WALTER PATER BY GERALD HEWES CARSON THESIS FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ENGLISH COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 1921 m\ UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LU C/O Je 192 / THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY JiAcJlot rttuAS C OASCrvi ENTITLED „ _ __ _ IS APPROVED BY ME AS FULFILLING THIS PART OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF E/ CZ^/z U> A U <;// .{ A 2D /uaD/ / . ‘AAA'iyi/?76>/7 Instructor in Charge ApPROVRTT 22 77^ AAc^zA?-j^<^ HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF aLaI^^/AlA? t o-G? i' c? Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/walterpaterOOcars Chapt er Chap ter Chapter Chap ter Chapter Tab] e of Contents I. Literary and Artistic Criticism. II. Marius The Epicurean. III. The "Imaginary Portraits." IV. The "Greek Studies." V. The Paterian Plato Bibl iography Page 2 15 40 57 68 83 -3 - CHAPTER I LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CRITICISM Walter Pater never succeeded in escaping from himself; and because of his own intensely personal vein his criticism is subject to distinct linitations, gaining as well, it is to be noted, a spe- cial force impossible in objective criticism. It was his constant desire to enter into, t.o assimilate, spiritual moods, philosophies, all things mirrored in historical events. But he was temperamental- ly unfitted to be the impersonal agent, concerned merely with the function of bringing his material into a new bright focus. He was definitely limited in his appreciation of Rosetti, for example, by his absorbing intellectual passion; "the innermost world of mystical passion in which Rosetti lived was as a locked and darkened chamber to Pater". He suffered the same limitation in interpreting Plato, or the Stoic ideal of Marcus Aurelius; "to him history was only an extension of his own Ego, and he saw himself whithersoever he turn- ed his eyes". The fact is noted by all commentators; by some, such as Benson, with extenuation, and an insistence on the rare "creative criticism" which he evolved; by others, for example, Paul Elmer More, with considerable asperity. Pater’s gain in working ever in the presence of his own ego, made of his work "a species of poetical and interpretative crit- icism, of a creative order, working upon slender hints and employing artistic productions as texts and motifs for imaginative creation". It was not in dealing with matters of fact, in mere lucid exposition, or even in the enunciation of aesthetic or critical principles that Pater was at his best; but rather, in the imaginative penetration - 2 . of events* of past crises of spirit* the elaboration and restoration of "the recondite, the suggestive element" in the subjects he treat- ed. Such a work as his lecture on Raphael in which his purpose is expository rather than the interpretation of the Raphael itic spirit* or the bulk of the "Essays from the Guardian" add very little to his reputation* There is no subtle, insinuating elaboration of slender hints. They are not in the characteristic Pater ian manner. Pater exercises this peculiar individual gift of re-incarna- ting figures from the dead past by a singular critical proceedure* His method was to settle on one distinctive quality of the art or poetry he wishes to illuminate, and subject it to all possible elaboration of suggestive and poetic conjecture. "His Studies in the Reaissance, for example* do not attempt to deal with the Renaissance as a whole, as a phenomenon. They do not even attempt to give complete portraits of the men whose names stand as headings to the chapters. Pater’s glance is concentrated on some one characteristic of the personages he deals with. The event- ful life of Pico della Mirandola is barely alluded to; for in this essay Pater emphasizes, as usual, some particular feature of the man; his endeavor to reconcile Christianity with the philosophy of ancient Greece. * * * We see, then, what Pater’s own peculiar aim is. He fastens his attention on one particular characteristic of a thing and illuminates it so strongly with his "gemlike flame" that he reinter- prets it, gives it a new value, exercising, in short, crea- tive criticism, and proving Wilde’s theory that criticism < ' , * ■ * ■ • . ■ •- « ; , ' -3 is a more difficult task than creation itself"** It has been frequently remarked that the writers of the early nineteenth century were sustained by religion and misunderstood Hellenism* Pater cannot be accurately assigned to either group, for though his Hellenism was in its characteristic qualities chiefly of his own creation, it was a creation based not upon misapprehension, or lack of sympathetic imagination, but upon certain pecul iarities of temperament which colored the romantic, shadowy, complex mani- festations of Greek antiquity which remained to him, with the roseate glow of his own impassioned imagination. A kindred temperament, also born out of its age, we may fancy from Pater’s sympathetic essay, was Winckelraann, whose chief quality he fixes upon as a peculiar, intuitive aptitude for the apprehension of life, as inspiration in the sphere of art which opened "a new or- gan for the human spirit." "Hellenism," remarks Pater in the essay,, "has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate." In that case Winckelmann sprang from excellent soil; the child of a tradesman, a youth growing to manhood in the most sor- did circumstances, a dull uninspired program of education, from which le had to flee incontinently to escape being enmeshed in German theology, all conspired to give Winckelraann a full bitter potion of the discipline of repression. No aesthetic theorist ever held to those ideas of life and conduct and the appreciation of the beautiful which he had evolved in long years of study and reflection, with more passionate affirmation than Pater, yet he never, in marked contrast to Matthew Arnold, went * J. M. Kennedy. English Literature 1380-1905. P. 32 and 37. < t ■ » t 4 ( . ! ♦ < . . - . • • , < ’ . - 4 - on the stump, so to speak, for his ideals* It was "but a natural con- formity to the tenets of his philosophy, and one perhaps which we should only expect. As he neglected to champion them, he may