by Walter Pater
“He seems,” he adds, “to have little sense of the beauty of holiness,” but to be absorbed by a “sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy.”
He treats of Pascal from the literary side with a whole-hearted admiration. He says that he made the French language “as if by a new creation, what it has remained — a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness.” He dwells on the fragrant charm, the naturalness, of the Letters, proceeding from one who was hardly a student, knowing but two or three great books. And the Pensées he considers to be pure inspirations “penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark.” How could the Pensées be more nobly summarised than as “those great fine sayings which seem to betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one’s feet”? They seem to him to combine faultless expression, perfect economy of statement, marvellous suggestiveness, with a “somewhat Satanic intimacy” with the weaknesses of the human heart.
What kept Pascal from scepticism, or, rather, what threw him into religion, was a bewildered, a terrified apprehension of the strange inconsistency of human nature, the blending of meanness and greatness which everywhere appears.
We may consider this essay, then, as Pater’s most deliberate utterance on ethical things. It reveals him, I think, as a deep though unwilling sceptic; it shows a soul athirst yet unsatisfied; it shows that the region of beauty, both in art and religion, in which he strove to live, was but an outer paradise in which he found what peace he could; but in the innermost shrine all is dark and still.
On leaving London, Pater had settled, in 1893, in a house in St. Giles’, Oxford. It is a quiet house with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left is a little passage leading to the back of the house. The inner arch is surmounted with a quaint carved face. Here he settled with his sisters in great contentment.
The President of Magdalen, Mr. T. H. Warren, speaking of the later Oxford days, writes: —
“One would have said that there was a kind of placid piety, an inner content, which somehow manifested itself in him. He did not talk a great deal, yet always enough. What I think struck me most about him was a sort of gentleness in his whole manner, in perception and predilection, almost at times a softness, — and yet it was balanced by hardness of decision too. He was a very familiar figure, with his pale face, strong jaw, heavy, chopped, German-looking moustache, tall hat and apple-green tie. He was often seen walking, and latterly he rather laboured in his walk, which gave, rightly or wrongly, the idea of conscious or half-conscious suffering.... At the Dante Society he did not say much, but what always struck me was that he spoke with a certain authority and a strong common sense; and, moreover, with what appeared a personal and natural knowledge of what a poet or a literary artist in his temperament and habits really is....
“It seemed to me that he cultivated a wise, grave passiveness, a gentle susceptibility, a kind of soft impressionability; that he tried to keep, and did keep, a sort of bloom upon his mind. I never remember a single unkind criticism or remark.... My opinion of him is rather an impression than an opinion, and that is, I think, what he would himself have wished — and what is fairest too.
“Can I put it in a few words? He expressed life for himself and to others in terms of sensations, of impressions. These he might analyse, combine, and re-combine, but together they formed his working synthesis. I did not really know him in the earlier days, when in his written work the sensuousness and the referability of everything to sensation was so avowed. I only knew him well much later when he had become a kind of quietist: what the real man was I could not say.”
In the spring of 1894 Pater went to Glasgow to receive the honorary degree of LL.D., a little piece of recognition which pleased him, and took the opportunity of visiting some of the Northern Cathedrals. In the summer of the same year he was for the first time in his life seriously ill. He had an attack of rheumatic fever and was confined to his bed. But he made an apparent recovery, and became convalescent. He was allowed to leave his bed and come downstairs. He was full of cheerfulness and interest, though he was feeling weak; it is certain, however, that there was something organically wrong, though he allowed himself, with the instinct of one who enjoyed the ordinary routine of life to the full, and who was impatient of invalid conditions, to resume his activities too soon. Still there seemed no reason to suppose that he was acting imprudently. He was working at the lecture on Pascal, which was to have been delivered in July, when, in consequence of writing too near to an open window, he had an attack of pleurisy, which still further reduced his strength. Again he became convalescent, and left his room on July 29 without ill effects. But on the morning of Monday, July 30, 1894, at ten o’clock, on coming downstairs, he had a sudden attack of heart failure, and died apparently without suffering. If he had lived five days longer he would have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was buried in the Holywell cemetery at Oxford, in the presence of many of his old friends. It is melancholy to feel that in all probability his life might have been prolonged for some years, if he had but realised how much reduced in strength he was. But it was the happiest kind of end that could befall a man of Pater’s sensitive and apprehensive temperament. He had always, from his earliest years, been much preoccupied with the thought of death, and even with the effort to reconcile himself to it. It was strange and beautiful that it should, after all, have befallen him so quietly and simply. He felt no shadow of death, no mournful forebodings of mortality. He had won a secure fame, he was surrounded with respect and affection, he had fulfilled in patience and with much quiet happiness a great task; and so with no decay of faculty, no diminution of zest and enthusiasm, no melancholy foreboding, death came to him as a quiet friend and beckoned him smilingly away.
