by Walter Pater
A Roman Epicurean, one suspects, was not unlike the proverbial Italianated Englishman. The native incompatibility between the distinctive Roman temperament and the light-hearted gayety of Greek sensuousness was similiar to that between the English and the Italian character in the later times; the perfection of Marius by means of a Greek ideal may run parallel with English culture under southern influences. There was, too, in Roman character a trait or two which brings it near to qualities that lie at the base of our own stock. Even in the Italian landscape there are Northern notes such as Mr. Pater mentions when Marius, in his walks to the coast, sees “the marsh with the dwarf roses and wild lavender, the abandoned boat, the ruined floodgates, the flock of wild birds.” We are told, also, that “poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating hard without.” This note of Marius’s home-life and the love he had for it, with his particular regard for “Domiduca, the goddess who watches over one’s safe coming home,” and with the ideal of maternity that grew up in his memory of home, — this peculiarly English note is struck in the opening and is dominant at the end. Certain other characteristics ally this Etrurian boy with that nobler strain of English blood, the Puritan strain as it was in Spenser. His instinctive seriousness, his scrupulosity of conscience, his inheritance of a certain sombreness from the stock that adorned the Etruscan funeral urns, his attachment to places and awe of some of them as sacred by the touch of a divine power, his sense of invisible enemies about his path, his rigorous self-discipline in preparation for certain hereditary sacred offices, a deadly earnestness at times, — as when he gazes so fixedly on the rigid corpse of his friend Flavian, — such are some of the traits that define his nature as essentially rather Northern than Southern, and provide a ground of special sympathy and understanding for us.
The second device by which Marius is modernized is by giving to him a power which, for one who runs as he reads, makes the character incredible. He is said to be affected sometimes in a way the opposite of the experience which many have who, on seeing a new place, seem to have been there before: Marius feels, in the most marked of his experiences, something that shall be, — he has always a prescience. Thus, in the cadence of Flavian’s verses he hears the music of the Latin hymnology; in the sight of his second friend, Cornelius, who displays and puts on his armor of a Roman knight in the dusty sunshine of the shuttered country-house, he foresees the Christian chivalry; in the faces and groups of the worshipers in Cecilia’s house he discerns the serene light and streaming joy of Giotto’s and of Dante’s vision, and looks on the Madonna and the Child that Raphael first painted. In all this there seems an unreality; in the Puritan Roman, the Cyrenaic Christian, there is a sense almost of conscious artifice, as if one were being befooled. And yet, as for those Northern notes of landscape, custom, and character, scholarship can give chapter and verse for them; and as for the gift of prescience, — well, if it were impossible for Marius to have it, in a sufficient measure at least, then the theory of ideal living which he held to was at fault. And this Marius, so constituted, his creator places in an Italy over which the romantic desolation, which we know, was laying its charm of dreamful decay, and in a Rome which, then as now, was the huddled deposit of religions.
The intellectual conviction on which Marius conducted his life was simple and common enough, as must be the case with every theory capable of being made a principle of living. The world is what we think it, and our part in existence is the fleeting moment of present consciousness. What shall be done with this moment? Economize it, said Marius, in dissent from the Stoic who said, “Contemn it.” Economize it; make the most of the phenomena that arise in it, and see, so far as it depends on you, that these phenomena, both of sensation and idea, as they arise, are the most valuable possible to the moment; and so your experience — in other words, your life — will be the fullest and most refined. Above all, do not forget the main thing in this doctrine of economy, which is that the worth of experience depends, not on what it is at the moment in its detached and transitory phase, but on what it will prove in memory when it takes its place permanently and in relation to the whole of life. In such a scheme, receptivity, the most alert and varied powers of taking in impressions, is the one aim of cultivation. Here, too, much depended on the nature of Marius, this time on the side of his Southern endowment. An impressibility through sensation was his gift, his talent; and especially he was susceptible to what the eye observes: he was one of those who are “made perfect by the love of visible beauty.” This is the point of union of his life with the æsthetic ideal, and makes the story of it a pathway through scenes of loveliness not unlike, in a certain mild beauty, the frescoes on ancient walls. The narrative is pictorial, almost to the point of decoration, and moves always with an outlook on some fair sight. From the landscape of the villa where Marius was born — among those delightful Etrurian hills whence one looks to the marbled rifts of Carrara gleaming above olive and chestnut slopes, and gazes off through the purple sea-valley of Venus’s Port, the noblest gateway of the descending sun — to the last throttling earthquake morning, a beautiful visible world is about us, and exercises its attractiveness both in nature and in humanity. The one end of Marius was to appropriate all this, to choose the best of sensation and its most nearly connected emotions, and to live in that. To do this involves a secondary talent, a gift of insight, a power to perceive relative values, which in reality means a faculty of moral discrimination; and just here one may easily fail to see whence Marius derived this.
