CHAPTER VII

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

In younger days Pater was refined and dignified in appearance; there is an early photograph of him, shortly after he took his degree, with a soft eye, a serious gentle look, with regular and rounded features.[2] But this altered in later years; he became graver and heavier of aspect, and his face took on a character that has been described as “Japanese”; the pallor of his complexion, like old ivory, became more marked; but his eyes were his most eloquent feature, of a light hazel tint, almost grey-green, which lit up with an impressive light of animation and kindness when he was moved.

[2] There is a portrait of him, a drawing by Simeon Solomon, made in 1872, now in the possession of Mr. Herbert Horne. There is also another drawing, a lithograph, by Mr. Rothenstein, included in the Oxford Portraits. Neither of these is considered wholly satisfactory by those who knew Pater best.

He was in later life slow of movement, bent, sad of aspect, except when particularly stirred, and somewhat sedentary in appearance. Yet he was broad-shouldered, strongly-built, sturdy, and gave an impression of soundness, and even toughness of constitution. His great pale face, with the strong lower jaw and carefully trimmed moustache, gave him something of the air of a retired military man. There was an impression sometimes of languor about him. He had to strangers, at first sight, in later years, a fatigued, faded, lustreless air, as of a caged creature. But this, I learn from those who knew him best, was in reality a false impression. He was undoubtedly robust; he was a patient, an unwearying traveller, often walking long distances without fatigue, and bearing uncomplainingly the extreme of Italian heat. But, like all impressionable, perceptive, artistic temperaments, his physical strength was apt to ebb and flow with his inner mood; when he was pleased, interested, delighted, he was also equable, animated, alert. When he was aware that he was expected to fulfil anticipations, conscious of social strain, uninterested, he became melancholy, drooping, unstrung. To any one introduced to him for the first time he at once gave the impression of great gentleness and sympathy. There was nothing awe-inspiring about him but his reputation. His low deferential voice, his shy smile, the delicate phrasing of his sentences, his obvious interest in the temperament of his companion, gave the feeling of great and sincere humility. He was, too, singularly easy and accessible; he had no desire to keep a conversation in his own hands, or to claim attention for his opinions. He had rather a delicate power of encouraging confidence and frankness. One realised at once that one was in the presence of a man of subtle sensibilities, anxious, not of set purpose but from considerate instinct, to do the fullest justice to the feelings of his companion, and to give him his undivided attention. This came from a fine simplicity of nature, from a character that made no egotistical demands; he seemed to expect and to require little from life, but to be full of a quiet gratitude for such delight as came naturally in his way.

He arrayed himself with scrupulous neatness, and always dressed for Hall. He invariably wore a tall hat, and carried the neatest of gold-topped umbrellas. His gait was peculiar: he had a slight stoop, and dragged one foot slightly, advancing with a certain delicacy. He disliked stopping to talk to people, and often was at some pains not to appear to recognise them; he had a peculiar courteous gesture of the hand, if recognition was inevitable, by which he paid a certain tribute of courtesy, and yet contrived to indicate that he wished to be unmolested. He was shy in large mixed assemblies, but his shyness did not make him silent or abrupt. He was apt to talk, gently and persistently, of trivial topics, using his conversation rather as a shield against undue intimacy.

People on first meeting him were sometimes struck with the extraordinary conventionality of his manners and conversation in society; but this almost oppressive suavity melted into a gentle and sympathetic kindness on further acquaintance. A friend, writing to Miss Pater after her brother’s death, spoke of

“his kindness, his sweetness, his gentle and amiable wearing of all his great gifts, his happy and gracious willingness to give all around him the enjoyment of them.”

Another friend of his writes:—

“The only attitude I ever observed in Pater, the only mood I saw him in, was a sort of weary courtesy with which he used to treat me, with somehow a deep kindness shining through. It was as though he would have liked to lavish sympathy and even affection, but was frightened of the responsibility and unequal to the effort. He seemed to me, if I may use an allegory, to point to a sack of treasure, and say,—‘That is yours, if you like to take it; I am only sorry that I am too tired myself to rise and place it in your hands.’”

But, on the other hand, Dr. Bussell, the closest companion in the later years, writes of the side of himself that Pater turned to the nearer circle:—

“His ordinary talk ... was the happiest blending of seriousness and mirth, of deep feeling and a sort of childlike glee in the varying surfaces of things.”

This subdued air came to a certain extent from the circumstances of his life, but still more from a deep-seated reclusiveness, rather than humility of nature. Indeed, it may be said that, with all his gentleness, he was not innately humble. What often appeared to be humility was, in reality, an intense dislike of opposition. A consciousness of antagonism irritated him so intensely, that he often preferred to withdraw both what he had said and written, rather than provoke contradiction and argument. It was not that he was diffident about his intuitions; he was rather diffident about his power of defending and recommending them. He was little inclined to dogmatise, and realised most sympathetically the differences of temperament; but the path which he had chosen was the only path for him; and though he might seem to yield to argument and remonstrance, he was never converted, except by reflection. He was probably never fully appreciated at Oxford. Busy, effective, academical natures tended to think of him as a secluded dreamer of dreams; his fame grew so insensibly and secretly, and was, even so, confined so much to the συνετοὶ, the connoisseurs, that there never came that revulsion of feeling that has sometimes lifted a man suddenly on to a pinnacle of unquestioned reputation. Moreover, it is fair to say that the air of the Universities is not at the present moment favourable to the pursuit of _belles lettres_ and artistic philosophies. The praise of academical circles is reserved at the present time for people of brisk bursarial and business qualifications, for men of high technical accomplishment, for exact researchers, for effective teachers of prescribed subjects, for men of acute and practical minds, rather than for men of imaginative qualities. This is the natural price that must be paid for the increased efficiency of our Universities, though it may be regretted that they maintain so slight a hold upon the literary influences of the day. The whole atmosphere is, in fact, sternly critical, and the only work which is emphatically recognised and approved is the work which makes definite and unquestionable additions to the progress of exact sciences.

A genial epigrammatist once said that if a man desired to court unpopularity in academical circles he had but to enjoy an outside reputation, to write a good literary style, and to make it his business to see something of undergraduates, to gain his end with entire celerity.

There is some truth in the contention. The erudite world is apt to think that a reputation acquired with the general public by literary accomplishments is a second-rate sort of affair, and only to be gained by those who are not sufficiently hard-headed and exact to win academical repute. A man, too, who betrays an interest in the younger members of the community is thought to be slightly abnormal, and either to be actuated by a vague sentimentality, or else to be desirous of receiving the admiration of immature minds, which he cannot win from more mature intellects.

This atmosphere, these conditions, Pater accepted with the gentle outward deference that was characteristic of him; he had no taste for the warm luxuriance of coteries; he had no sort of desire to label with contemptuous names those who must have appeared to him deaf and blind to the subtle and beautiful effects that made the substance of his own life.

It seemed a curious irony of fate which planted Pater in a college which for years enjoyed a robust pre-eminence for athletic triumphs, together with a reputation for wholesale turbulence. But it may be said that such an atmosphere was not wholly uncongenial to Pater. Though he had no sort of proficiency in athletics, and though he was pre-eminently peaceable in disposition, he had, as I have said, a genuine and deep admiration for strongly developed physical vigour, while he had little of the sensitive disciplinary instinct that feels the frank display of youthful ebullience a kind of slur upon the privileges of constituted authority. No one was more anxious than Pater, in a disciplinary crisis, to give a case a fair hearing, and to condone as far as possible an outbreak that was thoughtless rather than deliberate. In all cases where there was a question of the infliction of punishment for some breach of discipline, Pater was always on the side of mercy. And this was with no wish to preserve his own dignity by temporising with the disorderly section. He was always a loyal and faithful supporter of authority, while he was anxious that a case should not be judged with the undue sternness that the sense of outraged dignity tends to bring with it. As Dr. Bussell wrote:—

“Naturally inclined to a certain rigour in discipline, he was full of excuse for individual cases; and regretted and thought over stern measures more than most members of a governing body can afford to do.”

Apocryphal stories are related of him, such as his excuse for the rowdiness of undergraduates after Hall, that they reminded him of playful young tigers that had just been fed; or his supposed remark about bonfires in Brasenose quad, that he did not object to them because they lighted up the spire of St. Mary’s so beautifully. These were, of course, intended to represent the imperturbable search for beautiful impressions in the most incongruous circumstances; but they represent, too, a half-truth, namely, a real and vital charity of nature, inclined to condone, and even to sympathise with, the manifestations of natural feeling, however personally inconvenient.

