Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  The rite with which the Roman Church “makes a clerk,” aims certainly at no low measure of difference from the coarser world around him, in its supposed scholar: and in this case the aspirant (the precise claims of the situation being well considered) had no misgiving. Discreetly, and with full attention, he answers Adsum! when his name is called, and advances manfully; though he kneels meekly enough, and remains, with his head bowed forward, at the knees of the seated bishop who recites the appointed prayers, between the anthems and responses of his Schola, or attendant singers — Might he be saved from mental blindness! Might he put on the new man, even as his outward guise was changed! Might he keep the religious habit for ever! who had thus hastened to lay down the hair of his head for the divine love. “The Lord is my inheritance” whispers Gaston distinctly, as the locks fall, cut from the thickly-grown, black head, in five places, “after the fashion of Christ’s crown,” the shears in the episcopal hands sounding aloud, amid the silence of the curious spectators. From the same hands, in due order, the fair surplice ripples down over him. “This is the generation of them that seek Him,” the choir sings: “The Lord Himself is the portion of my inheritance and my cup.” It was the Church’s eloquent way of bidding unrestricted expansion to the youthful heart in its timely purpose to seek the best, to abide among the things of the spirit.

  The prospect from their cheerful, unenclosed road, like a white scarf flung across the land, as the party returned home in the late August afternoon, was clear and dry and distant. The great barns at the wayside had their doors thrown back, displaying the dark, cool space within. The farmsteads seemed almost tenantless, the villagers being still at work over the immense harvest-field. Crazy bells startled them, striking out the hour from behind, over a deserted churchyard. Still and tenantless also seemed the manor as they approached, door and window lying open upon the court for the coolness; or rather it was as if at their approach certain spectral occupants started back out of the daylight— “Why depart, dear ghosts?” was what the grandparents would have cried. They had more in common with that immaterial world than with flesh and blood. There was room for the existing household, enough and to spare, in one of the two old houses. That other, the Château d’Amour, remained for Gaston, at first as a delightful, half-known abode of wonders, though with some childish fear; afterwards, as a delightful nursery of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or that, its old tenants and their doings, from the affectionate brothers, onwards — above all, how in one room long ago Gabrielle de Latour had died of joy.

  With minds full of their recent business it was difficult to go back to common occupations; as darkness came on, the impressions of the day did but return again more vividly and concentrate themselves upon the inward sense. Observance, loyal concurrence in some high purpose for him, passive waiting on the hand one might miss in the darkness, with the gift or gifts therein of which he had the presentiment, and upon the due acceptance of which the true fortune of life would turn; these were the hereditary traits alert in Gaston, as he lay awake in the absolute, moon-lit, stillness, his outward ear attentive for the wandering footsteps which, through that wide, lightly-accentuated country, often came and went about the house, with weird suggestions of a dim passage to and fro, and of an infinite distance. He would rise, as the footsteps halted perhaps below his window, to answer the questions of the travellers, pilgrims, or labourers who had missed their way from farm to farm, or halting soldier seeking guidance; terrible or terror-stricken companies sometimes, rudely or piteously importunate to be let in — for it was the period of the Religious Wars, flaming up here and there over France, and never quite put out, during forty years.

  Once, in the beginning of these troubles (he was then a child, leaning from the window, as a sound of rickety, small wheels approached) the enquiry came in broken French, “Voulez-vous donner direction?” from a German, one of the mercenaries of the Duc de Guise, hired for service in a civil strife of France, drawing wearily a crippled companion, so far from home. The memory of it, awakening a thousand strange fancies, had remained by him, as a witness to the power of fortuitous circumstance over the imagination.

  One night there had come a noise of horns, and presently King Charles himself was standing in the courtyard, belated, and far enough now from troublesome company, as he hunted the rich-fleshed game of La Beauce through the endless corn. He entered, with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the place, expressed in a shrill strain of half-religious oaths, like flashes of hell-fire to Gaston’s suddenly- awakened sense. It was the invincible nature of the royal lad to speak, and feel, on these mad, alto notes, and not unbecoming in a good catholic; for Huguenots never swore, and these were subtly theological oaths. Well! the grandparents repressed as best they could their apprehensions as to what other hunters, what other disconcerting incident, might follow; for catholic France very generally believed that the Huguenot leaders had a scheme for possessing themselves of the person of the young king, known to be mentally pliable. Meanwhile they led him to their daintiest apartment, with great silver flambeaux, that he might wash off the blood with which not his hands only were covered; for he hunted also with the eagerness of a madman — steeped in blood. He lay there for a few hours, after supping very familiarly on his own birds, Gaston rising from his bed to look on at a distance, and, afterwards, on his knee, serving the rose-water dish and spiced wine, as the night passed in reassuring silence; Charles himself, as usual, keenly enjoying this “gipsy” incident, with the supper after that unexpected fashion, among strange people, he hardly knew where. He was very pale, like some cunning Italian work in wax or ivory, of partly satiric character, endued by magic or crafty mechanism with vivacious movement. But as he sat thus, ever for the most part the unhappy plaything of other people’s humours, escaped for a moment out of a world of demoniac politicians, the pensive atmosphere around seemed gradually to change him, touching his wild temper, pleasantly, profitably, so that he took down from the wall and struck out the notes of a lute, and fell to talking of verses, leaving a stanza of his own scratched with a diamond on the window-pane — lines simpler- hearted, and more full of nature than were common at that day.

