No More Learning

The present is never our end; the past and
the present are our means, the future alone is our end. Thus
we never live, but hope to live; and while we always lay our-
selves out to be happy, it is inevitable that we can never be so.
OUR nature exists by motion; perfect rest is death.
GREAT men and little have the same accidents, the same tem-
pers, the same passions; but one is on the felloe of the wheel,
the other near the axle, and so less agitated by the same revolu-
tions.
MAN is full of wants, and cares only for those who can sat-
isfy them all. "Such a one is a good mathematician," it is said.
But I have nothing to do with mathematics: he would take me
for a proposition. This other is a good soldier. " He would
treat me as a besieged city. I need then an honorable man who
can lend himself generally to all my needs.
I FEEL that I might not have been, for the "I" consists in my
thought; therefore I, who think, had not been had my mother
been killed before I had life. So I am not a necessary being.
Neither am I eternal nor infinite; but I see plainly there is in
nature a necessary being, eternal and infinite.
WE NEVER teach men to be gentlemen, but we teach them
everything else; and they never pique themselves so much on all
the rest as on knowing how to be gentlemen. They pique them-
selves only on knowing the one thing they have not learnt.


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11156
PASCAL
I PUT it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said
of the other, there would not be four friends in the world. This
is evident from the quarrels which arise from indiscreet reports
made from time to time.
WERE we to dream the same thing every night, this would
affect us as much as the objects we see every day; and were an
artisan sure to dream every night, for twelve hours at a stretch,
that he was a king, I think he would be almost as happy as a
king who should dream every night for twelve hours at a stretch
that he was an artisan.
Should we dream every night that we were pursued by ene-
mies, and harassed by these painful phantoms, or that we were
passing all our days in various occupations, as in traveling, we
should suffer almost as much as if the dream were real, and
should fear to sleep, as now we fear to wake when we expect in
truth to enter on such misfortunes. And in fact, it would bring
about nearly the same troubles as the reality.
But since dreams are all different, and each single dream is
diversified, what we see in them affects us much less than what
we see when awake, because that is continuous; not indeed so
continuous and level as never to change, but the change is less
abrupt, except occasionally, as when we travel, and then we
say, "I think I am dreaming," for life is but a little less incon-
stant dream.
-
WHEN it is said that heat is only the motion of certain mole-
cules, and light the conatus recedendi which we feel, we are sur-
prised. And shall we think that pleasure is but the buoyancy of
our spirits? we have conceived so different an idea of it, and
these sensations seem so removed from those others which we
say are the same as those with which we compare them. The
feeling of fire, the warmth which affects us in a manner wholly
different from touch, the reception of sound and light,- all this
seems to us mysterious, and yet it is as material as the blow of
a stone. It is true that the minute spirits which enter into the
pores touch different nerves, yet nerves are always touched.
I


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11157
WALTER PATER
(1839-1894)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
HE functions of criticism are of necessity didactic, not creat-
ive; analytical, not synthetic. Yet from time to time critics
reveal themselves who vivify their presumably crystallized
work with profoundly imaginative thought. Walter Pater is one of
these inspirers of criticism. He holds a unique position among Eng-
lish essayists of the nineteenth century by reason of his refinement
of vision; of his power of expressing what
he saw in language of exquisite rectitude;
of the suggestive philosophy which under-
lies his criticisms, whether they be of Greek
art, or of English poets, or of the Italian
Renaissance. He is an artist-critic in the
sense that he looks upon life with the dis-
crimination of the poet, not of the scientist.
He is a creator in the sense that he gives
to tradition the freshness of immediate
revelation. His essays on Botticelli, on
Leonardo, on 'Measure for Measure,' throw
sudden, vivid light on apparently smooth
surfaces of long-accepted fact, revealing
delicate and intricate beauties.

WALTER PATER
Pater's philosophy of the beautiful in art and life is intrinsically
a compiled philosophy, but it becomes original in its application.
The old Spartan ideal of temperance in every affair of life becomes
for him the governing principle in the manifestations of art. He
emphasizes again and again the value of the asceticism inherent in
all great art products, a Greek asceticism which is but another word
for harmony and proportion. To him the life of the artist resolves
itself into a Great Refusal: whether it is that of the patient Raphael,
steadfastly purposing that he will not offend; or of Michelangelo,
subduing his passion to the requirements of the passionless sonnet;
or of the Greek athlete, with his superb conception of physical econ-
omy; or whether it is the asceticism of the stylist who rejects all
words, however tempting, which will not render him exquisite service.


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11158
WALTER PATER
"Self-restraint, a skillful economy of means, ascêsis, that too has a
beauty of its own. "
This self-conscious modern application of an essentially Greek
ideal, inborn in Pater, was further developed by his educational
influences. Walter Horatio Pater was born August 4th, 1839, of a
family originally from Holland, but long resident in England. In
1858 he entered Queen's College, Oxford. At this time England's
period of romanticism had already found brilliant expression in the
paintings and poems of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Modern
mysticism had attained its apotheosis in 'The Blessed Damozel. '
It was a mysticism clearly intelligible to the sensuous soul of Pater,
who, though dominated by the Greek ideal, retained always his love
of flesh, half revealing, half concealing the elusive spirit. His essays
on Sandro Botticelli, on Luca della Robbia, on 'Aucassin and Nico-
lette,' witness to this love of the mediæval incapacity for distin-
guishing soul from body; the Dantesque belief that they are one,
and must fare forth together even into the shadowy ways of eternity.
But Pater by the law of his development passed from under the
influence of Ruskin and Rossetti into the influence of Winckelmann
and Goethe. Goethe's problem "Can the blitheness and univer-
sality of the antique ideal be communicated to artistic productions
which shall contain the fullness of the experience of the modern
world? " became Pater's problem, which he, essentially a modern,
found difficult of solution. "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 experi-
ence, the problem of unity within ourselves, in blitheness and repose,
is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of
antique life. " This passage from his essay on Winckelmann is the
keynote of Pater's world-weariness, as it is of all who strive to
build up Greek serenity on modern experiences. Goethe succeeded
in uniting the Romantic with the Hellenic spirit by the fusing power
of his genius. Pater, being a critic, not a creator, could not always
reconcile the conditions of nineteenth-century life with the temper of
Greece.
His works exhibit a hunger for perfection which was the fruit
of a passionate admiration of Greek form, and of the spirit which it
embodied, the rational, chastened, debonair spirit of the daylight.
Because the maladies of the soul were not unknown to him, this
critic and lover of the great past placed an almost exaggerated
value upon that unperplexed serenity which perished with young
Athens. Heiterkeit and Allgemeinheit (Blitheness and Universality)!
are they possible to the complex modern, troubled about many
things? At least he can attain to them approximately through his


