Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  Besides these two critical appreciations, Pater wrote at this time a Shakespearian study, and the little essay on “Romanticism,” which re-appeared in 1889 as the Postscript to Appreciations, which may be shortly discussed here.

  It has a high value. It is a careful attempt to find a definition for the two terms classical and romantic. Pater sees with perspicuous clearness that one of the difficulties of finding a precise formula for large terms, expressive of tendency, is the disentangling them from the loose, conventional, and conversational sense that they come to bear. Thus he says of the word classical, that “it has often been used in a hard, and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it — people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and tame.”

  He says that the charm of classical literature is the charm of the “well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity.”

  “It comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us.”

  But the romantic spirit is that which craves for new motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style: its essence is the addition of strangeness to beauty; its danger is to value what is after all inartistic — anything that is bizarre, strained, exaggerated. Pater contrasts Pope and Balzac as instances of the defects of the two styles, — Pope’s lack of curiosity producing insipidity, and Balzac’s excess of curiosity not being duly tempered with the desire of beauty; and with singular felicity he selects the Philoctetes of Sophocles as a typically romantic book, but yet with all the tranquillity of the classical spirit.

  Pater shows that romanticism generally arises, as in France with Rousseau, after a long period of stagnation and ennui. But after all the essence of the situation lies in the fact that, as Stendhal says, all good art was romantic in its day; and thus the charm of romanticism is the charm of the spring, of the unfolding of new forms, and strangely shaped flowers, and scented fruits; the charm of classicism is the charm that creeps over the same landscape with the mellow richness of autumn; and Pater sums up the whole subject by saying that “in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.”

  The conclusion, then, for Pater is that our work should unite the true qualities of both romanticism and classicalism; that it should be fresh, new, spontaneous, and unconventional; decorous, but not hampered by decorum; gaining soberness and richness from recognised methods and due authority; but in the truest sense a development, neither a new departure nor a servile imitation. We are not to think slightingly of the old forms, or to neglect the hallowed influences of association; authority must control the manner, vitality suggest the matter. And in all this Pater is true to his creed, clinging as he did to the old forms of melodies and enriching them with new harmonies. He is content, indeed, to look backwards with reverent eyes upon the past; but he is all alive with the problems of the present, the hopes of the future.

  And thus the essay comes to have a direct value, because in it he summarises and reflects, stating the truth positively, and not by allusion and in allegories. It is in a sense one of the manifestoes scattered through his writings; and it testifies to his belief, which one might forget in his dwelling upon the old and the established, that he was in heart upon the side of the new, the inquisitive, the expansive; that his work indeed is only critical in form, but essentially creative in spirit.

  He wrote too, at this time, the essay on the “School of Giorgione,” which was added to the Renaissance essays in the third edition, and which has already been discussed. But his main concern was with the Greek Studies. “Demeter and Persephone” was delivered in the form of two lectures at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1875 and appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1876. In the same year and in the same magazine appeared the “Dionysus.” As then the most solid and vigorous sections of the Greek Studies were the work of these years, it will be better to speak of the book here, rather than at the date of its eventual publication (1895).

  I do not mean here to dwell at any great length upon the volume, beautiful as the Studies are, because they are so strongly intermingled with the antiquarian and the scholarly element that they require a-familiarity with classical learning, a special sort of initiation, to comprehend them. They are fully but not heavily freighted with erudition, and testify to a long and patient accumulation of facts and traditions. When the accumulation was complete — and it must have been a task of great labour — the details had to be touched as lightly and placed as expressively as possible. And they thus stand as an excellent work of art, and testify to the shaping into finished and balanced studies of a mass of technical and professional material.