  The life of Gaston de Latour was almost to coincide with the duration of the Religious Wars. The earliest public event of his memory was that famous siege of Orleans from which the young Henri de Guise rode away the head of his restless family, tormented now still further by the reality or the pretence of filial duty, seeking vengeance on the treacherous murder of his father. Following a long period of quiet progress — the tranquil and tolerant years of the Renaissance — the religious war took possession of, and pushed to strangely confused issues, a society somewhat distraught by an artificial aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration among newer things so little warlike.

  A difficult age, certainly, for scrupulous spirits to move in! A perplexed network of partizan or personal interests underlay, and furnished the really directing forces in, a supposed Armageddon of contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de L’Hôpital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival cla
ims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the so-called “Political” party, professedly almost indifferent to it, but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the spirit can be done. The new sect of “Papists” were not the true catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound regret “that inauspicious day,” in the year 1562, Gaston’s tenth year, “when the work of devastation began, which was to strip from France that antique garniture of religious art which later ages have not been able to replace.” Axe and hammer at the carved work sounded from one end of France to the other.

  It was a peculiarity of this age of terror, that every one, including Charles the Ninth himself, dreaded what the accident of war might make, not merely of his enemies, but of temporary allies and pretended friends, in an evenly balanced but very complex strife — of merely personal rivals also, in some matter which had nothing to do with the assumed motives of that strife. Gaston de Latour passing on his country way one night, with a sudden flash of fierce words two young men burst from the doors of a road-side tavern. The brothers are quarrelling about the division, lately effected there, of their dead father’s morsel of land. “I shall hate you till death!” cries the younger, bounding away in the darkness; and two atheists part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of Catholic and Huguenot.

  The deeds of violence which occupy the foreground of French history during the reigns of Catherine’s sons might indeed lead one to fancy that little human kindness could have remained in France, — a fanatical civil war of forty years, that no place at all could have been left for the quiet building of character. Contempt for human life, taught us every day by nature, and alas! by man himself: — all war intensifies that. But the more permanent forces, alike of human nature and of the natural world, are on the whole in the interest of tranquillity and sanity, and of the sentiments proper to man. Like all good catholic children, Gaston had shuddered at the name of Adretz, of Briquemaut with his great necklace of priests’ ears, of that dark and fugitive Montgomeri, the slayer, as some would have it the assassin, of a king, now active, and almost ubiquitous, on the Huguenot side. Still, at Deux-manoirs, this warfare, seething up from time to time so wildly in this or that district of France, was for the most part only sensible in incidents we might think picturesque, were they told with that intention; delightful enough, certainly, to the curiosity of a boy, in whose mind nevertheless they deepened a native impressibility to the sorrow and hazard that are constant and necessary in human life, especially for the poor. The troubles of “that poor people of France” — burden of all its righteous rulers, from Saint Lewis downwards — these, at all events, would not be lessened by the struggle of Guise and Condé and Bourbon and Valois, of the Valois with each other, of those four brilliant young princes of the name of Henry. The weak would but suffer somewhat more than was usual, in the interest of the strong. If you were not sure whether that gleaming of the sun in the vast distance flashed from swords or sickles, whether that far-off curl of smoke rose from stubble-fire or village-steeple, to protect which the peasants, still lovers of their churches, would arm themselves, women and all, with fork and scythe, — still, those peasants used their scythes, in due season, for reaping their leagues of cornland, and slept with faces as tranquil as ever towards the sky, for their noonday rest. In effect, since peace is always in some measure dependent on one’s own seeking, disturbing forces do but fray their way along somewhat narrow paths over the great spaces of the quiet realm of nature. La Beauce, vast enough to present at once every phase of weather, its one landmark the twin spires of Chartres, salient as the finger of a dial, guiding, by their change of perspective, victor or vanquished on his way, offered room enough for the business both of peace and war to those enamoured of either. When Gaston, after a brief absence, was unable to find his child’s garden-bed, that was only because in a fine June the corn had grown tall so quickly, through which he was presently led to it, with all its garish sweets undisturbed: and it was with the ancient growths of mind — customs, beliefs, mental preferences — as with the natural world.