Perhaps the playful irony, the light-handed humour, which was to Pater a deliberate shield against the roughness of the world, tended to obscure his deep seriousness of nature, his devotedly religious spirit. He sympathised, it is true, with all humanity with a largeness which is surprising in a man of such sensitive and secluded constitution. He had a determination, remarkable in a man of delicate organisation, to see the world as it really was, to admire what was vigorous and natural and vital in it. He had no wish to create for himself an unreal paradise, to suppose the world to be other than it appeared, or to drown the insistent cries that reached him in a web of blurred impression or uncertain sound. He admired what was joyful and brave and strong. Had he been of a more alert physical constitution he would have thrown himself, we may safely assert, into the pursuit of athletics ardently and eagerly. As he could not, he contented himself with admiring the youthful exuberance of activity, and, true to his nature, with disentangling as far as he could the fibre of beauty which ran for him through the universe. But in all this he was akin and not alien to the insouciant and pleasure-loving spirit of youth.

He was by nature an extremely reticent man; he never seemed to think that his ideas were likely to command attention or his personality to cause interest. He wrote very few letters and never kept a diary. His whole attitude to the world and its concerns was the attitude of a spectator, and even his closest and nearest relationships with others could not win him from his isolation; he could be kind, courteous, considerate, and sincere; but he could not be intimate; he always guarded his innermost heart.

He was very loath to express his own personal view of a matter, especially if it involved taking any credit to himself. But a friend remembers that he was once talking of the artistic perceptions of Ruskin, and said suddenly with a show of impatience, “I cannot believe that Ruskin saw more in the church of St. Mark than I do.”

His courteous deference, to both old and young alike, was very remarkable. He would agree gently with the crudest expressions of opinion, “No doubt! I had never thought of it in that light!” But he could occasionally fire up when some deeply felt opinion of his own was challenged. Mr. Ainslie remembers being in his company when some one spoke disparagingly of Flaubert. He came suddenly out of his shell, and spoke with great emotion and much wealth of illustration.

Though Pater was never unkind, he could give a pungent judgment on occasions. The conversation, in his presence, had once turned upon H. A. J. Munro, and a man was mentioned with whom Munro was intimate, and with whom he often associated, who was distinguished rather for a mundane interest in affairs and for a devotion to sociable and convivial enjoyment than for any interest in literature or scholarship. Surprise was expressed at this friendship. “I should not have thought they had anything in common,” said one of those present. “Do you think that is so?” said Pater. “I always felt that there was a good deal of the _mahogany-table_ element in Munro.” This is a just judgment which, though ironically expressed, exhibits a considerable penetration on the part of Pater, in the case of a man of whom he knew but little.

He was extraordinarily loyal to his friends. He spoke once with great gravity and seriousness of one whom he had known, whom he thought to be drifting into dangerous courses, and expressed a deep desire to help or warn him, or, at all events, to get a warning conveyed to him. His confidant tells me that he never saw him so deeply moved and distressed as on this occasion, as he tried to devise some way of bringing conviction home to the unhappy object of his anxiety.

His tendency indeed was always to mitigate harsh judgments, to appreciate the good points of those with whom he was brought into contact. He had indeed a great eye for little individualities and peculiarities, with a gentle enjoyment of the manifestation of foibles; but it was always an indulgent and a tender attitude. And it may be said that it is rare to find one so perceptive of the most delicate and subtle shades of temperament, who was yet so uniformly charitable and kind, so determined to see the best side of every one.

Pater kept himself severely aloof from the current thought of the day, but with characteristic reticence never adopted the position of an opponent. He took no interest in scientific movements or discoveries, and merely left such questions alone.

In politics he was what may be called an old-fashioned Liberal. His view of the scheme of Government, the movement of political forces and economical problems, was dim. He took no real interest in such matters, as lying outside of his circle. He rarely committed himself to any statements on political matters; but he had a dislike to Napoleon III., and once said with some animus, “I hope we shall soon arrive at a time when no one will be so vulgar as to want to go and live at the Tuileries.” His interest was all in detail and external values. “I am quite tired,” he said once, “of hearing people for ever talking of the causes which led to the French Revolution; I don’t want to know. I am all for details. I want to know how people lived, what they wore, what they looked like.”

He had no personal ambition, no desire for recognition. He never paid visits, and took no trouble to make the acquaintance of literary men, even at a time when his reputation would have secured him warm welcome and distinguished respect. He stayed at Oxford because he thought that the life there gave him the best opportunity of doing the quiet, thorough work which he felt himself most capable of performing. He had a deep sense of responsibility, though he did not willingly assume it, and felt bound to exercise his special faculties to the uttermost, and to give liberally of his sympathy.

It is clear that Pater changed very much as the years went on; after his silent and reserved boyhood and youth, he had a period of _épanouissement_, when the ideas that began to crowd thickly into his mind produced a certain want of balance, a paradoxical daring of speech, a certain recklessness of statement; this was no doubt enhanced by the discovery that he could hold his own in a brilliant society, that he had quick perceptions and conversational gifts; and at this period he tasted the pleasures of effective talk, the intellectual delight of the process which is best described by the old homely proverb of saying Bo! to geese. In these days he desired to be impressive rather than to be sympathetic; but as his character deepened and widened, through perception and insight, through friendship and misunderstanding alike, he reverted more to what was really the basis of his character, the desire for simple and affectionate companionship. He was condemned by temperament to a certain isolation; he was outside the world and not of it. A happy marriage might have brought him more into line with humanity; but his genius was for friendship rather than for love, and his circumstances and environment were favourable to celibacy; and thus he passed through life in a certain mystery, though the secret is told for those who can read it in his writings. Art demands certain sacrifices, and the price that an artist pays for the sorrowful great gift is apt to be a heavy one. Pater paid it to the full, and paid it ungrudgingly; he found, he followed his true life, through dark and lonely windings; he emerged into the free air and the sun, though he bore upon him the marks of the conflict; and his place is with the sons of art who have used faithfully and joyfully the gift committed to their keeping.

That the inner and deeper current of Pater’s thought was profoundly serious is only too plain from his books; such humour as is here not infrequently introduced is of a delicate kind, often almost mournfully disguised; the same kind of humour that one may sometimes discern in the glance of a sympathetic friend when some mirth-provoking incident occurs at a solemn ceremony at which it is essential to preserve a dignity of deportment. At such moments a look of silent and rapturous appreciation may pass between two kindred spirits; such, in its fineness and secrecy, is the humour of Pater’s writings, and presupposes a sympathetic understanding between writer and reader.

Dr. Bussell, writing of the apparent contrast between the solemnity of his writings and his demeanour to his closest friends, writes:—

“To a certain extent, but to a certain extent only, these (writings) may be taken as an index to his character, as unveiling the true man. But to those who knew him as he lived among us here, they seemed a sort of disguise. There was the same tenderness, the same tranquillising repose, about his conversation that we find in his writings; the same carefulness in trifles, and exactness of expression. But his written works betray little trace of that childlike simplicity, that naïve joyousness, that never-wearying pleasure in animals and their ways,—that grave yet half-amused seriousness, also childlike, in which he met the events of the daily routine.”

Those who did not know him personally have supposed him to be a man of a strained and affected solemnity. The exact opposite was the truth. Pater did not despise the day of small things. He loved easy talk and simple laughter. He had a relish for small jokes. He loved plays that made him laugh. Such performances as Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas were his delight, and a friend who accompanied him to _Ruddigore_ said that it was delightful to see the whole-hearted and childlike enjoyment to which he surrendered himself. Mr. Gosse went with him to Mr. Pinero’s _Magistrate_, and remembers him convulsed with overwhelming laughter. In his own home he used to discourse with intense gravity, mingled with great bursts of laughter, of the adventures of a set of entirely fictitious relatives. Again, he took a delighted pleasure in the ways and mannerisms of his acquaintances. Mr. Gosse remembers how admirably he used to imitate Mark Pattison’s speech and peevish intonation. This was best exemplified in the imaginary dialogue which Pater used to render, supposed to take place between the Rector of Lincoln and a burglar who had invaded his house: “I am a poor old man. Look at me, you can see that I am a very poor man. Go across to Fowler—he is rich, and all his plate is real. He is a very snug fellow, Fowler!” This was a really admirably dramatic performance, so dramatic that Pater appeared to be quite convinced of its truth.

Pater had an unceasing delight in watching the ways and habits of pet animals. His own domestic cats, indeed, were kept and lovingly tended, till from age and disease they had nearly lost all semblance to the feline form. He was deeply conscious of the charm of seeing these bright creatures so close at hand, with the extraordinary relation that may exist, such perfect confidence, such unrestrained affection, while yet there is no communication of thought, and so little comprehension on either side of what is really passing in the mind. He was strangely attracted by the mysterious tie, so close and, in a way, so intimate, and yet with so little mutual understanding, and accompanied by such isolation. He was particularly fond of cats, their dainty ways, their graceful attitudes; and aware too of the refined selfishness, so different from the eager desire to please of the dog; the cat, intent on its own business, using human beings to minister to its needs, making its own arrangements, giving or withholding its company, with no idea of obedience or subservience or dependence; but just living gracefully and indolently in the houses of men, because it suits its convenience to do so. All this, together with its dramatic mystery, its intent secretiveness, its whimsical mirth, its charming solemnity, had an unfailing pleasure for Pater. He was always strangely drawn too, with a mixture of curiosity and indignation, by the sight of those collections of incongruous animals known as Happy Families that are to be seen in gregarious resorts; he would linger about them, expressing his indignation, yet always ending by contributing liberally to their maintenance.

