by Walter Pater
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world: — that must involve the alliance, the congruity, of all things with each other, great reinforcement of sympathy, of the teacher’s personality with the doctrine he had to deliver, the spirit of that doctrine with the fashion of his utterance. In his own case, certainly, as Bruno confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language, were the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as it might seem from the speaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passing irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits unaware. In Bruno, that abstract theory of the perpetual motion of the world was a visible person talking with you.
And as the runaway Dominican was still in temper a monk, so he presented himself in the comely Dominican habit. The eyes which in their last sad protest against stupidity would mistake, or miss altogether, the image of the Crucified, were to-day, for the most part, kindly observant eyes, registering every detail of that singular company, all the physiognomic lights which come by the way on people, and, through them, on things, the “shadows of ideas” in men’s faces (De Umbris Idearum was the title of his discourse), himself pleasantly animated by them, in turn. There was “heroic gaiety” there; only, as usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevish cloud seemed all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face that looked, after all, made for suffering — already half pleading, half defiant — as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair’s breadth from its estimate of yourself.
Like nature, like nature in that country of his birth, the Nolan, as he delighted to proclaim himself, loved so well that, born wanderer as he was, he must perforce return thither sooner or later, at the risk of life, he gave plenis manibus, but without selection, and, with all his contempt for the “asinine” vulgar, was not fastidious. His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power. Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old pagan one, the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of the age, according to the fashion of that ornamental paganism which the Renaissance indulged. To excite, to surprise, to move men’s minds, as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function of the teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient university. Fantastic, from first to last that was the descriptive epithet; and the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre-eminently due to Italy. A bookman, yet with so vivid a hold on people and things, the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to revive in him, to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of his old readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than was then actually exposed; himself to enjoy the fulness of a great outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the curiosity of the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you seemed to see that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified kindling from word to word. What Parisians then heard was, in truth, the first fervid expression of all those contending apprehensions, out of which his written works would afterwards be compacted, with much loss of heat in the process. Satiric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+ insolence, insult, all that those fabled satyrs embodied — the volcanic South is kindly prolific of this, and Bruno abounded in mockeries: it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, for Plato’s genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harsh laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtly exterior, with mordent words, in unabashed criticism of all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the “triumphant beast,” the “constellation of the Ass,” shining even there, amid the university folk, those intellectual bankrupts of the Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them gravely a worthless “parchment and paper” currency. In truth, Aristotle, as the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of things from the eyes of men. Habit — the last word of his practical philosophy — indolent habit! what would this mean in the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which are most opposed to the essential freedom and quickness of the Spirit, because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them?
To Bruno, a true son of the Renaissance, in the light of those large, antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon some deeper, more radical antagonism between two tendencies of men’s minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? between Christ and the world, say! Christ and the flesh? — that so very ancient antagonism between good and evil? Was there any place for imperfection in a world wherein the minutest atom, the lightest thought, could not escape from God’s presence? Who should note the crime, the sin, the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit, which could have made no misshapen births? In proportion as man raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him, just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. There were no weeds, no “tares,” in the endless field. The truly illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would. Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had ever been the precept, which the larger theory of “inspiration” had bequeathed to practice. “Of all the trees of the garden thou mayst freely eat! If you take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you! And I think that I, too, have the spirit of God.”
Bruno, the citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its proper speculative limits. But a kind of secresy, an ambiguous atmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and the doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters, the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel reign of the spirit — what it might actually be — would hardly fail to find in Bruno’s theories a method of turning poison into food, to live and thrive thereon; an art, surely, no less opportune in the Paris of that hour, intellectually or morally, than had it related to physical poisons. If Bruno himself was cautious not to suggest the ethic or practical equivalent to his theoretic positions, there was that in his very manner of speech, in his rank, unweeded eloquence, which seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent, rather than to art, distinguishing, rejecting, refining. Commission and omission; sins of the former surely had the preference. And how would Paolo and Francesca have read the lesson? How would this Henry the Third, and Margaret of the “Memoirs,” and other susceptible persona then present, read it, especially if the opposition between practical good and evil traversed another distinction, to the “opposed points,” the “fenced opposites” of which many, certainly, then present, in that Paris of the last of the Valois, could never by any possibility become “indifferent,” between the precious and the base, aesthetically — between what was right and wrong, as matter of art?
NOTES
234. Pater’s article appeared in The Fortnightly Review, 1889. Later it was much revised an
d included as Chapter VII of the unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour.
234. From Heine’s Aus der Harzreise, “Bergidylle 2”: “Tannenbaum, mit grunen Fingern,” Stanza 10.
243. Liddell and Scott definition: “wanton violence, arising from the pride of strength, passion, etc.”
The Essays
Walter Pater lived at 2 Bradmore Road in North Oxford between 1869 and 1885 with his sisters, including Clara Pater, a pioneer of women's education.