Yet as we realise that this wistful, this inquisitive spirit had indeed drawn near to the gate, through which he had seen others pass, had indeed endured the passage, upon the incidents and impressions of which he had often meditated with an intense and reverent curiosity, the imagination torments and perplexes itself with the wonder as to what the end or the awakening may have been, whether indeed he ever knew, in some moment of swimming gaze and darkened eyes, that he should not return to life and daylight. We find our minds dwelling upon the words with which he ended the finest of all his essays, that on “Leonardo da Vinci,” written twenty-five years before. We lose ourselves “in speculating how one who had been always so desirous of beauty, but desired it always in such definite and precise forms, as hands or flowers or hair, looked forward now into the vague land, and experienced the last curiosity,”
CHAPTER VII. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
IN younger days Pater was refined and dignified in appearance; there is an early photograph of him, shortly after he took his degree, with a soft eye, a serious gentle look, with regular and rounded features. But this altered in later years; he became graver and heavier of aspect, and his face took on a character that has been described as “Japanese”; the pallor of his complexion, like old ivory, became more marked; but his eyes were his most eloquent feature, of a light hazel tint, almost grey-green, which lit up with an impressive light of animation and kindness when he was moved.
He was in later life slow of movement, bent, sad of aspect, except when particularly stirred, and somewhat sedentary in appearance. Yet he was broad-shouldered, strongly-built, sturdy, and gave an impression of soundness, and even toughness of constitution. His great pale face, with the strong lower jaw and carefully trimmed moustache, gave him something of the air of a retired military man. There was an impression sometimes of languor about him. He had to strangers, at first sight, in later years, a fatigued, faded, lustreless air, as of a caged creature. But this, I learn from those who knew him best, was in reality a false impression. He was undoubtedly robust; he was a patient, an unwearying traveller, often walking long distances without fatigue, and bearing uncomplainingly the extreme of Italian heat. But, like all impressionable, percep
tive, artistic temperaments, his physical strength was apt to ebb and flow with his inner mood; when he was pleased, interested, delighted, he was also equable, animated, alert. When he was aware that he was expected to fulfil anticipations, conscious of social strain, uninterested, he became melancholy, drooping, unstrung. To any one introduced to him for the first time he at once gave the impression of great gentleness and sympathy. There was nothing awe-inspiring about him but his reputation. His low deferential voice, his shy smile, the delicate phrasing of his sentences, his obvious interest in the temperament of his companion, gave the feeling of great and sincere humility. He was, too, singularly easy and accessible; he had no desire to keep a conversation in his own hands, or to claim attention for his opinions. He had rather a delicate power of encouraging confidence and frankness. One realised at once that one was in the presence of a man of subtle sensibilities, anxious, not of set purpose but from considerate instinct, to do the fullest justice to the feelings of his companion, and to give him his undivided attention. This came from a fine simplicity of nature, from a character that made no egotistical demands; he seemed to expect and to require little from life, but to be full of a quiet gratitude for such delight as came naturally in his way.
He arrayed himself with scrupulous neatness, and always dressed for Hall. He invariably wore a tall hat, and carried the neatest of gold-topped umbrellas. His gait was peculiar: he had a slight stoop, and dragged one foot slightly, advancing with a certain delicacy. He disliked stopping to talk to people, and often was at some pains not to appear to recognise them; he had a peculiar courteous gesture of the hand, if recognition was inevitable, by which he paid a certain tribute of courtesy, and yet contrived to indicate that he wished to be unmolested. He was shy in large mixed assemblies, but his shyness did not make him silent or abrupt. He was apt to talk, gently and persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversation rather as a shield against undue intimacy.
People on first meeting him were sometimes struck with the extraordinary conventionality of his manners and conversation in society; but this almost oppressive suavity melted into a gentle and sympathetic kindness on further acquaintance. A friend, writing to Miss Pater after her brother’s death, spoke of “his kindness, his sweetness, his gentle and amiable wearing of all his great gifts, his happy and gracious willingness to give all around him the enjoyment of them.”
Another friend of his writes: —
“The only attitude I ever observed in Pater, the only mood I saw him in, was a sort of weary courtesy with which he used to treat me, with somehow a deep kindness shining through. It was as though he would have liked to lavish sympathy and even affection, but was frightened of the responsibility and unequal to the effort. He seemed to me, if I may use an allegory, to point to a sack of treasure, and say, ‘That is yours, if you like to take it; I am only sorry that I am too tired myself to rise and place it in your hands.’”
But, on the other hand, Dr. Bussell, the closest companion in the later years, writes of the side of himself that Pater turned to the nearer circle: —
“His ordinary talk... was the happiest blending of seriousness and mirth, of deep feeling and a sort of childlike glee in the varying surfaces of things.”
