by Walter Pater
The story opens beautifully enough. The boy Gaston lives the quiet life of the country at the old house of Deux-manoirs in La Beauce, the central corn-land of France, with the dim shape of the great church of Chartres visible, like a ship under press of canvas, on the low horizon.
Gaston is of the same type as Marius — innocent, serious, devout, keenly sensitive to impressions of beauty. We see him first taking upon himself the vows of the ecclesiastical life, “duly arrayed for dedication, with the lighted candle in his right hand and the surplice folded over his left shoulder,” in the dark glowing church.
Somehow the figure fails to appeal to us. We feel — could Pater have felt the same? — that we are but meeting Marius over again in altered circumstances.
Yet the description of the Office, sung in the presence of the courtly and vivacious Bishop of Chartres, is full of beauty: —
“It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way — Mirabilia testimonia tua! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of men’s lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there was the sheep astray, sicut ovis quae periit — the physical world; with its lusty ministers, at work, or sleeping for a while amid the stubble, their faces upturned to the August sun — the world so importunately visible, intruding a little way, with its floating odours, in that semicircle of heat across the old over-written pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries within.”
The quiet life of the Manor is broken shortly afterwards by a sudden visit of the young King Charles the Ninth, who enters from a hunting expedition, and “with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the place” utters a shrill strain of half-religious oaths. Pale, with an ivory whiteness, vivacious, unbalanced, the young king feels the charm of the place, touches a lute, talks of verses, and scratches a stanza of his own with a diamond upon a window-pane.
As Gaston lives on his quiet life in a disturbed and alarmed country his reflective nature begins to open. “In a sudden tremor of an aged voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit observance of a day, be became aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world.”
He goes on to join the episcopal household of Chartres as a page, in the company of other noble youths. He makes friends; books and talk— “the brilliant surface of the untried world” — confront him; but his own calm instinct, his tranquillising sense of religion, provide the necessary balance. He takes three chosen companions home with him to spend the hot bright weeks of the summer; and here, through the poems of Ronsard, the infection of the living and breathing spirit of the modern poetry, near, actual, tangible like the faces of flowers, seizes upon him.
“Never before had words, single words, meant so much. What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and it was the lark’s voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity lent itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal ornaments, of the people on the highway.”
“Here was a discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative regeneration of the world.”
In this excited mood he rides with his companions to the Priory, not far away, of which Ronsard was the Prior, to see the great man himself. And here Pater is at his best. They find the Prior himself digging in his garden; they attend a solemnity in the church; they sup with the poet, who, touched by the generous enthusiasm of the boys, abandons himself to a sociable mood, shows them his treasures, his manuscripts, his portraits. But Gaston finds that Ronsard has attained to no serenity of spirit; his “roving, astonished eyes” reveal him as “the haggard soul of a haggard generation.”
Ronsard is sympathetically interested in the ardent spirit of the boy, and gives him an introduction to the great Montaigne; whom he presently goes to visit, in his château in Dordogne.
“It was pleasant to sleep as if in the sea’s arms, amid the low murmurs, the salt odour mingled with the wild garden scents of a little inn or farm, forlorn in the wide enclosure of an ancient manor, deserted as the sea encroached — long ago, for the fig-trees in the riven walls were tough and old.”
He finds the great man in his towered manor, with the view from the roof of the rich noonday scenery. He feels after a few moments’ talk as if he had known the genial philosopher all his life.
“In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!”
“Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the torrents.”
The portrait of this splendid human egotist is admirably touched, with a wealth of subtle illustration from his writings. His deeply sceptical spirit, his vivid agnosticism, confronted again and again with hopeless mysteries, and yet for ever turning back upon the quest, undaunted, unsated, absolutely sincere, admitting his own egotism with frank humour—” in favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our private confession, I confess myself in public.” And this outward egotism of manner was but the symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism; “I have no other end in writing but to discover myself.”
Pater indicates, with perfect insight, the “broad, easy, indifferent” passage of Montaigne through the world, his relish for meat and drink and corporeal sensation; and yet, side by side with this, a curious, superstitious, formal kind of piety, all springing from the same worship for the whole of humanity. But after all, it was the sincerity and tolerance of the man that was the charm, his quaint fancy, his rich sympathy, his perfect comprehension; the influence that he exercised was that of one who made no selection of moods and things, but tasted all, enjoyed all.