In conversation, especially in earlier days, Pater adopted a consistent and deliberate irony of speech which was such as often to baffle even his intimate friends. He delighted in paradox, and in a kind of whimsical perversity. He would dwell upon the unessential attributes of a scene, a personality, a book, when a serious judgment was desired. And this, combined as it was with a serious, grave, and almost gloomy manner, completed the mystification.

He was fond, as I have said, of insisting upon some altogether unimportant detail on these occasions; he used to pretend that he shut his eyes in crossing Switzerland, on his journeys to and from Italy, so as not to see the “horrid pots of blue paint,” as he called the Swiss lakes. He would profess himself unable to read the books of a person whose name or personal appearance distressed him. The celebrated story, which is widely current about him as to the examination in which he took a part, is characteristic of the same mood. He was supposed to have looked over a paper, but when the examiners met he seemed to have kept no record of his impressions; to assist his recollection the names of the candidates were read over, but he seemed to be unable to connect any ideas with any of them until the name Sanctuary appeared, at which he visibly brightened, and said that he was now sure he had looked over the papers because he remembered that he liked the name.

Probably the habit arose from the fact that he was of a shy and sensitive temperament, and that to give a real and serious opinion was a trial to him. He disliked the possibility of dissent or disapproval, and took refuge in this habit of irony, so as to baffle his hearers and erect a sort of fence between them and his own personality.

But partly too he was undoubtedly aware, in his earlier days, that the expectation of conversational _friandises_ amused and delighted his hearers. He was rather the spoilt child of the intellectual circle in which he lived, and it is held by some that he rather presumed on the indulgence of his friends in this respect.

Mr. Basil Champneys, for instance, recollects how he was dining in company with Pater at Professor Bywater’s, about the year 1875, with a small party. The conversation turned on George Eliot, and Pater announced that he did not think much of George Eliot as a writer. “It is impossible,” he said, “to value a writer all of whose characters are practically identical. What,” he said, “is Maggie Tulliver but Tito in petticoats?” Such a criticism is of course purely perverse, and contains no germ of critical seriousness.

The same tendency is reflected in the peevish monologue, attributed by tradition to Mark Pattison, and often delightedly repeated by Pater himself. The question of possible travelling-companions was being discussed, when the Rector broke out with: “I would not travel with Pater for anything! He would say the steamboat was not a steamboat, and that Calais was not Calais!”

The example that he set was somewhat contagious. Those affected by it became the most subjective of critics, and acquired the superficial conversational method, which consisted in speaking of serious things on social occasions as if they had no seriousness, and of diligently searching for the ridiculous aspect that they could be found to bear. There came a certain reaction at a later date against this style of conversation, until the flippant treatment of topics, however superficially amusing, came to be regarded with perhaps undue impatience. But the fact remains that Pater was in ordinary talk, through early years, _un vrai moqueur_, while the seriousness of his demeanour lent a certain piquancy to his paradoxical talk which had a distinct charm. In this respect, indeed, the caricature of Pater in the pages of the _New Republic_ gives an entirely wrong impression. In the _New Republic_ Mr. Rose is made to talk as though he were uttering his secret thoughts, _dicenda tacenda locutus_, with entire indifference to the tone of the audience that surrounded him. This is a hopeless misconception of Pater’s ordinary ways.

There are two or three anecdotes which survive which aptly illustrate the same tendency. I do not know to what extent these reminiscences are coloured by the legendary element, but they are contemporary stories which have survived, and are therefore worth repeating. He was asked, for instance, whether he did not find his College work a great burden to him. He replied with inimitable gravity, “Well, not so much as you might think. The fact is that most of our men are fairly well-to-do, and it is not necessary that they should learn very much. At some Colleges I am told that certain of the young men have a genuine love for learning; if that were so here, it would be quite too dreadful.” He sighed, and looked sadly at his auditor.

On another occasion it is said that, when advising a man what to read for Greats, Pater said: “I cannot advise you to read any special books; the great thing is to read authors _whole_; read Plato _whole_; read Kant _whole_; read Mill _whole_.”

Again, though the following is probably to be regarded as legendary, it is said that he once, in a lecture, announced that in certain aspects we might be justified in regarding religion as a beautiful disease. This remark was quoted by an undergraduate to his parent with the substitution of the word “loathsome” for “beautiful.” The parent wrote indignantly to Pater to ask if it was right that such opinions should be expressed by a tutor to undergraduates. Pater, according to his own account, replied that he did not think he could have used the word “loathsome.” He might, he said, have used the word “beautiful”—“a beautiful disease.” “The parent,” he added, “expressed himself entirely reassured and satisfied by the explanation.”[3]

[3] The origin of this story is no doubt to be found on page 217 of the 1889 edition of the _Appreciations_, in the suppressed essay on “Aesthetic Poetry.” “That monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses.”

He went to see a rather elderly game of hockey played by middle-aged performers, and, after a moment of silence, said softly to his companion: “Come away; I think we ought to go on; it seems hardly fair to look at them.”

But the habit of indulging in ironical or reckless paradox had its dangerous side. There was at Oxford in the days of Pater’s early residence a certain aesthetic movement, a species of renaissance, in which the creed of beauty was strongly insisted upon. In some members of the circle that was thus affected, this resulted in much extravagance of thought; and in some it had even worse results in loosening the principles of morality, and judging action by the canons of what was held to be beautiful. It is a difficult subject to treat discreetly, because the _epigoni_ of the school, in certain notorious instances, ended in complete moral and social shipwreck. With the extravagances and excesses of the school it is needless to say that Pater, a man of scrupulous conscience and a high standard of moral delicacy, had not the slightest sympathy; but his love of paradox, his recklessness of irony, unquestionably led him to say things which could be unhappily distorted and misapplied, and which, not in his own case, but in the case of those who heard and exaggerated them, were capable of being construed in a serious light, and the utterance of which may be said to have justified both anxiety and distress. Here, as elsewhere, the true Pater is to be seen in his writings, and not in his ironical _dicta_. And any careful student of his deliberate thoughts finds no difficulty in discerning the delicacy and the loftiness of his view. He refused, it is true, to take a conventional view of the principles of art; but though the essential purity of art can be distorted into a wild appetite for beautiful impressions and sensual experience, it can yet be safeguarded and kept in a high and austere region, in which the lower impulse is entirely inconsistent with the grave appreciation of beauty.

In the aesthetic movement, Pater concerned himself solely with the doctrine; but at the same time it is undeniably true that the leaders of a movement are always judged by the extravagances of their followers; and the anxiety and even suspicion with which Pater’s views were at one time regarded in Oxford, were due to the fact that those with whom he was in a certain sense in sympathy on the higher aesthetic grounds, applied the doctrine of beauty to a recklessness of practice which Pater not only condemned, but the contemplation of which both disgusted and appalled him. It is better to have no misconception on this point. It is as unfair to think of Pater as in sympathy with the decadent school, as it is to attribute to the original teachers of Predestination the immoral distortion of the doctrines which disgraced some of their fanatical sectaries. When the whole movement has, so to speak, shaken down; when we can look dispassionately at the part which the aesthetic school has played in the mental development of the age, we shall be able, while we condemn whole-heartedly the excesses of the advanced disciples, to discern the part that Pater and the other leaders of the movement played in setting the deliberate appreciation of beauty, the sedulous training of the perceptions in the discrimination of the subtle effects of impassioned art, in its right place among the forces which tend to the ennobling of human character and temperament.

Having thus drawn out, as far as possible, what Pater’s ethical creed was not, let us try to indicate the nature and movement of his religious life. He began, it is plain, by feeling the strong aesthetic attraction of the accessories of religion; probably he did not disentangle the elements of religious faith from the effect which great churches, solemn ceremonial, ecclesiastical music, and hieratic pomp had upon his mind. As Jowett is once, in early days, reported to have said to him somewhat irritably, at the close of a discussion, “Mr. Pater, you seem to think that religion is all idolatry!” But as soon as Pater plunged into the study of metaphysics, he found that philosophy began to act as a solvent upon his creed; he still had a bias towards the expression of religious truth; and his half-formed idea of becoming a Unitarian minister, which, as I have said, was suggested in all probability by the career of Coleridge, was the outcome of this mood.