be said to have scarcely formulated them. We can abstract no such catch-words as "the grand manner", "high seriousness," "sweetness and light", from his writings. As succinct a statement of a dominant thought as may be found appears in the famous Conclusion to The Renaissanc e, where he sums up "the good, the beautiful and the true" of existence as characterized by the note of intellectual passion, of receptivity toward sensuous impression, of burning with ecstatic, lambent flame, which epitomize "success in life." It was the philosophy minutely set forth in Mariu s the Epicurean, and one, as Pater himself real ize<^ easy of mis interpretation. Detailed discussion of the ethical im- plications of this philosophy of life is reserved for the chapter on Marius the Epicurean . In the "Essay on Style" we get the closest approach there is to an exposition of Pater’s own art. The close distinction which has been made of late between prose and verse is in danger of being pressed too closely, he finds. The difference in form is often mis- taken for one of spirit; when, as a matter of fact, there is much prose cast in verse form; and there is a thoroughly poetic qual ity attained in some varieties of prose. Imaginative prose, -- Pater calls it "the special and opportune art of the modern world", as suited best to the complexity of our life, and the naturalistic trend of art and literature today. The true stylist, the 1 iterary artist, will address himself to a scholarly audience, one with the "male con- science", with delicate appreciation and wide experience in 3 itera. 4 < K f. K t < ( t ( < ->5 ture. He delights in a strict economy of means, in fitting the right word into its appropriate context, finding the str enuousness of the search stimulating, productive of the highest artistic pleasure; he must share Flaubert's ideal of the right word or phrase whose use is as inevitable as though predestined, and the guarantee of perfection! an organic, architectural unity of design and effect,. As an aesthetic critic he attempted to combat the tendency toward abstraction, formalization, as adding nothing to the enjoy* ment of art or poetry, and failing even in giving any new precision to such words as beauty, excellence, art, poetry, which are hope- lessly abstract and, per se . completely beyond the power of defin- ition. "Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. *** What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of be- ing deeply moved by the presence of beautiful ob- jects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question he asks is always: -- In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? Where was the receptacle of it3 refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all t t , -S equal , ” says William Blake, *but genius is always above its age.®” In M The School of Giorgione” he ventures with unusual ex- plicitness to promulgate aesthetic principles. Art addresses us neither through pure sense nor pure reason, but through the "imagina- tive reason”, so that each art has ”its own peculiar and untranslat- able sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limita- tions; to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special material,” to present, in short, ”a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful.” Pater does, how- ever, in working toward another idea prominent in his aesthetics, admit "although each art has thus its own specific order of im- pressions yet it is noticeable that, in its special mode of hand- ling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art”, and shortly there comes the pronuncia- mento laid down with unusual emphasis and clarity, ” A1 1 art constant - ly aspires towards the condition of music In the field of art criticism, Pater still remained a distinct ly literary influence. Perhaps it is well that he devoted little attention to the material or technical aspects of art, Mr. A. C, Benson has devoted considerable time and care to setting forth the errors which he committed in his artistic judgements. His mission was the revelation of the poetical, suggestive quality in art, of what it meant to him, and what he conceived to be its general signif- icance, He shared with RuBkin perhaps the feeling of the need for the humanization of art, of the opportunity, in treating it with a high seriousness, to widen and deepen immeasurably its power in a - 7 - society overindustrial ized, over -commercial ized, weary of thousand- giged respectability and laissez faire * One must be on his guard here again not to over -state the case; for the bracketting of Pater with Ruskin would endow him with a mission, an in-touch-ness with the stream of nineteenth century thought and activity which he was far from experiencing, from which he certainly shrank. Pater’s proceedure, in bringing out all the nuances of *' ex- pressiveness” in interpreting the sentiment of art, is happily put by Perris Greenslet, Says Greenslet, ”he studies history, biography, letters, fragmentary remains, all the flotsam and jetsam of the past, and revives the atmosphere, or — to use a word savouring of the shop - the mil ieu of the artist; then he subjects the painter’s work to a kind of long, mystic meditation, until by virtue of his mediumship we behold the very spirit of it, and even partake of the mood wherein it was created." Among the characteristic motives of the Renaissance which Pater mentions appear "the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination,” Sandro Botticelli came "a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and color" as a new interpreter of the relitious sentiment, leaving behind him the simple, received religion of the century which pre- ceded him, taking his inspiration from the well-springs of his own religious emotion. Botticelli’s work exhibits a strange blending of the real and the ideal, "that middle world in which men take no sides in the great 0 onf * m ak a ^jSt-g£jsaiL, refuse i a , - 8 - He thus sets himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work,** Pater speaks so frequently of the dis -severing of art from "moral ambition" that we cannot well avoid the conclusion that he considered such a separation as nothing less than an emancipation