Then follows the chapter called “Shadows of Events,” which it was well to publish, but about which it is easy to comprehend Pater’s own hesitation. It is a historical survey mainly, but the impression is all clouded and blurred; one cannot help feeling that the one thing lacking to Pater was the very largeness of tolerance which he described so admiringly in Montaigne; certain characteristics, certain brilliant points, attract him; but he cannot visualise what he does not admire. The characters that play a large, robust, coarse, straightforward part are all outside of him, incomprehensible, repellent. The types whom Pater discerned so clearly were those who crept somewhat remotely, spectatorially, even timidly, through the throng, who lived the interior life of thought and speculation and appreciation, tasting the finer savours; not those who strode out boldly, feeling the air of the world their native air. Something of this melancholy aloofness was true of Pater himself, and he draws near only to those in whom he discerns something of the same wistful remoteness.
“Looking back afterwards,” says Pater of Gaston, “this singularly self-possessed person had to confess that under (the) influence (of the unsettled conditions of the age) he had lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real differences and oppositions of things in that hotly-coloured world of Paris, — like a shaken tapestry about him.”
The last phrase is exactly true of the chapter — it is a shaken tapestry, a multitude of blurred heads and faces, confused gestures, agitated forms.
And so we pass to the dignified banishment of Charles, and the arrival of the new king; when across the story breaks the teaching of Bruno — Pantheism, as it is named, “the vision of all things in God,” as the end and aim of all metaphysical speculation.
Bruno, originally a Domi
nican monk, had conceived the idea of the wholeness of life in a spiritual region.
“Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself, to the infinite relish of this ‘prodigal son’ of Dominic. God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, of absolute limitation. Touch! see! listen! eat freely of all the trees of the garden of Paradise, with the voice of the Lord God literally everywhere! — here was the final counsel of perfection.”
What repels Gaston in the teaching of Bruno is the want of artistic distinction and refinement about his theory. The instinct of the artist was just that — to define, disentangle, discern, to distinguish between “the precious and the base, aesthetically; between what was right and wrong in the matter of art.”
It is not clear then how the doctrine of Bruno or even of Montaigne was to affect the spirit of Gaston. It is a case of a soul the very breath of whose life was the arriving at canons of some kind, whose most sacred duty appeared to be to select from the immense mass of experience and material flung so prodigally down in the world, the things that belonged to his peace. The difficulty is to comprehend what was to be the issue. In the theory of Montaigne and Bruno alike, Gaston is brought into contact with types essentially uncritical, and one would suppose that they were intended to have an enlarging effect. But the hint seems rather to be that they were to act in the opposite direction, and to throw Gaston back upon the critical attitude, as the one safeguard in the bewildering world.
One feels as though Pater had here essayed too large a task; that he was, so to speak, preaching to himself the doctrine of robust tolerance, of good-humoured sympathy with a more vivid and generous life; and that he could not to his satisfaction depict the next steps in the development because it was precisely the very type of development of which he had had no personal experience.
Thus the book, from its very incompleteness, has the interest of being again an intimate self-revelation. It stands like a great unfinished canvas by a master of minute, imaginative, suggestive portraiture. Only, one is tempted to wish that he had not given so much thought and energy to so baffling a task — that he had constructed more of those solitary figures which he had, as we know, in his mind, in which his powers would have had their full scope, in which every delicate touch would have told.
After the publication of the five chapters of Gaston de Latour, Pater gave himself up to the composition of one of the most interesting of all his productions.
The essay on “Style,” which appeared in the Fortnightly Review of December 1888, and was prefixed to Appreciations in 1889, is one of Pater’s most elaborate and finished productions. It is indeed so elaborate, so carefully wrought, it disdains so solemnly the devices that bring lucidity, the way-posts and milestones of the road, that in reading it one is apt to lose the sense of its structure, and not to realise what a simple case he is presenting. Professor Seeley used to enunciate the maxim to those whose essays he was criticising, “Let the bones show!” Well, in Pater’s essay the bones do not show; not only does the rounded flesh conceal them, but they are still further disguised into a species of pontifical splendour by a rich and stiff embroidered robe of language.
