Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now. A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.
But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”
The man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice of things to revere was not identical with his accuser’s. But in these sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more profound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions to authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all, to reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out, though most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a quest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed reverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth, of unsoiled ambition, of the flame alight before the altar of the potential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose continuance of life is the measure of each man’s nobility.
1912.
WALTER PATER
WALTER PATER
Walter Pater was brought up at Enfield, where he was near London, and knew from his earliest years “those quaint suburban pastorals” that gather “a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.” Something of that weighty atmosphere, and with it something of that rapid light, I find in his work, whether he is writing of the Italians of the Renaissance, of Montaigne, of the Greek philosophers, of the Dutch van Storck, or the German Carl of Rosenmold.
The external facts of his life may be shortly dismissed. He “was fond,” as a child, “of organising little processional pomps,” and a meeting with Keble strengthened for a time his boyish resolve to enter the Church. That part of his temperament which sought satisfaction in such a course found it, perhaps, in the hieratic character of his prose. He read Ruskin when he was nineteen, but his appreciations were too independent of Ruskin’s sanction to allow us to recognise the deep influence that is popularly attributed to the older man. Ruskin believed that he had “discovered” Botticelli, but he first spoke of him in the Oxford lectures of 1871, and Pater’s essay had been published in the Fortnightly Review the year before. Pater went from the King’s School at Canterbury to Queen’s College, Oxford, took a Second Class in the Final Classical Schools, and, in 1864, was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He lived at Oxford thenceforward, with only occasional periods of residence in London. In different long vacations he knew Heidelberg, Dresden, and various parts of France, and, in 1869, four years before the publication of The Renaissance, travelled in Italy. He died at Oxford after a life of unhurried labour on July 30, 1894.