Why was it, for example, that he, being so attached to sensation and the emotions that cling closest to it, rejected voluptuousness, with all its forms of beauty and joyfulness, as a thing essentially not beautiful nor joyful? What was it that kept him, the comrade of Flavian, who represents the pagan surrender to this life, pure, — so pure, indeed, that with his visionary sense he foresaw in chastity an ideal that was to be, and foreknew its coming beauty? A mere interpreter of character, an analyst, would say, that Marius obeyed in these choices his own nature, — that Puritan nature whose compulsion is always strong. He venerated his own soul and cherished its early instincts, and this was his salvation. But one might also give another explanation, which would seem more harmonious with the purpose of the author; one might say that what is moral is in its outward manifestation so clothed with beauty, visible beauty, that the man who looks for beauty only, the noblest, the ideal beauty, will find therewith the highest, the ideal good. It is essential to such a seeker that he shall look with his own eyes and be frank with himself; shall “look straight out” and acknowledge what he sees; and this Marius does, thereby prefiguring in a way and practically making that “return to nature” which is the continually recurring necessity of all sincerity. If virtue does in fact wear this outward loveliness — and who would deny it? — why may not the lover of beauty have truly seen the new and springing forms of goodness, recognized them, and taken their promise into his life? In other words, was not that prescience of Marius merely a power of clear and honest seeing of the elements of beauty and ugliness there before him?
That this is Mr. Pater’s view of the matter is indicated most definitely by the contrast which he continually insists on between Marcus Aurelius and Marius, and which he brings out clearly in the attitude of these two toward the gladiatorial shows. In the amphitheatre Marius is conscious of the Emperor, the strenuous Stoic, as “eternally his inferior on the question of righteousness.” The young Epicurean has a “decisive conscience on sight” which is indubitable, — that conscience which, in its condemnation of the great sin of an age, is the touchstone of the select few in it, and makes them on the side of the future and aware of its excellence to be, when “not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side was to have failed in life.” Aurelius, we are told, made the great mistake: Vale, anima infelicissima! is the
last word of our author to him on the eve of the persecutions. And the reason is, that the Stoic was truly blind; he had paltered with his senses until they lied to him, or spoke not at all. Marius saw the deformity of the evil, and, while rejecting it as something he might not see and live, chose the good by its beauty, and so selected in the midst of that Roman corruption the Christian elements in whose excellence the Church would triumph and be made fair.
There may be some surprise in perceiving in the evangel of æstheticism a morality of this height, a concentration of attention on the beauty of austerity, an exaltation of a noble Puritanism toward which the Cyrenaic ideal may lead. When this is understood, however, one finds it natural enough that the pervading tone of this history of an ideal life is really religious; idealism, when it is living, cannot be otherwise than essentially religious. Nevertheless, it is a bold thing to put the question, as Mr. Pater implicitly does, whether an attention to the beautiful, to visible beauty, may not only be equivalent to moral discrimination and a safeguard of virtue, but also a mode of solving the ultimate religious questions of deity and man’s relation to it. Marius does arrive at an intimation, perhaps a faith, that a protective divine companionship goes beside him, and at an emotion of gratitude to that unseen presence.
Two points only, in this wide branch of the speculation, can be dwelt on now. He says toward the end that he thinks he has failed in love; and here he touches on one weakness of his ideal, for it is only by love, as he perceives, that any reconciliation between the lover of beauty and the multitudinous pitiful pain which is so large a part of the objective universe can be obtained. The second weakness is perhaps greater. In his ideal there is both doubt and isolation; the subjective element in his knowledge, the exclusive reliance on his own impressions, the fact that in metaphysical belief the world is only his world, and in actual living the experience is individual, — all this holds in it a basis of ultimate incertitude. True and real for him it no doubt is, but is that, indeed, the necessary limit of knowledge and life? In effect, too, his creed is Protestant; independently of the necessary element of doubt in it, it has the isolating force inevitable to the believer who will accept only the results of his own examination by exercise of private judgment. This position is unsatisfactory; and it seems to allow the rationality of that principle of authority by which an individual life obtains correction for its idiosyncrasies, cancels the personal error, and at the same time lets in upon itself the flood of the total experience of humanity summed up and defined in the whole body of the elect. Though stated here in terms of the Stoical philosophy, this is the Catholic conclusion. Or, if Marius does not quite assent to this, he does accept it in a half-hearted way as an hypothesis which is worth making since it reunites him to mankind. There is, it may be observed, a tendency toward Catholicism throughout the religious speculation. Another note of it, for example, is the attraction felt by Marius in the ritual of worship, as the perfection of that ceremonialism to which, in his boyish worship of the old gods, he was devoutly trained.
