by Walter Pater
Of course no great originality is to be expected in these compositions. Thus reviewing three editions of Wordsworth in the Guardian of February 27, 1889, he does not hesitate to use many of his own deliberate dicta from the “Wordsworth” essay which had appeared in the Fortnightly in 1874, and was to be reprinted in the same year in which he wrote the review in question (1889), in Appreciations. Perhaps the review of Robert Elsmere (Guardian, March 28, 1888) reveals most plainly the almost childlike delight which Pater could take in the motif and characters of a story which one would have thought would not have been by any means congenial to him.
Pater’s chief critical work in 1886 was the essay on Sir Thomas Browne, to be published afterwards in the Appreciations of 1889. In this study the same principle of autobiographical selection comes out which we see so constantly at work in Pater’s mind. The charm for him in Browne is that whimsical mixture of scientific and poetical elements, the ceremonious piety, the strong sensitiveness to the human association of things, the thirst to record and express a point of view.
Again, what gives Pater a strong interest in Browne’s writings is the fact that he exhibits at a remote point the evolution of native English prose, that evolution which was distracted, we would believe, by the wave of classicalism, the effect of the tide of the Renaissance, which beat, belated and enfeebled, on our solitary shores. The invasion of English prose by the wrong kind of classicalism, the sonorous elaboration of Latinity instead of the lucid charm of native English, deferred, no doubt, the development of natural English prose, though it perhaps eventually ministered to its richness. Browne, like Montaigne in France, is the type of the essayist, the writer whose object is not the precise statement of a case, but the saturation of a subject in his own personality. Such writing is often lacking in structure and conception, but it has an indefinable charm. “It has,” writes Pater of Browne’s style, “its garrulity, its various levels of painstaking, its mannerism, pleasant of its kind or tolerable, together with much, to us intolerable, but of which he was capable on a lazy summer afternoon down at Norwich.” It is just that which is the charm; that it brings before us the same elements that delight us in our own life, the summer, the freshness of the open air, the pleasant house with its gardens and studious chambers, together with a venerable setting which does but heighten the sense that though philosophical, political, and religious theories may have shifted and developed, the greater part of men’s lives and joys are made up out of far simpler and commoner elements, which hardly indeed change from century to century.
And then, too, there comes in the art of the psychologist, “to whom all the world is but a spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in the things or the people around him.”
The other points in which the character of Browne appealed strongly to Pater are his emotional interest in ecclesiastical ceremony, which made him rejoice in the return of the comely Anglican order to the Norwich churches at the time of the Restoration, which caused him to weep abundantly at the sight of solemn processions; and there is also the vein of curious speculation about death, his anatomical and antiquarian researches alike testifying to his preoccupation with the thought of the mystery of decay and extinction of vital power; till his life becomes, as Pater says humorously, “too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral.”
Pater brings out very clearly the fact that the Religio Medici is perhaps a misleading title. One would expect a treatise dealing with scientific analysis, tending naturally to materialism and scepticism, but struggling through and retaining a hold on religion, all the stronger for the speculative temptations that would seem to block the way. But Browne, says Pater, “in spite of his profession of boisterous doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing of the character of a concession.” He is a convinced Theist, and a confirmed pietist. “The Religio Medici is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; a refinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a help, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the maintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular calling.” He goes further, indeed, and shows that it is only Browne’s method, not his mind, that is scientific. “What he is busy in the record of, are matters more or less of the nature of caprices; as if things, after all, were significant of their higher verity only at random, and in a sort of surprises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched into sound by a wandering finger, among the lumber of people’s houses.”
And thus, though Browne is in a sense an investigator, he misses the conclusion to which his investigations are tending; because he does not really seek to arrive at a conclusion, but only to harmonise facts, as he investigates them, with a conclusion which he has inherited rather than drawn.
Of the essay on “Feuillet’s La Morte,” the work of the same year, it is unnecessary to speak. It is a mere review, full of copious quotation, with a slender trickle of exposition; Pater neither philosophises nor evolves principles; he merely analyses the story; indeed, it is rather a problem why he eventually included this study in the Appreciations at all; it is significant only of a certain catholicity of taste, and bears but few traces of his own temperament.
