by Walter Pater
And the second point, which is allied closely to this, is that Pater presses too heavily upon laboriousness in art at the expense of ecstatic freedom; because though there are among the greatest artists many instances of those who have attained supremacy by endless and painstaking labour, yet, in the case of the best artists of all, they seem to start at a point to which others may hardly attain, to be more like the inheritors of perfect faculty than the laborious acquirers of it. Writers like Scott and Thackeray, for instance, not to travel far for instances, seem to have achieved, as Scott himself said, their best results by a “hurried frankness” of execution, and to have produced by a kind of instinct what others have to learn to produce by toil and thought.
And thus it is that the essay, in its very incompleteness and partiality of view, has an immense value as an autobiographical document, and helps us, if it is the personality of Pater that we desire to apprehend and penetrate, to draw closer to the real man, in his strength and in his limitations, than any other extant writing; and is indeed a piece of intimate self-revelation.
Moreover, the concluding paragraphs of the essay, the frank confession of his belief, in words which his natural reticence make into what may be carelessly regarded as a piece of tame and conventional rhetoric, in the ultimate mission of art, have an intense and vital significance; the increase of sympathy, the amelioration of suffering, the service of humanity — these, then, were in his deliberate view the ends of art. The very use, in the very crucial passage of the summary, of the vague and trite phrase “the glory of God” as a motive for high art, has a poignant emphasis: it reveals the very depth of the writer’s soul. He of all men, at the very crisis of the enunciation of his creed, could never have used such an expression unless it contained for him an essential truth; and this single phrase bears eloquent testimony to the fact that, below the aesthetic doctrine which he enunciated, lay an ethical base of temperament, a moral foundation of duty and obedience to the Creator and Father of men.
In the course of 1889 — not a prolific year— “Hippolytus Veiled” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, and “Giordano Bruno,” one of the Chapters of Gaston de Latour, in the Fortnightly. Pater also published the Appreciations — rather a made-up volume, one is forced to reflect, the kind of book that is issued in response to the appeal of a publisher. We have already discussed all the contents of the volume, except the Shakespearian studies, three in number, of which “Measure for Measure” had appeared in 1874, “Love’s Labours Lost” in 1878. “Shakespeare’s English Kings” had not appeared before, and was the only new item in the volume. Two facts are noticeable about the book. The essay on “Aesthetic Poetry,” written in 1868, reappeared here, but was omitted in the later edition of 1890; and the study called “Romanticism,” written in 1876, reappeared as a Postscript.
The Shakespearian studies do not demand any very close attention. In the little essay on “Love’s Labours Lost” he points out that in the play Shakespeare was dallying with Euphuism. “It is this foppery of delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied in ‘Love’s Labours Lost.’” But he points out, too, that in dealing with a past age, one cannot afford to neglect a study of its playthings: “For what is called fashion in these matters occupies, in each age, much of the care of many of the most discerning people, furnishing them with a kind of mirror of their real inward refinements, and their capacity for selection. Such modes - or fashions are, at their best, an example of the artistic predominance of form over matter; of the manner of the doing of it over the thing done; and have a beauty of their own.” And this, he concludes, is the chief value of the play.
In the essay on “Measure for Measure” he shows that the play is a remodelling of an earlier and rougher composition; but he points out that the value and significance of it is that Shakespeare works out of it “a morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for the central expression of his moral judgments.” He says that we have in it “a real example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described as suggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hints only, brings into distinct shape the reader’s own half-developed imaginings.” He notes the dark invasion of the shadow of death in the play, death the “‘great disguiser,’ blanching the features of youth and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its disgraceful associations.” And further, he touches with exquisite skill the way in which Shakespeare here brings out, by a sudden vignette, a romantic picture of a scene; the episode of Mariana, “the moated grange, with its dejected mistress, its long, listless, discontented days, where we hear only the voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the loveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare’s school, is the pleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant places.” Not less delicate is the apprehension of the character of Isabella, so tranquil, chaste, and sisterly at first, changed, by the inrush of contending passions, in a moment, into something fierce, vindictive, and tiger-like. He sums up his conclusion by saying that the charm of the work is its underlying conception of morality, not the morality which opposes a blunt and stubborn front to the delicate activities of life, but the artistic morality that watches, judges, values and appreciates, and is on the side of culture rather than on the side of prejudice and rectitude.
The essay on “Shakespeare’s English Kings” (1889) is rather a slight performance, and the analysis of a somewhat superficial kind. Pater, for instance, almost fails to realise the magnificence of the conception of Richard II., the tragedy of which consists in the fact that, at a sudden crisis, a prompt force and vigour are demanded of a ruler whose nature is full indeed of wise and fruitful thoughts, but whose position calls for a bluff and cheerful energy, when all that he can give is a subtle and contemplative philosophy. But he traces the general motive finely: ——
“No!” he says, “Shakespeare’s kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men: rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon greatness, with those pathetic results, the natural self-pity of the weak heightened in them into irresistible appeal to others as the net result of their royal prerogative. One after another, they seem to lie composed in Shakespeare’s embalming pages, with just that touch of nature about them, making the whole world akin.”
