No More Learning

THE spirit of this sovereign judge of the world-man-is not
so independent but that it is liable to be troubled by the first
disturbance about him. The noise of a cannon is not needed to
break his train of thought, it need only be the creaking of a
weathercock or a pulley. Do not be astonished if at this mo-
ment he argues incoherently: a fly is buzzing about his ears, and
that is enough to render him incapable of sound judgment.
Would you have him arrive at truth, drive away that creature
which holds his reason in check, and troubles that powerful intel-
lect which gives laws to towns and kingdoms. Here is a droll
kind of god!
WHEN We are too young our judgment is at fault; so also
when we are too old.
If we take not thought enough, or too much, on any matter,
we are obstinate and infatuated.
He that considers his work so soon as it leaves his hands, is
prejudiced in its favor; he that delays his survey too long, can-
not regain the spirit of it.
So with pictures seen from too near or too far: there is but
one precise point from which to look at them; all others are too


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PASCAL
near or too far, too high or too low.
precise point in the art of painting.
in truth or morals?
Perspective determines that
But who shall determine it
IT is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to
have all we want.
NOTHING more astonishes me than to see that men are not
astonished at their own weakness. They act seriously, and every
one follows his own mode of life, not because it is as a fact
good to follow, being the custom, but as if each man knew cer-
tainly where are reason and justice. They find themselves con-
stantly deceived; and by an amusing humility always imagine
that the fault is in themselves, and not in the art which all pro-
fess to understand. But it is well there are
so many of this
kind of people in the world, who are not skeptics for the glory of
skepticism; to show that man is thoroughly capable of the most
extravagant opinions, because he is capable of believing that his
weakness is not natural and inevitable, but that on the contrary
his wisdom comes by nature.
Nothing fortifies skepticism more than that there are some
who are not skeptics. If all were so, they would be wrong.
CHANCE gives thoughts, and chance takes them away; there is
no art for keeping or gaining them.
A thought has escaped me. I would write it down. I write
instead, that it has escaped me.
THE nature of man is not always to go forward,-it has its
advances and retreats. Fever has its hot and cold fits, and the
cold proves as well as the hot how great is the force of the fever.
THE strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his
occasional efforts, but by his ordinary life.
WE DO not remain virtuous by our own power: but by the
counterpoise of two opposite vices, we remain standing as between
two contrary winds; take away one of these vices, we fall into
the other.
IT is not shameful to man to yield to pain, and it is shameful
to yield to pleasure. This is not because pain comes from with-
out us, while we seek pleasure; for we may seek pain, and yield


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to it willingly, without this kind of baseness. How comes it then
that reason finds it glorious in us to yield under the assaults of
pain, and shameful to yield under the assaults of pleasure? It is
because pain does not tempt and attract us. We ourselves choose
it voluntarily, and will that it have dominion over us. We are
thus masters of the situation, and so far man yields to himself;
but in pleasure man yields to pleasure. Now only mastery and
empire bring glory, and only slavery causes shame.
WHEN I have set myself now and then to consider the vari-
ous distractions of men, the toils and dangers to which they
expose themselves in the court or the camp, whence arise so
many quarrels and passions, such daring and often such evil.
exploits, etc. , I have discovered that all the misfortunes of men
arise from one thing only, that they are unable to stay quietly
in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he
knew how to dwell with pleasure in his own home, would not
leave it for seafaring or to besiege a city. An office in the
army would not be bought so dearly, but that it seems insup-
portable not to stir from the town; and people only seek con-
versation and amusing games because they cannot remain with
pleasure in their own homes.
But upon stricter examination, when, having found the cause
of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it, I have
found one which is paramount: the natural evil of our weak and
mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can console us when
we think of it attentively.
Whatever condition we represent to ourselves, if we bring to
our minds all the advantages it is possible to possess, royalty is
the finest position in the world. Yet when we imagine a king
surrounded with all the conditions which he can desire, if he be
without diversion, and be allowed to consider and examine what
he is, this feeble happiness will never sustain him; he will neces-
sarily fall into a foreboding of maladies which threaten him, of
revolutions which may arise, and lastly, of death and inevitable
diseases: so that if he be without what is called diversion he is
unhappy, and more unhappy than the humblest of his subjects
who plays and diverts himself.
Hence it comes that play, and the society of women, war, and
offices of State, are so sought after. Not that there is in these
any real happiness, or that any imagine true bliss to consist in


