CHAPTER II

EARLY WRITINGS

I have thought it best in this study of a life marked by so few external events, to follow as far as possible the chronological order of Pater’s writings, for this reason; that though he revealed in conversation and social intercourse scarcely anything of the workings and the progress of his mind, yet his writings constitute a remarkable self-revelation of a character of curious intensity and depth, within certain defined limits.

After disentangling himself from metaphysical speculations, after what may be called his artistic conversion, which dates from his first journey to Italy, he threw himself with intense concentration into the task of developing his power of expression. Thus his first deliberate work is a species of manifesto, an enunciation of the principles with which he began his artistic pilgrimage.

The interest of the study “Winckelmann” is very great. It has been made the subject of a myth, the legend being that it was written while Pater was a boy at school. This statement, which is wholly without foundation, is only worth mentioning in order that it may be contradicted. The origin of the story is probably to be found in the desire to make Pater’s boyhood prophetic of his later interests; but the study was as a matter of fact written in 1866. It appeared in January 1867, in the _Westminster Review_.

There is a charm about the early work of writers whose style is strongly individual. Sometimes these early attempts are tentative and unequal, as if the writer had not yet settled down to a deliberate style; they bear traces of the effect of other favourite styles. The curtain seems to rise, so to speak, jerkily, and to reveal the performer by glimpses; but in the case of the “Winckelmann” the curtain goes up tranquilly and evenly, and the real Pater steps quietly upon the stage.

The style in which “Winckelmann” is written is a formed style; it contains all the characteristics which give Pater his unique distinction. It is closely and elaborately packed; the sentences have the long stately cadences; the epithets have the _soigneux_ flavour; and it is full, too, of those delicate and suggestive passages, where a beautiful image is hinted, with a severe economy of art, rather than worked out in the Ruskinian fashion. There is, too, a rigid suppression of the ornamental; it is like gold from which the encompassing gravel has been washed. But it has also a passion, a glow, which is somewhat in contrast to a certain sense of weariness that creeps into some of the later work. It is youthful, ardent, indiscreet. But for all that it is accurately proportioned and mature. It shows the power, which is very characteristic of Pater, of condensing an exact knowledge of detail into a few paragraphs, retaining what is salient and illuminating, and giving the effect of careful selection.

It is plain, in the “Winckelmann,” that the writer had been hitherto occupied in somewhat experimental researches; but here he seems to have found his own point of view in a moment, and to have suddenly apprehended his attitude to the world. It is as when a carrier-pigeon released from its prison beats round and round, determining by some mysterious instinct the direction of its home; and at last sweeps off, without doubt or hesitation, with steady strokes on the chosen path.

Winckelmann was one who, after a dark and poverty-stricken youth, of mental and indeed physical starvation, became aware of the perfect beauty of Greek art, and renounced all study but that of the literature of the arts, till he became “consummate, tranquil, withdrawn into the region of ideals, yet retaining colour from the incidents of a passionate intellectual life.” He renounced his metaphysical and legal studies, in which he had made progress. He joined the Church of Rome, to gain the patronage of the Saxon Court; and finally transferred himself to Rome, where he wrote his _History of Ancient Art_. He lived a life of severe simplicity, absorbed entirely in intellectual and artistic study, his only connection with the world in which he lived being a series of romantic and almost passionate friendships. His end was tragic; for he was murdered by a fellow-traveller at Trieste for the sake of some gold medals which he had received at Vienna. Goethe, whose intellectual ideal had been deeply affected by Winckelmann’s writings, was awaiting his arrival at Leipsic with intense enthusiasm, but was not destined ever to see him.

Such was the figure that appealed so strongly to Pater’s mind; and perhaps the chief interest of the essay is the strong autobiographical element that appears in it. Pater saw in Winckelmann a type of himself, of his own intellectual struggles, of his own conversion to the influence of art. After a confused and blinded youth, self-contained and meagrely nourished, Winckelmann had struck out, without hesitation or uneasy lingering, on his path among the stars. It is impossible not to feel in many passages that Pater is reading his own soul-history into that of his hero.

“It is easy,” he writes, “to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.”

