by Walter Pater
An eager intensity of feeling thrills through these impassioned sentences. One feels instinctively that the writer of these words, after years of blind and mute movements, like the worm in the cocoon, had suddenly broken free, and had seen his creased and folded wings expand and glitter in the sun. Art, friendship, perception, emotion, that was the true life he had been desiring so long; and yet, after all, what an inner life it was to be! There was no impulse to fling himself into the current of the world, to taste the life of cities, where the social eddy spun swift and strong; he was to be austere, self-centred, silent still. Only in seclusion was he to utter his impassioned dreams in a congenial ear. “Blitheness and repose!” these were to be the keynotes of the new life; a clear-sighted mastery of intellectual problems, a joyful perception of the beauties of art, a critical attitude, that was to be able to distinguish by practised insight what was perfect and permanent from what was merely bold and temporary. And so, light of heart, his imagination revelling at the thought of all the realms of beauty it was to traverse, undimmed and radiant, the dumb and darkened past providing the contrast needed to bring out the brightness and the hope of what lay before, Pater set out upon his pilgrimage. And yet there is a shadow. As he writes in one of the most pathetic sentences, in one of his later and most tender sketches, of just such another pilgrimage, “Could he have foreseen the weariness of the way!”
The years began to pass slowly and quietly. Pater performed his tale of prescribed work, and gave himself over to leisurely study and meditation. He was not averse to social pleasures in these days, and began to make congenial acquaintances, among whom he gained a reputation as a brilliant and paradoxical talker. He fed his sense of beauty by frequent visits to Italy, though he never gained more than a superficial acquaintance either with Italian art or modern -Italian life. He was in this matter always an eclectic, following his own preferences and guided by his prejudices. He had little catholicity of view, and seldom studied the work of artists with whom he did not feel himself at once in sympathy. His travels were rather a diligent storing of beautiful impressions. He wrote to Mr. Edmund Gosse in 1877, of a visit to Azay-le-Rideau: —
“We find always great pleasure in adding to our experiences of these French places, and return always a little tired, indeed, but with our minds pleasantly full of memories of stained glass, old tapestries and new flowers.”
Pater certainly showed no undue haste to garner the harvest of the brain in these years. He was studying, enjoying, meditating. He wrote at the rate of a short essay or two a year. The essay of 1868 on “Aesthetic Poetry” was suppressed for twenty-one years. In 1869 he wrote the “Notes on Leonardo da Vinci,” one of the most elaborate and characteristic of his writings. In 1870 — it was “A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli.” In 1871 — it was “Pico della Mirandola,” and the “Poetry of Michelangelo.” All these appeared in the Fortnightly Review. And then in 1873 he produced his first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in which he included, together with those studies which had previously been published, a Preface and a “Conclusion,” both of which are of deep significance in studying the course of Pater’s mental development, and three other essays: “Aucassin and Nicolette” (in later editions named “Two Early French Stories”), “Luca della Robbia,” and “Joachim du Bellay.” To these, in the third edition of the Studies (1888), was added “The School of Giorgione,” which had appeared in the Fortnightly Review for October, 1877; while in the second edition of the book, which came out in the same year (1877), the “Conclusion” was omitted, but re-appeared with slight modifications in the third edition.
The essay on “Aesthetic Poetry” eventually appeared, as we have said, in 1889 in Appreciations, but it was again omitted in the second edition of that volume (1890), and does not appear in the complete issue of his works.
I do not know what it was that made Pater withdraw the essay on “Aesthetic Poetry,” written in 1868, from the later issue of Appreciations. Probably some unfavourable or wounding criticism, expressing a belief that he was closer to these exotic fancies then he knew himself to be. It is a strange and somewhat dreamy composition, rather a mystical meditation upon a phase of thought than a disentangling of precise principles. He takes William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere as a text, saying that “the poem which gives its name to the volume is a thing tormented and awry with passion... and the accent falls in strange, unwonted places with the effect of a great cry.” He says that the secret of the enjoyment of this new poetry, with the artificial, earthly paradise that it creates, is “that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous.” He compares the movement with the development of mystical religious literature, and defines the dangerous emotionalism of the monastic form of life, when adopted by persons of strongly sensuous temperament, saying that such natures learn from religion “the art of directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction is towards objects of sense.”
“Here, under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them.”
One cannot help feeling that the above sentence may be the very passage, from the air of strange passion which stirs in it, for which the essay was condemned. Or again the following sentence: “He (Morris) has diffused through ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’ the maddening white glare of the sun, and tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down — the sorcerer’s moon, large and feverish. The colouring is intricate and delirious, as of ‘scarlet lilies.’ The influence of summer is like a poison in one’s blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things.” There is indeed a certain disorder of the sense in this passage, the hint of a dangerous mood which seems to grasp after strange delights and evil secrets, in a reckless and haunted twilight. It is a veritable fleur du mal; and Pater, with his strong instinct for restraint and austerity of expression, probably felt that he was thus setting a perilous example of over-sensuous imagery, and an exotic lusciousness of thought.