This subdued air came to a certain extent from the circumstances of his life, but still more from a deep-seated reclusiveness, rather than humility of nature. Indeed, it may be said that, with all his gentleness, he was not innately humble. What often appeared to be humility was, in reality, an intense dislike of opposition. A consciousness of antagonism irritated him so intensely, that he often preferred to withdraw both what he had said and written, rather than provoke contradiction and argument. It was not that he was diffident about his intuitions; he was rather diffident about his power of defending and recommending them. He was little inclined to dogmatise, and realised most sympathetically the differences of temperament; but the path which he had chosen was the only path for him; and though he might seem to yield to argument and remonstrance, he was never converted, except by reflection. He was probably never fully appreciated at Oxford. Busy, effective, academical natures tended to think of him as a secluded dreamer of dreams; his fame grew so insensibly and secretly, and was, even so, confined so much to the συνετοί, the connoisseurs, that there never came that revulsion of feeling that has sometimes lifted a man suddenly on to a pinnacle of unquestioned reputation. Moreover, it is fair to say that the air of the Universities is not at the present moment favourable to the pursuit of belles lettres and artistic philosophies. The praise of academical circles is reserved at the present time for people of brisk bursarial and business qualifications, for men of high technical accomplishment, for exact researchers, for effective teachers of prescribed subjects, for men of acute and practical minds, rather than for men of imaginative qualities. This is the natural price that must be paid for the increased efficiency of our Universities, though it may be regretted that they maintain so slight a hold upon the literary influences of the day. The whole atmosphere is, in fact, sternly critical, and the only work which is emphatically recognised and approved is the work which makes definite and unquestionable additions to the progress of exact sciences.
A genial epigrammatist once said that if a man desired to court unpopularity in academical circles he had but to enjoy an outside reputation, to write a good literary style, and to make it his business to see something of undergraduates, to gain his end with entire celerity.
There is some truth in the contention. The erudite world is apt to think that a reputation acquired with the general public by literary accomplishments is a second-rate sort of affair, and only to be gained by those who are not sufficiently hard-headed and exact to win academical repute. A man, too, who betrays an interest in the younger members of the community is thought to be slightly abnormal, and either to be actuated by a vague sentimentality, or else to be desirous of receiving the admiration of immature minds, which he cannot win from more mature intellects.
This atmosphere, these conditions, Pater accepted with the gentle outward deference that was characteristic of him; he had no taste for the warm luxuriance of coteries; he had no sort of desire to label with contemptuous names those who must have appeared to him deaf and blind to the subtle and beautiful effects that made the substance of his own life.
It seemed a curious irony of fate which planted Pater in a college which for years enjoyed a robust pre-eminence for athletic triumphs, together with a reputation for wholesale turbulence. But it may be said that such an atmosphere was not wholly uncongenial to Pater. Though he had no sort of proficiency in athletics, and though he was pre-eminently peaceable in disposition, he had, as I have said, a genuine and deep admiration for strongly developed physical vigour, while he had little of the sensitive disciplinary instinct that feels the frank display of youthful ebullience a kind of slur upon the privileges of constituted authority. No one was more anxious than Pater, in a disciplinary crisis, to give a case a fair hearing, and to condone as far as possible an outbreak that was thoughtless rather than deliberate. In all cases where there was a question of the infliction of punishment for some breach of discipline, Pater was always on the side of mercy. And this was with no wish to preserve his own dignity by temporising with the disorderly section. He was always a loyal and faithful supporter of authority, while he was anxious that a case should not be judged with the undue sternness that the sense of outraged dignity tends to bring with it. As Dr. Bussell wrote: —
“Naturally inclined to a certain rigour in discipline, he was full of excuse for individual cases; and regretted and thought over stem measures more than most members of a governing body can afford to do.”
Apocryphal stories are related of him, such as his excuse for the rowdiness of undergraduates after Hall, that they reminded him of playful young tigers that had just been fed; or his supposed remark about bonfires in Brasenose quad, that he did not object to them because they lighted up the spire of St. Mary’s so beautifully. Th
ese were, of course, intended to represent the imperturbable search for beautiful impressions in the most incongruous circumstances; but they represent, too, a half-truth, namely, a real and vital charity of nature, inclined to condone, and even to sympathise with, the manifestations of natural feeling, however personally inconvenient.
Perhaps the playful irony, the light-handed humour, which was to Pater a deliberate shield against the roughness of the world, tended to obscure his deep seriousness of nature, his devotedly religious spirit. He sympathised, it is true, with all humanity with a? largeness which is surprising in a man of such sensitive and secluded constitution. He had a determination, remarkable in a man of delicate organisation, to see the world as it really was, to admire what was vigorous and natural and vital in it. He had no wish to create for himself an unreal paradise, to suppose the world to be other than it appeared, or to drown the insistent cries that reached him in a web of blurred impression or uncertain sound. He admired what was joyful and brave and strong. Had he been of a more alert physical constitution he would have thrown himself, we may safely assert, into the pursuit of athletics ardently and eagerly. As he could not, he contented himself with admiring the youthful exuberance of activity, and, true to his nature, with disentangling as far as he could the fibre of beauty which ran for him through the universe. But in all this he was akin and not alien to the insouciant and pleasure-loving spirit of youth.
He was by nature an extremely reticent man; he never seemed to think that his ideas were likely to command attention or his personality to cause interest. He wrote very few letters and never kept a diary. His whole attitude to the world and its concerns was the attitude of a spectator, and even his closest and nearest relationships with others could not win him from his isolation; he could be kind, courteous, considerate, and sincere; but he could not be intimate; he always guarded his innermost heart.