And again:—

“Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life.... The pure instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that these forms of culture can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life. With a kind of passionate coldness, such natures rejoice to be away from and past their former selves.”

And once again:—

“On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is the more liberal life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabout have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little they have emancipated us!”

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 qualities 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 over-composed 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.”

Though the celebrated passage which describes “La Gioconda” has been abundantly quoted, it may here be given in full:—

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”

Such writing as this has an undeniable magic about it; though its vagueness is not wholly characteristic of Pater’s ordinary manner, it is a wonderful achievement; it is more like a musical fantasia, embodying hints and echoes, touching with life a store of reveries and dreams, opening up strange avenues of dreamful thought, than a precise description of any actual work of art. To say that Leonardo himself would have disclaimed this interpretation of his picture is not to dispel the beauty of the criticism; for the magical power of art is its quickening spirit, its faculty of touching trains of thought that run far beyond the visible and bounding horizon. It is possible, too, to dislike the passage for its strong and luscious fragrance, its overpowering sensuousness, to say that it is touched with decadence, in its dwelling on the beauty of evil, made fair by remoteness; but this is to take an ethical view of it, to foresee contingencies, to apprehend the ultimate force of its appeal. As in all lofty art, the beauty is inexplicable, the charm incommunicable; its sincerity, its zest is apparent; and it can hardly be excelled as a typical instance of the prose that is essentially poetical, in its liquid cadences, its echoing rhythms. In any case, whether one feels the charm of the passage or not, it must remain as perhaps the best instance of Pater’s early mastery of his art, in its most elaborate and finished form.

The essay on the “School of Giorgione” is a later work (1877), but it will be well to consider it here. It is an elaborate composition, and shows a tendency to return to metaphysical speculation, or rather to interfuse a metaphysical tinge into artistic perception. He lays down the principle that the quality of the particular medium of a work of art is what it is necessary to discern, and that it is a mistake to blend the appeal of different methods of artistic expression. “All art,” he says in an italicised sentence, showing that he is laying it down as an established maxim, “_constantly aspires towards the condition of music_,” because music is the only art which makes its appeal through pure form, while all other art tends to have the motive confused by the matter, by the subject which it aims at reproducing. “Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed,” he adds, “is the true type or measure of perfected art.”

The attitude of Giorgione, his distinctive quality, lies, according to Pater, in the fact that “he is the inventor of _genre_, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching—little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape—morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar.” But one of the chief points of interest in the essay is that Pater devotes more space to his perception of music than he does in any other place. Giorgione himself was, according to traditions, an admirable musician, and musical scenes are made the motive of many of his pictures, or of those attributed to him: “music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments—people with intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet sound—a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.”

But the essay is not perhaps quite as lucid as some of the earlier work; the tendency to construct long involved sentences, full of parentheses, is here apparent; it gives one the impression of a vague musical modulation, which, beautiful in its changes, its relations, lacks the crispness and certainty of precise form.

There remains the “Joachim du Bellay,” a slight essay where Pater occupies himself with showing how Ronsard endeavoured to draw the influence of the Italian renaissance in to enliven and deepen the native Gothic material of French song, “gilding its surface with a strange delightful foreign aspect, like a chance effect of light.” He indicates how, in that transformation, the old French seriousness disappeared, leaving nothing but “the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect manner” in the poets of Ronsard’s school, of whom Du Bellay was the last. Du Bellay strove with all his might, as in the little tract, _La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse_, “to adjust the existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture,” “to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection.” Pater traces the eagerness for word-music, the beginnings of _poésie intime_, the poetry in which a writer strives to shape his innermost moods or to take the world into his confidence. He illustrates Du Bellay’s fondness for landscape: “a sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.”

The whole essay is in a lighter, a less serious tone, and dwells more softly upon the surface of things; and thus gives a kind of relief, a breathing space in the intense mood. One feels that some art went to the careful placing of these essays; for we pass to the study on “Winckelmann,” of which we have spoken at length, in which Pater found a type by which he might reveal his own inner thought, the conversion which he had experienced. And thus we come to the “Conclusion,” a most elaborate texture of writing, made obscure by its compression, by its effort to catch and render the most complicated effects of thought. This “Conclusion” was omitted in the second edition of the book. Pater says that he excluded it, “as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” He adds that he made a few changes which brought it closer to his original meaning, and that he had dealt more fully with the subject in _Marius the Epicurean_.