He goes on to say that in this poetry, life seems to break from conventional things, and to realise experience, pleasure, and pain alike, as new and startling things for which no poetry, no tradition, no usage had prepared it. “Everywhere there is an impression of surprise, as of people first waking from the golden age, at fire, snow, wine, the touch of water as one swims, the salt taste of the sea. And this simplicity at first hand is a strange contrast to the sought-out simplicity of Wordsworth. Desire here is towards the body of nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it.” He shows that even Morris’s classical poems, such as Jason and the Earthly Paradise, are filled and saturated with the medieval spirit; for it will be remembered that though the setting of the Earthly Paradise is primarily medieval, yet the point of the poem is that we are supposed to be brought into contact with “a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divine good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age.” The pagan element, he points out, is “the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life,” contrasting with the natural unspoiled joy in the beauty of the world.
Early as the essay is, in the date of its composition, one feels that Pater, by omitting it from later editions, was deliberately retracing his steps, conscious that he had turned aside, in writing it, into a bypath of the spirit, and away from the more sober and serious ideal of his life. Its strange beauty is undeniable; but in its omission we see, as it were, a warning hand held up, indicating that not in this luxurious gloom, this enervating atmosphere, are the true ends of the spirit to be attained.
The Studies in the History of the Renaissance deserve close attention, in the first place for themselves, because of the elaborateness of the art displayed, the critical subtlety with which typical qual
ities are seized and interpreted. As the bee ranges over flowers at will, and gathers a tiny draught of honey from each, which, though appropriated, secreted, and reproduced, still bears the flavor of the particular flower, whether of the garden violet or the wild heather-bell, from which it was drawn, so these essays exhibit each a characteristic savour of the art or the figure which furnished them. They are no shallow or facile impressions, but bear the marks of resolute compression and fine selection. But they are not mere forms reflected in the mirror of a perceptive mind. They are in the truest sense symbolical, charged to the brim with the personality of the writer, and thus to be ranged with creative rather than critical art. Those who cannot see with Pater’s eyes may look in vain, in the writings or the pictures of which he speaks, for the mysterious suggestiveness of line and colour which he discerns in them. They have suffered in passing through the medium of his perception, like the bones of the drowned king, “a sea-change into something rich and strange”; they are like the face which he describes, into which the soul with all its maladies had passed. It is hardly for us to estimate the ethical significance of the attitude revealed. It must suffice to say that in the hands of Pater these pictures out of the past have been transmuted by a secret and deep current of emotion into something behind and beyond the outer form. They are charged with dreams.
And in the second place they reveal, perhaps, the sincerest emotions of a mind at its freshest and strongest. No considerations of prudence or discretion influenced his thought. Pew writers perhaps preserve, through fame and misunderstanding alike, so consistent, so individual an attitude as Pater. But it must also be borne in mind that he was deeply sensitive, and though he was deliberately and instinctively sincere in all his work, yet in his later writings one feels that criticism and even misrepresentation had an effect upon him. He realised that there were certain veins of thought that were not convenient; that the frank enunciation of principles evoked impatience and even suspicion in the sturdy and breezy English mind. He held on his way indeed, though with a certain sadness. But there is no touch of that outer sadness in these first delicate and fanciful creations; the sadness that breathes through them is the inner sadness, the veiled melancholy that makes her sovereign shrine in the very temple of delight. Here, too, may be seen the impassioned joy that is born of the shock of exquisite impressions coming home to a nature that is widening and deepening every hour.
The preface of the book strikes a firm note of personality. Pater is here seen to be in strong revolt against the synthetic school of art-criticism. The business of the aesthetic critic, he declares with solemn earnestness, is not to attempt a definition of abstract beauty, but to realise the relativity of beauty, and to discern the quality, the virtue, of the best art of a writer or an artist. He explains too his principle of selection, namely that while the interest of the Renaissance is centred in Italy, its outer ripples, so to speak, must be studied in French poetry as well as in the later German manifestations of the same spirit.