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11150
we
the money won at play, or in the hare which is hunted:
would not have these as gifts. We do not seek an easy and
peaceful lot, which leaves us free to think of our unhappy con-
dition, nor the dangers of war, nor the troubles of statecraft, but
seek rather the distraction which amuses us, and diverts our mind
from these thoughts.
Hence it comes that men so love noise and movement; hence
it comes that a prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes
that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And
it is the great subject of happiness in the condition of kings, that
all about them try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for
them all manner of pleasures.
The king is surrounded by persons who think only how to
divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is
unhappy, king though he be, if he think of self.
That is all that human ingenuity can do for human happiness.
And those who philosophize on the matter, and think men unrea-
sonable that they pass a whole day in hunting a hare which they
would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare itself
would not free us from the view of death and our miseries, but
the chase of the hare does free us. Thus, when we make it a
reproach that what they seek with such eagerness cannot satisfy
them, if they answered-as on mature judgment they should do-
that they sought in it only violent and impetuous occupation to
turn their thoughts from self, and that therefore they made choice
of an attractive object which charms and ardently attracts them,
they would leave their adversaries without a reply. But they do
not so answer, because they do not know themselves; they do not
know they seek the chase and not the quarry.
They fancy that were they to gain such-and-such an office
they would then rest with pleasure, and are unaware of the
insatiable nature of their desire. They believe they are honestly
seeking repose, but they are only seeking agitation.
They have a secret instinct prompting them to look for diver-
sion and occupation from without, which arises from the sense of
their continual pain. They have another secret instinct, a relic
of the greatness of our primitive nature, teaching them that hap-
piness indeed consists in rest, and not in turmoil. And of these
two contrary instincts a confused project is formed within them,
concealing itself from their sight in the depths of their soul,
leading them to aim at rest through agitation, and always to


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imagine that they will gain the satisfaction which as yet they
have not, if by surmounting certain difficulties which now con-
front them, they may thereby open the door to rest.
Thus rolls all our life away. We seek repose by resistance to
obstacles; and so soon as these are surmounted, repose becomes
intolerable. For we think either on the miseries we feel or on
those we fear. And even when we seem sheltered on all sides,
weariness, of its own accord, will spring from the depths of the
heart wherein are its natural roots, and fill the soul with its
poison.
THE Counsel given to Pyrrhus, to take the rest of which he
was going in search through so many labors, was full of diffi-
culties.
STRIFE alone pleases us, and not the victory. We like to
see beasts fighting, not the victor furious over the vanquished.
We wish only to see the victorious end, and as soon as it comes
we are surfeited. It is the same in play, and in the search for
truth. In all disputes we like to see the clash of opinions, but
care not at all to contemplate truth when found. If we are to
see truth with pleasure, we must see it arise out of conflict.
So in the passions: there is pleasure in seeing the shock of
two contraries, but as soon as one gains the mastery it becomes
mere brutality. We never seek things in themselves, but only
the search for things. So on the stage: quiet scenes which raise
no emotion are worthless; so is extreme and hopeless misery, so
are brutal lust and excessive cruelty.
CÆSAR, as it seems to me, was too old to set about amusing
himself with the conquest of the world. Such a pastime was
good for Augustus or Alexander, who were still young men, and
these are difficult to restrain; but Cæsar should have been more
mature.
NoT from space must I seek my dignity, but from the ruling
of my thought. I should have no more if I possessed whole
worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me as
an atom; by thought I encompass it.
MAN is but a reed, weakest in nature, but a reed which
thinks. It needs not that the whole universe should arm to


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11152
crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him.
But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more
noble than that which has slain him, because he knows that he
dies, and that the universe has the better of him. The universe
knows nothing of this.
All our dignity, therefore, consists in thought. By this must
we raise ourselves, not by space or duration which we cannot
fill. Then let us make it our study to think well; for this is the
starting-point of morals.
JUSTICE and truth are two such subtle points, that our instru-
ments are too blunt to touch them accurately. If they attain the
point, they cover it so completely that they rest more often on
the wrong than the right.
OUR imagination so enlarges the present by dint of continu-
ally reflecting on it and so contracts eternity by never reflecting
on it, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of
nothing; and all this has such living roots in us, that all our
reason cannot suppress them.
WE ARE not content with the life we have in ourselves and
in our own being: we wish to live an imaginary life in the idea
of others, and to this end we strive to make a show. We labor
incessantly to embellish and preserve this imaginary being, and
we neglect the true. And if we have either calmness, gener-
osity, or fidelity, we hasten to let it be known, that we may
attach these virtues to that imaginary being; we would even
part with them for this end, and gladly become cowards for the
reputation of valor. It is a great mark of the nothingness of
our own being that we are not satisfied with the one without the
other, and that we often renounce one for the other. For he
would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honor.
VANITY is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a
camp-follower, a cook, a porter, makes his boasts, and is for
having his admirers; even philosophers wish for them. Those
who write against it, yet desire the glory of having written well;
those who read, desire the glory of having read; I who write
this have maybe this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.
man has but to
The cause is an
Whoever will know fully the vanity of
consider the causes and the effects of love.