The only substantial alterations in the essay are as follows. Pater originally wrote:—

“High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’”

This sentence became:—

“Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.”

Again, in a passage dealing with the various ways of using life, so as to fill it full of beautiful energy, he says that “the wisest” spend it “in art and song.” In the later version he qualifies the words “the wisest” by the addition of the phrase “at least among ‘the children of this world.’”

The alterations do not appear at first sight to have any very great significance; but Pater says that they brought out his original meaning more clearly; and the very minuteness of the changes serves at least to show his sense of the momentousness of phrases.

He traces, in a passage of rich and subtle complexity, the bewildering effect upon the mind of the flood of external impressions; and compares it with the thought that gradually emerges, as the spirit deals with these impressions, of the loneliness, the solitude of personality; and with the mystery of the movement of time, the flight of the actual moment which is gone even while we try to apprehend it. He compares the perception to “a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream” of sense; and goes on to indicate that the aim of the perceptive mind should be to make the most of these fleeting moments, to “be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.” “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” “Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.”

He goes on to say that to get as many pulsations into the brief interval of life, is the one chance which is open to a man; and art, he says, gives most of these, “for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

The “Conclusion,” then, is a presentment of the purest and highest Epicureanism, the Epicureanism that is a kind of creed, and realises the duty and necessity of activity and energy, but in a world of thought rather than of action. The peril of such a creed, of which Pater became aware, is that it is in the first place purely self-regarding, and in the second place that, stated in the form of abstract principles, it affords no bulwark against the temptation to sink from a pure and passionate beauty of perception into a grosser indulgence in sensuous delights. The difficulty in the artistic, as in the ethical scale, is to discern at what point the spirit begins to yield to the lower impulse; when it deserts the asceticism, the purity, the stainlessness of nature which alone can communicate that lucidity of vision, that seriousness of purpose, that ordered simplicity of life that is to be the characteristic of the nobler Epicureanism.

Not that Pater withdrew the “Conclusion,” because he mistrusted his own principles; such principles as he held would tend to the refinement and enlargement of the moral nature, by multiplying relationships, by substituting sympathy for conscience, by admitting to the full the loftier religious influences; and thus the self-absorption of the artist would insensibly give place to a wider, more altruistic absorption.

But Pater felt, no doubt, that having struck a sensuous note in his essays, this statement of principles of artistic axioms lent itself to misrepresentation; and nothing could more clearly prove the affectionate considerateness of his nature, his desire for sympathy and relationship, his tender care for those whom he loved in spirit, than his fear of giving a wrong bias to their outlook. And thus the omission has a biographical interest, as showing the first shadow of disapproval falling on the sensitive mind, that disapproval which sometimes hung like a cloud over Pater’s enjoyment of the world, though it never for a moment diverted him from his serious and sustained purpose, as a prophet of mysteries.

Pater’s art criticism was distinctly of a literary and traditional type. He made little attempt to trace or weigh the extrinsic value of works of art, or to discuss the subject from the archaeological or the technical point of view. He accepted the traditional knowledge of the period, made no artistic discoveries, settled no controverted points. His concern was entirely with the artistic merits of a picture and its poetical suggestiveness; his criticism, indeed, was of the type which he defined in a review which he wrote many years afterwards for the _Guardian_ as “imaginative criticism”—“that criticism which is itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer, shaping his work;” and thus the errors which he made, of which we may quote one or two examples, do not really affect the value of his criticism very greatly.

To take his criticism of Leonardo. He was certainly wrong, for instance, in his judgment of the Medusa picture. This is a picture which shows strong traces both of classical and realistic influences. The head is classical, the serpents are realistic. It is almost certainly at least a century later than Leonardo’s period.

Again, the little head with the aureole of hair, which Pater had engraved for a frontispiece to the _Renaissance_ as a genuine work of Leonardo’s, is simply a school drawing, done under the influence, perhaps under the supervision, of Leonardo, by a pupil, but certainly not the work of the master’s hand.

