WALTER PATER

Whatever else one may say of Pater, however one may like or dislike him, he stands in the complex, elusive nineteenth century as a clear sign of something fixed and known. But he performs this office not as a critic, as he is commonly reckoned; indeed, of the critical mind, exactly speaking, he had little, being at once something more and something less than this. The hardest test of the critic, in the exercise of his special function, is his tact and sureness in valuing the productions of his own day. But in that tact and sureness, which come only with the last refinement of self-knowledge, Pater was never an adept. Take, for instance, his reviews of contemporary books collected under the title of Essays from the Guardian; they contain no doubt a good deal that is worth reading, but they lack discrimination and leave in the mind no sense of finely estimated values; their very language, as showing the uncertainty of the author's mental procedure, falls at times into the most awkward involutions.

Nor was his power of discrimination any firmer when dealing with the past. It is of course a perfectly legitimate, perhaps the higher, function of criticism to take the expression of life as it comes to us in literature, and to develop therefrom a philosophy and vision of the critic's own; and this was the deliberate intention of Pater. Such an aim is entirely justifiable, but it is not justifiable to misunderstand or falsify the basis on which the critic's own fabric is to be raised. If he is true critic his first concern must be the right interpretation of the documents before him, and whatever else he may have to offer must proceed from primary veracity of understanding. Just here Pater faulted, or defaulted. He has much to say that is interesting, even persuasive, about the great leaders and movements of the past, but too often his interpretation, when the spell of his manner is broken, turns out to be fundamentally wrong, springing not from a desire to see the facts and fit them into his argument, but from a purely literary ambition to illustrate and authorize a preconceived theory of life. There is, beneath much erudition and a certain surface accuracy, no search for la vraie verite, to use one of his own phrases; and this disregard of the truth passes inevitably into his own superimposed philosophy, is indeed its key-note.

This may seem a harsh judgement to pass on a writer who has been one of the main influences in later nineteenth-century literature, but it can be easily substantiated. In his three greatest works - Plato and Platonism, Marius the Epicurean, and The Renaissance - he has dealt with three spiritual crises of history; and in each case he has, gravely, though with varying degrees, falsified the reality. Plato and Platonism is a book that every student of Greek and of life should read; it is in itself a meticulously wrought work of art in which each detail is fitted into its place to create a total designed effect; but that effect, presented as an interpretation of Plato, is of a kind, it can scarcely be said too emphatically, that differs absolutely from what Plato himself meant to convey in his dialogues, and is nothing less than a betrayal of critical trust. In one of his chapters Pater gives a picture, based ostensibly on Karl Otfried Mueller, of the Doric life in Lacedaemon as the actuality which Plato had in mind when he conceived his ideal city-state. It is a picture of cool colours and deliciously subdued harmonies, an idyl beautiful in itself, and not without lessons for the youth of to-day in its insistence on the sheer loveliness and exquisite pleasures that may flow from calculated renunciation and self-suppression. It has its own wisdom, shown especially in the development of the text, suggested by Mueller, to the effect that "in a Doric State education was, on the whole, a matter of more importance than government." But it has one grave defect: it is not true to the facts. This city, as the portrait finally arranges itself, is simply not the cold, hard Sparta that lay on the banks of the Eurotas, but some glorified Auburn wafted into an Arcadia of the imagination. At the end of the chapter, after giving a brave account of the training, or askesis, by which the Lacedaemonian youth were drilled for life, Pater represents an Athenian visitor as asking: "Why this strenuous task-work, day after day; why this loyalty to a system, so costly to you individually, though it may be thought to have survived its original purpose; this laborious, endless education, which does not propose to give you anything very useful or enjoyable in itself?" The question is apt, and Pater puts the answer into the mouth of a Spartan youth: "To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus into the eyes of all Greece."- The discipline of Lycurgus, that is to say, was to the end that the young men of Sparta might be "a spectacle, aesthetically, at least, very interesting" (the words are Pater's) to the rest of Greece! Really, a more complete perversion of history has not often been conceived. What the institutions of Sparta actually stood for may be known in a word from the opinion of the Lacedaemonian in Plato's Laws; they were ordered to the end that Sparta might conquer the other States in war, nothing more nor less - hoste polemo nikan tas allas poleis. Not the indulgence of vanity, however chastely controlled, but the need of self-preservation and the terrible law of the survival of the fittest made the Lacedaemonian men and women the comeliest of Hellas; they were warriors and the mothers of warriors, not aesthetes.[ A critic of this essay has accused me of misrepresenting Plato. It is true that the Athenian Stranger, who speaks for the author in the Laws, sees a higher meaning in the institution of Lycurgus than is admitted by the Lacedaemonian; but certainly, whatever may have been the bye-product, so to speak, of the Spartan constitution, self-preservation and conquest were its first and main object.]