After this impulse, if it was ever so much as an impulse, died away, he seems to have been content for some years to suspend his judgment. He even, both in public and in private, used expressions which indicated an attitude of definite hostility to the Christian position. He was immersed in artistic conceptions, and in practical work; but as he grew older the old associations began to reassert themselves; he found, like so many people of speculative temperament, who set out on a philosophical quest with an impatience of received traditions and conventional opinion, that there was far more truth in the accumulated treasures of human thought, simple and in many ways contradictory as they appeared, than he had originally believed. As he wrote once, in one of his reviews for the _Guardian_, “the religious, the Catholic, ideal, ... the only mode of poetry realisable by the poor.”

He discovered afresh the tranquillising influence of a direct faith on quiet people—of the type that he described in another review; speaking of sacristans as “simple people coming and going there, devout, or at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical life.” And thus the old quiet consecration of life by faith, not very confident perhaps, hardly more than a sacred hope of beautiful and tender possibilities, reasserted itself.

As Lady Dilke wrote of a talk with him in the later years:—

“Pater came and sate with me till dinner-time. We had been talking before that on the exclusive cultivation of the memory in modern teaching as tending to destroy the power of thought, by sacrificing the attitude of meditation to that of perpetual apprehension. When the others left we went on talking of the same matter, but on different lines. Thence we came to how it might be possible, under present conditions of belief, to bring people up not as beasts but as men by the endeavour to train feeling and impart sentiments as well as information. He looks for an accession of strength to the Roman Church, and thinks that if it would abandon its folly in political and social intrigue, and take up the attitude of a purely spiritual power, it would be, if not the best thing that could happen, at any rate better than the selfish vulgarity of the finite aims and ends which stand in the place of an ideal in most lives now. He has changed a great deal, as I should think for the better, and is a stronger man.”

Pater spoke, indeed, as I conceive, very plainly in one place—the review of _Robert Elsmere_—of what was the inner attitude of his mind:—

“_Robert Elsmere_ was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognise our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false, unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the world. The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of worthy priests. They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees, of all ages.”

And thus he came both to feel and to express a deep and sincere sympathy with the Christian point of view; _Marius_ reveals most subtly the closeness of this approximation; but it may be seen, in scattered hints and touches, through all his later writings. Speaking, for instance, of the death of Socrates he wrote that the “details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared.” A friend of Pater’s tells me that the present Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Gore, went to the Brasenose Church Society to read a paper on the Blessed Trinity, and was rather taken aback to find Pater in the chair. “However, he proved to be an admirable chairman, directing the discussion after the paper, and checking anything approaching irreverence.”

He wrote Mrs. Humphry Ward a very interesting letter on December 23, 1885, on receiving from her as a Christmas gift her newly published translation of _Amiel’s Journal_. After congratulating her on the admirable literary grace of the translation, he continued:—

“I find a store of general interest in _Amiel_, (take at random, _e.g._, the shrewd criticism of Quinet,) which must attract all those who care for literature; while for the moralist and the student of religion he presents the additional attraction of yet another thoroughly original and individual witness to experiences on the subject they care most for. For myself, I gather from your well-meditated introduction, that I shall think, on finishing the book, that there was still something _Amiel_ might have added to those elements of natural religion, (so to call it, for want of a better expression,) which he was able to accept, at times with full belief, and always with the sort of hope which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs, and the function in the world, of the historic church, form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities, which the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself; and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent we give to any assumption, in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the _natural_ questions of the human mind.”

In connection with this frame of mind we may quote an interesting passage which occurs in the _Greek Studies_ (“The Bacchanals of Euripides”). He is speaking of Euripides, at the end of a long life of varied emotion and experience; he says:—

“Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old) accustomed ideas, conformable to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man’s allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or ironical, but that he tends, in the sum of probabilities, to dwell on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side of things; and what is accustomed—what holds of familiar usage—comes to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects; and the well-known delineation of the vague country, in Homer or Hesiod, one’s best attainable mental outfit, for the journey thither.”

This is no doubt a true picture of the writer’s own inner mood, a forecast of the later years in which the excitement of the quest for new ideas, new experiences, dies down; and a man begins to rediscover for himself the humanity, the reality, of the old and constant stock of mortal tradition; the thoughts that have tortured, comforted, attracted, satisfied, the great company of mankind.

When he lived in London he was fond of attending St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Albans, Holborn, and other high Anglican Churches; and he was sometimes seen at the Carmelites’ Church in Kensington; but there is no sort of evidence that he had any thought of Anglican orders, or that he was tending towards Roman Catholicism. He found in religion a deep and tranquillising force, and recognised the religious instinct, the intuitions of faith, as a Divine influence even more direct and unquestionable than the artistic or the intellectual influence. And thus we may think of him as one who, though his intellectual subtlety prevented his aiming at any very precise definition of his creed, was yet deeply penetrated by the perfect beauty and holiness of the Christian ideal, and reposed in trembling faith on ‘the bosom of his Father and his God.’

Much that is beside the mark has been written and said about Pater’s precise habits of composition. The truth is that they were in no way unusual. The common tradition is that he wrote words and sentences upon cards, and then when he had accumulated a sufficient store, he dealt them out as though he were playing a game of patience, and made them into a species of mosaic. The real truth is much simpler. When he was studying a subject he took abundance of notes, but instead of making them in a note-book, he preferred slips of paper, for the greater convenience of sorting them, and arranged them in order so that they might illustrate the divisions of his subject.

Mr. Gosse, to whom was entrusted the task of deciphering the fragmentary manuscript of the “Pascal,” gives one or two interesting instances of these notes, most of which are of the nature of passing thoughts, captured for future reference. One runs:—

“Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., belfries, solemn night come in about the birds attracted by the Towers.”

And again:—

“? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, only _after_ the Fall?”

When he had arranged his notes he began to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the effect; the same device that Tennyson so often used.

The work of writing grew easier to him as time went on. “Ah! it is much easier now,” he said to Mr. Gosse, near the end of his life. “If I live long enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing.”

He was a regular rather than a hard worker. It was his habit for many years to devote two or three hours of the morning to writing, and he often wrote again for another hour in the afternoon. But he never worked late at night; writing was to him an absorbing and at the same time a fatiguing process, to be pursued temperately and quietly. Some writers work for a time as though possessed, fall into a profound exhaustion when a book is finished, and then lie fallow for a time. Such was never Pater’s way. His writing was his central concern; he loved it with an ever-growing love; it formed the staple employment of his days; but his friends say that there never was a man who seemed to be always so free from preoccupation, so ready to put his work aside, and enter into conversation of the most trivial kind; there were no furtive glances at the clock, none of the air of jealous if patient resignation, no hunted sense of the desire to escape from interruption.

Again, too much emphasis has been laid upon the conscious fatigue and exhaustion arising from his work. He was not, like Flaubert, the racked and tortured medium of his thought. He was a man of low physical vitality, and he would sometimes half-humorously lament the labour that his work cost him. But the toil and the delight were inextricably intermingled; such writing as Pater’s with its subtle distinctions, its fine metaphors, its delicate effects, its haunted richness, its remote images, its liquid cadences, could never have been produced except by one who tasted to the full the artistic pleasure of elaborate workmanship. And it is beyond all doubt that his work became to him in increasing measure the mainspring of his life, a spring of the purest joy.

One source of his concentrated strength was that he never wasted time in experimental researches; he knew his own mind; he knew exactly what interested him and the limitations of his taste; thus he confined his ideals to a restricted circle, and though perhaps losing somewhat in catholicity of thought, he gained astonishing depth and insight in certain specified directions. But he made no parade of omniscience. He used to say smilingly that it was such a relief to work hard at a subject and then forget all about it.

One of Pater’s happiest accomplishments was his power of bringing up in a few words a figure or a scene, beautiful in itself and charged moreover with a further and remote significance, revealing as by a sudden glimpse or hint some solemn thought enshrined within the outer form. Thus he said once that churches where the Sacrament was reserved gave one the sense of a house where a dead friend lies; and again in a subtle allegory he touched the difference between Roman Catholicism with all its rich fabric of association and tradition, and Puritanism with its naked insistence on bare rectitude and rigid conduct. Roman Catholicism, he said, was like a table draped in fair linen, covered with lights and flowers and vessels of crystal and silver; while Puritanism was like the same table, after it had been cleared, serviceable enough, but without charm or grace. The essential form present in both; but the one furnished with rich and dainty accessories, the other unadorned and plain.

It may be said generally that richness under a severe restraint is the principal characteristic of Pater’s style; but there are two or three special small characteristics, almost amounting to mannerisms, which may be noted in his writing. One is the natural result of his habit of composition; it is of overloading his sentences, of introducing long parentheses, of heaping fine detail together, which sometimes gives an impression of over-luxuriousness. Here is a typical sentence, out of one of the _Guardian Essays_, the review of Wordsworth:—

“An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.”

This sentence has every charm except the charm of perfect lucidity. But any one who enjoys the characteristic quality of Pater, will be able to give its due value to the slight blurring of outline on which the charm to a certain extent depends.