  To indicate them briefly in detail, the first is a study of “Dionysus,” which touches with innumerable mystical and poetical suggestions the bright, gay, ruthless figure of the god, alive from head to foot, thrilling with the joy of life and beauty, and, with a divinely unassailed temperance of his own; as he passes lightly in his robe of skins, poising his wand with the bare brown arm, carrying in his hand the strange secret of the vine, its heady visions, its power of overwhelming by a sort of resistless, poisonous energy the mortal spirit, heightening and gilding on the one hand its bright fancies and sparkling dreams into a sort of mysterious rapture, an inner careless glee; and on the other hand sinking melancholy thoughts into an abandoned and exaggerated grief, and at last merging both joy and grief together into a deep stupor of mind and body. We Northerners, with the inherited taste for potent and ardent beverages, as resources to fight against our cheerless skies, our damp mists, our aching frosts, enlightened, too, by the later researches of natural philosophers, who have explained the magic of intoxication as a sort of unseemly poisoning of mind and body alike, are apt to view the effects of wine as an essentially grotesque and commonplace thing; we forget what a mystery this fierce excitement, this strange imported ecstasy of soul, the cloudy following lethargy might mean, would mean to those to whom the whole of life was a commerce with the divine, and who felt themselves surrounded by secret and unseen influences. And then, too, we must bear in mind that tendency of personification which lay so close to the heart of these old nations. With us it is all the other way; we tend to refer all things to a vast unity of law, to prodigious impersonal forces, thereby drawing, no doubt, nearer to truth, but further and further away from the romance that appeals to simple minds.

  Thus to the Greeks the worship of the grape was a discerning of “the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines.” The rites of Dionysus were holy things, “breaths of remote nature... the pines, the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the heights.” Dionysus, thus, was a spirit of fire and dew; of fire first: —

  “And who,” says Pater, “that has rested a hand on the glittering silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes of sweetness are lying, does not feel this? It is out of the bitter salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with the most curious virtues.... In thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the leafless twigs in February, or like t
he almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron’s rod that budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when Tannhäuser’s repentance is accepted.”

  And then, too, Dionysus is born of the dew — of the freshness, the solace, of liquid in a hot land.

  “Think of the darkness of the well in the breathless court, with the delicate ring of ferns kept alive just within the opening; of the sound of the fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into the houses of Venice, on summer mornings.”

  It is this combining of symbolism that Pater believes to be so characteristic of the Greek sentiment: “the religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers.”

  And with it all, in the conception of this mystical impassioned Deity, goes a deep sadness, the sadness of one who is old though everlastingly young, who has seen a thousand fair things fade, year after year, the flowers withering in the sheltered places, the trees losing their rich summer foliage; he has seen generation after generation arise in grace and beauty, thirsting for life, coming with new wonder to taste the sweet mysteries; and they too have gone; he knows the secrets of the grave; he knows that though new life arises, the old life, the old passionate identities, are not restored. He himself defies death and the violence of traitorous people, infuriated by the sorrows that follow so hard in the path of joy; he is slain, but arises again with strength renewed and sadness increased; thus the vision glows, and fades, and glows again.

  It is in vain to ask ourselves whether the whole of this body of symbolism was ever present in any mind or group of minds. That is not the concern of Pater; his thought is rather to trace the many clear streams that have ever flowed within the single channel. He gathers the waters in a heap, as the prophet of old said. And the value of the essay is that it reveals something of the freshness and richness of the Greek mind, the exquisite power of seeing the beauty of sweet and simple things, of interweaving them into joyful fancies, embodying them into strange high-hearted tales; this tendency is the exact opposite of our own Celtic tendency, which loses itself in a vague and wistful melancholy in the thought of desolate spirits full of sorrow, that find their natural home in the soft weeping world, the moors in which the rain drops pitifully, the lonely hills. With the Greeks the sense of presences behind life, hovering near, revealing themselves in halfglimpses, took shape in the bright sparkling pageant of life — life that is determined in its brief space to press out the most poignant qualities of sorrow and laughter, of love and song.

  In the “Bacchanals of Euripides” the same point is touched on a different side; here we see the intoxicating sense of life and spring, the tingling impulse of the dance, coming out in the group of worshippers, the women who surround the woman-like god, touching thought exclusively through the senses. To these was given to feel “the presence of night, the expectation of morning, the nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural things — the echoes, the coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through the darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion, the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes with the morning.”