He ends by a subtle passage, not fully worked out, indicating that as unity of impression in a work of art is its perfect virtue, and as lyrical poetry is the best vehicle for such unity, then “a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were still lying at the root of it.”
In these Shakespearian studies, produced at points so far apart in Pater’s life, the chief interest is that he should have approached Shakespeare at all. It is after all another testimony to the width and largeness of Shakespeare’s mind, that it should have forced an expression of admiration from a spirit so introspective, so definite in its range, so preoccupied with a theory, as Pater’s. Moreover, as we have seen, dramatic art had little attraction for him. One feels that he does not enter into the humanity, the profundity, of Shakespeare. He is like a man who hovers about the thickets that lie on the verge of a great forest, peeping into the glades, noting the bright flowers and the sweet notes of hidden birds, but with little desire to thread the wood or penetrate its haunted green heart.
The years 1890 and 1891 were not apparently very fruitful; indeed the latter was one of the six, out of the twenty-nine years of Pater’s literary life, in which he published nothing but a review or two; but he was hard at work on his Plato and Platonism, which began to appear in 1892.
“Prosper Mérimée” was written as a lecture in 1890, and thus belongs to the last period of Pater’s work. He begins by a melancholy summary of the century — Mérimée was born in 1803 — a century of disillusionment, in which the ancient landmarks had been removed, and men began to ask themselves whether of all the ancient fabric of tradition, of thought, of
principles, there was anything certain at all. To make the best of a changed world — that was the problem; and thus art and literature would tend to become pastimes, fierce games born of a desperate sort of make-believe, just to pass the time that remained. Whatever else was uncertain, it was at least certain that life had somehow to be lived; if the great old words like patriotism, virtue, honour, were mere high-sounding names, and stood only for burnt-out illusions, at least there was a space to be filled, before the dark hours came bringing with them the ultimate certainty.
Prosper Mérimée, in Pater’s view, is the summary and type of these tendencies. The world is utterly hollow to him; his cynicism is complete and all-embracing. He is indifferent to ideas, to politics, to art; but there still remains the vast and inconsequent spectacle of human life to study, to amuse oneself with, to depict with a contemptuous grace. History, artistically selected and displayed, is perhaps the best distraction of all. History reveals, no doubt, little but desperate and passionate illusions, but even so there is a narcotic interest about the spectacle. Into this quarry of ancient materials Mérimée flings himself with the zest and appetite of an energetic mind. And so, too, there were similar possibilities of romance in the modern world. Corsica, where the scene of Colomba is laid, was a place still full of primal, simple, passionate emotions — exaggerated, no doubt, and unreasonable, but still unquestionably there. Even that morbid personal pride with its passion for revenge, its view of life as a sacrifice to honour, offers a stimulus to the imagination, though the terror of it is free from all interfusion of pity. —
Pater skilfully indicates the perfect art of Mérimée, the minute proportion, the horror of all loose and otiose statement, issuing in a style of which every part is closely tied with every other part, and the end synchronises sharply with the conclusion of the story; and further, he characterises the human charm of the Lettres à une Inconnue, where the author seems surprised and baffled by the unsuspected violence of his own emotion; the fine intellectual companionship of which he is in search betraying him suddenly, like a crust of ashes over a smouldering fire.
He concludes with an interesting passage which shows that impersonality was the aim of Mérimée’s art, so that his books stand “as detached from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness to their maker than if they were the work of another person.” The same is true of his style—” the perfection of nobody’s style,” as Pater cleverly calls it—” fastidiously in the fashion — an expert in all the little, half-contemptuous elegances of which it is capable... a nice observer of all that is most conventional.”
And thus we see that the absence of soul, of subjectivity, of peculiarities, is at once the weakness and the strength of Mérimée’s work. It is all pure mind, and produces a singular harshness of ideal, so that “there are masters of French prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off.”
It is a fine piece of critical analysis, perhaps a little overstated, but essentially true. Mérimée does not succeed quite to the extent that Pater thinks in absolute self-effacement, but he has seen clearly enough the spirit of the man; and though his exposition marches somewhat relentlessly on, discarding such evidence as may tell against his theory, yet he has somehow penetrated the secret of this brilliant writer with his flawless polish, his inner hardness, as only a great critic can.
Of the delivery of this lecture on Mérimée, the President of Magdalen says: —
“A large audience, too large for the ugly and inconvenient Lecture Room at the Taylorian, came to hear him. He seemed surprised and overwhelmed. I don’t think he knew how much of a celebrity he was, and he seemed a little frightened. He read his lecture in a low monotonous voice.”