And this same misrepresentation runs through much of Pater's direct analysis of Platonism. Pater saw, as all who study Plato are forced to see, that the heart of Plato's doctrine lay in his conception of ideas, in his use and enforcement of dialectic or the process of passing intellectually from particulars to generals. But Pater could not help feeling also that there was something in this dialectical procedure that did not accord with his particular notion of aesthetics, and he was bound if he accepted Platonism - as it was his desire to assimilate all the great movements of history - to interpret Platonic ideas in his own way. The result is a striking passage in the chapter on The Doctrine of Plato:

To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, under general notions, and with - yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms - a botanic or "physic" garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it must be confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is more interesting than ever....

So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance of the eye; so it may be with the moral act, with the condition of the mind, or a feeling.... Generalization, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective, the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad-cast light he enjoys! - that scholar, confronted with the sea-shell, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circumstances which may never precisely so occur again; in the contemplation of that single phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not only sees, but understands (thereby only seeing the more) and will, therefore, also remember. The significance of the particular object he will retain, by use of his intellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to use Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels, not indeed of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or bronze. So much by way of apology for general ideas- abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and wooden, as we may sometimes think them.

From the consideration of Plato and Platonism we turn naturally to the greatest of Pater's works, Marius the Epicurean, and here again we are confronted by a false interpretation of one of the critical moments of history. The theme of Marius, I need scarcely say, is the life of a young Italian who, in the age of Marcus Aurelius, is searching for some principle of conduct amid the dissolution of all traditional laws, for the peace which his troubled heart craves and cannot discern. He sees the world about him, the world at least that has outgrown the ancestral belief in the gods and has not sunk into frivolity or sullen scepticism, divided between the two sects of the Epicureans and the Stoics, and the larger part of the story is really a disquisition on the effect of these opposed philosophies upon the human soul. Much of this is subtly conceived, and especially the adaptation of the legend of Cupid and Psyche from the Golden Book of Apuleius, and the long discourse of Marcus Aurelius contrived with delicate adjustment from the Meditations, are among the rare things of literature; although even here there is a certain taint, an insinuating betrayal of the truth, in the factitious charms lent to these philosophies. Apuleius may have been, in a sense, decadent, but he was not languorous as Pater presents him in translation, and Marcus Aurelius is in expression crabbed and scholastic and very far from the smooth periods of his imitator. In his hesitancy between these two philosophies Marius is revolted by the indifference of the Emperor to the sufferings of the world, and leans towards a kind of sentimental and chastened Epicureanism. At the last, however, he is introduced into the home of a Christian family living outside of Rome, is fascinated by the purity and decorum of their lives, and is himself in the way of conversion, when, after the manner of romantic heroes, he fades out of existence:

The people around his bed were praying fervently - Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! In the moments of his extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to ail those old passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil.

But I summon thee, not such as when formed in schools, trained in libraries, fed in Attic academies and porches, thou blurtest forth wisdom - I address thee simple, and rude, and uncultured, and untaught, such as they possess who possess thee and nothing else; the bare soul from the road, the street, the weaver's shop.

In the third of Pater's major works, The Renaissance, there is again a reading of Paterism into the past, but without the perversion of spirit and without the offensiveness that some may feel in his treatment of Platonism and Christianity. Not a little of the romanticism from which Pater drew his philosophy may be traced back to the Italy of Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci; but the tone, the energy, the ethos, are changed. The nature of the change cannot be better displayed than in the famous description of La Gioconda, which, if it may seem too familiar for quotation, is too characteristic of Pater to be omitted; as indeed the whole essay on Leonardo may be taken as the subtlest expression of his genius:

La Gioconda [he writes of the portrait now, alas, lost] is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece.... We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea.... The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

The simple truth is that Pater was in no proper sense of the word a critic. He did not on the one hand from his own fixed point of view judge the great movements of history and the great artists in their reality; nor on the other hand did he show any dexterity in changing his own point of view and entering sympathetically into other moods than his own. To him history was only an extension of his own Ego, and he saw himself whithersoever he turned his eyes. The result may be something greater than criticism - though this I should myself deny - it is certainly something different from criticism. To form any just estimate of Pater's work, then, we must forget the critical form in which so much of his writing is couched and regard the substance of his own philosophy apart from any apparent relation to the period or person to which it is transferred. And here we are aided by the singular consistency of his nature. There is no need with Pater, as happens with most other men, especially with those who treat their themes historically, to distinguish between what is his own and what he has taken up from other sources; nor is the problem complicated by any change in point of view as he passed from one period of his career to another or from influence to influence. All is of a piece, and all is the perfectly logical outgrowth of a single attitude towards the world.