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WALTER PATER
11159
productions, if he be an artist. So Walter Pater recovers the Greek
spirit in scrupulous, restrained workmanship, in devotion to form for
its own sake. In his Greek studies, in his Plato and Platonism, in
his essay on Winckelmann,-throughout his writings, indeed,— this
practice toward perfection receives emphasis. It is not that of the
Christian art "always struggling to express thoughts beyond itself";
but it is a self-controlled pagan practice, satisfied with the tangible
goal of an art which suggests nothing beyond its own victorious
fairness.
This devotion to the poise of Greek art and life, to the significant
indifference which precludes blind enthusiasm and therefore inade-
quate workmanship, is blended in Pater with a love of those delicate
transitional periods of growth and experience in the lives of nations
and of men. The Studies of the Renaissance' are chiefly concerned
with the revelations of its dawn. The Imaginary Portraits' are of
youths who have not yet surrendered to custom their freshness, their
bland originality. Pater had the Greek love of youth, and of its
characteristics, so precious because so fleeting. These characteris-
tics agree best with his philosophy. Youth loves experience; and to
Pater, not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Youth is not habit-bound, and "our failure is to form habits; for
after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world. " So he draws
Marius, whose young years accumulate experiences but pass no
judgments, and the Child in the House, and Emerald Uthwart dead
before his life had crystallized, and Gaston de Latour in the transi-
tional environment of the Renaissance, and Hyacinth slain in the
freshness of his beauty, and Sebastian van Storck escaping from life
with passionate haste that he may find refuge in the eternal. These
youths are on a mental pilgrimage, whose goal they never reach.
The most famous of them, Marius the Epicurean, seems the embodi-
ment of Pater's peculiar philosophy, his love of training, of asceticism
in the Greek sense; his appreciation of the value of the transitional.
The spiritual journey of Marius is indicated through wonderful chap-
ter after chapter of a novel without a plot. This young Roman lives
his chastened, thoughtful, expectant life against the background of
the Empire of Marcus Aurelius; enjoying its vivid, varicolored scen-
ery in the detached spirit of the artist; turning always with a sense
of relief from the garish show to the gray realms of philosophic
thought. The Emperor himself is the second hero of the book,
portrayed effectively as the philosopher king who might have ruled
Plato's Republic. Like Marius, he too is a mental wayfarer, who
refuses the comforts of the wayside Inn for the sake of the intan-
gible Goal. Marius dies young, with the vision of the City of God
still far in the bleak distance; yet with the hope of a mind naturally


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11160
WALTER PATER
Christian, that on his love for others his soul may assuredly rest and
depend.
The pathos of mortality seems to Pater to embody itself in this
craving of Marius, and of his kin in every age, for the personal and
the definite: in their refusal to accept, despite this craving, the an-
thropomorphic gods of the multitude, lest they should miss a rarer
divinity. "We too desire," said Lucian, the friend of Marius, "not a
fair one, but the fairest of all; unless we find him we shall think that
we have failed. "
To Pater, viewing this life and its phenomena in the Heraclitean
spirit, yet always with the half-suppressed longing for the Fixed, the
Absolute, orthodoxy is but a retardation of progress; conviction and
certitude are alike numbing to the soul of man. He extracts most
from life who passes through it with a kind of divine indifference,
handling all things as though they were not; yet absorbing the fine
essence of each experience because it is transitory. "Not to discrim-
inate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and
in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their
ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. "
Of Pater's style much has been said in praise and detraction. It
expresses his hunger for perfection in its extreme polish, its elabo-
rate form, its verbal nicety. But it is never spontaneous, and its art
is sometimes artifice. Its merits are perhaps too evident to make of
it a great style. Yet it will always witness to the value of patience
and of conscientiousness in the handling of words: furthermore, it is
an effective key to the otherwise shadowy personality of Pater; to
the complex nature, tinged with morbidness, in which end-of-the-cen-
tury passions broke in upon classic, perhaps pseudo-classic calm.
Walter Pater died July 30th, 1894, at Oxford; where, as a Fellow
of Brasenose College, he had spent the greater portion of his unevent-
ful life. His influence may not be far-reaching in the future; but as
he himself said of Rossetti, his works will always appeal with power
to a special and limited audience.
Area Marine Sholl


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WALTER PATER
11161
-
WHITE-NIGHTS
From Marius, the Epicurean'
T
AN instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the
childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Noth-
ing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired
place, surely nothing could happen there without its full accom-
paniment of thought or revery. White-nights! -so you might
interpret its old Latin name. "The red rose came first," says
a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called
white things" as being "ever an after-thought, the doubles, or
seconds, of real things, and themselves but half real or material:
the white queen.
the white witch-the white mass, which, as
the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by
horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the
priesthood, with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal. " So
white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy,
should be nights not passed in quite blank forgetfulness, but
those which we pass in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by
sleep. Certainly the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful
name in this, that you might very well conceive, in the face
of it, that dreaming, even in the daytime, might come to much
there.
―
-
The young Marius represented an ancient family, whose estate
had come down to him much curtailed through the extrava-
gance of a certain Marcellus two generations before, a favorite
in his day of the fashionable world at Rome, where he had at
least spent his substance with a correctness of taste which Marius
might seem to have inherited from him; as he was believed also
to resemble him in a singularly pleasant smile, consistent how-
ever, in the younger face, with some degree of sombre expression
when the mind within was but slightly moved.
As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and
nearer to the dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a
trace of workday negligence or homeliness, not without its pict-
uresque charm for some,- for the young master himself among
them. The more observant passer-by would note, curious as to
the inmates, a certain amount of dainty care amid that neglect,
as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance to disturb old
associations. It was significant of the national character, that a
sort of elegant gentleman-farming, as we say, was much affected