But Pater was now hard at work on an interesting series of experiments of a kind that he may be held to have originated. These are the Imaginary Portraits, of which the first, “A Prince of Court Painters,” was written in 1885, as soon as Marius was off his hands; two others followed in 1886 “Sebastian van Storck” and “Denys l’Auxerrois” — and a fourth in 1887, “Duke Carl of Rosenmold.” But beside these four, which compose the volume known as Imaginary Portraits, there were several others which may be referred to the same class. “The Child in the House,” which has been already treated of, is one. “Hippolytus Veiled,” the work of 1889, is another, which has been dealt with among the Greek Studies, with which he included it. He told Mr. Arthur Symons at the end of his life that he intended to bring out a new volume of Imaginary Portraits. “Apollo in Picardy,” the work of 1893, was to have been included, as well as “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), of which we have spoken. He added that he meant to write one on the picture by Moroni known as The Tailor, which he thought a very fine and dignified figure. He would make him, he said, a Burgomaster. Mr. Ainslie says that he had in his mind Count Raymond of Toulouse as another possible subject.
Pater’s method was to take some romantic figure which attracted his attention, to form a conception of the temperament of the man, and study his environment as far as possible. He then would amplify the details, working in historical hints; or else, as in the case of “Denys l’Auxerrois,” it would be a pure fantasy, suggested by some trace of a peculiar mind revealed in the architecture or sculpture of a particular building.
This was perhaps the most congenial field for a temperament like Pater’s, that was imaginative rather than creative, that needed a definite motif to set his imagination at work.
Thus in the Imaginary Portraits Pater gave himself up to the luxurious pleasure of evolving fantasies arising from some biographical hint, some piece of unnamed art; some type of character that he conceived. They are true creations, worked out in a sober pictorial manner. But they make it abundantly clear that he had not the dramatic gift; there is no attempt at devising the play of situations, no contrast of character. The backgrounds, both of people and of landscape, are finely indicated; but the interest in each concentrates upon a single figure, and they are told in a species of dreamy recitative.
“A Prince of Court Painters” is the story of Antony Watteau told in the home-keeping journal of a girl of his own age, daughter of a craftsman of Valenciennes, who perhaps loves him, though with the reticence so characteristic of the author this only emerges in a shadowy hint here and there. The journal is extrao
rdinarily graceful, and exhibits, to give it verisimilitude, many French turns of expression and phrase, as though it had been originally conceived in French; but the whole lacks vital truth; there is too much philosophy of a hinted kind, too much criticism; the omission, for instance, of a dozen deliberate phrases indicating the supposed sex of the writer, might convert the whole into the work of a pensive man. There is little sentiment or emotion, though it is faintly illuminated as by a setting sun with a tender aloofness, a spectacular dreamfulness — a beautiful quality and finely conceived, but yet with little hold on nature.
There is a characteristic thread of personal interest interwoven with the story. The girl who writes the journal is the sister of Jean Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau; and the artistic progress of her brother, his enthusiastic admiration for his master, his patient development, which is sharply contrasted with the fitful and restless energy of Watteau, plays a real though a secondary part in the study. It is also highly characteristic of Pater’s reticent delicacy that, though he liked to fancy the painter a collateral member of his own family, the actual name of Pater is never introduced into the piece, the brother figuring throughout simply as Jean Baptiste.
But there is an abundance of fine criticism both of life and art in the whole picture. Could the charm of Watteau be more delicately captured than in the following passage? —
“And at last one has actual sight of his work — what it is. He has brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming Noblesse — can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture — a tree-architecture — to which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, ‘The evening will be a wet one.’ The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another generation.”
Throughout the whole of the study, as one might expect, the personality of Pater emerges in little dicta and comments. “Alas!” writes the girl, “How little peace have his great successes given him; how little of that quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true dignity of character.”
The interest, then, of this little study lies not so much in itself, as in the fact that it is from the creative point of view the most ambitious, the most deliberately dramatic, of Pater’s writings. He attempted to throw himself into a French mood, and in this he has partially succeeded; and into the mood of a quiet girl of the bourgeois class; and here he must be held to have failed. Perhaps it revealed to him his own limitations, his own strength. For he wisely wrote no more in this manner.
In “Denys l’Auxerrois” we have one of the most fantastic of all Pater’s writings; indeed, in this strange combination of the horrible and the beautiful, there is something almost unbalanced, something that reminds one of the rich madness of Blake; as if the mind, though kept in artistic check, had flung itself riotously over the line that divides imagination from insanity; the fancy seems to struggle and trample with a strange self-born fury, as though it had taken the bit in its teeth, and was with difficulty overmastered. The essay begins soberly enough with a vein of quiet reminiscence of travel; the writer is supposed to see some tapestries at a priest’s house representing a series of strange experiences; and it is upon this that the story is based. Denys of Auxerre, a love-child, comes among the craftsmen of the place, like a pagan god incarnate, and fills them, like Dionysus, with a species of Bacchic fury. This idea, the reappearance of pagan deities, had a strong fascination for Pater’s mind.
The curious and contradictory traits of the character of the boy, gentleness side by side with cruelty, wild courage shadowed by unreasonable terrors, his unaccountable appearances and disappearances, his mysterious gifts of presage and inspiration, are all subtly indicated.
