by Walter Pater
“Duke Carl of Rosenmold” is an eighteenth-century study of a very different temperament. He is the heir of an aged Grand-Duke, and is full to the brim of enthusiasm for art, music, literature, and nature. But just as Sebastian van Storck was the victim of an excess of intellectual power, so Duke Carl is the victim of its defect. His soul is in revolt against stolid German heaviness; he is a typical figure of the spirit of the Renaissance, all athirst for beauty and novelty. But his temperament is whimsical and unbalanced; he has little originality or lucidity of thought; he falls under the spell of all that is rococo, and mistakes novelty for energy; he takes up each new interest with eager zest, but too soon tires of it; to relieve the dreariness of satiety in the search for new sensations, he causes his death to be announced and is present in disguise at his own funeral. Here he parts company with soundness of mind, and in his rebellion against all that is conventional he mistakes the true stuff out of which unconventionality is made. The true creative genius, to use a metaphor, accepts the conventions of the age as a sort of necessary frame to impulse, and troubles his head little about it; his concern is with the picture itself, how to make it perfectly sincere, perfectly impressive. But Duke Carl’s originality is vitiated by the desire to startle and surprise timid natures, and to have his originality admired or at least recognised. His grandfather abdicates, and soon after dies, and Duke Carl’s mind, which has been distracted for a while by foreign travel, becomes set upon marriage with a peasant girl, partly from real affection, partly from a desire to do the unexpected thing. His end is somewhat mysterious; he arranges to meet his betrothed in a lonely stronghold, and falls a victim to an armed invasion. Contrary to his habit, instead of letting the story speak for itself, Pater appends a conclusion in which he says that his object has been to sketch a precursor of what may be called the German Renaissance, of Lessing and Herder, leading on to Goethe. But the interest remains psychical rather than historical. The duke is a type of those natures who, with an intense susceptibility to artistic influences, have no real force of character or conception in the background, and fall victims to a neurotic desire, which approaches near to vulgarity, to cause a commotion among stolid and commonplace persons, because they are conscious of their inability, from want of real intellectual energy, to impress or influence the higher natures.
The whole volume, then, is based on an idea of intellectual and artistic revolt; each of the four types depicted, Watteau, Denys, Sebastian, and Duke Carl, is a creature born out of due time, and suffering from the isolation that necessarily comes from the consciousness of being out of sympathy with one’s environment. In all four there is a vein of physical malady. Watteau and Sebastian are phthisical, and Denys and Duke Carl are of unbalanced mind. This tendency to dwell on what is diseased and abnormal has a curious psychological interest; and it will be observed, too, that all the four figures depicted are youthful heroes, endowed with charm and beauty, but all overshadowed by a presage of death. There is thus something of the macabre, the decadent element, about the book.
It will be as well here to consider the two other Imaginary Portraits, “Emerald Uthwart” (1892) and “Apollo in Picardy” (1893), because, though of slightly later date, they in reality belong to the same series.
“Apollo in Picardy” is one of the purest pieces of fantasy that Pater ever composed. In its motif it much resembles “Denys l’Auxerrois,” the conception being that of a reincarnation of a sort of pagan spirit, perhaps a fallen deity, in the midst of a monastic world.
Prior Saint-Jean, bred as a monk, is occupied in middle age in the composition of an abstruse book of astronomy and music, dry and scientific enough. He is sent, being in indifferent health, down to the Grange of the monastery, to superintend the building of a great monastic barn. He takes with him a novice named Hyacinth, the pet of the community, neat, serviceable, frank, boyish. The first evening after their arrival the Prior goes into the granary, and finds there asleep among the fleeces a young serf of the monastery, a youth of extraordinary beauty, with a strange harp lying beside him. The Prior mutters a collect, conscious of a certain unholy charm, and goes softly away. The next day he finds the serf waiting upon them. The great barn is built, and a series of mysterious and inexplicable circumstances occurs. The serf seems to inspire a sort of wild gaiety, a spontaneous art, into the builders, and manifests, too, an almost Satanical strength.
The boy Hyacinth finds this strange creature a delightful playmate; and yet there is a bewildering mixture of charm and cruelty about him. The wild creatures of the forest will come at his call; he will play with them, and when tired of play will pierce them with an arrow or snap their fragile backs. Yet they nestle to him to die in his arms.
Sometimes the cruelty breaks out in horrible ways. One evening the great pigeon-house is invaded by some creature unknown, which destroys the birds wholesale, leaving their bodies ruthlessly rent and torn. Yet next day the serf comes weeping to the mass; the chapel is found to be strangely decked with exotic flowers, and the serf himself joins with his harp in the canticles, drawing the rough voices to a silvery music.
The Prior feels the magical influences of the place slowly involving him. He turns to his book, but there seems a madness in his brain. Instead of penning dry scientific discussions, he finds himself impelled against his will to crowd strange drawings and illuminations into his book, “winged flowers, or stars with human limbs and faces, still intruding themselves, or mere notes of light and darkness from the actual horizon.”