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11162
WALTER PATER
by some of the most cultivated Romans. But it was something
more than an elegant diversion, something more of a serious
business, with the household of Marius; and his actual interest in
the cultivation of the earth and the care of flocks had brought
him, at least, intimately near to those elementary conditions of
life, a reverence for which the great Roman poet, as he has
shown by his own half-mystic preoccupation with them, held
to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive
morals. But then farm life in Italy, including the culture of the
vine and the olive, has a peculiar grace of its own, and might
well contribute to the production of an ideal dignity of character,
like that of nature itself in this gifted region. Vulgarity seemed
impossible. The place, though impoverished, was still deservedly
dear, full of venerable memories, and with a living sweetness of
its own for to-day.
It had been then a part of the struggling family pride of the
lad's father to hold by those ceremonial traditions, to which the
example of the head of the State, old Antoninus Pius,—an ex-
ample to be still further enforced by his successor,—had given a
fresh though perhaps somewhat artificial popularity. It was con-
sistent with many another homely and old-fashioned trait in him,
not to undervalue the charm of exclusiveness and immemorial
authority, which membership in a local priestly college, hereditary
in his house, conferred upon him. To set a real value on those
things was but one element in that pious concern for his home
and all that belonged to it, which, as Marius afterwards discov-
ered, had been a strong motive with his father. The ancient
hymn-Jana Novella! -was still sung by his people, as the
new moon grew bright in the west; and even their wild custom
of leaping through heaps of blazing straw on a certain night
in summer was not discouraged. Even the privilege of augury,
according to one tradition, had at one time belonged to his race;
and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an impressible boy
might have an inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of the mean-
ing and consequences of all that,-what was implied in it becom-
ing explicit for him,-you conceive aright the mind of Marius,
in whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted before.
every undertaking of moment.
The devotion of the father, then, had handed on loyally- and
that is all many not unimportant persons ever find to do- a cer-
tain tradition of life, which came to mean much for the young


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WALTER PATER
11163
Marius. It was with a feeling almost exclusively of awe that he
thought of his dead father; though at times, indeed, with a not
unpleasant sense of liberty, as he could but confess to him-
self, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and continual
a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and
Roman law gave to the parent over his son. On the part of his
mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's memory,
there was a sustained freshness of regret; together with the recog-
nition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice, to be cred-
ited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy
enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long ser-
vice to the departed soul; its many annual observances centring
about the funeral urn-a tiny, delicately carved marble house,
still white and fresh-in the family chapel, wreathed always with
the richest flowers from the garden: the dead, in those country
places, being allowed a somewhat closer neighborhood to the old
homes they were supposed still to protect, than is usual with.
us, or was usual in Rome itself,- a closeness which, so diverse
are the ways of human sentiment, the living welcomed, and in
which the more wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge
themselves. All that, Marius followed with a devout interest,
sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow. After the
deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impi-
ous so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of
their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred
presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe
and archaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him
a sort of devout circumspection, lest he should fall short at any
point of the demand upon him of anything in which deity was
concerned: he must satisfy, with a kind of sacred equity, he must
be very cautious not to be wanting to, the claims of others, in
their joys and calamities, the happiness which deity sanctioned,
or the blows in which it made itself felt. And from habit, this
feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and things,
towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side,
came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him
serious and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in
after years much engrossed him, when he had learned to think of
all religions as indifferent; serious, among many fopperies, and
through many languid days: and made him anticipate all his life
long, as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself,
-
―


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11164
WALTER PATER
some great occasion of self-devotion like that which really came,
which should consecrate his life, and it might be the memory of
it among others; as the early Christian looked forward to martyr-
dom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon it.
The traveler, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he
got his first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way
to read the face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying
well away from the white road, at the point where it began to
decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building
of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw
beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a
once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of
the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along
its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble
plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds
had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in
garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the act-
ual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order
reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to have well
understood the decorative value of the floor-the real economy
there was, in the production of rich interior effect, of a some-
what lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on. The
pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness; but
though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like
a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in
old age.
Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in
its little cedar chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful
but elegant Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow
waxen features to Marius, just then so full of animation and
country color. A chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form,
which he had added to the mansion, still contained his collection
of works of art; above all, the head of Medusa, for which the
villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old Greek towns
on the coast had flung away or lost the thing, as it seemed,
in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands of
which it had been drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine
golden lamina still clinging here and there to the bronze. It
was Marcellus also who had contrived the prospect tower of
two stories, with the white pigeon-house above it, so character-
istic of the place. The little glazed windows in the uppermost
chamber framed each its dainty landscape: the pallid crags of


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WALTER PATER
11165
Carrara, like wildly twisted snowdrifts above the purple heath;
the distant harbor with its freight of white marble going to
sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark head-
land, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on
summer nights the air there had always a motion in it, and
drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of
the house.
Something pensive, spell-bound,- and as but half real, some-
thing cloistral or monastic, as we should say,-united to that
exquisite order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were,
(sacellum) the peculiar sanctuary of his mother, who still in
real widowhood provided the deceased Marius the elder with that
secondary sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our
intensely realized memory of them; the "subjective immortality,"
as some now call it, for which many a Roman epitaph cries out
plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still alive in the land.
of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations regarding
them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary
existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least, beside
the living, the desire for which is actually, in various forms, so
great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even
thus early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to
lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort
of natural want. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set
among the many folds of the veil and stole of the Roman
widow, busy upon her needle-work, or with music sometimes,
defined themselves for him as the typical expression of maternity.
Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for
her musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such
things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying the fresh-
ness of his country-grown habits,- the sense of a certain deli-
cate blandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the
"chapel of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise,
in winter or stormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt,
hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter;
of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its generous heat,
keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating
hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his
Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in
the winters especially, when the sufferings of the animal world
come so palpably before even the least observant. It fixed in
――――
――――――――


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WALTER PATER
him a sympathy for all creatures; for the almost human sick-
nesses and troubles of the flocks, for instance. It was a feeling
which had in it something of religious veneration for life, as
such,- for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to
create in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of
his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes
for the hungry wild birds on the salt-marsh. A white bird, she
told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must
carry in his bosom across a crowded public place. - his own soul
was like that! Would it reach the hands of his good genius
on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother
became to him the very type of maternity in things,-its unfail-
ing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type
of all love, so that beautiful dwelling-place gave singular reality.
and concreteness to a peculiar ideal of home, which through all
the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit,
to be ever seeking to regain.
-
And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, en-
hanced still further that sentiment of home, as a place of tried
security. His religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with
the really light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep under-
current of gloom, its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively
confined to the walls of Etrurian tombs. The function of the
conscience, not always as the prompter of a gratitude for benefits
received, but oftenest as his accuser before those angry heavenly
masters, had a large place in it; and the sense of some unex-
plored evil ever dogging his footsteps made him oddly suspi-
cious of particular places and persons.
Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole more given
to contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than
at an earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animat-
ing his solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the
traditions of the past, he lived much already in the realm of
the imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue all
through life, something of an idealist; constructing the world
for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of
meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the
individual for its measure of all things, there was to be always
in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a
certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's values of things.
And the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he
•