After all, at the end one still states the promises of this æsthetic ideal, even when working on so unusual a nature as Marius’s, interrogatively. Marius’s life does not set it forth with convincing power. For one thing, it is not a vital life, but a painted one; and there is an inconsequence in the series of pictures, — they do not seem to follow one another by any iron necessity. It would be foolish to complain that a life avowedly only receptive and contemplative of the beautiful is inactive. Marius does nothing except at the end. Yet, within such limits, one never sees how beauty affected Marius or developed his soul, and though he is said to have got much from companionship, one sees love operant in him very seldom, and then it is a very silent and unexpressed love. He repeats his own epitaph, — tristem neminem fecit, — and it was true; but all his life seems negative, and continually one asks, How did he really live? and gets no answer. His whole life was a meditatio mortis, — that is all that is told us.
A sense of failure, or rather of incompleteness, oppresses one at the end of the narrative. Even granting that the success Marius is said to have achieved — one is never quite sure that he did — by that exquisite appreciation of beauty and impassioned contemplation of its ideal forms, was, in fact, his; yet of what worth was it, — what did it mean to either God or man? The Northern idealist, the Puritan, cannot dispense with some serviceableness as essential to any high living. One should not push the point too far, however. Independently of all that has been said, any one who cares to think on counsels of perfection for man’s life will find profound and original thought about the ideal elements still at hand in modern days for use, and many wise reflections, sown in this history. It is a rare work, and not carelessly to be read. Some exquisiteness of taste, some delight in scholarship, some knowledge of what is best worth knowing in the historic expressions of man’s aspiration, and, above all, that “inward tacitness of mind” the reader must bring to its perusal. What of it? Have we not the highest authority for casting our pearls where Circe’s herd cannot come?
WALTER PATER by Arthur Symons
From ‘Figures of Several Centuries’
Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpreted Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:
But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the stress of a great name and authority.
It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, than the very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properly understood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is ‘the delicacies of fine literature’ that chiefly appeal. There have been greater prose-writers in our language, even in our time; but he was, as Mallarmé called him, ‘le prosateur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps.’ For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of form, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt his attraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great age of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcely fail to become, not only ‘the object of a special diligence,’ but also of ‘a consideration wholly affectionate,’ not lessened by the slowly increasing ‘stress of authority’ which is coming to be laid, almost by the world in general, on his name.
In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and does all its hard work as if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and to overhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is like music, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it is precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and it comes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is a style in which, to use some of his own words, ‘the writer succeeds in saying what he wills.’
The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particular qualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often, been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely its adaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary closeness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, in the man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you got accustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, so slow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet scrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise, pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousness of utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask moulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man, literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far
more than that, the man himself, whom one felt through his few, friendly, intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us, in a slow and gradual revelation.
He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:
The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner.
And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty, or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom, and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor of the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of all this again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, the criticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, a confession, the vraie vérité (as he was fond of saying) about the world in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he was sure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught the tangible moments as they passed. It was a world into which we can only look, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, an unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful in passing things.
In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soars wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out the liberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for the absolute, his ‘hunger for eternity,’ and for his part he is content to set all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis, on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asks for no ‘larger flowers’ than the best growth of the earth; but he would choose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just living, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract its essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated ‘hedonism,’ even of the mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he added something more like a Stoic sense of ‘duty’ to the old, properly and severely Epicurean doctrine of ‘pleasure.’ Pleasure was never, for Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first, and had always to be served with a strict ritual. ‘Only be sure it is passion,’ he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealed for the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; be sure, he said, ‘that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.’ What he cared most for at all times was that which could give ‘the highest quality to our moments as they pass’; he differed only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was. ‘The herb, the wine, the gem’ of the preface to the Renaissance tended more and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, ‘the discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension’ by which ‘the imaginative regeneration of the world’ should be brought about, or even, at times, a brooding over ‘what the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers that may really occupy it.’