He makes, too, the general mistake of treating Leonardo as a realist. But there is no basis of truth in this. The influence of realism had not begun to be felt at his date, or at all events in his work. The studies, for instance, to which Pater alludes, as of various flowers, of which there are a number of instances in the Windsor collection, are not realistically treated, but conventionally, and with the influence of tradition strongly marked in them.

Again it will be remembered how Pater speaks of the angel’s head, which according to tradition Leonardo contributed to a picture of his master, Verrocchio. He says that the head is still to be seen, “a space of sunlight in the cold, laboured, old picture.” There are in reality two heads in the picture, probably both by Leonardo, and one curiously ill-drawn. But the picture is not cold and laboured; it is simply unfinished, and not in a condition on which a judgment of its possibilities could be passed.

In the essay on “Botticelli” he was on firmer ground. But the essay on the “School of Giorgione” is perhaps the most typical instance. There are only two Giorgiones which can be positively identified as his from contemporary records. These are the picture known as “The Three Philosophers,” or “The Chaldean Sages,” which is now supposed by some critics to represent the arrival of Aeneas in Italy; and the picture known as “The Stormy Landscape” in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, which is now sometimes called “Adrastus and Hypsipyle.” Then there is the great Castelfranco altar-piece, which by tradition and internal evidence may be held to be an indubitable Giorgione. Then there are others with a reasonable degree of probability, such as the “Knight in Armour” in the National Gallery, said to be a study for the figure of S. Liberale in the Castelfranco altar-piece, an “Adoration of the Shepherds,” belonging to Mr. Wentworth Beaumont, and two panels at Florence, one representing an incident in the legendary childhood of Moses, and the other “The Judgment of Solomon.” But “The Concert,” in the Pitti, cannot be certainly attributed to Giorgione, and it may be said that the more Pater had known about Giorgione, the less likely would he have been to have attributed the picture to him. The truth is that Giorgione is a somewhat legendary painter, and what work of his is authentic is probably his later work. Art critics have of course as far as possible to account for the existence of such a legend; but the result is that in Pater’s hands, with the faulty and imperfect knowledge that existed about Giorgione at the time when he wrote, the subject is misconceived and exaggerated. There is, in the authentic works of Giorgione, an almost entire want of dramatic unity. In “The Stormy Landscape,” for instance, the figures of the mother with an infant and the young knight have no connection with each other, and are both entirely out of keeping with and unaffected by the scene, where the storm is breaking in thunder and rain. So, too, in “The Judgment of Solomon” panel there is no concentration of motive; each figure is conceived separately, and there is no sort of attempt at dramatic combination.

But when all this has been said, it really affects very little the value of Pater’s work. After all, the pictures which he described exist; the message which they held for his own spirit was generated by the sight of them, and the poetical suggestiveness of his criticism is full of vital force; he made no attempt to set misconception right, to date pictures, or to alter their dates. He took them on trust; and thus, though his judgments have no precise technical value, the inspiration of his sympathetic emotion forfeits little or none of its force by being expended on pictures which he did not attribute correctly, and which it could not be expected that he should have so attributed.

The publication of the _Renaissance_ was to be attended by important results. It gave Pater a definite place in the literary and artistic world. But it had a still deeper effect. The spirit of artistic revolt was in the air. The writings of Ruskin, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites may be taken as two salient instances in very different regions of the rising tendency. What underlay the whole movement was a desire to treat art seriously, and to give it its place in the economy of human influences. Side by side with this was a strong vein of discontent with established theories of religion, of education, of mental cultivation. The younger generation was thrilled with a sense of high artistic possibilities; it realised that there was a hidden treasure of accumulated art, ancient and medieval, which remained as a living monument of certain brilliant and glowing forces that seemed to have become quiescent. It became aware that it was existing under cramped conditions, in a comfortable barbarism, encompassed by strict and respectable traditions, living a bourgeois kind of life, fettered by a certain stupid grossness, a life that checked the free development of the soul.