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11167
could trace up to the days when his life had been so like the
reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for
unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis comes nearest to it,
perhaps; and in that precise sense, might describe the spirit in
which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary
in his family,-the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the absti-
nence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such prepa-
ration involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening
of the play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps the temple
floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt
to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar
influences which he never outgrew; so that often in after-times,
quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him, still fresh
and strong.
That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the
sense of dedication, survived through all the distraction of the
world, when all thought of such vocations had finally passed
from him, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort of
hieratic beauty and orderliness in the conduct of life.
And now
what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the lad's
pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to
the coast, over the marsh with the dwarf roses and wild laven-
der, and the delightful signs, one after another, -the abandoned
boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild birds,-that one
was approaching the sea; the long summer day of idleness among
its vague scents and sounds. And it was characteristic of him
that he relished especially the grave, subdued, northern notes in
all that; the charm of the French or English notes, as we might
term them, in the luxuriant Italian landscape.
-
THE CLASSIC AND THE ROMANTIC IN LITERATURE
A Postscript in Appreciations>
αίνει δὲ παλαίον μὲν οἶνον, ἀνθεα δ᾽ ὕμνων νεωτέρων *
THE
HE words classical and romantic, although, like many other
critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have
understood them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define
two real tendencies in the history of art and literature. Used
in an exaggerated sense, to express a greater opposition between
"In wine 'tis the age we praise,
But the fresher bloom in lays. "


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11168
WALTER PATER
are
those tendencies than really exists, they have at times tended to
divide people of taste into opposite camps. But in that House
Beautiful which the creative minds of all generations-the art-
ists and those who have treated life in the spirit of art-
always building together for the refreshment of the human
spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the House
Beautiful, the true æsthetic critic, uses these divisions only so
far as they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the
objects with which he has to do. The term classical, fixed as
it is to a well-defined literature and a well-defined group in art,
is clear, indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard and
merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accus-
tomed, at the expense of what is new,- by critics who would
never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work,
whether new or old; who value what is old, in art or literature,
for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that
has gathered about it, people who would never really have
been made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and
who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome only because
they fancy her grown now into something staid and tame.
And as the term classical has been used in a too absolute,
and therefore in a misleading sense, so the term romantic has
been used much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The
sense in which Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this:
that in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he
loved strange adventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much
later, in a Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a
more really characteristic fruit in the work of a young girl,
Emily Bronté,-the romance of Wuthering Heights'; the fig-
ures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliff
tearing open Catherine's grave, removing one side of her coffin,
that he may really lie beside her in death,-figures so passionate,
yet woven on a background of delicately beautiful moorland
scenery, being typical examples of that spirit. In Germany,
again, that spirit is shown less in Tieck, its professional repre-
sentative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidonia the Sorceress'
and the 'Amber-Witch. ' In Germany and France, within the last
hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular
school of writers: and consequently, when Heine criticizes the
Romantic School in Germany,- that movement which culminated
in Goethe's 'Goetz von Berlichingen'; or when Théophile Gautier
-


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WALTER PATER
11169
criticizes the romantic movement in France,- where indeed it
bore its most characteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over;
where, by a certain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with
faultless literary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative
literature; they use the word with an exact sense of special
artistic qualities, indeed; but use it nevertheless with a limited
application to the manifestation of those qualities at a particular
period. But the romantic spirit is in reality an ever present, an
enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities
of thought and style which that and other similar uses of the
word romantic really indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very
continuous and widely working influence.
Though the words classical and romantic, then, have acquired
an almost technical meaning in application to certain develop-
ments of German and French taste, yet this is but one variation
of an old opposition, which may be traced from the very begin-
ning of the formation of European art and literature. From the
first formation of anything like a standard of taste in these
things, the restless curiosity of their more eager lovers neces-
sarily made itself felt in the craving for new motives, new
subjects of interest, new modifications of style. Hence the op-
position between the classicists and the romanticists; between the
adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty
and authority respectively,- of strength, and order or what the
Greeks called κοσμιότης.
-
-
Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the 'Causeries du Lundi,'
has discussed the question, "What is meant by a classic ? " It
was a question he was well fitted to answer, having himself lived
through many phases of taste, and having been in earlier life an
enthusiastic member of the romantic school; he was also a great
master of that sort of "philosophy of literature" which delights
in tracing traditions in it, and the way in which various phases
of thought and sentiment maintain themselves, through successive
modifications, from epoch to epoch. His aim, then, is to give the
word classic a wider, and as he says, a more generous sense than it
commonly bears; to make it expressly grandiose et flottant: and
in doing this, he develops, in a masterly manner, those qualities.
of measure, purity, temperance, of which it is the especial func-
tion of classical art and literature. - whatever meaning, narrower
or wider, we attach to the term-to take care.
―――――――
The charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature,
is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless
XIX-699


## p. 11170 (#390) ##########################################

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WALTER PATER
listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the
absolute beauty of its artistic form is added the accidental, tran-
quil charm of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which
these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail
to excite us.
"Romanticism," says Stendhal, ❝is the art of pre-
senting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of
their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest
possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them
with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their
grandfathers. " But then, beneath all changes of habits and be-
liefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion of music - which
what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the
best of us, and what pleased our grandparents may at least tran-
quillize us. The "classic" comes to us out of the cool and quiet
of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has
shown will at least never displease us. And in the classical lit-
erature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last cen-
tury, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in
beauty, which they possess indeed in a pre-eminent degree, and
which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else
in them.
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the
romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed
element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curi-
osity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic tem-
per. Curiosity, and the desire of beauty, have each their place
in art, as in all true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient,
when one is not eager enough for new impressions and new
pleasures, one is liable to value mere academical properties too
highly, to be satisfied with worn-out or conventional types, with
the insipid ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later
Greek sculpture which passed so long for true Hellenic work;
to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the
artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating
products of art a mere irritation. And when one's curiosity is
in excess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is
liable to value in works of art what is inartistic in them; to be
satisfied with what is exaggerated in art, with productions like
some of those of the romantic school in Germany; not to dis-
tinguish jealously enough between what is admirably done, and
what is done not quite so well,- in the writings, for instance, of
Jean Paul. And if I had to give instances of these defects, then