for beauty* In the "Essay on Style" the same creed is stated for literary art, the spokesman this time being Flaubert® "Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were something else than healing, of the painter than painting — as if the end of art were not, before ail else, the beautiful" * The crop which grew from the seed sown by Pater may be found flourishing in ripe luxuriance in the artistic theories laid down by Oscar Wilde in the preface to Dorian Gray * A few examples will be sufficient* "No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." "Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for his art." "The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely." "All art is quite useless." This is the direct, succinct statement of the "art for art’s sake" creed of the whole aesthetic school 0 One of the most famous examples of Pater’s invasive imagina- tion is the consummate essay "Leonardo da Vinci", in which occurs < * - * • , < < < , ♦ * ♦ . , . * ( * - < - 9 - the celebrated, often quoted, passage on La Glonconda * Da Vinci’s art was born of the conflict of curiosity and the desire for beauty* M This struggle between the reason and its ideas, and the senses, the desire of beauty, is the key to Leonardo’s life at Milan -- his restlessness, his endless re -touchings, his odd experiments with col our . " In the years which followed, Da Vinci’s life has all the colour and glamourous movement which we at the distance of five centuries find so picturesque; romantic adventure, the brilliance and excitement of court life, the chastening of poverty and distress* And all the while his expanding genius, Goethean in its proportions, urged him on to ceaseless bold experimentation, unheard-of artistic invention* All the high zest and torturing travail of the passion- ately active intellectual principle in his nature (as an approach to maturity so attractive to Pater himself J) was finally devoted to his portrayal of the Florentine women, "these languid women", as Pater calls the refined, cultivated feminine grace which the polished society of Florence had evolved, with a wealth of symbolical ex- pression, "a cryptic language for fancies all his own," The finest flower of his genius, revaling this peculiar qua! « ity in him, occurs in La Gioconda . And in the passage which attempts to enter into the artist’s mood and render poetically the obscure message buried in the lady’s enigmatic smile occurs the most reveal- ing instance of Pater’s subtle genius. The tradition of the descrip- tion is so firmly grounded, that the passage may be rendered without apology* "The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand f f t X X < . - 10 - years men had come to desire. Kers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expres- sive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thou- sand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life* Cer- tainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old ( t -11 fancy, the symbol of the modern idea," Voicing the patriotic sentiment which he possessed to a good healthful degree, Fater reflected in the "Poster ipt" to Apprecia - tions upon "the contorted, proportionless accumulation of our know- ledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes and dis- illusion", all of which needed so badly to be set in order, out of which some harmony should be produced by the proper manipulation of the instrument most readily at hand, the English language,, Fater 9peaks here in the same vein as in the "Essay on Style", — "as the French write", with Flaubert plainly in mind, "as scholars should write", a bit of special pleading for his own stylistic formulas,. But first he is lead into attempting the difficult task of fixing and differentiating between the terms classic and romantic* He sets out realizing that they are tags, convenient labels for cer- tain peculiarities of substance or mood. The romantic spirit is characterized by a love of the past, with the emphasis placed strong- ly upon the intimately human side of history; Walter Scott’s love of strange adventure and dominating personality in history, exemplified in his treatment of Richard Coeur de Leon, and Maurice Hewlett’s later veriations upon the same theme. As a matter of principle, it is "the addition of strangeness to beauty", the free, exploring spirit of the individual, who, being a law unto himself .makes and un- makes artistic law, recognizing no other arbiter than the promptings of his own aesthetic conscience. In brief, Fater asks for the treatment of material attractive to the romantic spirit, in the classic manner. It is a fantastic union of incompatible elements, idyllic, speciously convincing as he phrases it, yet involving certain disaster, as Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne each learned. .2 2 - Pater found in the work of Pica del 3 a Mirandola the express ion of a general purpose broadly characteristic of the fifteenth century Italian Renaissance, whose mission it was to reconcile Christianity with the natural charm they felt in the early pagan Greek worship, Pico was ’’one of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained the claim on men’s faith of the pagan religions,” He absorbed without reservation the Platonic cultus of his time, with special affinity for the mystical elements therein, ”the chilling touch of the ab. stract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to long for,” He scanned sympathetically and minutely the legends and myths of the older cosmogonies. Yet he was firmly intrenched in the philosophy of the School, In the manner characteristic of knight -errants of philo- sophy, he offered to defend nine hundred paradoxes upon his first arrival at Rome, and he died in the habit of Saint Dominic, The writing of Pico was inspired by deep emotion, compounded of a curious blending of the religious and artistic sensibilities with which he was so richly endowed. However he fell short of com- plete attainment of his ideal, he remains a significant figure, at least, of the upward impulse to achieve, in a century ” great rather by what it designed to do or aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved,” Bx forti dul cedo -- out of the