproving of it. It cannot be pretended that it is brisk, lucid, or lively; there is nothing of “sonorous metal, blowing martial sounds,” about it; rather it winds like a cloud of smoke on a still day, hanging in fine-drawn veils and aerial weft. It is intensely deliberate, self-conscious, mannerised. Its fault is to fall into involved sentences, with long parentheses and melodious cadences. It never trips or leaps or runs; but always moves like a slow pontifical procession, stiff-robed, mystical, and profound. It never aims at crisp precision, but rather at a subtle refinement, a mysterious grace.
Its finest art is displayed in an economy of impression, whose very severity ends in a suggestiveness of picture which is attained, not by elaborate description, but by haunted glimpses of beauty. These touches of perfect loveliness relieve the graver analysis with a sudden sense of coolness and repose, as a student may look up from a book into a sunny garden, and find in the golden light some hallowing, some confirmation of the inner mood. And the most severe passages of philosophical writing are again lit up by exquisite similes or still more delicate metaphors, in which the whole sentence seems steeped and stained, as with the juice of a berry shut in upon the page.
Thus he writes: —
“He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant motion of things — the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of ambitious systems, in the stream around him, the first source, the ultimate issue, of which, in regions out of sight, must count with him as but a dim problem.... He might reserve it as a fine, high, visionary consideration, very remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that ladder seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly no time left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so close to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground.”
No one can say that these sentences are obvious, clear, sharply cut. But they are full of a poetical suggestiveness, and sparkle with hidden lights like opalescent gems.
Indeed, the writing of Pater may best be compared to the opal. It has not the clear facets, the limpid colour of the unclouded gem; but it is iridescent, rounded, shot with flashing lights and suffused with a milky mist of which one can hardly say whether it be near or far. It is this strange sense of depth, so inherent in a cloudy gem, that it gives one. One can measure to a millimetre the actual bulk of the jewel; but within that limit, what spent lights gleam, what misty textures roll! it is like a little coloured eyehole, through which one can discern the orbits of pale stars, the swimming vapors of some uncreated world.
But the fact is that most of the objections that can be urged against Manus are prima farcie objections; it is criticised mostly for not possessing qualities that it was not meant to have; it stands as one of the great works of art of which it may be said that the execution comes very near to the intention. Possibly Pater himself did not feel it to be so; he said once humorously to a friend that he would like to give him a copy of the second edition, because the first was “so very rough.” That is a criticism which could have entered into no mind except the author’s own. It remains a monument of sustained dignity and mellifluous precision. The style of it is absolutely distinctive and entirely new: the thing had never been done before; it is a revelation of the possibilities of poetical prose which the English language contains. The fact that it is not difficult to imitate is in its favour rather than otherwise, because the same is true of all great masters of individual style. But the feat was to discern and then to display a new capacity in English prose. It might have been said with truth that, before the advent of Pater, English prose could display qualities of lucidity, vigor, force; that it could lend itself to stately rhetoric and even glowing ornament; but it had never before exhibited the characteristic of seductive grace. And yet this was effected by Pater by the pure instinct for what was beautiful and melodious; he has no special preference for either the use of Saxon terms or for more elaborate Latinisms. He uses both impartially. Indeed his use of short, crisp, emphatic, homely words side by side with rotund, sonorous classicalities is one of the charms of the style. He never hesitates to employ technical, metaphysical language, but he contrives to fuse the whole into a singular unity; it is not even a fair criticism to say that his language is not natural, for there are many sentences of an almost childish naïveté. The only thing of which one is almost invariably conscious is of the art employed, and thus the writings of Pater appeal more, perhaps, to the craftsman than to the ordinary reader, because of the constantly delightful sense of difficulties overcome and crooked places made straight. There will, of course, always be people who will feel a sense of constraint, a lack of freedom. But those who feel the charm, will rightly discern in Marius the true impassioned poetical quality, guided and enforced by severe economy and delicate taste.
But however much we may analyse the characteristics of the style, its inversions, its cadences, its peculiar use of metaphor, its accumulation of delicate touches, its swift pictorial quality, we cannot penetrate its secret any more than we can penetrate the secret of the painter or the musician. Unity, due subordination, clearness of conception, subtle correspondence of language to emotion, these were the qualities which Pater used by a sort of fine native instinct. It is the natural consequence of our type of classical education, which encourages imitation rather than originality, and submission to authority rather than individual expansion, that we fail to do justice to such an achievement as Pater’s. We need not look upon his work as containing a finality of expression, we need not desire that he should originate a school of similar writers, but we may recognise gratefully the fact that he discovered and exhibited a new possibility in the composition of English prose.
CHAPTER V. LONDON LIFE
IN 1885, the year of the publication of Marius, Pater made a change in his environment; he took a house in London, No. 12, Earl’s Terrace, Kensington, near Holland House, which he held for eight years. This change of residence was dictated both by a desire for change, and by the feeling that the wider circle and more varied influences of London would lend him a larger and more vivid stimulus. He still resided during the term at Brasenose, and lived in London mostly in the vacations. Those who visited him in London were struck by the extreme quiet and simplicity of the household arrangements. Pater went a good deal into society, and enjoyed it greatly; but otherwise he just pursued his ordinary routine of writing and working as he might have done at Oxford. The London period was one of great interest and enjoyment; he found a warm welcome awaiting him in literary, artistic, and social circles; he made many new friends, and expanded in many directions.
In London, as at Oxford, there was never the least personal luxury in Pater’s ménage, though there was quiet and solid comfort. His official income and the receipts from his books were practically all that he had to depend upon. He was fond of travelling, to the very end of his life, both in France and Italy. He generally went abroad for five or six weeks, and always with his sisters. He liked the movement, the gaiety, the greater �
�panouissement of France. He threw himself with a deep appreciation into all that he saw, and entered, as may be seen from his writings, with a sympathetic intensity into the spirit of the buildings, the sculpture, the pictures, the landscapes that he saw. He used also to tire himself, on these occasions, with excess of walking, his only form of exercise. But still, his enjoyment of travel maybe best tested by the fact that his favourite tonic for the slight weariness, resulting perhaps from the emotional reaction, which he experienced for a day or two after his return from a tour, was to plan a scheme of travel for the following year.
The years that followed were the most fruitful years of Pater’s life. The reception of Marius had been both respectful and enthusiastic; it had lifted its author into a position in the very front rank of English prose-writers. And then, too, the strain of the continuous work was lifted off his shoulders, and he was able with renewed zest to take up some of the many subjects which in the course of those laborious years had appealed to him as congenial. He had faithfully and religiously eschewed the temptation to pursue them, subordinating all vagrant fancies to his central theme; he could now expatiate freely; moreover he had found, in the course of his work, if not fluency, at all events a pleasurable flow of appropriate if characteristic language. He began to contribute reviews to the Guardian, the Athenaeum, the Pall Mall Gazette. Some twenty of these reviews have been identified, and nine reviews which appeared in the Guardian have been since reprinted, privately in 1896, and latterly published 1901.
These reviews are not of very great intrinsic value; but evidently considerable time has been spent upon them; the book with which they deal has been carefully read, and a delicate appreciation composed. What strikes one most in reading them is, in the first place, a marked tenderness for the feelings of the author whom he is reviewing, and a great and princely generosity of praise. There seems to be no severity about Pater; and he enters into the intentions of the writer with a great catholicity of sympathy. There is also visible a certain irresponsible enjoyment about the tone of the reviews, as if with anonymity he had put on a certain gaiety to which in his public appearances he felt bound to be a stranger.