And this we see in his life itself as clearly as in his writings. Walter Horatio Pater was born at Shadwell, between Wapping and Stepney, in 1839. His father, a physician who had been born in America, died while Walter was a young child, and the family moved to an old house with a large garden at Enfield - the pleasant suburb where just a few years earlier the Clarkes describe "the most enchanting walks" which Charles and Mary Lamb used to take with them "in all directions of the lovely neighbourhood," but where Lamb called himself whimsically "a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable paraclete." There is a delicately wrought study of Pater's, called The Child in the House, which shows, if we may accept it as partly autobiographical, the influences that surrounded these years and the temperament of the man already marked in the boy. He speaks of the rapid growth in him "of a certain capacity of fascination by bright colour and choice form - the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lips of those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or sang,- marking early the activity in him of a more than customary sensuousness, 'the lust of the eye,' as the Preacher says, which might lead him, one day, how far!" All these impressions are subdued in his memory to a passive alertness, and such they no doubt were actually in the boy's experience. "So he yielded himself to these things, to be played upon by them like a musical instrument, and began to note with deepening watchfulness, but always with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment, the phases of the seasons and of the growing or waning day, down even to the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiling." The rapture of the elusive moment, the economical indulgence of the senses, the feeling and thought finely responsive to the fair things of the world, were, it should seem, born in him; and in the end these were his deliberate philosophy.

In 1858 Pater went up to Oxford, and at Oxford, except for a period of eight years in London, he resided until his death in 1894. He first entered Queen's College, but in 1864 was elected to a Fellowship at Brasenose, with which college he was henceforth identified, although he had also a home outside of the collegiate walls. His existence now took on the colour it was to maintain until the end. Brasenose itself is described by Mr. A. C. Benson, from whom I have taken most of these details of Pater's life, as "one of the sternest and severest in aspect of Oxford colleges":

It has no grove or pleasaunce to frame its sombre antiquity in a setting of colour and tender freshness. Its black and blistered front looks out on a little piazza occupied by the stately mouldering dome of the Radcliffe Library; beyond is the solid front of Hertford, and the quaint pseudo-Gothic court of All Souls. To the north lies a dark lane, over the venerable wall of which looms the huge chestnut of Exeter, full in spring of stiff white spires of heavy-scented bloom. To the south a dignified modern wing, built long after Pater's election, overlooks the bustling High Street. To the west the college lies back to back with the gloomy and austere courts of Lincoln. There is no sense of space, of leisureliness, of ornament, about the place; it rather looks like a fortress of study.

He was not a laborious scholar; he was not even a great reader of books, and in later years he confined himself almost exclusively to Plato and the Bible and the few other masterpieces which gave him the intellectual and artistic sustenance he craved. His own writing was slow and painful; it was his habit to write on alternate lines of ruled paper, leaving space for revision, and often copying out a composition more than once and even having it privately set up in type so that he might judge better its effect. His work in fact was only one aspect or expression of that art of life which he seems to have practised from youth, whether it was in its origin a deliberate mental choice or, more likely, the instinctive prompting of his temperament which was afterwards reinforced by reading and observation - an art made up of timidity and persistence and lucid self-interrogation, seeking its exquisite satisfactions more in what it renounced than in what it appropriated from the world's ambiguous gifts and pleasures.

If we search for the sources of his philosophy, apart from the original character of the man himself, we shall find them without difficulty. He was one of those on whom Goethe's ideal of an artistically rounded culture early imposed itself, and to this model he later added the enthusiasm and the "divinatory power over the Hellenic world" of Goethe's master, Winckelmann. Among English writers he himself would probably have ascribed the chief influence upon him to Ruskin, but as a matter of fact I suspect that the more dominating personal influence came from another and more insinuating mind- from one who meets us at every turn as we attempt to trace the artistic impulses of the later nineteenth century, and who was, perhaps, the most perfect type that England has known of the romantic temperament turned purely to art. I do not certainly know that Pater ever met Rossetti in the flesh, but he recognized that great and sad genius as one of his teachers. William Sharp ("Fiona Macleod") knew Rossetti as well as he knew Pater, and he once wrote to Pater in regard to these subtle relationships:

Years ago, in Oxford, how often we talked these matters over! I have often recalled one evening, in particular, often recollected certain words of yours: and never more keenly than when I have associated them with the early work of Rossetti, in both arts, but pre-eminently in painting: "To my mind Rossetti is the most significant man among us. More torches will be lit from his flame - or torches lit at his flame - than perhaps even enthusiasts like yourself imagine."

