V
FROM AN IVORY TOWER
"Their impatience," was the answer once given by Cardinal Newman to the question, What is the chief fault of heresiarchs? In this category Walter Pater never could have been included, for his life was a long patience. As Newman sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought and expression, of which his work is a supreme exemplar in modern English literature. Flaubert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympathy, toiled no harder for the perfect utterance of his ideas than did this retiring Oxford man of letters. And, like his happy account of Raphael's growth, Pater was himself a "genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius."
Walter Pater's intimate life was once almost legendary. We heard more of him a quarter of a century ago than yesterday. This does not mean that his vogue has declined; on the contrary, he is a force at the present such as he never was either at Oxford or London. But of the living man, notwithstanding his shyness, stray notes crept into print. He wrote occasional reviews. He had disciples. He had adversaries who deplored his—admittedly remote—immoral influence upon impressionable, "slim, gilt souls"; he had critics who detected the truffle of evil in savouring his exotic style. When he died, in 1894, the air was cleared by his devoted friends, Edmund Gosse, Lionel Johnson, William Sharp, Arthur Symons, and some of his Oxford associates, Dr. Bussell and Mr. Shadwell. It was proved without a possibility of doubt that the popular conception of the man was far from the reality; that the real Pater was a plain liver and an austere thinker; that he was not the impassive Mandarin of literature pictured by some; that the hedonism, epicureanism, cyrenaicism of which he had been vaguely accused had been a confounding of intellectual substances, a slipshod method of thought he abhorred; that his entire career had been spent in the pursuit of an æsthetic and moral perfection and its embodiment in prose of a rarely individual and haunting music. Recall his half-petulant, half-ironical exclamation of disgust to Mr. Gosse: "I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." He would have been quite in accord with Paul Bourget's dictum that "there is no such thing as health, or the contrary, in the world of the soul"; Bourget, who, lecturing later at Oxford, pronounced Walter Pater "un parfait prosateur."
Despite the attempt to chain him to the chariots of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Pater, like Chopin, during the Romantic turmoil, stood aloof from the heat and dust of its battles. He was at first deeply influenced by Goethe and Ruskin, and was a friend of Swinburne's; he wrote of the Morris poetry; but his was not the polemical cast of mind. The love of spiritual combat, the holy zeal of John Henry Newman, of Keble, of Hurrell Froude, were not in his bones. And so his scholar's life, the measured existence of a recluse, was uneventful; but measured by the results, what a vivid, intense, life it was. There is, however, very little to tell of Walter Pater. His was the interior life. In his books is his life—hasn't some one said that all great literature is autobiographical?
There are articles by the late William Sharp and by George Moore. The former in Some Personal Recollections of Walter Pater, written in 1894, gave a vivid picture of the man, though it remained for Mr. Moore to discover his ugly face and some peculiar minor characteristics. Sharp met Pater in 1880 at the house of George T. Robinson, in Gower Street, that delightful meeting-place of gifted people. Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, now Mme. Duclaux, was the tutelary genius. She introduced Sharp to Pater. The blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, was of the party. Pater at that time was a man of medium height, stooping slightly, heavily built, with a Dutch or Flemish cast of features, a pale complexion, a heavy moustache—"a possible Bismarck, a Bismarck who had become a dreamer," adds the keen observer. A friendship was struck up between the pair. Pater came out of his shell, talked wittily, paradoxically, and later at Oxford showed his youthful admirer the poetic side of his singularly complex nature. There are conversations recorded and letters printed which would have added to the value of Mr. Benson's memoir.