strong, sweetness, --Pater took as the leitmotif of his appreciation of the poetical quality of Michelangelo’s sculpture. His was a lovely, but virile, genius, se- curing consummate artistry and ideality of expression by a certain incompleteness in the conception of its subject. And his verse too follows closely in its ’’effort to tranquillize and sweeten life in idealizing its vehement sentiments”, the latter of the two great tra- ditional types, the one expressed in the Vita Nuova of Dante, the t t < t < i X < c t t < < . , < , t i < K l < - 16 - ion of Numa had lost all vitality* They amused themselves with all phil osophies, stoicism. Platonism, neopythagoreanism, and dialectics* But it was remote from the atmosphere of Rome, at White-nights "an old country-house, half farm, half villa,” that Marius was born, near the end of the reign of Antoninus Pius, Marius was educated de voutly in the old religion, because of the remoteness of the villa from the decadent thought of the urban centres, and perhaps because of a traditional partly sacerdotal character which clung to the male head of the family, and which Marius* father carefully cherished. To familiarity with the ritual and symbolism of religion, Marius joined ”a great seriousness -- an impressibility to the sacred ness of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship”, all of which became the sign in him of the development far beyond the ordinary of a sense of relitious responsibility. All this filled the lad with a sense of reverence, of the H sacred pre- sences” with which life seemed to be filled. The appeal of the religion was for him a strange mingling of sensuousness and austerity ---a trait which he carried with him throughout his life, and one which furnishes us with the true key to his nature. He was at once highly intellectual, deeply religious, and strangely susceptible to sense-impressions, as all aesthetic natures must be. The motive of his 3tory, which is, as a story, the merest thread of narrative, is his earnest attempt to orient himself in the world, to find a reli- gious or philosophical basis upon which he can adjust the antagon- istic elements in his nature, Marius was, of course, tremendously self-conscious. From the first time he began to think and observe, he fell into a practical, if not strictly philosophic, solipsism. Reality for him was only that which he found within himself, and his keenest observation was r * < < < < -17 only pointed by its application to himself* Marius was, most in- tensely, an individualist* Raymond Laurent * f inds that in Marius, " Le probl erne qui , , , s * off re a nous et s e trouve peu ei peu resolu „ est 1 e triomphe de 1 * individual isme sur 1 es forces ennemies qui 1 * opp - r iment 0 w When Marius had attained the stature of "a tall school boy" his mother died, and he was sent to Fisa to continue his education. Here he met Flavian, It is curious, despite the romantic tone of the book, that Marius formed so few attachments. For the most part, the existence of his fellows was shadowy, unreal, and a matter of slight importance to him. With the exception of Marius himself, the characters are little better than lay figures, which occupy posi- tions of more or less prominence, but whose definiteness is owing more to their position in relation to the centra] figure, than to their importance in their own character* Here we come upon one of Pater’s most definite limitations as a literary artist. The de- lineation of Marius* character, a type touched with the subtle and artful charm of decadence he accomplished with exquisite success, and one recognizes it from the most cursory reading as partly auto- biographical, It is the same sympathy in the creation of personal- ity which he infused into his most effective descriptive passages, in which he painted the decaying landscape of the Roman campagna ; "Altho the great plain was dying steadily, a new race of wild birds establishing itself there, as he knew enough of their habits to understand, and the idle contadino with his never-ending ditty of decay and death replacing the lusty Roman labourer, never had that poetic region between Rome and the •^Raymond Laurent. Etudes Anglaises.Par is . 1910.p o 180 i t i i K K f . < K * r ' - 13 - sea more deeply impressed him than on this sunless day of early autumn, under which all that fell with- in the immense horizon was presented in one uniform tone of a clear, penitential blue.. .From time to time, the way was still redolent of the floral relics of summer, daphne and myrtl e -bl ossom, sheltered in the little hollows and ravines.* * But Pater does not put the breath of life in a character such as Cornelius, the young Roman soldier who later becomes the most inti- mate friend of Marius# He is blithe, serene, self -suff icient and unquestioning, and utterly unreal 0 Pater’s description of Cornelius would bear the same relation to that of Marius, one feels, as his interpretation of the atmosphere of the Italian country of the time would have to an attempt to describe a rural America of hard roads, tractors, barbed wire fences, red barns, tile silos, shiny white houses, and scientific farmers# Flavian, with whom Marius formed the first of his two friend- ships, was three years Marius’ senior, poor, habitually proud, brilliant with a somewhat elegant literary drift, and a turn for what might be called the euphuism of life# Flavian was, even at his early age, a sensualist, and it was in his friendship with Flavian that Marius made his first intimate contact with evil in seductive guise# "How often, afterwards, did evil things present them- selves in malign association with the memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm in its natural grace!" * ♦ Marius the Bpicurean # 11.220-221. Ibid. Ip. 57. -19 But Marius remained untouched by the luxurious influence of the town, preserved by what Mr. A, C. Benson called ”a certain coldness and fastidiousness of temperament”, in which, perhaps, the religious note was significant. Marius had already begun to develop. The same meditative turn of mind which had dominated his sensual nature was exhibited in his attitude toward the schoolboy games of his associates. He noted their wholehearted struggle for prizes already become in his mind trivial 0 He could still appreciate the heat of battle and the joy of success- ful competition sympathetically, but it was inconceivable that he should enter into them with the same conpleteness. He was viewing life as a drama, or procession. Whatever figure of speech you like, it is the characteristic attitude of mind of the spectator. This incipient feeling of apartness which was later to grow into a fundamental constituent of character, was accompanied by the first intimations of Epicureanism. ”He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art, name- ly, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday life-- of so exclusively living in them--that the un- adorned remainder of it, the mere drift or debris of our days, comes to be as tho it were not.”