There is an interesting passage, in the recent memoir of Lady Dilke, about Pater’s Renaissance. It will be remembered that when the book appeared she was the wife of Mark Pattison. She was then much engaged in the practice of art-criticism, and reviewed the book with some severity, as lacking in scientific exactness and in historical perspective. She thought that Pater had isolated the movement from its natural origins, and complained that he had treated the Renaissance as “an air-plant, independent of the ordinary sources of nourishment... a sentimental revolution having no relation to the actual conditions of the world.” This criticism has a certain truth in it, and gains interest from the fact that it probably to a certain extent represents the mature judgment of Pattison himself. But it is based on a misconception of the scope of the book, and is sufficiently rebutted by the modest title of the volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The book, indeed, lays no claim to be an exhaustive treatment of the movement. It is only a poetical and suggestive interpretation of certain brilliant episodes, springing from deeper causes which Pater made no attempt to indicate.
In the first essay, “Aucassin and Nicolette,” he points out that the sweetness of the Renaissance is not only derived from the classical world, but from the native outpouring of the spirit which showed itself in ecclesiastical art and in native French poetry, and which prompted and prepared the way for the enthusiastic return to classical art.
In “Pico della Mirandola” he traces the attempt to reconcile the principles of Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece, not by any historical or philosophical method, but by allegorical interpretation, in the spirit of that “generous belief that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality.” He dwells with wistful delight upon the figure of this graceful and precocious scholar, Pico, “Earl of Mirandola, and a great Lord of Italy” — Pico, nurtured in the law, but restless and athirst, with the eager and uncritical zest of the time, for philosophy, for language, for religion, working, fitfully and brilliantly, in the hope that some solution would be found to satisfy the yearnings of the soul, some marvellous secret, which would in a moment gratify and harmonise all curious and warring impulses. Pico, beloved of women, seemly and gracious of mien, dying of fever at so early an age, and lying down for his last rest in the grave habit of the Dominicans, mystical, ardent, weary with the weariness that comes of so swift and perilous a pilgrimage, is a type of beauty shadowed by doom, mortality undimmed by age or disease, that appealed with passionate force to Pater’s mind.
In the essay on “Sandro Botticelli” he touches on the meditative subtlety, the visionary melancholy of the painter, “the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss about them — the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs through all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.” He traces the strange mixture of idealism and realism which transfuses Botticelli’s pictures, his men and women, “clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy.” He confesses frankly that Botticelli displays an incomplete grasp of the resources of art; but he indicates with subtle perception the haunted and wistful spirit of the artist.
In the “Luca della Robbia” Pater traces very skilfully the attempt made to unite the pleasure derivable from sculpture with the homely art of pottery, the old-world modesty and seriousness and simplicity which put out its strength to adorn and cultivate daily household life; and he shows, too, the exquisite intimité and the originality of the man, which is so rarely exhibited in the white abstract art of sculpture.
The motif of the “Poetry of Michelangelo” is best summed up in the words which Pater uses as a recurrent phrase: ex forti dulcedo — out of the strong came forth sweetness. He says: —
“The interest of Michelangelo’s poems is that they make us spectators of this struggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive, as Dante’s was.”
The essay beautifully contrasts the extremes of that volcanic nature, the man who, as Raphael said, walked the streets of Rome like an executioner, and who yet, at the other end of the scale, could conceive and bring to perfection the exquisite sweetness, the almost overcomposed dignity, of the great Pietà. The essay abounds in subtle and delicate characterisation of the manifestations of that desirous, rugged, uncomforted nature. Thus, in speaking of the four symbolical figures, Night, Day, The Twilight, The Dawn, which adorn the sacristy of San Lorenzo, Pater says that the names assigned them are far too precise. —
“They concentrate and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments,
which shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, whenever the thoughts try to fix themselves with sincerity on the conditions and surroundings of the disembodied spirit. I suppose no one would come to the sacristy of San Lorenzo for consolation; for seriousness, for solemnity, for dignity of impression, perhaps, but not for consolation. It is a place neither of terrible nor consoling thoughts, but of vague and wistful speculation.”
Perhaps it may be said that in this essay Pater reveals an over-subtlety of conception in his desire to substantiate the contrast. There was an essential unity of character, of aim, about Michelangelo; and the contrasts are merely the same intensity of mood working in different regions, not a difference of mood. The chief value of the essay lies in its lyrical fervour, in the poetical and suggestive things that are said by the way.
The essay on “Leonardo da Vinci” is certainly the most brilliant of all the essays, and contains elaborate passages which, for meditative sublimity and exquisite phrasing, Pater never surpassed. The fitful, mysterious, beauty-haunted nature of Leonardo, the stream of his life broken into such various channels, his absorption, his remoteness, passing “unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand” — all this had a potent attraction for Pater. The essay is a wonderful piece of constructive skill, interweaving as it does all the salient features of the “legend” of Vasari with a perfect illustrative felicity. But it is in the descriptive passages that Pater touches the extreme of skill, as for instance in his description of the sea-shore of the Saint Anne, “that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo’s strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.”