## p. 11171 (#391) ##########################################

WALTER PATER
11171
I should say that Pope, in common with the age of literature to
which he belonged, had too little curiosity,- so that there is
always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as
it is; and coming down to our own time, that Balzac had an
excess of curiosity-curiosity not duly tempered with the desire.
of beauty.
But however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by
critics, or exaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies.
really at work at all times in art; molding it, with the balance
sometimes a little on one side, sometimes a little on the other;
generating, respectively, as the balance inclines on this side or
that, two principles, two traditions, in art, and in literature so
far as it partakes of the spirit of art. If there is a great over-
balance of curiosity, then we have the grotesque in art; if the
union of strangeness and beauty, under very difficult and com-
plex conditions, be a successful one, if the union be entire, then
the resultant beauty is very exquisite, very attractive.
With a
passionate care for beauty, the romantic spirit refuses to have it
unless the condition of strangeness be first fulfilled. Its desire
is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a profound alchemy,
by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings it even out
of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the grotesque,
may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression, about
its ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will have strength,
the grotesque, first of all: the trees shrieking as you tear off the
leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of convict life; for Red-
gauntlet, the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with
this strangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness,
as much beauty, as is compatible with that. "Énergique, frais, et
dispos" these, according to Sainte-Beuve, are the characteristics
of a genuine classic: "les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques
parce qu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont énergiques, frais, et
dispos. " Energy, freshness, intelligent and masterly disposition,
these are characteristics of Victor Hugo when his alchemy is
complete: in certain figures, like Marius and Cosette; in certain
scenes, like that in the opening of 'Les Travailleurs de la Mer,'
where Déruchette writes the name of Gilliatt in the snow, on
Christmas morning: but always there is a certain note of strange-
ness discernible there, as well.
-
The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curi-
osity and the love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of


## p. 11172 (#392) ##########################################

11172
WALTER PATER
these qualities that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the
overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked
sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by
strong imagination, out of things unlikely or remote.
Few, probably, now read Madame de Staël's 'De l'Allemagne,'
though it has its interest, the interest which never quite fades
out of work really touched with the enthusiasm of the spiritual
adventurer, the pioneer in culture. It was published in 1810, to
introduce to French readers a new school of writers- the roman-
tic school, from beyond the Rhine; and it was followed, twenty-
three years later, by Heine's 'Romantische Schule,' as at once a
supplement and a correction. Both these books, then, connect
romanticism with Germany, with the names especially of Goethe
and Tieck; and to many English readers, the idea of romanti-
cism is still inseparably connected with Germany-that Germany
which, in its quaint old towns, under the spire of Strassburg
or the towers of Heidelberg, was always listening in rapt inac-
tion to the melodious, fascinating voices of the Middle Age, and
which, now that it has got Strassburg back again, has, I suppose,
almost ceased to exist. But neither Germany with its Goethe
and Tieck, nor England with its Byron and Scott, is nearly so
representative of the romantic temper as France, with Murger
and Gautier and Victor Hugo. It is in French literature that
its most characteristic expression is to be found; and that, as
most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiar conditions.
as ever reinforce it to the utmost.
For although temperament has much to do with the gener-
ation of the romantic spirit, and although this spirit, with its
curiosity, its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable
in excellent art (traceable even in Sophocles), yet still, in a lim-
ited sense, it may be said to be a product of special epochs.
Outbreaks of this spirit, that is, come naturally with particular
periods: times when, in men's approaches towards art and poetry,
curiosity may be noticed to take the lead; when men come to art
and poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a
long ennui, or in reaction against the strain of outward, practical
things: in the later Middle Age, for instance; so that mediæval
poetry, centring in Dante, is often opposed to Greek and Roman
poetry, as romantic poetry to the classical. What the romanticism
of Dante is, may be estimated, if we compare the lines in which
Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from whose broken twigs flows.


## p. 11173 (#393) ##########################################

WALTER PATER
11173
the blood of Polydorus,- not without the expression of a real
shudder at the ghastly incident,- with the whole canto of the
'Inferno,' into which Dante has expanded them, beautifying and
softening it, meanwhile, by a sentiment of profound pity. And
it is especially in that period of intellectual disturbance imme-
diately preceding Dante, amid which the Romance languages
define themselves at last, that this temper is manifested. Here,
in the literature of Provence, the very name of romanticism is
stamped with its true signification: here we have indeed a roman-
tic world, grotesque even, in the strength of its passions, almost
insane in its curious expression of them, drawing all things into
its sphere, making the birds-nay, lifeless things-its voices
and messengers; yet so penetrated with the desire for beauty
and sweetness that it begets a wholly new species of poetry,
in which the Renaissance may be said to begin. The last cen-
tury was pre-eminently a classical age; an age in which, for art
and literature, the element of a comely order was in the ascend-
ant; which, passing away, left a hard battle to be fought between
the classical and the romantic schools. Yet it is in the heart
of this century of Goldsmith and Stothard, of Watteau and the
'Siècle de Louis XIV. ,'-in one of its central, if not most charac-
teristic figures, in Rousseau,- that the modern or French roman-
ticism really originates. But what in the eighteenth century is
but an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve
and discretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of the
nineteenth breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness,
an incomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experi-
ence to some degree, but yearning also, in the genuine child-
ren of the romantic school, to be énergique, frais, et dispos,— for
those qualities of energy, freshness, comely order; and often, in
Murger, in Gautier, in Victor Hugo, for instance, with singular
felicity attaining them.
It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in fact, that French
romanticism, with much else, begins: reading his 'Confessions,'
we seem actually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit
in the French mind. The wildness which has shocked so many,
and the fascination which has influenced almost every one, in the
squalid yet eloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that
book, wandering under the apple blossoms and among the vines
of Neuchâtel or Vevey, actually give it the quality of a very
successful romantic invention. His strangeness or distortion, his


## p. 11174 (#394) ##########################################

WALTER PATER
III74
profound subjectivity, his passionateness,-the cor laceratum,—
Rousseau makes all men in love with these. "Je ne suis fait
comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus. Mais si je ne vaux pas
mieux, au moins je suis autre. " (I am not made like any one
else I have ever known. Yet, if I am not better, at least I am
different. ) These words, from the first page of the Confessions,'
anticipate all the Werthers, Renés, Obermanns, of the last hun-
dred years.
For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the
spirit of the whole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in
him was a peculiarity, became part of the general consciousness.
A storm was coming: Rousseau with others felt it in the air,
and they helped to bring it down; they introduced a disturbing
element into French literature, then so trim and formal, like our
own literature of the age of Queen Anne.
<
In 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the
spirit of "young France," the ennui of an immense disillusion.
In the last chapter of Edgar Quinet's Révolution Française,'
a work itself full of irony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two
books, Senancour's 'Obermann' and Châteaubriand's 'Génie du
Christianisme,' as characteristic of the first decade of the pres-
ent century. In those two books we detect already the disease
and the cure: in Obermann' the irony, refined into a plaint-
ive philosophy of "indifference"; in Châteaubriand's 'Génie du
Christianisme,' the refuge from a tarnished actual present, a
present of disillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the
Middle Age, as at an earlier period-in 'René' and 'Atala’—
into the free play of them in savage life. It is to minds in
this spiritual situation, weary of the present, but yearning for
the spectacle of beauty and strength, that the works of French
romanticism appeal. They set a positive value on the intense,
the exceptional: and a certain distortion is sometimes noticeable
in them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo or
Gwynplaine, something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre,
as the French themselves call it; though always combined with
perfect literary execution, as in Gautier's 'La Morte Amoureuse,'
or the scene of the "maimed" burial rites of the player, dead of
the frost, in his 'Capitaine Fracasse,'-true "flowers of the yew. "
It becomes grim humor in Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with
the devil-fish; or the incident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn
out at length, of the great gun detached from its fastenings on
shipboard, in 'Quatre-Vingt-Treize' (perhaps the most terrible of