Again, he was fond of beginning a sentence with the emphatic phrase, and thus inverting the clause. Where another writer would say, “That tale of hours, the long chanted English service, develops patience,” Pater wrote: “It develops patience—that tale of hours, the long chanted English service.” And again: “Horace!—he was, had been always, the idol of their school.” And again: “Submissiveness!—It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart.” Such sentences, occurring as a rule at the opening of a paragraph, are of constant occurrence. He had a fondness for points of exclamation: “How wretched! how fine! how inconceivably great and difficult!—not for him!” and his frequent introduction of the word “say!” with its stop breaking the continuity of the clause where an ordinary writer would use “for instance,” is a favourite usage.

It is clear that he did not aim primarily at simplicity or lucidity. His style was deliberately adopted and practised, and he was careful to allow no influence whatever to interfere with it. He told Mr. Gosse that he had read scarcely a chapter of Stevenson, and not a line of Mr. Kipling.

“I feel, from what I hear about them,” he said, “that they are strong; they might lead me out of my path. I want to go on writing in my own way, good or bad. I should be afraid to read Kipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat down to write.”

His view was that slipshod impressionism, rough, sketchy emphasis, was the literary fault of the time which needed to be sternly resisted. Writing of a serious kind, he felt, ought to be a strenuous, almost a learned process. He wrote in one of the reviews he contributed to the _Guardian_:—

“Well, the good quality of an age, the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and confusion, may well be eclecticism.... A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned language.”

This thought had its effect upon his writing, even when he was dealing with the apprehension of the ordinary objects of sense and perception.

Great as was Pater’s appreciation of nature, and fine as was his perception of the quality and beauty of landscape, it is almost always through a medium of art that he beheld it. Nature is to him always a setting, a background, subordinated to the human interest. The thought that men had laboured, painfully or joyfully, over a building, or a picture, or a book, invested the result with a certain sacredness in his eyes. The nearer that outward things approached to humanity, the more they appealed to Pater. The home, the house, the room, its furniture and decoration, the garden, the pleasaunce, all these were nearer to his heart than nature in her wilder and sterner aspects, because the thought and hand of humanity had passed over them, writing its care and its dreams legibly on cornice and lintel, on panel and beam, on chest and press, on alley and bower, on border and fountain. When, as in “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” or in “Sebastian van Storck,” he describes the sunny vine-clad country, or the lonely clump on the long hill that seems to summon the vagrant foot thither, or the frozen lake with the fur-clad skaters moving to and fro, it is always with a sense of how such scenes might have been painted. It was always nature seen through the eye of the artist rather than in the mind of the poet. There is little sense of expanse or largeness about these natural touches; they are rather caught at salient points, in glimpses and vignettes, grouped and isolated. It may be observed how rarely he alludes to natural sounds; these visions seem to be seen in a reflective silence, recorded and represented by the mind that has stored itself full of minute pictorial impressions. Pater went to nature, not in the spirit of Wordsworth, to exult in the freedom, the width, the tenderness, the energy, the vastness of it all; but rather as a great quarry of impressions, through which he walked with a perceptive gaze, selecting and detaching striking and charming effects, which could afterwards be renewed and meditated over in the home-keeping mind. None of his direct nature-touches, beautiful as they are, are penetrated with quite the same zest and emotion as his descriptions of nature when represented by some master-hand. It was the penetration of nature by human personality that gave it its value for Pater, its significance; and thus it comes about that his descriptions of scenes always seem, so to speak, to have a frame about them. He did not, like a poet, desire to escape from man to nature; but rather to suffuse nature at every point with humanity, to judge of it, to feel its beauty, not as the direct expression of the mind of God, but as it affected and appealed to man.

It might have been imagined that so deliberate and precise a craftsman, with so definite a theory of his art, would perhaps have held on his way producing his careful masterpieces, content to put it on record that he had thought thus, and expressed it just so, content that the beautiful thing should be formed and fashioned, and made available for the use or delight of any that followed the same or a like path among the things of the soul. One could have supposed Pater indifferent to criticism and censure, deeming it enough not to be unfaithful to the heavenly vision. For to him, doubtless, the first and chiefest pleasure lay in the thrilling thought, that thought which sets the writer’s spirit all aglow, leaping into the mind, as it does, with an almost physical shock, and opening up a sudden vista of possibilities; as when a man, walking in a wood, comes suddenly across a ride, and sees the green space run to left and right, with its carpet of flowers, its leafy walls. And next to that first and sacred joy came the delight of the slow and careful conception, tracing the development, restricting the ramification, foreseeing the proportion. Then followed the later joy, the gradual embroidery of the austere outline, the laying of thread by thread, of colour by colour; and then the final pleasure of strict revision, of enriching the close texture, of strengthening the languid cadence, of refining the refined epithet, the eagerness to reach that impossible perfection that seemed to recede even as he drew near.

Yet even to a craftsman thus wholeheartedly intent upon his work, there is a satisfaction in publication which is like the framing of a picture. The book with its white margins, its delicate sprinkling of ornament, its headings and mottoes, all this is the symbol of completion, of an end attained. There is a further delight still in the possibility of becoming thus the companion of the imagined reader; to be held in unknown hands and scanned by gentle eyes; to appeal to kindred natures, kindly and generous persons; the thought of this to one like Pater, who had found so many in the world whom he could love, and to whom human relations had always so deep and sacred a significance, was full of a potent attraction. But one is perhaps surprised to learn that he was also deeply sensitive to adverse criticism; that he felt about the harsh and summary treatment of his books, especially when they were misrepresented or misunderstood, something of what the old Psalmist felt, when he prayed that his darling might be delivered from the power of the dog. There were times when he suffered acutely from the attacks of critics, as when the exquisite and elaborate Essay on “Style” was treated as incomprehensible and affected; when he declared with desolate conviction that his pleasure in writing was gone, and that he could never resume his work. Only those nearest to him knew of these dark moods of discouragement, because he was not one who took the world into his confidence; indeed, to those who were without, his gentle and equable manner seemed to bear witness to a tranquillity of mind, which indeed he sedulously practised, although he never attained the deep serenity of which he was in search.

It is a curious fact that Pater showed no precocious signs, in boyhood and youth, of a desire to write. Those in whose blood stirs the creative impulse, the literary energy, feel the thrill as a rule very early, and cover paper diligently from their first years. But Pater’s family cannot remember that he ever showed any particular tendency to write. He never wrote poetry in childhood, except a few humorous verses, long lost and forgotten; later on he made some verse-translations from Goethe, Alfred de Musset, and the Greek Anthology; and this abstention from the composition of verse is a remarkable fact in the case of one whose prose is so essentially poetical. It is common to differentiate the prose of poets, as in the case of Dryden, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and others, from the prose of those who have never attempted to write in verse; it is thought that it has a greater precision, a sonorous richness, a more vivid colouring. If Pater had ever practised the art of poetry, it would be easy to point to his prose as a supreme instance of these qualities, because, quite apart from its luxurious prodigality, both of epithet and image, it has a strong, rhythmical, almost metrical movement in places. But, as a matter of fact, his chief characteristics, as a prose-writer, came to him late. As a rule, the makers of gorgeous and exquisite prose have begun by erring on the side of diffuseness and ornament, and have chastened their style into due proportion and lucidity. But Pater’s earliest writings, which seem to have been essays for Societies, have none of the later charm; they tend to be austere, hard, and even dry. Neither did he arrive at his plentiful and magnificent vocabulary, as some writers have done, by the production of large masses of writing that never see the light, in which their hand has learned firmness of outline, and their teeming brain the power of summoning the supremely appropriate word from a suspended cloud of more or less suitable language. His method was far otherwise. At one time he applied himself daily for some months to translating a page of Sainte-Beuve or Flaubert, and this seems to have been his only exercise. His prose steadily grew in volume and depth; and the one serious fault of his writing, the tendency that his sentences have to become long and involved, did not diminish. What he did gain as years went on was a refined and surprising power over words, a power of condensing an elaborate effect into a single haunting sentence which suggests rather than reveals. His work was always the result of much patient and unseen labour; but though he revised carefully and jealously enough in many cases, his richness was not derived in reality so much from these stippled effects, as from the fulness of mind out of which he wrote. Any one who has ever gone over the same ground as Pater, and studied the same authorities, will be amazed to find how conscientiously and diligently the material has all been employed; not by elaborately amplifying detail, but by condensing an abundance of scattered points into a single illuminating hint, a poignant image, an apt illustration. He was entirely remote from those easy superficial writers who generalise from insufficient premises, and bridge the gaps in their knowledge by graceful fabrics of words. All Pater’s work was strongly focussed; he drew the wandering and scattered rays, as through a crystal lens, into a burning and convergent point of light. Not to travel far for instances, the essay on Leonardo is a perfect example of this. The writing is so delicate, so apparently fanciful, that it is only through a careful study of the available tradition that one comes to realise how minute is the knowledge that furnishes out these gemmed and luminous sentences. It is true that his knowledge is not pedantically applied, that he concerns himself little with minute and technical questions of art-criticism; but I conceive that Pater’s attempt was always to discern the inner beauty, the essence of the thing; to disentangle the personality, the humanity of the artist, rather than to classify or analyse the work. And so it comes about that his art-criticism is essentially a creative thing, that adds little to the historical aspect of the development of art, and falls indeed at times into positive error; the training, the severe observation, the cultivated instinct, is there, but it is relegated, so to speak, to an ante-room, while the spirit is led to apprehend something of the mysterious issues of art, initiated into the secret appreciation of beauty, and drawn to worship in the darkened innermost shrine. There is always something holy, even priestly, about Pater’s attitude to art. It insists upon the initial critical training, the necessity of ordered knowledge; but it leaves this far behind; it passes beyond the nice apprehension of eye, the cultivated sense of line and colour, the exact discrimination of style and medium, into a remote and poetical region. Such secrets cannot be explained or even analysed; they cannot be communicated to those that are without; they must be emotionally and mystically apprehended, by the soul rather than by the mind.