In judging Pater, then, we must not come to him for interpretive or constructive criticism, constructive, that is, as based on a correct insight into the material he pretends to use, but for his own philosophy of life. And in this judgement two things are to be taken into account: on the one hand, how consistent and clear he was in the expression of this philosophy of life, and on the other hand, what the value of this philosophy is in itself. For the first the answer is all in his favour. From the beginning to the end, as we have seen, there is scarcely a discordant note in his writing; whether he was posing as an interpreter of Plato or early Christianity or the Renaissance, he was in reality exhibiting only himself. It is true that in his essays on Wordsworth and one or two other modern writers he seems for a while to escape from the magic circle of himself, but the escape is more apparent than real. So much for his consistency, and his clearness is no less complete. More than once he gives direct expression to his philosophy, nowhere else so explicitly as in the conclusion to his volume on The Renaissance. The motto of that chapter is the famous saying of Heracleitus, All things are in a state of flux and nothing abides, and the chapter itself is but a brief exhortation to make the most of our human life amidst this endless and ceaseless mutation of which we are ourselves an ever-changing element:

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,- for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.

Yet withal the account with Pater cannot stop here, nor, if we consider the fruit of his teaching in such men as Oscar Wilde, can we admit that it was altogether without offence. His error was not that he inculcated the art of life at all seasons, but that his sense of values was finally wrong; his philosophy from beginning to end might be called by a rhetorician a kind of hysteron-proteron. And this was manifest in his attitude to the three great moments of history. Thus in his interpretation of Plato we have seen how he falsified Plato's theory and use of facts by raising beauty, or aesthetic pleasure, above truth as the goal to be kept in sight. Now this may seem a slight sin, when in extolling the one nothing is intentionally taken away from the honour of the other. Pater would even say that as truth and beauty are the same it makes no difference which of them you set before your gaze; and in this he would have the authority of many eminent predecessors. Are we not all fond of quoting the great words of Keats?

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In like manner, when Pater in his treatment of Christianity placed emotional satisfaction before religious duty, he really missed the goal of happiness he was aiming at. The old Scotch preacher Blair pronounced the sure answer to such an error many years before Paterism existed: "To aim at a constant succession of high and vivid sensations of pleasure, is an idea of happiness altogether chimerical.... Instead of those fallacious hopes of perpetual festivity, with which the world would allure us, religion confers upon us a cheerful tranquillity." Nor was Pater's fault in regard to the Renaissance essentially different in its consequences; it may even be that here where his temperament would seem to be most at home, his subtle inversion of the facts, in making beauty and pleasure the purpose of life instead of holding them the reward or efflorescence of right living, is the most instructive of all. Read Pater's exquisitely refined pages on Leonardo da Vinci, with their constant implication that beauty is a kind of malady of the soul, and then recall the strong young soul of the Renaissance as it speaks, for instance, in the ringing lines of Chapman:

Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves t' have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind....
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is -

This exaltation of beauty above truth, and emotional grace above duty, and fine perception above action, this insinuating hedonism which would so bravely embrace the joy of the moment, forgets to stay itself on any fixed principle outside of itself, and, forgetting this, it somehow misses the enduring joy of the world and empties life of true values. It springs, at least as we see it manifest in these latter years, from the sense of an exasperated personality submerged in the ceaseless ebb and flow of things, and striving desperately to cling to the shadows as they speed by and thus to win for itself an emotion of power and importance. In Platonism and Christianity and, to a certain extent, in the Renaissance, the beauty and joy of the flux of nature were held subordinate to an ideal above nature, the everlasting Spirit that moves and is not moved. Because Pater had lost from his soul this vision of the infinite, and sought to deify in its place the intense realization of the flux itself as the end of life, for that reason he failed to comprehend the inner meaning of those great epochs, and became instead one of the leaders of romantic aestheticism. Thus it is that we cannot finally accept Pater's philosophy of the art of life, notwithstanding all that may be said in its favour; that even his lesson of moderation and self-restraint, much as that lesson is needed to-day and always, seems at last to proceed from some deep-seated taint of decaying vitality rather than from conscious strength. So intimately are good and evil mingled together in human ideals.