* Marius and Flavian pursued their literary training together, an important incident of which was the reading of the ” Golden Book ” of Apuleius, containing the story of Cupid and Psyche. However im- portant the occasion was in stimulating Marius, it is of considerably less interest to one who wishes to follow the development of Marius’ * Ibid, p . 57 . . . « < - 20 . characters and who wou]d be wi.33i.ng to accept his successive states of mind as indicated, without the offering of lengthy evidence in their support* The fact that the adaptation in the hands of Pater is very fine3y done 8 scarce3y atones for a break of fifty pages in the narrative* Flavian became the victim of a pesti3ence which the army, re- cent3y returned from Parthia, brought with it* In the 3ast moments, the ta3ent of Flavian shone most brightly, and Marius conceived an ardent admiration for the “richness of imagery” and “firmness of out. 3ine“ which was the especial quality of his writing* “Flavian was no more,*' His death came to Marius like “a final revelation of nothing less than the soul’s extinction”, and marked the end of Marius’ childish religious faith. It was the first mile- stone on his soul’s journey* After this, it is but natural that we find Marius, lacking his only intimate, congenial human relationship, turning with deep passion to the life of reflection, and accepting an existence of detachment from his fellows without complaint* It was the sign of the real budding of the “high Epicureanism” which found “a poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought.” The writings of Heraclitus and Aristippus were the sources from which Marius drew strength to fortify himself in his new posi. tion* From the Heraclitean cosmogony Marius learned that the world is a machine; that nature is in a constant state of flux, of constant mutation and qualitative transformation* What was most important of all, he came to believe in sensation as the criterion of truth* This doctrine he applied empirically and faithfully, and reality, when re— ( t i t < t t 1 -21 - duced to the experience of the individual, came to consist for him of the bital and significant experience which was his own; that of all others vague, because vicarious. He learned "that the individual is to himself the measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty to himself of his own impressions” , This might and did easily become the theoretical basis for a hedonistic code of conduct,, A1 tho Heraclitus taught that ” tout metaphysique est vaine qui pretend a expl iquer 1 1 essenc e et 1 * etre " *, Marius found that "ab- stract philosophy became with Aristippus a very subtly practical wordly -wisdom" . Abstract metaphysics held not only possibilities for the individual to bewilder himself methodically, but, for him who holds the key to them, to become translated into intelligent conduct, with a valuable adjunct in the way of possibilities rich in senti- ment,, These elements drawn from Heraclitus and the Cyrenian philos- ophy joined themselves to Marius’ natural deftness in seeking out and fastening upon "the ideal or poetic traits" of life, so that the measure of completeness in life came to mean for him the finding of "elements of distinction" in it, and the conscious cultivation of an attitude of obliviousness to its "drift or debris", " Marius cherche une doctrine , pratique , une cul ture , une education destinee a elargir et aff iner see facul tes receptives , c est -a -dire 1 e domaine des sensations e t de 1 * emotion , Le plaisir n ’ est pas le t erme de cette phil - osophie ; cel 1 e -ci a pour ideal une general completeness of life, vie dont la vie est 1 e but, ou t ous I es phenomene3 concourent , ♦ Laurent. p,194. < < « r t -22 accor d auquel r ien ne manque de £e qui exlste* sorte de mu s igue au sens platonicien du root ” . * This educative culture, the highest apprehension of his sen- sations and emotions, together with a fulness of life in which the emphasis was laid upon "aesthetic charm" and "austerity of mind" "be- came Marius* chief pursuit* To pass most swiftly from point to point, to "be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest enerty", to make ecstacy, "ex- quisite passion", the mark of the successful life, became the creed of "the new Cyrenaicism" evolved by Marius* It is the very essence of the philosophy of life of Pater himself, as stated in the famous "Conclusion" in The Renaissance , which he held consistently from the beginning to the end of his career* With the Cyrenaic creed definitely formulated, Marius* nature whose dual character was alluded to at the outset, was rounded out* His was to be an attitude, consciously assumed, of active receptivity to the sensual elements in life, and an intell ectual iz ing of vivid sensation into "whatever form of human life might be heroic, im- passioned, ideal", the ideal of life being untouched by hedonism, but aiming rather at "a general completeness*" The aim being a complete life, Marius settled upon the selec- tive principle as a working program* He found it desirable to cherisb as precious all intense sensation, "including noble pain and sorrow even", and to discard and obliterate the rest by a deliberate closing of the avenues of sense to life’s debris . The result was the develop- ment of a fastidiousness and refinement so delicately pointed that he gave himself up wholeheartedly to the cultivation of the aesthetic * ♦ Laurent, p* 194 < < < * r