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11153
unknown quantity, and the effects are terrible. This unknown.
quantity, so small a matter that we cannot recognize it, moves
a whole country, princes, armies, and all the world.
Cleopatra's nose-had it been shorter, the face of the world
had been changed.
ON WHAT shall man found the economy of the world which
he would fain govern? If on the caprice of each man, all is con-
fusion. If on justice, man is ignorant of it.
Certainly, had he known it, he would not have established the
maxim, most general of all current among men, that every one
must conform to the manners of his own country; the splendor
of true equity would have brought all nations into subjection,
and legislators would not have taken as their model the fancies,
and caprice of Persians and Germans instead of stable justice.
We should have seen it established in all the States of the world,
in all times; whereas now we see neither justice nor injustice
which does not change its quality upon changing its climate.
Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence, a meridian
decides what is truth, fundamental laws change after a few years.
of possession, right has its epochs, the entrance of Saturn into
the Lion marks for us the origin of such-and-such a crime.
That is droll justice which is bounded by a stream! Truth on
this side of the Pyrenees, error on that.
Car there be anything more absurd han that a man should
have the right to kill me because he lives across the water, and
because his prince has a quarrel with mine, although I have
none with him?
THE most unreasonable things in the world become most
reasonable because of the unruly lives of men. What is less
reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to guide a
State? for we do not choose as steersman of a ship that one of
the passengers who is of the best family. Such a law would be
ridiculous and unjust; but since men are so themselves, and ever
will be, it becomes reasonable and just. For would we choose
the most virtuous and able, we at once fall to blows, since each
asserts that he is the most virtuous and able. Let us then affix
this quality to something which cannot be disputed. This man
is the king's eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute.
Reason can do no better, for civil war is the worst of evils.
XIX-698


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MEN of unruly lives assert that they alone follow nature, while
those who are orderly stray from her paths; as passengers in
a ship think that those move who stand upon the shore. Both
sides say the same thing. There must be a fixed point to enable
us to judge. The harbor decides the question for those who are
in the vessel; but where can we find the harbor in morals?
Do we follow the majority because they have more reason?
No; but because they have more power.
THE way of the majority is the best way, because it is plain,
and has power to make itself obeyed; yet it is the opinion of the
least able.
It is necessary that men should be unequal. True; but that
being granted, the door is open, not only to the greatest domina-
tion, but to the greatest tyranny.
It is necessary to relax the mind a little, but that opens the
door to extreme dissipation.
We must mark the limits. There are no fixed boundaries in
these matters; law wishes to impose them, but the mind will not
bear them.
MINE, THINE. -"This is my dog," say poor children; "that is
my place in the sunshine. " Here is the beginning and the image
of the usurpation of the whole earth.
Good birth is a great advantage; for it gives a man a chance
at the age of eighteen, making him known and respected as an
ordinary man is on his merits at fifty. Here are thirty years
gained at a stroke.
How rightly do men distinguish by exterior rather than by
interior qualities! Which of us twain shall take the lead? Who
will give place to the other? The least able? But I am as able
as he is. We should have to fight about that. He has four
footmen, and I have but one; that is something which can be
seen; there is nothing to do but to count; it is my place to yield,
and I am a fool if I contest it. So by this means we remain at
peace, the greatest of all blessings.
-
WE CARE nothing for the present. We anticipate the future.
as too slow in coming, as if we could make it move faster; or


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11155.
we call back the past, to stop its rapid flight. So imprudent are
we that we wander through the times in which we have no part,
unthinking of that which alone is ours; so frivolous are we that
we dream of the days which are not, and pass by without reflec-
tion those which alone exist. For the present generally gives us
pain; we conceal it from our sight because it afflicts us, and if it
be pleasant we regret to see it vanish away. We endeavor to
sustain the present by the future, and think of arranging things
not in our power, for a time at which we have no certainty of
arriving.
If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occu-
pied with the past or the future. We scarcely think of the pres-
ent; and if we do so, it is only that we may borrow light from it
to direct the future. 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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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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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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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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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,
-
―


## p. 11164 (#384) ##########################################

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
――――
――――――――


## p. 11166 (#386) ##########################################

11166
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
•


## p. 11167 (#387) ##########################################

WALTER PATER
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. "


## p. 11168 (#388) ##########################################

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
-


## p. 11169 (#389) ##########################################

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) ##########################################

Ir170
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


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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


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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.


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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.