It was this secret vision, this inner enlightening, on which Pater had set his heart, and which he sought for urgently and diligently. He loved the symbol, not for itself alone, but for the majesty which it contained, the hidden light which it guarded. It is in this region alone that he seems to wear an absorbed and pontifical air, not with the false sacerdotal desire to enhance personal impressiveness and private dignity, through the ministry of divine powers and holy secrets, but with the unconscious emotion of one whose eyes behold great wonders enacting themselves upon the bodiless air, which the dull and the contemptuous may not discern.

It remains to attempt to indicate Pater’s position in later English literature, and his philosophy, or rather his point of view, by summarising what has already, it is to be hoped, been made clear by analysis.

In literature he practically struck out a new line. The tendency of the best prose-writers of the century had been, as a rule, to employ prose in a prosaic manner. Landor had aimed at a Greek austerity of style. Macaulay had brought to perfection a bright hard-balanced method of statement, like the blowing of sharp trumpets. This was indeed the prose that had recommended itself to the taste of the early Victorians; it was full of a certain sound and splendour; it rolled along in a kind of impassioned magnificence; but the object of it was to emphasise superficial points in an oratorical manner, to produce a glittering panorama rich in detail; it made no appeal to the heart or the spirit, awaking at best a kind of patriotic optimism, a serene self-glorification.

Carlyle had written from the precisely opposite point of view; he was overburdened with passionate metaphysics which he involved in a texture of rugged Euphuism, intensely mannerised. But he had no catholicity of grasp, and his picturesqueness had little subtlety or delicacy, because his intense admiration for certain qualities and types blinded him to finer shades of character. There was no restraint about his style, and thus his enthusiasm turned to rant, his statement of preferences degenerated into a species of frantic bombast.

With these Pater had nothing in common; the writers with whom he is more nearly connected are Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Newman, and Ruskin. He was akin to Charles Lamb in the delicacy of touch, the subtle flavour of language; and still more in virtue of his tender observation, his love of interior domestic life. He has a certain nearness to De Quincey in the impassioned autobiographical tendency, the fondness for retrospect, which Pater considered the characteristic of the poetical temperament. He is akin to Newman in respect of the restraint, the economy of effect, the perfect suavity of his work; but none of these probably exerted any very direct influence upon him. Ruskin perhaps alone of the later prose-writers had a permanent effect on the style of Pater. He learnt from Ruskin to realise intensely the suggestiveness of art, to pursue the subjective effect upon the mind of the recipient; but though the rich and glowing style of Ruskin enlarged the vocabulary of Pater, yet we can trace the time when he parted company with him, and turned aside in the direction of repression rather than volubility, of severity rather than prodigality.

It may be said, then, that Pater really struck out a new line in English prose, working on the principles enunciated by Flaubert in a widely different region. The essence of his attempt was to produce prose that had never before been contemplated in English, full of colour and melody, serious, exquisite, ornate. He devoted equal pains both to construction and ornamentation. Whether he is simple and stately, whether he is involved and intricate, he has the contrast always in view. His object was that every sentence should be weighted, charged with music, haunted with echoes; that it should charm and suggest, rather than convince or state. The danger of the perfection to which he attained is the danger of over-influence, seductive sweetness; the value is to suggest the unexplored possibilities of English as a vehicle for a kind of prose that is wholly and essentially poetical. The triumph of his art is to be metrical without metre, rhythmical without monotony. There will, of course, always be those whom this honeyed, laboured cadence will affect painfully with a sense of something stifling and over-perfumed; and, indeed, the merits of a work of art can never be established by explanation or defended by argument; but to such as can apprehend, feel, enjoy, there is the pleasure of perfected art, of language that obeys and enriches the thought, of calculated effect, of realisation, with a supreme felicity of the intention of the writer.

One does not praise his works as the perfection of style; there is a limpidity and lucidity of prose style—prose as used by Newman, by Matthew Arnold, by Ruskin, in chastened moods,—to which no style that depends upon elaborateness and artifice can attain; but it may fairly be claimed for Pater that he realised his own conception of perfection. The style is heavy with ornament, supple with artifice. It is not so much a picture as an illumination. For sunlight there is stiff burnished gold; it is full of gorgeous conceits, jewelled phrases; it has no ease or simplicity; it is all calculated, wrought up, stippled; but it must be considered from that point of view; it must be appraised rather than criticised, accepted rather than judged.

To feel the charm it is necessary to be, to some extent, in sympathy with the philosophy of Pater. We see in him a naturally sceptical spirit, desiring to plunge beneath established systems and complacent explanations; and this, in common with an intense sensibility to every hint and intimation of beauty, apprehended in a serious and sober spirit; not the spirit that desires to possess itself of the external elements, but to penetrate the essential charm. Yet it is not the patient and untroubled beauty of nature, of simple effects of sun and shade, of great mountains, of wide plains, but of a remote and symbolical beauty, seen by glimpses and in corners, of which he was in search—beauty with which is mixed a certain strangeness and mystery, that suggests an inner and a deeper principle behind, intermingled with a sadness, a melancholy, that is itself akin to beauty.

There is always an interfusion of casuistical and metaphysical thought with Pater’s apprehension of beauty; he seems to be ever desirous to draw near to the frankness, the unashamed happiness, of the Greek spirit, but to be for ever held back by a certain fence of scepticism, a malady of thought.

Yet the beauty of which he takes account is essentially of a religious kind; it draws the mind to the further issue, the inner spirit. All the charm of ritual and ceremonial in worship has for Pater an indefinable and constant attraction. He is for ever recurring to it, because it seems to him to interpret and express an emotion, a need of the human spirit, whose concern is to comprehend if it can what is the shadowy figure, the mysterious will, that moves behind the world of sight and sense.

We can trace the progress of thought in the case of Pater as clearly as it is possible to trace the thought of any recent writer; though reticent and even suavely ironical in talk, he was in his writings at once self-centred and _intime_. His own emotions, his own preoccupations, were absorbingly important to him; yet while he shrank from giving them facile utterance, he was irresistibly impelled to take the world into his confidence. He had none of the frank egotism of Wordsworth, none of the complacent belief in the interest of his revelations of himself; and yet there is no writer that speaks more persistently and self-consciously of his own point of view. He made little attempt to pass outside of it, and hardly disguised what he would fain have concealed. The instinct, indeed, for expression triumphs at every point over the instinct for reticence.

We see the silent, self-contained boyhood, the intellectual awakening, the absorption in metaphysics, and their abandonment, the eager pursuit of recondite beauty, that from the days of his maturity never left him; we see in the candour, the urbanity, the delicate and gentle outlook, the intellectual strenuousness, of his heroes a reflection of his own personal ideal. We see how he was led to trust personal intuitions rather than intellectual processes; to listen rather for the simpler, sweeter message which comes from life, from experience, from sympathy, than to obey the logical conclusions of reason, which indeed arrives so soon at the consciousness of its own limitations; we see that he determined that the function of reason was rather to keep judgment suspended; that it should be applied as a solvent alike to philosophical and religious systems; but that the spirit should not thus be bound; that reason should indeed erect the framework of the house, its walls and doorways—and that then its work was done; while the spirit should dwell within, drawing its strength from the tender observation of humanity, from humble service, from quiet companionship, while it should all the time keep its eyes open to any faintest message flashed from afar, whether it came through glance or word, through book or picture, through charm of form or colour, from tower or tree, from the clear freshness of the solitary dawn, or from the orange sunset dying softly over wide, glimmering fields.