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WALTER PATER
11175
all the accidents that can happen by sea); and in the entire epi-
sode, in that book, of the Convention. Not less surely does it
reach a genuine pathos: for the habit of noting and distinguish-
ing one's own most intimate passages of sentiment makes one
sympathetic; begetting, as it must, the power of entering, by all
sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of other minds:
so that pity is another quality of romanticism; both Victor Hugo
and Gautier being great lovers of animals and charming writ-
ers about them, and Murger being unrivaled in the pathos of
his 'Scènes de la Vie de Jeunesse. ' Penetrating so finely into
all situations which appeal to pity, above all, into the special or
exceptional phases of such feeling,- the romantic humor is not.
afraid of the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or
expression; pity, indeed, being of the essence of humor: so that
Victor Hugo does but turn his romanticism into practice, in his
hunger and thirst after practical Justice! -a justice which shall
no longer wrong children or animals, for instance, by ignoring,
in a stupid, mere breadth of view minute facts about them.
Yet the romanticists are antinomian too, sometimes; because the
love of energy and beauty, of distinction in passion, tended
naturally to become a little bizarre, plunging into the Middle
Age, into the secrets of old Italian story. "Are we in the In-
ferno? "— we are tempted to ask, wondering at something malign
in so much beauty. For over all a care for the refreshment of
the human spirit by fine art manifests itself, a predominant sense
of literary charm; so that, in their search for the secret of ex-
quisite expression, the romantic school went back to the forgotten
world of early French poetry, and literature itself became the
most delicate of the arts,-like "goldsmith's work," says Sainte-
Beuve, of Bertrand's 'Gaspard de la Nuit,'—and that peculiarly
French gift, the gift of exquisite speech, argute loqui, attained
in them a perfection which it had never seen before.
Stendhala writer whom I have already quoted, and of
whom English readers might well know much more than they
do-stands between the earlier and later growths of the roman-
tic spirit. His novels are rich in romantic quality; and his other
writings-partly criticism, partly personal reminiscences—are a
very curious and interesting illustration of the needs out of which
romanticism arose. In his book on Racine and Shakespeare,'
Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day; and
this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise, full


## p. 11176 (#396) ##########################################

11176
WALTER PATER
•
of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823;
and its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in
the choice and treatment of subject, both in art and literature,
against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent.
In pleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty,
both of form and of motive, in writings like the 'Hernani' of Vic-
tor Hugo (which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism),
that he is chiefly concerned to justify. To be interesting and
really stimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and liter-
ature must follow the subtle movements of that nimbly shifting
e-Spirit, or Zeit-Geist, understood by French not less than by
German criticism, which is always modifying men's taste, as it
modifies their manners and their pleasures. This, he contends, is
what all great workmen had always understood. Dante, Shake-
speare, Molière, had exercised an absolute independence in their
choice of subject and treatment. To turn always with that ever
changing spirit, yet to retain the flavor of what was admirably
done in past generations,-in the classics, as we say,- is the
problem of true romanticism. "Dante," he observes, "was pre-
eminently the romantic poet. He adored Virgil, yet he wrote
the Divine Comedy,' with the episode of Ugolino, which is as
unlike the 'Eneid' as can possibly be. And those who thus obey
the fundamental principle of romanticism, one by one become
classical, and are joined to that ever increasing common league,
formed by men of all countries, to approach nearer and nearer to
perfection. "
Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, is in its essen-
tial characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all times,
in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and
the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one
by one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending
on the varying proportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty,
-natural tendencies of the artistic spirit at all times,-it must
always be partly a matter of individual temperament. The
eighteenth century in England has been regarded as almost
exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a type of so
much which breaks through what are conventionally thought the
influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in
it, and the reaction in favor of naturalism in poetry begins in
that century early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and
the born classicists. There are the born classicists who start with


## p. 11177 (#397) ##########################################

WALTER PATER
11177
form: to whose minds the comeliness of the old, immemorial,
well-recognized types in art and literature have revealed them-
selves impressively; who will entertain no matter which will not
go easily and flexibly into them; whose work aspires only to be
a variation upon, or study from, the older masters. "Tis art's
decline, my son! " they are always saying to the progressive ele-
ment in their own generation; to those who care for that which
in fifty years' time every one will be caring for. On the other
hand, there are the born romanticists, who start with an origi-
nal, untried matter, still in fusion; who conceive this vividly, and
hold by it as the essence of their work; who, by the very vivid-
ness and heat of their conception, purge away, sooner or later,
all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the whole effect
adjusts itself in clear, orderly, proportionate form; which form,
after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn.
The romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a
literary work, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities
in it; and in this sense, a very real distinction may be drawn
between good classical and good romantic work. But all critical
terms are relative; and there is at least a valuable suggestion in
that theory of Stendhal's, that all good art was romantic in its
day. In the beauties of Homer and Pheidias, quiet as they now
seem, there must have been, for those who confronted them for
the first time, excitement and surprise, -the sudden, unforeseen
satisfaction of the desire of beauty. Yet the Odyssey, with its
marvelous adventure, is more romantic than the Iliad; which
nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes, that
of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death of
Patroclus. Eschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whose
'Philoctetes,' were it written now, might figure, for the strange-
ness of its motive and the perfectness of its execution, as typi-
cally romantic; while of Euripides it may be said that his method
in writing his plays is to sacrifice readily almost everything else,
so that he may attain the fullness of a single romantic effect.
These two tendencies, indeed, might be applied as a measure
or standard all through Greek and Roman art and poetry, with
very illuminating results: and for an analyst of the romantic prin-
ciple in art, no exercise would be more profitable than to walk
through the collection of classical antiquities at the Louvre, or the
British Museum, or to examine some representative collection of
Greek coins, and note how the element of curiosity, of the love