t t < * * •* « , ► * 1 / -23- Marius became a person temperament a] 1 y akin to the honnete homme of the age de 3 a preciosit e whose distinctive quality of spirit was de- scribed by Mere with brilliant penetration as consisting " princ i - pal ement n* avoir pas ce j e ne sais quoi de nobl e et d* exquls qui el eve un honnete homme au -dess u s d* un autre honnete homme . ** * After having formulated the creed of aestheticism and in- tensity of sensation, Fater assumed the task of making a place for morality in it® For the place of morality is not immediately per- ceived. To one bent on the H impassioned realization of experience” morality may appear very much like a convention which must be reso- lutely brushed aside in the quest of self-realization® But to Marius, whom we can scarcely conceive of being immoral, but who might easily have fallen into an attitude that was non-moral, the position of morality in the aesthetic philosophy was clearly out- lined® In a life whose ultimate happiness is based upon a M pleasure and the good which come from the fair adornment of life itself” the absence of a moral code would be a kind of incompl eteness, and in- completeness an imperfection® Pater* s insight failed to discover to him, as Mr. Robert Shafer * has pointed out, that the purely aes- thetic appeal for morality and religion is in effect the most in- sidious attack upon it. For in such instances, both morality and religion become the handmaidens of a philosophy or cult, and Philosophy invariably betrays Morality® ♦ Mere* Lettre a Mme® la Duchesse de Lesdiguieres, Lanson £ Lettres du XVII siecl e . p.150,153. quoted Histoire ill us tree de la Litterature Francaise . Paris, 1918. by k* Abry; C.AuHTo; P.Crouzet. p. 138. Robert Shafer. Walter Pater Redivivus. Reprinted from The Open Court . April, 1920, p. 8-9. » < < < - 24 - At the end of his career, Marius was to experience such a re- crudescence of his religious instincts, as he now held in framing his apology for moral s„ Throughout his life, from the time he aban- doned the old traditional religion and set sail on the sea of philo- sophy, Marius never succeeded in divorcing himself from his intense subjectivity. The frequent use of the word "mused” indicates his reaction to his experiences* He recollected in tranquility the sen- sations and ideas of the past, turned them over and examined them idly, with an interest that was casual and dilettante, but unflagging When his later observations among the Christians at Cecilia’s house reawakened his early susceptibility to emotional religious exper- ience, the conversion was never more actual than a graceful response to the aesthetic qualities of the new rel ition --the mystery of the Host, the sacerdotal air of the white-robed bishop, the happy faces of worshippers, and stifled sobs of penitents, the element of novelty in a faith based upon a vaguely apprehended Hebrew cosmogony, and filled with a buoyant hope that blew with stimulating, exhilarating freshness across an age weary of hard speculation, and sophisticated thought. We find Marius, nineteen years old, eminently the Epicurean, at court, attached to the person of the emperor in the capacity of amanuensis. The day after Marius’ arrival in Rome, the emperor re- turned triumphant] y from a bloodless campaign on the Danube. The emperor is described sympathetically, with the purpose in view of bringing out the intimate, personal element in a character whose moral virtue, stoical philosophy, and imperial tolerance history has fully treated, but whose essential humanity has seldom been given such a kindly touch as Pater’s. 1 K < i - 25 - Marius first saw Marcus Aurelius in the triumphal procession. He saw a man about forty-five years old; "with prominent eyes --eyes which, although demurely downcast during this essentially religious ceremony, were by nature broadly and benignantly observant;” hair brown and Clustering thickly"; a brow "low, broad and cl ear.., the brow of one who, amid the blindness of perplexity of the people about him, \uider stood all things clearly". The outward serenity of the emperor, mottled from time to time, it seemed to Marius, by the passing shadow of some unguessed cloud upon the spirit, strengthened the feeling of asceticism which the spareness of the emperor’s body gave him. The interview which followed sometime afterward, in which Marius was introduced to the emperor, left him with his first impressions of Aurelius, amplified and intensified. At this time he also met the empress Faustina, -- a mysterious, enigmatic, curiosity -stimulating beauty, about whom all Rome gabbled, and whose beauty and "license of gaze" occupied his mind for some time. Some months later Marius, together with Aurelius, Faustina, "a crowd of exquisites", and all the fashionable people who found the cultivation of philosophy pleasant and profitable, assembled at the temple of Peace to hear Marcus Cornelius Fronto discourse on the Nature of Moral s. in which Fronto was to recommend morality to the company according to the doctrine of Stoicism. Marius was, at this time, still possessed with the desire to taste all the experiences of life with intense ecstacy. We can imagine him in these days breaking off the chain of his reflections and apostrophizing Life in the words of Stevenson’s Wil 1 0 / the Mill ; t * t . ' • .1 -26 ’"You would not have me die like a dog and not see all that is to "be seen, and do all that a man can do, let it he good or evil? You would not have me spend all my days between this road here and the river, and not so much as make a motion to be up and live my own life?"