He comes to again and again from his wild work with a shock of terror and disgust. The boy Hyacinth becomes terrified at the Prior’s strange illusions, his loss of memory, his feverish periods of what seems such unhallowed work. But one hot, breathless evening he is drawn to play again with the serf, whom he begins to mistrust. They play with an ancient quoit, which is turned up from a grave. Stript to the skin, in wild excitement, they play late into the night, till the quoit flung by the serf, whether by accident or a sudden bloody impulse none knows, crashes into the boy’s brain, and leaves him dead on the turf.
The serf flies; the Prior falls under suspicion of the murder, but is claimed by the monastic authorities and confined as obviously insane. He spends long hours gazing out of the windows, weeping, uttering strange words; till at last his senses return to him, but he dies just as his release is permitted.
The study is full of beauty from end to end, beauty and strangeness side by side. Yet it is hard not to feel a sort of distempered, almost riotous, fancy at work under it all, and there is a cloistered horror about it, that reminds one of the old monastic legend of the monk who goes late into the dark church to recover a volume that he had left there, and finds a strange merry thing, in the habit of a priest, leaping all alone in unholy mirth before the altar.
It may be said that this is exactly the effect which the writer intended to produce, and the art is manifest. But for all that there is a species of uncanny terror which invests the tale; not the terror which may involve the narrative of one who has seen strange things and records them faithfully, but the terror with which one might watch a magician trafficking in breathless secrets, with a certain dark power of using energies which seem to menace alike serenity and virtue.
“Emerald Uthwart” is a little fantasy written in 1892. The incidents related are simple enough, and yet in a way sensational. Emerald is the son of an ancient English family, brought up in an old Sussex home, long the property of his ancestors, people of an unemphatic type. “Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their woods, noiselessly deciduous.” He goes to school, contrary to the tradition of the family, and the scene of his education is laid at what is obviously the King’s School, Canterbury. Here he forms a great friendship with a boy a little older than himself, James Stokes; they go on to Oxford together, get commissions in the army, in consequence of the breaking out afresh of a war, the scene of which is laid in Flanders. They are kept waiting before a beleaguered town; James Stokes conceiv
es a plan of entering the town with a few men on an expedition the object of which is obscure. They enter the town, secure their prize — a weather-beaten flag — and issue out again to find that the army has moved on; they rejoin their regiment, are tried by court-martial, and condemned to death. They are led out to execution, and when James Stokes has been shot, the scene being described with a grim realism, it is announced that Emerald’s sentence has been commuted into one of degradation and dismissal. This is carried out; he wanders about in want and wretchedness, but finally makes his way home, where he eventually dies, after a lingering illness of four years, from an old wound, aggravated by hardship and mental suffering. Just before the end his case is brought before the military authorities, and he receives an offer of a commission. The story ends by a somewhat terrible extract supposed to be from a surgeon’s diary, who removes the ball from the wound.
The motif of the story is to depict a certain type of Englishman, a type of decorous submissiveness. But the interest of the type lies rather in the attempt that is made to represent it in a character of great modesty and simplicity, but with a high natural charm both of manner and physical appearance.
The weakness of the conception may be said to lie in the fact, that apart from this external and physical charm the character is rather essentially uninteresting — unambitious and demure — a Spartan, not an Athenian type.
It was probably Pater’s object to depict the Spartan element of public-school education; and it is here that the main interest of the sketch lies.
“In fact,” he says, “by one of our wise English compromises, we still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lesson in attention and patience, at the least. Nay I by a double compromise, with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach them their pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-towers, amid the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the discipline, of monasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the English have never wholly lost an early inclination.... The result of our older method has had its value so far, at least, say! for the careful aesthetic observer. It is of such diagonal influences, through complication of influence, that expression comes, in life, in our culture, in the very faces of men and boys — of these boys. Nothing could better harmonise present with past than the sight of them just here, as they shout at their games, or recite their lessons, overarched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to church meekly, into the seats occupied by the young monks before them.”
But there is a certain want of naturalness about the conception. The picture of James Stokes descanting to his friend on minute points of meaning in Homer, in Virgil, lacks reality. Emerald himself, after being punished by the headmaster, stands up and says, “And now, sir, that I have taken my punishment, I hope you will forgive my fault.” Not so do English boys behave! And it is just here, in these rare touches of attempted drama, that Pater’s art invariably breaks down. He was aware that his own instinct was not dramatic. He wrote (August 9, 1891) to a friend, Mr. Douglas Ainslie, thanking him for a copy of a play which Mr. Ainslie had published, saying that he would read it with interest, but adding “the dramatic form of literature is not what I usually turn to with most readiness.”
Submissiveness, he says, was the key of Uthwart’s character: “it had the force of genius with him”; he entered into his work with serious obedience, but feeling that the perception of great literature was something unattainable by himself; religion too, “its high claims, to which no one could be equal; its reproaches.”