Mr. Moore's recollections are slighter, though extremely engaging. Above all, with his trained eye of a painter, he sketches for us another view of Pater, one not quite so attractive. Mr. Moore saw a very ugly man—"it was like looking at a leaden man, an uncouth figure, badly moulded, moulded out of lead, a large, uncouth head, the head of a clergyman,... a large, overarching skull, and small eyes; they always seemed afraid of you, and they shifted quickly. There seemed to be a want of candour in Pater's face,... an abnormal fear of his listener and himself. There was little hair on the great skull, and his skull and his eyes reminded me a little of the French poet Verlaine, a sort of domesticated Verlaine, a Protestant Verlaine." His eyes were green-gray, and in middle life he wore a brilliant apple-green tie and the inevitable top-hat and frock coat of an urban Englishman. In one of his early essays Max Beerbohm thus describes Pater: "a small, thick, rock-faced man, whose top-hat and gloves of bright dog skin struck one of the many discords in that little city of learning and laughter. The serried bristles of his mustachio made for him a false-military air." Pater is said to have come of Dutch stock. Mr. Benson declares that it has not been proved. He had the amiable fancy that he may have had in his veins some of the blood of Jean Baptiste Pater, the painter. His father was born in New York. He went to England, and near London in 1839 Walter Horatio, his second son, was born. To The Child in the House and Emerald Uthwart, both "imaginary portraits," we may go for the early life of Pater, as Marius is the idealized record of his young manhood. When a child he was fond of playing Bishop, and the bent of his mind was churchly, further fostered by his sojourn at Canterbury. He matriculated at Oxford in 1858 as a commoner of Queen's College, where he was graduated after being coached by Jowett, who said to his pupil, "I think you have a mind that will come to great eminence." Years afterward the Master of Balliol seems to have changed his opinion, possibly urged thereto by the parody of Pater as Mr. Rose by Mr. Mallock in The New Republic. Jowett spoke of Pater as "the demoralizing moralizer," while Mr. Freeman could see naught in him but "the mere conjurer of words and phrases." Others have denounced his "pulpy magnificence of style," and Max Beerbohm declared that Pater wrote English as if it were a dead language; possibly an Irish echo of Pater's own assertion that English should be written as a learned language.
He became a Fellow of Brasenose, and Oxford—with the exception of a few years spent in London, and his regular annual summer visits to Italy, France, and Germany, where he took long walks and studied the churches and art galleries—became his home. Contradictory legends still float in the air regarding his absorbed demeanour, his extreme sociability, his companionable humour, his chilly manner, his charming home, his barely furnished room, with the bowl of dried rose leaves; his sympathies, antipathies, nervousness, and baldness, and, like Baudelaire, of his love of cats, and a host of mutually exclusive qualities. Mr. Zangwill relates that he told Pater he had discovered a pun in one of his essays. Thereat, great embarrassment on Pater's part. Symons, who knew him intimately, tells of his reading the dictionary—that "pianoforte of writers," as Mr. Walter Raleigh cleverly names it—for the opposite reason that Gautier did, i.e., that he might learn what words to avoid. Another time Symons asked him the meaning of a terrible sentence, Ruskinian in length and involution. Pater carefully scanned the page, and after a few minutes said with a sigh of relief: "Ah, I see the printer has omitted a dash." Yet, with all this meticulous precision, Pater was a man with an individual style, and not a mere stylist. What he said was of more importance than the saying of it.
The portraits of Pater are, so his friends declare, unlike him. He had irregular features, and his jaw was prognathic; but there was great variety of expression, and the eyes, set deeply in the head, glowed with a jewelled fire when he was deeply aroused. In Mr. Greenslet's wholly admirable appreciation, there is a portrait executed by the unfortunate Simeon Solomon, and dated 1872. There is in Mosher's edition of the Guardian Essays a copy of Will Rothenstein's study, a characteristic piece of work, though Mr. Benson says it is not considered a resemblance. And I have a picture, a half-tone, from some magazine, the original evidently photographic, that shows a Pater much more powerful in expression than the others, and without a hint of the ambiguous that lurks in Rothenstein's drawing and Moore's pen portrait. Pater never married. Like Newman, he had a talent for friendship. As with Newman, Keble, that beautiful soul, made a deep impression on him, and, again like Newman, to use his own words, he went his way "like one on a secret errand."