He begins by dismissing with a great subtlety of illustration the ancient principle that a sharp distinction can be drawn between prose and poetry, showing that it is not true that poetry differs only from prose by the presence of metrical restraint; but that while a severe logical structure must underlie poetry, prose can exhibit high imaginative qualities; and that the real distinction in literature is between the literature that is imaginative, and the literature that attempts merely the transcription of fact. He points out that the moment that argument passes from the mere presentation of a theorem and becomes a personal appeal, that moment is the border-line crossed; and that in the work of the historian the poetical element is to be found in the personal element of selection which is bound to come in, and which may then transform statement into art.
“Just in proportion,” he says, “as the writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art (as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature also, truth — truth to bare fact, there — is the essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.”
He goes on to say that imaginative prose is the special art of the modern world, “an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.”
He then passes to the proposition that the art of the craftsman of words must be essentially a scholarly art; that the best writer, “with all the jealousy of a lover of words, will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them to efface the distinctions of language”; but there must be no hint of pedantry; the tact of the great writer being employed in seeing what new words and usages really enrich language and make it elastic and spontaneous, as well as what additions merely debase it. And then, too, the word-artist must employ “a self-restraint, a skilful economy of means”; every sentence must have its precise relief, “the logically filled space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome.” He must employ “honourable artifice” to produce a peculiar atmosphere; and thus the perfect artist will be recognised by what he omits even more than by what he retains. “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.”
The one essential thing, then, is “that architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first.”
“All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view.” It must be composition, and not loose accretion. The literary artist must leave off “not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end, but in all the freshness of volition.”
He admits that there are instances of great writers who have been no artists, who have written with a kind of unconscious tact; but he maintains that one of the greatest pleasures of really good literature is “in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure.”
He sums up this part of the subject by saying that all good literature must be directed both by mind and soul, the mind giving the logical structure, the soul lending the personal appeal.
He then diverges into an elaborate illustration drawn from the methods of Flaubert, whose theory it was that though there might be a number of ways of expressing a thought, yet that there was one perfect way, if the artist could only find it, one unique word, one appropriate epithet, phrase, sentence, paragraph, which alone could express the vision within; and again he enforces his belief in the “special charm in the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end.”
Truth, then, is the essential quality, truth of conception, truth of expression; and style must be characteristic and expressive of personality, and though taking its form from the conception, must take its colour from the temperament; and indeed that it should do so, that it should indicate the personal colour, is but another manifestation of sincerity.
Thus it will be seen that whether art is good depends upon the soul of the creator, whether it is great depends upon the mind; and then in memorable words he adds that i
f art “be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul — that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, — it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life.”
I have dwelt at length on this essay, because in one sense it is the summary of Pater’s artistic creed. It is perhaps the only direct and personal revelation of his theory of his art; but it will be observed throughout that he is speaking not to the outer circle, not even to the critical reader; it is not a concio ad populum, but a condo ad clerum. The audience whom he had in mind were the initiated, the craftsmen; and the whole oration presupposes a species of mystical apprehension of the work of the artist; hence comes his insistence on the delight that arises from the sense of difficulties overcome, a delight which only the artist who has striven much and failed often can share. It is therefore a technical discourse; and dealing with it from this point of view, it must be confessed that in two points it falls short of perfect catholicity and reveals the personal bias. The first of these is the point that has just been indicated, that from the highest art of all, such as the art of Shakespeare and Virgil, Dante and Homer, the sense of effort, of obstacles surmounted, disappears. Celare artem, that is the triumph; that the thing should appear simple, easy, inevitable. For in the pleasure that the artist takes in seeing a difficulty successfully wrestled with and overcome, there creeps in a certain self-consciousness, a species of gratified envy in seeing that, supreme as the process is, the difficulty was there; the absence, indeed, of this sense of effort is what keeps many critical students of art away from the highest masterpieces, and allows them to feel more at their ease in art where the mastery is not so complete. But this is a condition that one desires to remove rather than to emphasise; it is based on weakness and fallibility, rather than on strength and confidence.