— he felt it all to be immeasurable, “surely not meant for the like of him.” He is always “repressible, selfrestrained, always concurring with the influence, the claim upon him, the rebuke, of others.” He attracts the notice of strangers by his unconscious grace and healthy beauty; he is surprised at the charm he exerts on others, never elated by it, nor presuming upon it. And no doubt it is the intention of the piece to show how his one violation of duty, his single deviation from strict military obedience, brought with it ruin and death — so apparently disproportionate a punishment. But he takes his degradation with the same humble submissiveness, and it is in the same spirit that he meets his death, not repining nor complaining, but simply as the orders of some superior power, whom he is to obey unflinchingly by a sort of sacred instinct. The purpose of the piece, then, is to draw out the beauty of the obedient character, a soldierlike simplicity and tranquillity. It is hardly necessary to add that the accessories are exquisitely finished; the old house, with its scented flower-beds and venerable chambers; the ancient stately school, with the Cathedral to which it is attached; but in this one essay it may be said that the simplicity of the motive does not wholly harmonise with the delicacy of the setting. The thought is tinged and coloured by being seen through a somewhat selfconscious and sensuous medium. One cannot help feeling that Emerald would have disliked being regarded in this light, being made a picture of; that is perhaps no reason why it should not be attempted, but it militates against the success of the story, because one feels that Emerald is caught like a butterfly, in the gauzy meshes of a net, and is being too intimately, too tenderly scrutinised, when he is made for the free air and the sun.
And, artistically speaking, one cannot help regarding the extract with which the story ends as a blot. The operation for the removal of the ball, the replacing of the body in the coffin, with “the peak of the handsome nose remaining visible among the flowers” — one feels this to be a harsh realism, with an almost morbid dwelling upon the accidents of mortality, which does a certain violence to the whole conception. Thus, though there are passages in “Emerald Uthwart” which must always rank high among the achievements of Pater, it is impossible to resist the feeling that in this painful story he was attempting effects to which his art could not rise.
It is not, I think, fanciful to interpret this selection of types in the light of Pater’s own life, the half-lit atmosphere in which he deliberately or perhaps temperamentally moved. They are the work of a melancholy introspective mind, dwelling wistfully upon the outer beauty of the world, but with a deeper current of mournful amazement at the brevity and the mystery of it all. No doubt Pater, too, felt his own isolation heavily rather than acutely. Did he belong, one can imagine his asking himself, in spirit, to the earlier, more fragrant, more insouciant time, when men were less shadowed by the complexity of thought and the inherited conscience of the ages? Or did he belong to some future outburst of simpler, more liberal joy, to a time when the heavy commercialism of England, its conventional politics, its moral confusion, its mercantile view of education, should be leavened by beauty and sincere joy? Whichever it was, he had fallen on evil days. Oxford itself, that should have been the home of intellectual and artistic speculation, was crowded by a younger generation, whose idea of a University was a place where, among social and athletic delights, it was possible to defer for a time the necessity of adopting practical life. The older men, those who were accepted by the academical world as men of leading, were too often men of bursarial minds, who loved business and organisation better than intellectual freedom. Even the keener spirits, both among the younger and the older men, were of the dry and rigid type, believing in accuracy more than ideas, in definite accumulation more than intellectual enjoyment. In this atmosphere Pater felt himself misunderstood and decried. The daring and indiscreet impulses of youth had died away, and his unconventionalism had cost him dear. What wonder that his thoughts took on a melancholy tinge, and that he recurred in mind to the thought of figures whose unlikeness to those about them, in spite of the fine daring, the beautiful impulses of their nature, had brought them dissatisfaction and disaster and even death!
CHAPTER VI. LATER WRITINGS
ALL this time Pater was engaged upon a great work, which was destined never to be finished. Gaston de Latour was embarked upon soon after the completion of Marius. Five chapters appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in the course of 1888. A sixth chapter appeared in the Fortnightly Review in the next ye
ar under the title of “Giordano Bruno,” and various other unfinished fragments remain. The chapter called “Shadows of Events” is the only one of these which has been included in the 1902 volume. In the case of a writer as sedulous, as eager for perfection, as Pater it is right to withhold the incomplete fragments. He seems for some cause to have abandoned the book in dissatisfaction. We may speculate as to the cause of this. I am myself disposed to think that he found the historical setting too complicated and the canvas too much crowded. As the story advances the personality seems to ebb out of the figure of the hero, and he becomes a mere mirror of events and other personalities. The influences, too, that are brought to bear on him are of so complicated a nature that his development seems hampered rather than enlarged. No doubt Pater felt that the book was not exhibiting his own best qualities of workmanship; and there is a growing weariness visible, as if he felt that he was failing to cope with the pressure of historical experience that was closing in upon the central figure.
It may here be said that Patels best work is that which is built up delicately and imaginatively out of shadowy hints of events and slender records. His power lay in filling in, heightening, and enriching faint outlines, not in selecting typical touches from great masses of detail. He felt, and rightly, that he had mistaken his capacity. The period he had chosen, the struggle of Huguenots and Catholics, is crowded with salient figures, but to treat it romantically, the tact, the swift intuition, of such a writer as Walter Scott was needed, sketching in broad washes and bold strokes; not the patient and accumulative toil of a minute and delicate writer like Pater.