* * * * *

“Behold, this dreamer cometh!” So, with an envious contempt, the petty-minded scheming brethren of the inspired child beloved of God greeted him, as he came in unsuspecting innocence to join them in the field. He was to learn, even in the tender days of boyhood, how heavy a burden that secret knowledge was to be, that inheritance of the inner and deeper sight which could pierce behind the veil of mortality. If he could have foreseen the weary way he was to travel to the calm and prosperous eminence of later years, would he not have hidden the visions which he revealed so guilelessly? Not even the certainty of the honour and comfort of the future would have made amends for the loneliness, the malignity, of the labyrinth which he was so gently and faithfully to thread. This power of inner sight, this perception of the essence of things, must always, it seems, bring its possessor a certain sadness, a certain isolation. The prosperous worldly spirits, that swim so vigorously on the surface of things, have always a suspicion, a jealousy, a contempt, for one who dives deeper and brings back tidings of the strange secrets that the depth holds. But if such clear-sighted spirits go tranquilly upon their way, and utter fearlessly the truth they discern, though the way be difficult and arduous, the honour comes at last, unsought, unprized. And it is well perhaps that the conquest is so hard, because if the victory came at once, with it would doubtless come the relish for the easy, the obvious triumph; but by the time that it arrives, the pure spirit, chastened and refined, has reached a region where the only pleasure that fame brings is the knowledge that the truth has somewhat prevailed. There is no taint of personal complacency, no luxurious yielding to lower satisfactions, nothing but the unstained delight that the mystery, discerned and interpreted, is bearing in other hearts its rich and reviving fruits.

Such is the life that I have attempted to depict. It is the life of one who, through a dreamful and unpraised boyhood, through a silent and undistinguished youth, gradually discerned a principle in things; learned to see, with an impassioned zest, the truth that, in art and life alike, the victory is with those who attain to a certain patient and appreciative attitude of soul; who learn through careful toil, through much sorting of accumulated thought and expression, to discriminate between what is facile, impressive, specious, and what is deep, permanent, sincere. No taste can of course be wholly catholic; it is swayed by instinct, prepossession, and preference. But the point is, in however limited a sphere, to be able to detect with unfailing certainty the true quality of things.

He of whom we speak achieved this art of subtle discrimination, a gift which is shared by dumb and learned connoisseurs; but above this rise a few, who can not only by a trained instinct recognise what is perfect, but who can express their methods and powers so that canons and standards can be formed. Then to but one or two in a generation is given a further gift: the creative, the poetical power to express in language of high and haunting beauty the deepest mysteries of art; who can not only praise in noble and inspiring terms the beautiful thing, the exquisite work, the flashing thought, but can disentangle the very essence of the secret, establish remote and subtle connections, and open, if only for one glorious instant, a door into the inner shrine, showing a vision of awful angels, bent on high service, interpreting the loud crying of mysterious voices, echoing the rising strain that fills the golden-roofed palace, and giving perhaps an awe-struck glimpse of the presence that sits enthroned there.

But not always on these august heights does the haunted spirit dwell. There is a spell unknown to those who live the eager life of affairs, who dwell in crowded cities, or who carry the busy, scheming mind abroad with them into lonelier places; the spell that broods over the wooded valley with its hazel-hidden stream, where the bird sings among the thickets; the spell that lies behind the dark tree-trunks of the grove that bar the smouldering sunset with shafts of shade; that trembles in the green twilight when the stars begin to glimmer, and the winds are hushed. This too, and its appeal to the heart of man, the tinge that it lends to his dreams, the passionate desire to record, to represent, to give permanence of form, to the hurrying moment—all this needs to be interpreted as well.

But here, to the true prophet of these mysteries, the thought that must be caught and touched and given shape, is not so much the mystery itself—for that is dark and not to be apprehended—but the thrill which such visions have communicated to the hearts of other pilgrims, who have fared eagerly and sadly through the world before us, and have passed into the darkness, just leaving, in written signs and pictured symbols, the traces of the passion, the desire, the yearning, that such things have brought them. Such a task as this—this piecing together of personality, this testing of recorded impressions, this imbuing of ancient, half-faded dreams with the sanguine vitality, the eager hope, of to-day, needs one who is not less a poet than a critic. The dreamer that comes thus must not be absorbed in his own fruitful visions, but must be able, by an energy of sympathy, a lucid purity of soul, to enter no less eagerly into the dim and far-reaching visions of other inspired spirits.

INDEX

A

Ainslie, Mr. Douglas, 21, 136, 185.

America, one of Olney Paters emigrate to, 1.

_Amiel’s Journal_ (trans. Mrs. H. Ward), 199–200.

Appleton, Dr. (editor of _Academy_), 21.

_Appreciations_, 12; 1st ed. (1889), 2nd ed. (1890), 33; 119, 122, 147— “Aesthetic Poetry” (1868), 32, 33; reappeared (1889 ed.), omitted (1890 ed.), 153. “Charles Lamb,” 62–4, 78. Coleridge, S. T., considered as a philosopher, 12–13. “Feuillet’s _La Morte_,” 122. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (1898), 78, 153. “Measure for Measure” (1874), 153, 154. “Romanticism” (1876), 64–6, reappeared as postscript to (1889), 153. “Shakespeare’s English Kings” (1889), 153, superficial analysis of, 155–6. “Sir Thomas Browne” (1886), 119–22. “Style” (1888), 147–53, 209.

_Apuleius, Golden Book of_, 92.

Arnold, Miss Mary (Mrs. Humphry Ward), 21.

_Art, History of Ancient_ (Winckelmann), 29.

_Athenaeum_, 118.

Azay-le-Rideau, 32.

B

Brasenose College, description of, 15–17.

—— ancient ceremonies preserved at, 85.

“Bruno, Giordano” (_Gaston de Latour_), 140, 153.

Bussell, Dr. F. W., devoted companion to Pater, 21; memorial sermon on, 24; 180–1, 183, 189.

Bywater, Prof. Ingram, 20, 192.

C

Caird, Dr. Edward, 20.

Canterbury, King’s School at, 2, 6, 134.

Capes, Mr. W. W., 20.

Carlyle, Thomas, 213.

Champneys, Mr. Basil, 21, 192.

_Child in the House, The._ See _Miscellaneous Studies_.

“Concert, The” (picture), 50.

Cowper, William, 1.

Creighton, Bishop, 21.

D

Daniel, Dr., 21.

—— Mrs., 21.

Dante (Prefatory Essay to Dr. C. L. Shadwell’s translation of), 159.

_Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, La_ (Du Bellay), 45.

_Dialogues_ (Jowett), 56.

_Dictionary of National Biography_, 19.

Dilke, Lady, 37, 198.

E

_Earthly Paradise, The_ (Morris), 35.

Education (English system compared with Spartan theory of), 167–8.

Eliot, George, 192.

_English Poets_ (Ward’s), 12.

F

_Fortnightly Review_, publication of essays in, 32–3; 67, 119, 140, 147, 153.

“France, Some Great Churches in,” 168–9.

G

Goethe, 11, 14, 29, 131.

Gore, Dr., 199.

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 21; letter to, 32; 54, 189, 190, 202, 205.

_Greek Studies_ (1895)— “Aegina, The Marbles of,” 76. “Athletic Prizemen, The Age of,” 77, 168. “Demeter and Persephone, The Myth of,” 71–2. “Dionysus” (1876), 67–70. “Euripides, The Bacchanals of,” 70–1, 200. “Greek Sculpture, Beginnings of,” 74–6. “Hippolytus Veiled” (1889), 73–4, 122, 153.

_Guardian_, 48, 57, 118, 119, 204, 206.

_Guenevere, Defence of_ (W. Morris), 33.

H

Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, 176.

Hursley, 4.

I

_Imaginary Portraits_, 73— “Court Painters, A Prince of” (1885), 122. Composition of, 124–5, 126. “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), 122, 123, 126–8, 131. “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” (1887), 122, 130–1, 207. “Sebastian van Storck” (1886), 122, 128–30, 131, 207.

Italy, 9–10, 32.

J

_Jason_ (William Morris), 35.

Johnson, Mr. Lionel, 21.

Jowett, Rev. Benjamin, 9; his opinion of Pater’s ability, 54–5, 56, 57, 196–7; _Life_ of, 54, 56.

K

Keble, John, 4.

_King’s Tragedy, The_ (Rossetti), 87.

Kipling, Rudyard, 205–6.

L

Lamb, Charles, 213.

_Latour, Gaston de_, 92, 140–7.

_Letters_ (Pascal), 173.

_Lettres à une Inconnue_ (Prosper Mérimée), 158.

M

_Macmillan’s Magazine_, 140, 153.

Mallock, Mr., 52.

_Marius the Epicurean_, 46, 82–3, 85–9; autobiographical impression of, 91–115; reception of, 118, 162, 199; quoted, 93–9, 101–2, 104, 107, 108, 112, 114.

May, Mrs. Walter, 2.