Pater’s suggestive and poetical treatment of medieval art fired a train, and tended to liberate an explosive revolutionary force of artistic feeling which manifested itself in intemperate extravagances for which he was indeed in no sense responsible, but which could be to a certain extent referred to his principles. Young men with vehement impulses, with no experience of the world, no idea of the solid and impenetrable weight of social traditions and prejudices, found in the principles enunciated by Pater with so much recondite beauty, so much magical charm, a new equation of values. Pater himself was to pay dearly for his guileless sincerity, his frank confidence.

In 1877, the year in which the second edition of the _Renaissance_ was issued, appeared Mr. Mallock’s _New Republic_. It is a difficult question to decide to what extent a satire of the kind is justifiable. It was an extraordinarily suggestive and humorous book; and the author would no doubt justly maintain that in Mr. Rose he was merely parodying a type of the aesthetic school; but language was put into Mr. Rose’s mouth which was obviously a faithful parody of Pater’s style of writing, with an added touch of languor and extravagance. The bitterness of the satire was increased by its being cast in a conversational form, so that it would be concluded by those who did not know Pater that his conversation in a mixed society was couched in this exotic and affected vein, reaching a degree of grotesqueness on the one hand and sensuousness on the other which was bound to produce an unpleasant effect on the minds of readers. Mr. Rose is made to discourse in public in a dreamy vein in a manner which draws from Lady Ambrose, a conventional and worldly person, the comment that he always speaks of every one “as if they had no clothes on.” But there are more disagreeable innuendoes than that; and as it was inevitable from the language employed that Mr. Rose should be identified with Pater, it is hard to absolve the author from the charge of sacrificing the scrupulous justice that should have been shown to an individual to the desire for effectiveness and humour, though on the other hand an ample excuse is afforded in the youthful ebullience of the book, written, it is marvellous to reflect, when the author was still an undergraduate. Pater had indeed laid himself in one sense open to the attack, by committing to the impersonal medium of a book sentiments which could be distorted into the sensuous creed of aesthetes; to satirise the advanced type of the aesthetic school was perfectly fair, but it was unduly harsh to cause an affected and almost licentious extravagance of behaviour to be attributed to one whose private life and conversation were of so sober and simple a character. It seems clear that the satire caused Pater considerable distress. If he had been personally vain or socially ambitious, it might have gratified him to be included in so distinguished a company; but all this was entirely foreign to his retired and studious habits; he did not at all desire to have a mysterious and somewhat painful prestige thrust upon him; and though he seldom if ever spoke of the subject even to his most intimate friends, yet it is impossible not to realise that the satire must have caused him sincere pain. It was in this mood that he said to Mr. Gosse, “I wish they wouldn’t call me a ‘hedonist’; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek.” He felt that he had been deliberately misrepresented, made unjustly notorious, and the sober and strenuous ideal of his life cruelly obscured.

Although Pater had been a pupil of Jowett’s, and although there was a _rapprochement_ in later life, when Jowett took occasion warmly to congratulate Pater on his _Plato and Platonism_, there was a misunderstanding of some kind which resulted in a dissidence between them in the middle years. It has even been said that Jowett took up a line of definite opposition to Pater, and used his influence to prevent his obtaining University work and appointments. It is not impossible that this was the case. Jowett, in spite of his genius, in spite of his liberality of view and his deliberate tolerance, was undoubtedly an opportunist. He was not exactly guided by the trend of public opinion, but he took care not to back men or measures unless he would be likely to have the support of a strong section of the community, or at least conceived it probable that his line would eventually be endorsed by public opinion. Thus his religious position was based not on the fact that he wished to be in opposition to popular orthodoxy, but that he followed an enlightened line, with a belief that, in the long-run, the best intelligence of the country would adopt similar views. That this is not an over-statement is clear from Jowett’s _Life_, where he is revealed as a far more liberal, even destructive critic of popular religion than he allowed to appear in either his writings or public utterances.