LIST OF ESSAYS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
LEONARDO DA VINCI
HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
WINCKELMANN
A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
DENYS L’AUXERROIS
SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK
DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD
STYLE
WORDSWORTH
CHARLES LAMB
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
LOVE’S LABOURS LOST
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLISH KINGS
AESTHETIC POETRY
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
FEUILLET’S “LA MORTE”
POSTSCRIPT
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER
PLATO AND SOCRATES
PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
THE GENIUS OF PLATO
THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
LACEDAEMON
THE REPUBLIC
PLATO’S AESTHETICS
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS: THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: I
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: II
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE I: THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE II: THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES
THE MARBLES OF AEGINA
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN: A CHAPTER IN GREEK ART
A CHRONOLOGY OF PATER’S WORKS, 1866-1895
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE*
RAPHAEL*
PASCAL*
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY*
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS*
VÉZELAY*
APOLLO IN PICARDY*
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE*
EMERALD UTHWART*
DIAPHANEITÉ
ENGLISH LITERATURE
AMIEL’S “JOURNAL INTIME”
BROWNING
ROBERT ELSMERE
THEIR MAJESTIES’ SERVANTS
WORDSWORTH
MR. GOSSE’S POEMS
FERDINAND FABRE
THE “CONTES” OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
SYMONDS’S “RENAISSANCE IN ITALY”
M. LEMAÎTRE’S “SERENUS, AND OTHER TALES”
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
WORDSWORTH
A POET WITH SOMETHING TO SAY
IT IS THYSELF
FABRE’S “TOUSSAINT GALABRU”
CORRESPONDANCE DE GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION
A NOVEL BY MR. OSCAR WILDE
MR. GEORGE MOORE AS AN ART CRITIC
SHADWELL’S DANTE
GIORDANO BRUNO, PARIS: 1586.
LIST OF ESSAYS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION
A CHRONOLOGY OF PATER’S WORKS, 1866-1895
A NOVEL BY MR. OSCAR WILDE
A POET WITH SOMETHING TO SAY
A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS: THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW
AESTHETIC POETRY
AMIEL’S “JOURNAL INTIME”
APOLLO IN PICARDY*
ART NOTES IN NORTH ITALY*
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE II: THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES
BROWNING
CHARLES LAMB
CORRESPONDANCE DE GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
DENYS L’AUXERROIS
DIAPHANEITÉ
DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD
EMERALD UTHWART*
ENGLISH LITERATURE
FABRE’S “TOUSSAINT GALABRU”
FERDINAND FABRE
FEUILLET’S “LA MORTE”
GIORDANO BRUNO, PARIS: 1586.
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES
HOMO MINISTER ET INTERPRES NATURAE
IT IS THYSELF
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
LACEDAEMON
LEONARDO DA VINCI
LOVE’S LABOURS LOST
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
M. LEMAÎTRE’S “SERENUS, AND OTHER TALES”
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
MR. GEORGE MOORE AS AN ART CRITIC
MR. GOSSE’S POEMS
NOTRE-DAME D’AMIENS*
PASCAL*
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
PLATO AND SOCRATES
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST
PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
PLATO’S AESTHETICS
POSTSCRIPT
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE*
RAPHAEL*
ROBERT ELSMERE
SANDRO BOTTICELLI
SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK
SHADWELL’S DANTE
SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLISH KINGS
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
STYLE
SYMONDS’S “RENAISSANCE IN ITALY”
THE “CONTES” OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN: A CHAPTER IN GREEK ART
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE I: THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART
THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE*
THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
THE GENIUS OF PLATO
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
THE MARBLES OF AEGINA
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: I
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: II
THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO
THE REPUBLIC
THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE
THEIR MAJESTIES’ SERVANTS
TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES
VÉZELAY*
WINCKELMANN
WORDSWORTH
WORDSWORTH
WORDSWORTH
The Criticism
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST by Oscar Wilde
WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING
CONTENTS
A DIALOGUE: Part I.
A DIALOGUE: Part II.
A DIALOGUE: Part I.
Part I. Persons: Gilbert and Ernest.
Scene: the library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.
Gilbert (at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are you laughing at?
Ernest (looking up). At a capital story that I have just come across in this volume of Reminiscences that I have found on your table.
Gilbert. What is the book? Ah! I see. I have not read it yet. Is it good?
Ernest. Well, while you have been playing, I have been turning over the pages with some amusement, though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
Gilbert. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. But I must confess that I like all memoirs. I like them for their form, just as much as for their matter. In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us i
n the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sévigné. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it. Humanity will always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, that in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have not given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented — if that can be called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intellectual problems by a denial of the supremacy of the intellect — may not, cannot, I think, survive. But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The lonely church at Littlemore, where ‘the breath of the morning is damp, and worshippers are few,’ will always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yellow snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity they will think of that gracious undergraduate who saw in the flower’s sure recurrence a prophecy that he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of his days — a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes; autobiography is irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited Mr. Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle of the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion is the better part of valour, bustles about among them in that ‘shaggy purple gown with gold buttons and looped lace’ which he is so fond of describing to us, perfectly at his ease, and prattling, to his own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue petticoat that he bought for his wife, of the ‘good hog’s hars-let,’ and the ‘pleasant French fricassee of veal’ that he loved to eat, of his game of bowls with Will Joyce, and his ‘gadding after beauties,’ and his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial things. Even in actual life egotism is not without its attractions. When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.