In the same year appeared the “Art Notes in North Italy.” It is what it professes to be, a little study of certain Italian painters, jottings from an artistic traveller’s diary, and deserves no special consideration, excepting in so far as it reveals Pater’s preferences and his method.
In 1892, besides the first chapters of Plato and Platonism, and an ingenious and beautiful essay on the study of Dante, written as an introduction to Mr. C. L. Shadwell’s translation of the Purgatory, Pater published, in successive numbers of the New Review, “Emerald Uthwart,” which has been considered among the Imaginary Portraits. In the same year the essay on “Raphael” was written, as a lecture, and it thus differs in style to a certain extent from the more deliberate literary works, though less, perhaps, in the case of Pater than would be the case with many writers. But he certainly aimed at producing something which should be capable of being apprehended by an interested listener on a first hearing; there is less concentration, less ornament, less economy of effect, than in the more deliberate writings. The essay presupposes a certain knowledge of the subject, and aims at bringing out the central motif of the life of the great painter relieved against a somewhat shadowy and allusive background of events. But the central thought is not lacking in clearness.
“By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his life, some would add in the ‘opportunity’ of his early death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the good fortune, of genius.” This is an admirable summary; and he adds that upon a careful examination of his works “we shall find even his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his own patient disposal of the means at hand.” He goes on to show that the supreme charm of Raphael’s nature was in his teachableness, his prompt assimilation of influences, his essential humility and tranquillity; that his genius was not a vivid, tortured thing, like a lightning-flash, with prodigious efforts long matured in the womb of the cloud, with intervals of despairing silence and ineffectiveness — but a tranquil, equable progress: “genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius.” Pater says, indeed, that Raphael may be held to be the supreme example of the truth of the beatitude that the meek shall inherit the earth. He traces the steps of this progress. He shows him stainless, unruffled, untainted by the restlessness of the age that flowered in sin, and yet able by a supreme insight to transfer the hinted presence of fantastic evil into his pictures; he shows his gradual mastery of dramatic intensity, till he could concentrate the whole of a picture on one point, subordinate the whole scene to some central and poignant emotion. And he brings out, too, with great skill, that Raphael was always in his own thought a learner, with no desperate prejudice for originality, always open to influence, yet transfiguring and transmuting influence into higher and higher conceptions of his own. At last he brings him to Rome, where his life seems “as we read of it, hasty and perplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always to be completed, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a world of breathless competition, amid a great company of spectators, for great rewards.” Among these mighty tasks stands foremost his divergence into architecture, appointed, as he was, to succeed Bramante as architect of St. Peter’s. But all through shines out the unspoilt nature, making its charm felt upon artists and courtiers alike, the same unhasting, unresting diligence, the same smiling youthfulness of demeanour.
He shows the mental force of Raphael’s conceptions, his unequalled power of apprehending and transmitting to others complex and difficult ideas with a real philosophical grasp, yet for all his technique, all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge, never losing sight of essential beauty and peace. Pater instances as the supremely salient instance of his art the Ansidei or Blenheim Madonna, now in the National Gallery. It is not impossible that he was guided in this selection by a consideration for those whose opportunities for acquainting themselves with Raphael’s art were bound to be limited. “I find there,” he says, “at first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in a proposition of Euclid, a sense of the power of the understanding, in the economy with which he has reduced his material to the simplest terms, has disentangled and detached its various elements.”
“Keep them to that picture,” he adds, “as the embodied formula of Raphael’s genius.” The conclusion of the essay comes rather suddenly, and he sums up the purpose of Raphael’s life in the phrase, “I am utterly purposed that I will not offend.” It is this balance of temperament, this steady deliberate bias to perfect purity, that is the note of his life. He is the Galahad of art, and might say with Galahad —
“My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.”
The essay is thus a careful and sympathetic attempt to give to learners a lucid introduction to the art of Raphael. But it differs from his own chosen subjects, and is therefore less characteristic of Pater as a writer than much of his work — in that there is no attempt at tracing the recondite, the suggestive element, in the work of Raphael. He intermingles little of his own preference, his own personality, with the verdict; but it is still deeply characteristic of Pater in another region of his mind, of the patient sympathy which he was always ready to give, of his desire to meet others halfway, not to mystify or to bewilder the half-cultivated learner, whose zeal perhaps may outrun his critical knowledge, with more remote considerations, but to draw the rays into a single bright focus, rather than, as Pater so often did, resolve the single ray into rainbow tints and prismatic refractions. Here, then, at least, we see Pater in the light of the educator, the scribe, the expounder of mysteries, rather than as the hieratic presenter of the deeper symbol.