_Miscellaneous Studies_, 10— “Apollo in Picardy” (1893), 123, 132–4. “Art Notes in North Italy,” 159. _Child in the House, The_ (1898), 4, 5, 79–82, 89, 122. _Diaphaneitè_ (1864), 10–11. _Emerald Uthwart_ (1892), 4, 6, 123, 131, 134–9, 159. “Notre-Dame d’Amiens,” 168–9. “Pascal,” 169, 202. “Prosper Mérimée” (1890), 156–9. “Raphael,” 159–62. “Vézelay” (1894), 169.

N

_New Republic_ (Mallock), 52–4; 55; 193.

_New Review_, 159.

_Nineteenth Century_, 168.

O

Olney, 1.

Oxford, 8, 17–19, 23, 138.

P

Paget, Miss (Vernon Lee), 89–90.

_Pall Mall Gazette_, 118.

Pater, Dr. Richard Glode (father), 1; death of, 2.

—— Miss (sister), 180.

—— Mrs. (mother), 2; death of, 9.

—— Walter Horatio, forefathers, 1–2; father, 1; birth, 2; mother, 2, 9; brothers and sisters, 2; family removes to Enfield, 2; visits to Fish Hall, 2; goes to school at Canterbury, 2; religion, 2, 4, 13; religious doubts, 173–4, life, 196–201; love of symbolism, 3, 36, 85, 196; reticence, 3, 185; instinct for expression triumphs over instinct for reticence, 217; desires to take Holy Orders, 3; intellectual awakening, 3; meets Keble, 4; sensitive apprehension of beauty, 4, 6, 12, 14, 215–6; seriousness, 164; Ruskin’s influence, 7; enters Queen’s College, Oxford, 8; course of study, 8–9; takes second-class in Final Classical Schools, 9; vacations spent in Germany, 9; tours in Italy, 9, 32; elected to Fellowship at Brasenose, 9; goes into residence, 9; friends, 9–10, 20–1, 123, their appreciation of, 180–1; his loyalty to, 186, 192; early work destroyed, 10; member of ‘Old Mortality’ Society, 10; ideal of intellectual and moral sincerity, 10–11; interest in philosophy, 11, 14; Influence of Goethe, 11, 14; first published writing, 12; beginning of work, 13; description of college rooms, 17–9; simplicity of tastes, 18, 19, 117, 179; habits, 19–20; as a friend, 19–22, 26; dislike of responsibility, 23; deep sense of, 187; as lecturer, 20, 84; as Tutor and Dean, 20, 23, 25, 59, 84; takes house in Norham Gardens, 21; attitude towards young men, 24–6; compared to Telemachus, 26; self-revelation in writings, 27, 170; essays published in _Fortnightly Review_, 32; first book produced, 32; criticism of Morris’s “Defence of Guenevere,” 33–5; consistency and individuality, 36; revolt against synthetic school of art-criticism, 37; perception of music, 44; definition of success, 47; art-criticism, 48–9; a great critic, 158; writes for _Guardian_, 48; criticism of da Vinci, 49; of Botticelli, 50; style parodied, 52–4; misunderstanding with Jowett, 54–5; his view of Jowett, 55–8; reputation as a talker, 59, 188, 193; lectures on _Greek Studies_, 67, publication of, 67–78; work becomes creative rather than critical, 78; appearance of “The Child in the House,” 79; absorbed in _Marius_, 82; resigns tutorship, 83; physical appearance, 85, 178, 180; method of criticism, 87–8, of working, 89, 123–4; _Marius_ published, 89, letters to Miss Paget concerning, 89; removes to London, 117; resides at Brasenose during term, 117; appreciation of France, 117–18; most fruitful years, 118; contributes to current journals, 118–19; essay on Sir T. Browne, 119–22; at work on _Imaginary Portraits_, 122, intends to bring out new volume of, 123; fantastic writing, 126–8, lack of restraint in style of “Denys l’Auxerrois,” 128; melancholy introspectiveness, 138–9; engaged on _Gaston de Latour_, 140; composition of essay on “Style,” 147; summary of artistic creed, 151; ethical base of temperament, 153, view of end of art, 153, of value of the play, 154; skill in dealing with Shakespeare’s works, 154–5; at work on _Plato and Platonism_, 156, places this work at the head of his own writings, 162, aim in, 163; lectures on Mérimée, 159; writes introduction to _Dante_, 159; not a philosopher, 163–5, epigram on, 164; development contrasted with Henry Sidgwick’s, 165; last utterance, 169; deep significance of essay on “Pascal,” 169–72, admiration for, 173; summary of _Pensées_, 173; settles at St. Giles’, Oxford, 174; later days, 174–5; receives Hon. Degree of LL.D., Glasgow, 175; visits Northern cathedrals, 175; first serious illness, 175; recovery, subsequent relapse, death, 176; buried at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, 176; portraits of, 178; physical strength varies with inner mood, 179; sensibility, 179; dress, 179–80; shyness, 180; dislike to opposition, 181; lack of appreciation at Oxford, 181–2, personal characteristics at, 183–4; attitude towards the world, 185; uniform kindness, 186; aloofness from current thought, 186; political views, 187; reason for residence at Oxford, 187; sacrifice to art, 188; quality of humour, 188–91; attracted by cats, 190–1; as an examiner, 191–2; anecdotes about, 193–4; irony, 195; views on principles of art, 195–6; admiration for _Amiel’s Journal_, 199; habits of composition, 201–6; significant writing, 204; principal characteristics of style, 204, 215; typical sentence, 204–5; did not read Stevenson or Kipling, 205–6; always regards nature as a background, 206–7; sensitiveness to adverse criticism, 209; no precocious desire to write, 209–10; abstains from verse composition, 210; late development of style, 210–1; attitude towards art, 212; position in later English literature, 212–15; writing contrasted with Carlyle’s, 213; as a writer akin to Charles Lamb, 213; a dreamer, 217–20.

Pater’s friends, 20, 21.

Pater, William Thompson (brother), 2.

Pattison, Mark (Rector of Lincoln), 21, 37, 190, 192.

_Pensées_ (Pascal), 173.

“Philosophers, The Three” (“The Chaldean Sages”), (picture), 50.

Plato, 165, 167.

_Plato and Platonism_, 20, 54, 58, Jowett’s admiration of, 58; began to appear (1892), 156; 159; eventually published (1893), 162; 163–8.

Poe, E. A., criticism of, 23.

_Purgatory_ (C. L. Shadwell’s trans. of), 159.

Q

Queen’s College (Oxford), description of, 8.

R

_Renaissance, Studies in the History of the_ (with “Preface” and “Conclusion”), 1st ed. (1873), 2nd and 3rd (1877), 32–3; 35, 36— “Conclusion,” 45, reason for exclusion from 2nd ed. of _Studies_, etc., 46, 47–8; principle of selection explained, 37; Lady Dilke’s criticism of, 37–8; 49–51, 52, 59, 162. “Aucassin and Nicolette” (“Two Early French Stories”) (1873), 32–3, 38. “Joachim du Bellay,” 33, 44–5. “_Leonardo da Vinci, Notes on_” (1869), 32, 41, 42–3, 49, 177. “Luca della Robbia,” 33, 39. “Michelangelo, Poetry of,” 32, 39–40. “Pico della Mirandola” (1871), 32, 38–9. “Sandro Botticelli, A Fragment on,” 32, 39. “School of Giorgione, The” (1877), 43–4, 50–1, 66. “Winckelmann” (1866), 27–31, 45.

_Robert Elsmere_ (Mrs. H. Ward), 57, review on, 119, 198–9.

“Rossetti, Dante Gabriel” (Ward’s _English Poets_), essay on, 86–7.

Ruskin, John, 7, 51, 163, 185, 214–15.

S

“Shadows of Events” (_Gaston de Latour_), 140.

Shadwell, 2.

Shadwell, Dr. Charles Lancelot (Pater’s lifelong friend), 9, 10 _n._; as literary executor, 21.

“Solomon, The Judgment of” (picture), 51.

Stevenson, R. L., 205–6.

“Stormy Landscape, The” (“Adrastus and Hypsipyle”) (picture), 50, 51.

“Style,” see _Appreciations_.

Swinburne, Mr. A., 21.

Symons, Mr. Arthur, 21, 123.

T

_Tailor, The_ (Moroni’s), 123.

Telemachus, 26.

U

_Uthwart, Emerald_, see _Miscellaneous Studies_.

V

Verrocchio, 49.

W

Ward, Mr. Humphry, 18, anecdote touching Pater’s lectures, 20; Fellow of Brasenose, 21; description of Pater, 22; as tutor, 25; spends summer vacation with, 26; on Pater as a Fellow, 84, 199.

Warren, Mr. T. H., 21, 159, 174–5.

Watteau, Anthony, 124–5; Pater’s most ambitious creation, 125, 131.

_Westminster Review_, first published writings in, 12.

_Winckelmann, Life of_ (Otto Jahn), 14.

“Winckelmann,” Pater’s study on, see _Renaissance_.

“Wordsworth,” Study of, 60–2; review of, 119.