  Pater traces the plot of the strange beauty-haunted play, with its grotesque episodes, such as the indignity of the Bacchic passion seizing upon the old fatuous men, horribly renewing their youth in a kind of shameless parody of childish merriment, up to the appalling tragedy of the end, the doom of scepticism that yet involves a house and a nation in speechless grief and horror.

  In the “Myth of Demeter and Persephone,” which Pater said had been the most laborious and difficult piece of work he had ever done, he traces the complex shadowy legend from its early origins. The Mother of Nature, with her power over the kindly fruits of the earth, is first depicted; and then in the midst of her passionless content, her easy benevolence, her daughter is snatched away to be queen among the dead; the mother, in a sad indifference of grief, sets out stony-hearted on the quest, sometimes blasting, sometimes blessing the earth through which she passes, losing, in the stress of that bitter sorrow, the balance of mind, the responsibility, which her influence had brought her. Pater shows that behind all the brightness, the hopefulness, the impassioned geniality of the Greek creed, there lay a shadow: —

  “The ‘worship of sorrow,’ as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, were never ‘sick or sorry.’ But this familiar view of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities; and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the ‘worship of sorrow’ was not without its function in Greek religion; their legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight painful and strange.”

  But perhaps the most important dictum which Pater lays down in the essay is this — that “in the application of these theories, the student of Greek religion must never forget that, after all, it is with poetry, not with systematic theological belief or dogma, that he has to do.”

  In the second part of the essay he traces the myth through its treatment by many hands, the hands of poets, the hands of sculptors, each adding something of their own restless and eager personality to these figures of the “goddesses of the earth, akin to the influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light, tranquillising voices.”

  It is here that he conceives the secret to lie — that in the perceptions of these old imaginings we may not only draw nearer to the heart of the ancient world, but that they may bring us too, by sweet association and delicate shadowy imagery, some uplifting and enlarging of our own sympathies and hopes.

  The “Hippolytus Veiled” (1889) is a much later work, but it will be as well to treat of it here, though it belongs less to the stricter archaeological studies, and more to the series of Imaginary Portraits. Pater takes the old sad legend of Hippolytus, the child of Theseus and an Amazon, the type of a stainless and almost froward chastity, which brings with it the penalty of the scorning of divine influence, of natural law; and embroiders out of it an elaborate and beautiful story, heaped with rich and fervid accessories. He points out first the exquisite finish, the clear-cut detail, which characterises even the smallest and daintiest of Greek legends; “the impression of Greece generally,” he says, is “but enhanced by the littleness of the physical scene of events intellectually so great — such a system of grand lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one of its fine coins.” And thus he illustrates that salient characteristic of Greek life — the absence of centralisation, the intensity with which so vivid a life burnt sharply at so many provincial centres simultaneously. Then comes the story, the noble child so carefully nurtur
ed by the desolate sorrowing mother, acquiring in and through her woe all the arts of simple seemly living, in order that she may delicately nurture the child of her fall. Pater brings the lonely cave-life before one — the wax-tapers, the hunger of the boy so daintily satisfied, his eager prattling alertness, the joyful days, overshadowed only by the thought that they were surely passing. Then the boy passes on to the greater world, becomes renowned in all manly exercises, but keeps his purity unsullied, even in the perfumed chambers of the palace, face to face with the feverish desire of the shameless Phaedra. “He had a marvellous air of discretion about him, as of one never to be caught unaware, as if he never could be anything but like water from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of the morning star turned to human flesh.” Repulsed and mad with jealous shame, Phaedra whispers the traitorous tale to Theseus, who utters a curse upon the boy, so that he falls into a wasting sickness. Even so the gods are merciful; he struggles back to life, to lose it again before the wrath of Poseidon, or even perhaps of Aphrodite herself, as he drives his chariot along the shore. The earth rocks, a great wave whitens on the beach; the horses plunge and start, and he is buffeted to death among the sea-boulders and the crawling brine.