Probably Jowett either identified Pater with the advanced aesthetic school, or supposed that at all events his teaching was adapted to strengthen a species of Hedonism, or modern Paganism, which was alien to the spirit of the age. Or possibly he was alarmed at the mental and moral attitude with which Pater was publicly credited, owing in considerable measure to the appearance of the _New Republic_—in which he himself was pilloried as the representative of advanced religious liberalism—and thought that on public grounds he must combat the accredited leaders of a movement which was certainly unfashionable, and which was regarded with suspicion by men of practical minds. Whatever his motives were, he certainly meant to make it plain that he did not desire to see the supposed exponents of the aesthetic philosophy holding office in the University.

One feels that Jowett, with his talent for frank remonstrance, had better have employed direct rather than indirect methods; but the fact remains that he not only disliked the tendency of Pater’s thought, but endeavoured, by means that are invariably ineffectual, to subvert his influence.

It is not difficult to arrive at Pater’s view of Jowett; he regarded his qualities, both administrative and mental, with a considerable degree of admiration. He half envied and was half amused by the skilful way in which Jowett contrived, taught by adversity and opposition, to harmonise advanced religious views with popular conceptions, and to subordinate philosophical speculation to practical effectiveness. He considered him an excellent specimen of the best kind of virtuous sophist. A letter on the subject which he contributed in 1894 to the _Life of Jowett_ is interesting.

Speaking of his own undergraduate days, he says that Jowett’s generosity in the matter of giving undergraduates help and encouragement in their work was unprecedented,

“on the part of one whose fame among the youth, though he was then something of a recluse, was already established. Such fame rested on his great originality as a writer and thinker. He seemed to have taken the measure not merely of all opinions, but of all possible ones, and to have put the last refinements on literary expression. The charm of that was enhanced by a certain mystery about his own philosophic and other opinions. You know at that time his writings were thought by some to be obscure. These impressions of him had been derived from his Essays on St. Paul’s Epistles, which at that time were much read and pondered by the more intellectual sort of undergraduates. When he lectured on Plato, it was a fascinating thing to see those qualities as if in the act of creation, his lectures being informal, unwritten, and seemingly unpremeditated, but with many a long-remembered gem of expression, or delightfully novel idea, which seemed to be lying in wait whenever, at a loss for a moment in his somewhat hesitating discourse, he opened a book of loose notes. They passed very soon into other note-books all over the University; the larger part, but I think not all of them, into his published introductions to the _Dialogues_. Ever since I heard it, I have been longing to read a very dainty dialogue on language, which formed one of his lectures, a sort of ‘New Cratylus.’”

At the same time Pater had no sort of inner sympathy with Jowett’s position as a priest of the Anglican Church, considering the opinions on the subject of Christian doctrine which he held, or which Pater believed him to hold. There is practically no doubt that in the review of _Robert Elsmere_ which Pater contributed to the _Guardian_, he had Jowett in his mind in the following passage:—

“Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere came to be ought not to be a clergyman of the Anglican Church. The priest is still, and will, we think, remain, one of the necessary types of humanity; and he is untrue to his type, unless, with whatever inevitable doubts in this doubting age, he feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it of those influences which make for faith. It is his triumph to achieve as much faith as possible in an age of negation. Doubtless, it is part of the ideal of the Anglican Church that, under certain safeguards, it should find room for latitudinarians even among its clergy. Still, with these, as with all other genuine priests, it is the positive not the negative result that justifies the position. We have little patience with those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing else than the difficulties of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite force.”

The truth is that the two temperaments were radically opposed, though they had certain philosophical interests in common. At bottom Jowett was a man of the world, and valued effectiveness above most qualities; while Pater set no particular value upon administrative energy. Jowett was indifferent to art, except in so far as it ministered to agreeable social intercourse; with Pater art provided what were the deepest and most sacred experiences of his life. Not until Pater became a growing power in the literary and artistic world, not until it became clear that he had no practical sympathy with the exponents of a bastard aestheticism, did Jowett recognise the fame of his former pupil; and as the respect of Jowett, when conceded to persons with whom he did not agree, may be recognised as having a certain value of barometrical indication, as reflecting the opinion of the world in a species of enlightened mirror, we may consider that Jowett’s expressed admiration of _Plato and Platonism_ was a belated admission that Pater had indubitably attained to the eminence which the Professor of Greek had long before prophesied for him.