## p. 11178 (#398) ##########################################

11178
WALTER PATER
of strangeness, insinuates itself into classical design, and record
the effects of the romantic spirit there, the traces of struggle, of
the grotesque even, though overbalanced here by sweetness; as
in the sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the real sweetness of
mind in the sculptor is often overbalanced by the grotesque, by
the rudeness of his strength.
ner.
Classicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthu-
siastic band of French writers whose unconscious method he
formulated into principles, the reign of what is pedantic, conven-
tional, and narrowly academical in art; for him, all good art is
romantic. To Sainte-Beuve, who understands the term in a more
liberal sense, it is the characteristic of certain epochs, of certain
spirits in every epoch, not given to the exercise of original im-
agination, but rather to the working out of refinements of man-
ner on some authorized matter; and who bring to their perfection
in this way the elements of sanity, of order and beauty in man-
In general criticism, again, it means the spirit of Greece
and Rome, of some phases in literature and art that may seem
of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louis the
Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best an un-
critical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there
are typical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the
terms as we may, in application to particular epochs, there are
these two elements always recognizable; united in perfect art,-
in Sophocles, in Dante, in the highest work of Goethe, though
not always absolutely balanced there: and these two elements
may be not inappropriately termed the classical and romantic
tendencies.


## p. 11179 (#399) ##########################################

11179
COVENTRY PATMORE
(1823-1896)
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
OVENTRY KEARSEY DEIGHTON PATMORE was born at Woodford,
in Essex, England, on July 23d, 1823. The best impression
of the personality of this distinguished man may be found in
the pages of the Contemporary Review. It was written by Edmund
Gosse shortly after Patmore's death, which occurred in December
1896. It gives real insight into the character and accidental pecul-
iarities of a great psychological interpreter.
In the last ten years, Patmore's intention
and quality have begun once more to re-
ceive deserved attention and appreciation,
attracted principally by his 'Odes' (in 'The
Unknown Eros') and the strong mystical
characteristics of his prose essays, 'Princi-
ples in Art' and 'Religio Poetæ. '

Patmore's Poems (1844) attracted the
attention of Lord Houghton. They pleased
the Pre-Raphaelites, to whom he was in-
troduced by Tennyson; and he contributed
'The Seasons' to The Germ, which was the
organ of Rossetti and his colleagues. Pat-
more's poetic road was not smooth.
The
Angel in the House' had what Mr. Gosse calls a "rustic success. "
After that it became, in the mind of most readers, a work to be
classed with Mr. Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy. ' It included 'Tam-
erton Church Tower' (1853), The Betrothal' (1854), and The Es-
pousal (1856); the two latter he printed in The Angel in the
House' (1858), to which he afterwards added 'Faithful Forever' (1860)
and The Victories of Love' (1863). Then came 'Amelia' and 'The
Unknown Eros' (1877).
COVENTRY PATMORE
His important prose works are Principles in Art' (1889), 'Religio
Poetæ (1893), and 'The Rod, the Root, and the Flower' (1895). Mr.
Gosse laments the destruction of Sponsa Dei,' a "vanished master-
piece, not very long, but polished and modulated to the highest
degree of perfection. "


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11180
COVENTRY PATMORE
The reason why the sensitive and singular poet destroyed 'Sponsa
Dei' may be inferred from the underlying motive of much of 'The
Unknown Eros. ' He was a mystic; he dwelt on the heights with St.
John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and the English poet Crashaw. And
his favorite theme was the spiritual beauty of the body redeemed by
Christ from degradation. He found in the sacramental union of man
and wife the truest and most glowing symbol of the union of God
and man; as he says in his 'Scire Te Ipsum,'-
"God, Youth, and Goddess, one, twain, trine,
In altering wedlock, flamed benign. »
If men knew the Christian mystics better, or many were able
to comprehend them, the 'Sponsa Dei,' which concerned itself with
human love as typical of the Divine, would not shock "the general
reader. " But though Patmore had a deep contempt for this undis-
tinguished person, his conscience was scrupulous when it came to
consider the moral effect of his beautiful revelation upon the weaker
brethren, and so the last of his works was destroyed.
In his essay on 'Love and Poetry in Principles in Art,' he
expresses his sense of the relation of human love to life:-
"Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or
at any rate feels, that love, though the least 'serious,' is the most significant
of all things. The wise do not talk much about this knowledge, for fear of
exposing its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the profligate and un-
believing; and because its light, though, and for the reason that, it exceeds
all others, is deficient in definition. But they see that to this momentary
transfiguration of life all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and
that it is for this the race exists, and not this for the race, the seed for the
flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this love,
and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest and
highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a 'great sacrament,' hold-
ing that, with Transubstantiation,— which it resembles,—it is only unreason-
able because it is above reason.
Nothing can reconcile the intimacies
of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious — and
true lovers always are- that for the season at least, they justify the words,
I have said, Ye are gods. Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being
nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. »
•
The poet who interprets this love is a seer, a mystic,- one who
knows the meaning of hidden things, the heart of the mysteries;
and "perfect poetry and song are in fact nothing more than per-
fect speech upon high and moving objects. " Thus Patmore speaks
in his essay on 'English Metrical Law. ' He earnestly believed it;
and though he was not in love with modern scientific methods, he
was willing to put the form of poetry to any test, in order that
the divinity of its spirit might be better understood and expressed.


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11181
"With this reprint I believe," he says, in the preface to the fifth
collective edition of his 'Poetical Works,' "that I am closing my task
as a poet, having traversed the ground and reached the end which in
my youth I saw before me. I have written little, but it is all my
best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared
time or labor to make my words true. I have respected posterity;
and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to
hope that it will respect me. "
Time has begun to show that Patmore had ground for his hope.
The peculiar management of the catalexis in his odes has repelled
many who do not seriously consider the relations of music and
rhythm, to whom psychology as applied to poetical form does not
appeal; and the boldness of his images, invariably borrowed from
the Scriptures, or the mystical outpourings of saints madly ecstatic
with Divine love, shocks folk brought up in those modern ideas of
purity which he condemns.
In his prose
marvelously effective and
condensed he is at times arrogant, intolerant, and always he is a
reckless Tory. Nevertheless his poetry and prose are treasures, the
value of which is becoming more and more apparent every day.
With the author of Religio Medici,' the writer of 'Religio Poetæ’
hated the multitude; he wrote only for the elect; and probably it
would not please him if he knew that his fame is so rapidly spread-
ing, that there are those of the multitude who respect and admire
more in his work than 'The Toys,' — which long ago seized the pop-
ular heart, though constructed on that catalectic method which has
caused some critics to pause when they had expected to go on
admiring.
-
-
Coventry Patmore assisted Lord Houghton in editing the 'Life
and Letters of Keats' (1848); he wrote a curious pamphlet, How I
Managed my Estate' (1886); the Life of Bryan Waller Procter'
(1877); and part of a translation from A. Bernard on the Love of
God' (1881).
His odes revive a quality not found in English poetry since Cra-
shaw; and his prose has, above all, that distinction which he so
loved. He is fervent, sincere, exalted; and if we do not understand
him in his highest moods, it is because we have not yet learned to
look with undazzled eyes at the very face of the sun.
manne Francis Egan
безит