* Yet too, as was indicated above, * Marius was concerned with the disposal of his moral code* Tho he had yielded up his religious faith upon attaining his intellectual majority, he clung tenaciously to the moral regiment which his own strong ethical bent demanded,, Now as he came under the influence of the stoic philosophy in prox- imity to the emperor and old Front o, he was wavering somewhat in the pursuit of intensity. -As he inclined more and more to the stoic position, he began to see--and in the discourse of old Fronto, the seeing became clearer--how the old morality might be reconciled to the new philosophy, the avenue of escape being a "kind of artistic order in life” by which moral ity, or at least practical rectitude* would receive the sanction of custom, and of good taste 0 At this point Pater introduces his own criticism of the Cyrenaic view of life; "And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaic ism is ever the characteristic philo- sophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its survey-- sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical. It is one of those subjective and par- tial ideals, based on vivid, because limited, appre- hension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world, and the » p.9 r < < < - 27 . brevity of man’s life there) which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to egress/ * The precise way in which the philosophy of Cyrenaicism was costly to him did not appeal immediately to Marius in any such way as it appears in the clear exposition which Pater gave it* But he did come to detect "some craming, narrowing, costly, preference of one part of his own nature” and that he "paid a great price” for such a life "in the sacrifice of a thousand sympathies.” While conscious of an active dissatisfaction with a life which he felt lacked breadth, Marius again visited the emperor. Aurelius had just determined to sell the treasures of the imperial household at auction in order to obtain funds to prosecute the war. Marius finds him, as Benson says, feeling "an austere joy in the pleasure of a deep philosophical detachment from the world”. Be» cause of his temperamental sensitiveness to the psychical states of others, sharpened, as it was, by the state of mind he was in, Marius could not but feel himself tremendously impressed by the joy which the emperor felt in renunciation, which he realized readily enough, was of a higher and deeper quality than the purest Epicurean delight he might have experienced in their continued possession. Marius* personal relationship with the emperor came to an abrupt and poignantly tragic end. Cn an official visit to Praenestp, a favorite rural retreat of Aurelius*, he found the imperial resi. dence prostrated with grief because of an incurable illness which had seized the child Annius Verus. By an inadvertent trespass on the privacy of the emperor’s grief, he saw him carry the dying child away "pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its ob- ' < < < < t < l < ( < ( -28 scure distress. 1 ’ A short time later he saw Aurelius depart for the war, ”to make public rule nothing less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato’s requirement, now consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on the Danube.” Several years are supposed to have passed* Marius was attend- ing a notable banquet at which both the young Commodus and the great Apuleius were present* Marius engaged Apuleius in conversation on the terrace after the banquet had broken up* Apuleius was a Platon- ist, but one who made pretensions to ” ideal vision”, and drew from his lively interest in the outward world (his extraordinary personal history had been one which exhibited ideally the life of passing from point to point to reach centres of intensity) a peculiar con- ception of the Platonic Idea * Apuleius revealed to Marius his belief in a middle order of beings midway between the gods and men, ’’through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us”. It is, in brief, angel - ology* This view of the world brought to him very nearly a heighten- ed feeling of the loneliness of the actual world. Yet for all the appeal of such fantastic visions to his nature, Marius felt that he must cling to the world of sense, ”must still hold by what his eyes really saw.” While the ideas he gained from Apuleius were still vivid, he visited with Cornelius, a Roman knight whom he had met on his first journey to Rome, and with whom he had contracted a friendship deeper than any other attachment he ever experienced, the house of Cecilia, a Christian, and friend of the latter, whom Marius suspected of beiig a strong influence in preserving the freshness and strength and sim- plicity of character which he marvelled at in Cornelius* . , . * * ' < c * < * < « . ■ : , « , - 29 - The house of Cecilia revived in Marius to an overwhelming de- gree certain of his early r ecol 3 ec tions, He experienced again the serious joy he had conceived in places especially sympathetic to his emotional nature, the hieratic significance which he attached to the singing of children, to the thought of virtuous women, and ’’all the various affections of family life under its most natural conditions,” Marius investigated an old garden in the rear of the house, anc came upon the burying place of the Cecil ii which Cecilia had de- voted to the Christian cause, and which was rapidly becoming H a vast necropolis”. There was a special appeal for Marius in the fact that these people, contrary to the current pagan custom of burning the bodies of the deceased and preserving the ashes in elaborate urns, faithfully preserved the whole body, as though fearful of the com- plete dissolution of the material body, and, perhaps, sensible of "some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body”. Indeed, it seemed to Marius that the ideal of hope had become almost what might be called the motif of the tomb. He found it in the in- scriptions which he noticed carefully; ” Januarius , Agapetus . ffel icitas ; Martyrs ! refresh , pray you , the soul of Cecil , of Cornel ius j in the placing of favorite toys beside the graves of children; in the consolations of the martyrs’ graves. There was a mystical appeal in this ”strange new hope” which played movingly upon his sensuous nature, so heavily weighed down with Wei tschmerz 0 In this case, his stern decidion, the intellectual exigency by which he demanded of himself that he confine himself to his empirical philosophy, was relaxed, and the memory of his mystical experience, unexplained, and amounting al - most to intuition, he carried over into his emotional life, and -30- germinated "a new element therein, with which, consistently with his own chosen maxim, he must make terms,” It was the genius of the Christianity of the time, as Pater saw it that "the church was true for a