  It may be understood that there was a certain rudeness about the old manor, left almost untouched from age to age, with a loyalty which paid little or no heed to changes of fashion. The Château d’Amour, indeed, as the work of a later age, refined somewhat upon the rough feudal architecture; and the daintier taste had centred itself in particular upon one apartment, a veritable woman’s apartment, with an effect in some degree anticipating the achievement of Gaston’s own century, in which the apparatus of daily life became so eloquent of the moods of those to whom it ministered. It was the chamber of Gabrielle de Latour, who had died of joy. Here certainly she had watched, at these windows, during ten whole years, for the return of her beloved husband from a disastrous battle in the East, till against all expectation she beheld him crossing the court at last. Immense privilege! Immense distinction! Again and again Gaston tried to master the paradox, at times, in deep concentration of mind, seemed almost to touch the point of that wonderful moment.

  Hither, as to an oratory, a religious place, the finer spirits of her kin had always found their way, to leave behind them there the more intimate relics of themselves. To Gaston its influence imparted early a taste for delicate things as being indispensable in all his pleasures to come; and, from the very first, with the appetite for some great distinguishing passion, the peculiar genius of his age seeming already awake spontaneously within him. Here, at least, had been one of those grand passions, such as were needed to give life its true meaning and effect. Conscious of that rudeness in his home, and feeding a strong natural instinct for outward beauty hitherto on what was barely sufficient, he found for himself in this perfumed place the centre of a fanciful world, reaching out to who could tell what refined passages of existence in that great world beyond, of which the echoes seemed to light here amid the stillness. On his first visit one pensive afternoon, fitting the lately attained key in the lock, he seemed to have drawn upon himself, yet hardly to have disturbed, the meditations of its former occupant. A century of unhindered summers had taken the heat from its colours — the couches, the curtains half shading the windows, which the rain in the south- west wind just then touched so softly. That great passion of old had been also a dainty love, leaving its impress everywhere in this magic apartment, on the musical instruments, the books lying where they might have fallen from the hands of the listless reader so long since, the fragrance which the lad’s movement stirred around him. And there, on one of the windows, were the verses of King Charles, who had slept here, as in the most courtly resting-place of the house. On certain nights Gaston himself was not afraid to steal from his own bed to lie in it, though still too healthy a sleeper to be visited by the appropriate dreams he so greatly longed for.

  A nature, instinctively religious, which would readily discover and give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which had already found tongues to speak of a still living humanity — somewhere, somewhere, in the world! — waiting for him in the distance, or perchance already on its way, to explain, by its own plenary beauty and power, why wine and roses and the languorous summer afternoons were so delightful. So far indeed, the imaginative heat, that might one day enter into dangerous rivalry with simple old- fashioned faith, was blent harmoniously with it. They were hardly distinguishable elements of an amiable character, susceptible generally to the poetic side of things — two neighbourly apprehensions of a single ideal.

  The great passions, the fervid sentiments, of which Gaston dreamed as the true realisation of life, have not always softened men’s natures: th
ey have been compatible with many cruelties, as in the lost spirits of that very age. They may overflow, on the other hand, in more equable natures, through the concurrence of happier circumstance, into that universal sympathy which lends a kind of amorous power to the homeliest charities. So it seemed likely to be with Gaston de Latour. Sorrow came along with beauty, a rival of its intricate omnipresence in life. In the sudden tremor of an aged voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world. For once the darling of old age actually more than responded in full to its tenderness. In the isolation of his life there had been little demand for sympathy on the part of those anywhere near his own age. So much the larger was the fund of superfluous affection which went forth, with a delicacy not less than their own, to meet the sympathies of the aged people who cherished him. In him, their old, almost forgotten sorrows bled anew.

  Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well- nigh healed now — those once so poignant griefs — the scars remaining only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly, in violet, on the Innocents’ Day, and understood why they wept at the triumphant antiphons:— “My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler!” — thinking intently of the little tombs which had recorded carefully almost the minutes of children’s lives, Elizabeth de Latour, Cornélius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours. Yes! the cold pavement under one’s feet had once been molten lava. Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as if he stept softly over the earth, not to outrage its so abundant latent sensibilities.