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11182
COVENTRY PATMORE
Τ
WIND AND WAVE
HE wedded light and heat,
Winnowing the witless space,
Without a let,
What are they till they beat
Against the sleepy sod, and there beget
Perchance the violet!
Is the One found,
Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace,
To make heaven's bound;
So that in Her
All which it hath of sensitively good
Is sought and understood
After the narrow mode the mighty heavens prefer?
She, as a little breeze
Following still Night,
Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas
Into delight;
But in a while,
The immeasurable smile
is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent
With darkling discontent;
And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,
And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,
T'ward the void sky-line and an unguessed weal;
Until the vanward billows feel
The agitating shallows, and divine the goal,
And to foam roll,
And spread and stray
And traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands,
And so the whole
Unfathomable and immense
Triumphing tide comes at the last to reach
And burst in wind-kissed splendors on the deafening beach,
Where forms of children in first innocence
Laugh and fling pebbles on the rainbowed crest
Of its untired unrest.


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11183
THE TOYS
Y LITTLE Son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
MⓇ And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him, and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,-
His mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters, and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:—
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing thee in death,
And thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom thou hast molded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness. "
"IF I WERE DEAD"
"I
F I were dead, you'd sometimes say, Poor child! "
The dear lips quivered as they spake,
And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
Poor child, poor child!


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11184
COVENTRY PATMORE
I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.
It is not true that Love will do no wrong.
Poor child!
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,
And of those words your full avengers make?
Poor child, poor child!
And now, unless it be
That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,
O God, have thou no mercy upon me?
Poor child!
TO THE BODY
REATION'S and Creator's crowning good;
Wall of infinitude;
Foundation of the sky,
In heaven forecast
And longed for from eternity,
Though laid the last;
Reverberating dome,
CR
Of music cunningly built home
Against the void and indolent disgrace
Of unresponsive space;
Little sequestered pleasure-house
For God and for his Spouse;
Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,
Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,
Even to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,
And from the inmost heart
Outwards unto the thin
Silk curtains of the skin,
Every least part
Astonished hears
And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;
Formed for a dignity prophets but darkly name,
Lest shameless men cry "Shame! "
So rich with wealth concealed
That heaven and hell fight chiefly for this field;
Clinging to everything that pleases thee
With indefectible fidelity;
Alas, so true


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11185
XIX-700
To all thy friendships that no grace
Thee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;
Which thus 'bides with thee as the Jebusite,
That, maugre all God's promises could do,
The chosen People never conquered quite;
Who therefore lived with them,
And that by formal truce and as of right,
In metropolitan Jerusalem.
For which false fealty
Thou needs must, for a season, lie
In the grave's arms, foul and unshriven,
Albeit in heaven
Thy crimson-throbbing glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go,
And does with envy see
Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she
Who left the roses in her body's lieu.
Oh, if the pleasures I have known in thee
But my poor faith's poor first-fruits be,
What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss
Then shall be his
Who has thy birth-time's consecrating dew
For death's sweet chrism retained,
Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned!
LOVE SERVICEABLE
From The Angel in the House'
WHA
HAT measure Fate to him shall mete
Is not the noble lover's care;
He's heart-sick with a longing sweet
To make her happy as she's fair.
Oh, misery, should she him refuse,
And so her dearest good mistake!
His own success he thus pursues
With frantic zeal for her sole sake.
To lose her were his life to blight,
Being loss to hers; to make her his,
Except as helping her delight,
He calls but accidental bliss;
And, holding life as so much pelf
To buy her posies, learns this lore:
He does not rightly love himself
Who does not love another more.


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11186
COVENTRY PATMORE
SAHARA
From The Angel in the House'
STOOD by Honor and the Dean,
I
They seated in the London train.
A month from her! yet this had been,
Ere now, without such bitter pain;
But neighborhood makes parting light,
And distance remedy has none.
Alone, she near, I felt as might
A blind man sitting in the sun;
She near, all for the time was well:
Hope's self, when we were far apart,
With lonely feeling, like the smell
Of heath on mountains, filled my heart.
To see her seemed delight's full scope;
And her kind smile, so clear of care,
Even then, though darkening all my hope,
Gilded the cloud of my despair.
She had forgot to bring a book.
I lent one: blamed the print for old;
And did not tell her that she took
A Petrarch worth its weight in gold.
I hoped she'd lose it; for my love
Was grown so dainty, high, and nice,
It prized no luxury above
The sense of fruitless sacrifice.
The bell rang; and with shrieks like death,
Link catching link, the long array,
With ponderous pulse and fiery breath.
Proud of its burthen, swept away.
And through the lingering crowd I broke,
Sought the hillside, and thence, heart-sick,
Beheld, far off, the little smoke
Along the landscape kindling quick.
What should I do, where should I go,
Now she was gone, my love! for mine
She was, whatever here below
Crossed or usurped my right divine.
Life without her was vain and gross,
The glory from the world was gone;


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11187
And on the gardens of the Close
As on Sahara shone the sun.
Oppressed with her departed grace,
My thoughts on ill surmises fed;
The harmful influence of the place
She went to, filled my soul with dread.
She, mixing with the people there,
Might come back altered, having caught
The foolish, fashionable air
Of knowing all and feeling naught.
Or giddy with her beauty's praise,
She'd scorn our simple country life,
Its wholesome nights and tranquil days,
And would not deign to be my wife.
"My wife," "my wife,”—ah, tenderest word!
How oft, as fearful she might hear,
Whispering that name of "wife," I heard
The chiming of the inmost sphere.
I passed the home of my regret.
The clock was striking in the hall,
And one sad window open yet,
Although the dews began to fall.
Ah, distance showed her beauty's scope!
How light of heart and innocent
That loveliness which sickened hope
And wore the world for ornament!
How perfectly her life was framed;
And, thought of in that passionate mood,
How her affecting graces shamed
The vulgar life that was but good!