moment, truer, perhaps, than she would ever toe again, to that element of profound serenity in the soul of her Pounder which reflected the eternal good-will of God to man, 'in whom’ according to the oldest version of the ang- elic message, ’He is wel 1 -pi eased’ ** „ * Marius sensed in it the urtoane ideal of culture, of defining the path of humanism. Abandoning the fanaticism of its earlier and more tempestuous days, the Roman Church had already reached a maturity which was reflected in a more graceful and less ascetic faith which permitted the flourishing of the very ideal which Marius had come to cherish since he abandoned Cyrenaicism with its suppression of "a thousand sympathies" --the ideal of the "harmonious development of all parts of human nature, in just proportion to each other," Mr, Paul Elmer More, of an austere mind which makes him not the most sympathetic critic of Pater, believes the Christianity of, Montanism is nearer the real Christianity of the second century than "the sweet volup tousness of religion as it appeared to Marius" • ** It is better for one unversed in ecclesiastical history, it appears to me, to dodge the question at issue, than to attempt an interpre- tation of the spirit of Christianity in 200 A,D, Whether Pater was wrong in his interpretation of history or no, certain it is that there is no anachronism in the serenity and urbanity of the spirit * Ibid. II p«l 26. *♦ Paul K, More, The Drift of Romanticism, N.Y.1913, p«95, -31 of the Church as viewed through Marius* temperament* And if there were discordant currents in the religion of the times, it is "but natural that Marius, romantic and intensely subjective, should see the Church standing as a symbol for commen-sense, fairness, and naturalness, and the bishops of Rome, with a catholicity transcend- ing dogma, defining the true path of humanism, Marius went, one early morning to the villa of Cecilia in search of Cornelius, and became a witness of the celebration of the Eucharist, The experience satisfied his passion for worship as it had never been satisfied before. The whole atmosphere of the cere- mony, so far as it concerned Marius, was saturated in the romantic glow of ritual, liturgy, mysticism. The character of the pontiff was composed of ”the expression, the manner and voice,... as he took his seat on the white chair...” The long staff, badge of his office, seemed to exert a strange mesmeric power over the imagination of Marius, ~«and the moving hands, ”hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious power”, seemed to fascinate him with their languid gesture. And he observed ecstatically the H chanting in cadence of a grave sweetness the leading parts of the rite. What profound unction and mysticityl” What a profound distillation of the essence of Paterisra, one might remark. The ’’passion for worship” satisfied in Marius was more sensuous, exquisitely attenuated, than any religious faith--a conscious, artistic refinement of emotion finely drawn and aesthet - icised , a temperament pursuing its own shadow in the purlieus of Gethsemane« Indeed, one feels that it would not be far wrong to say that the humanism of the Roman Church militant, the urbane catholicity of her adherents, as Pater represented them, were not so much the c < < < t 1 < i < t -32 sign of the times as of Pater’s own insurmountabl e subjectivity. The aesthetic romanticism of the bi ithe bishops arose, as a matter of fact, from the same cult of cheer as that which was to produce twenty years later the facilely philosophical, blithe pagan in evening clothes. At this point a long dialogue is introduced between Lucian* the satirist, and young Hermotimus, Like the adaptation from Apuleius’ Gol den Book it is a rare piece of literature in itself, but it frays badly the slender thread of the narrative, Hermotimus is an enthusiastic young student of philosophy, earnest, blushing, modestly ingenu . The substance of the dialogue is made up of PI a- tonic philosophy, interpreted by Pater, and the upshot of the talk is "that the adoption of any form of philosophic belief is dictated by a preference and an instinct in the disciple," There follow a series of incidents which Marius had recorded in his diary, all of which were designed to play upon theemotions of pity and sympathy; a wounded racehorse lead to slaughter, a young peasant woman and her husband bringing a toil-worn and broken old mother to a house provided for afflicted people, a delicate child bathed in the dust of a brick furnace, "regarding wistfully his own place in the world, there before him", a little girl playing blithe- ly with her hopelessly crippled brother, happily unaware of the tragedy which must enter their lives when lovers come for her, while the even monotony of his existence drags dully on. In reviewing such incidents ad these, Marius finds that he has failed in love and human charity in shutting himself into a life of meditation, "I would that a stronger love might arise in my heartl", he cries. It is intimated at various points that Marius cherished a more than brotherly love for Cecilia, Yet he kept his passion re- . , ' < * < < c c t .33 markably well curbed: "It had always been his policy, through all his pursuit of ’experience’ , to take flight in time from any too disturbing passion, from any sort of affection likely to quicken his pulses be- yond the point at which the quiet work of 1 if e was practicable,"* It is fortunate for the lady that she entertained no recipro- cal affection. It would surely have seemed to her that he was al- most too much the master of his turbulent emotions I As a matter of fact, one feels that there is something lacking in a man so well disciplined. Such calm sureness is not far removed from complacency and smugness, Marius managed to attain a kind of detachment, in which he could view his own emotion objectively. It became for him a thing delicately touched with poetry, whose ebb and flow he could watch with the exquisite pleasure of a connoiseur, like "another man’s story, or a picture on the wall". The following spring Marius ventured to hear the Easter cere- monies, at which were read the "Epistle of the churches of Lyons and Vienne", They told of persecutions and martyrdoms, instigated by Mar