“Long before it came he could detect the scent of rain from afar, and would climb with delight to the great scaffolding on the unfinished tower to watch its coming over the thirsty vine-land, till it rattled on the great tiled roof of the church below; and then, throwing off his mantle, allow it to bathe his limbs freely, clinging firmly against the tempestuous wind among the carved imageries of dark stone.”
A climax of horror is reached when a search is made for the buried body of a patron saint of the church, till, in the uncertain light of morning, the coffin is found and opened, and the bishop with his gloved hands draws out the shrouded shrunken form. At this Denys has an access of terror, and rolls in a fit upon the grass. But he recovers himself, and though by this time suspected of sorcery, he gives much anxious care to the setting up of the great organ of the church.
“The carpenters, under his instruction, set up the great wooden passages for the thunder; while the little pipes of pasteboard simulated the sound of the human voice singing to the victorious notes of the long metal trumpets.”
At last he ventures to appear in public at a pageant. The haircloth he wears scratches his lips and makes them bleed, and at the sight, an unholy fury fills the crowd. He is literally torn in pieces.
“The soul of Denys was already at rest, as his body, now borne along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb. The men stuck little shreds of his flesh, or, failing that, of his torn raiment, into their caps; the women lending their long hairpins for the purpose.”
In such a passage as this the horror passes beyond the range of perfect art; and the shadow is heightened by the natural tranquillity and austerity of the writer. One cannot help feeling that Pater was here overpowered by his conception, and that he allowed to escape him, for almost the only time in his writings, a kind of almost animal zest in blood and carnage. There is no lack of what is commonly called power, but there is a lack of the restraint which as a rule Pater so diligently preached. It reminds one of the tale of Tod Lapraik in Catriona, where the staid and smiling weaver dances alone in a hollow of the rocks in the black glory of his heart; or of the still more grim story of Kipling, where the veil that separates the man from the brute is twitched aside, and the unhappy wretch, intoxicated by a bestial instinct, asks eagerly for raw meat, and rolls and digs in the earth beneath the dark shrubs of the garden.
“Sebastian van Storck” is an astonishing contrast to the last. The motif of the essay is devotion to the purest and most abstract reason. Sebastian is a young Hollander, the son of a Burgomaster of wealth and high social position. The young Sebastian, a graceful finished nature, but with a strain of phthisis in his constitution, is a lonely, isolated young man, out of sympathy with the rich, phlegmatic, easy life which surrounds him, who is drawn into a track of abstract intellectual speculation, partly by a certain mortal coldness of temperament, and partly by a clear and logical faculty of thought. He becomes interested in the philosophy of the young Spinoza, who is a friend and contemporary, and he sets out upon a chilly pilgrimage of thought with a kind of intellectual disinterestedness, till he arrives at the conclusion that the only use to make of life is to cultivate a severe detachment from all its interests and ties. His view of God becomes ever colder and more impersonal.
“For him, that one abstract being was as the pallid Arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacier, a barren and absolutely lonely sea. The lively purpose of life had been frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was ‘equilibrium,’ the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth
are but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be ‘loved in return.’”
The crisis comes by his being almost drawn into a marriage with a beautiful girl of his own circle. He has to a certain extent submitted to her charm, and the betrothal is looked upon as an event daily to be expected. The girl herself falls under the spell of Sebastian’s beauty and fascination; and at a social gathering at which the friends of both expect and desire the pledge to be given and accepted, she betrays a certain innocent coquetry, which in Sebastian’s tense mood acts like water dashed in his face. He is filled with a sharp disgust and flies from home, taking refuge in a lonely manor-house, the property of his family. A spell of stormy weather succeeds and the land is inundated. When at last it is possible to reach the lonely house through the raging flood Sebastian is found dead, having apparently lost his life in saving a child, who is discovered unhurt wrapped in Sebastian’s furs.
Pater seems in this essay to have endeavoured, we will not say to enforce the dangers of the intellectual pursuit of abstraction, for the picture has hardly an ethical motive, but to depict in neutral tints the natural course of the quest of pure reason. It is a melancholy essay. Sebastian seems to suffocate under warmth and light; and the whole sketch has something of the frozen silence, the mute impassivity, of the stiffened leafless earth. It is more like a piece of cold and colourless sculpture than a picture; and the contrast of the stainless icy figure of the victim of thought thrown into relief by the warm, fire-lit, comfortable indoor world, peopled with types of indolent and contented materialists, is skilfully enough wrought. But the subtle beauty of the treatment does not remove a certain inner dreariness of thought, and the central figure seems to shiver underneath the rich robe draped about it.