A shrill music, a laughter at all things - Dionysian Walter Pater

Max Beerbohm’s “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton” includes a joke that requires some readerly inference:

… when Braxton’s first book appeared fauns had still an air of novelty about them.  We had not yet tired of them and their hoofs and their slanting eyes and their way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from respectability.  We did tire later.

There must have been so, so many of those things.  Walter Pater wrote one of them, his Imaginary Portrait  “Denys l’Auxerrois,” and provided the intellectual support for some of the others in several of the essays in Greek Studies (1894).  Dionysus was one of Pater’s subjects.  This mild, ascetic man and his theoretical bacchanals.

Denys is the god Dionysus in a degenerate medieval form.  He mysteriously appears in Auxerre as a child, becomes an organ-builder and musician, and leads the townspeople into frenzy.

The hot nights were noisy with swarming troops of disheveled women and youths with red-stained limbs and faces, carrying their lighted torches over the vine-clad hills, or rushing down the streets, to the horror of timid watchers, towards the cool spaces by the river.  A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere.

The vintage becomes, of course, especially good.  Wine snobs may sneer: sure, the vintage of Chablis!  Now, now.

But Pater is up on the latest scholarship, as he shows in Greek Studies, and his Dionysus is not the triumphant god of the Bacchae of Euripides but rather a true fertility god, flourishing but also dying with the seasons, so that it is not the unbelievers but Denys himself who is torn apart in a frenzy. 

The monk Hermes sought in vain next day for any remains of the body of his friend.  Only, at nightfall, the heart of Denys was brought to him by a stranger, still entire.  It must long since have mouldered into dust, under the stone, marked with a cross, where he buried it in a dark corner of the cathedral aisle.

Denys’s life and death are also pictured in a stained glass window that gets “Pater’s” attention, putting a frame around the story.  I have been in that very cathedral, I believe I have even heard the organ there, but no one pointed out the window or where the heart of a reincarnated Greek god was kept as a relic.

I might not have read Pater’s Greek Studies if I had not just read The Birth of Tragedy (1872).  Pater is less fanciful, or bold, than Friedrich Nietzsche.  In particular, he does not think Euripides destroyed tragedy but rather takes The Bacchae as a useful and genuine example of Greek religious expression.  He turns the Euripides play into another imaginary portrait, some mix of criticism, like a summary with commentary, and fiction, but with essayistic digressions.   He does the same for the myths of Demeter and Persephone and the Hippolytus of Euripides.  As criticism, it is odd, but enjoyable, personable.

The Renaissance is easily Pater’s best book, followed by the 1888 collection Appreciations, which I have barely mentioned, but further reading in Pater was rewarding, if often confusing.  Imaginary Portraits deserves a fresh look, but by whom, exactly?

he loved the distant - Pater's Imaginary Portraits - Anything so beautiful is not to be seen now

These semi-fictions Walter Pater wrote, like “The Child in the House” or the four in Imaginary Portraits (1887), they should lead to a Pater revival.  They are not so different than some of the imaginary portraits in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) or László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below (2008), where aesthetic ideas are often the subject of the fiction.  In Pater’s stories, as in Seiobo, beauty is apparently trying to murder its devotees.

People are into hybrid works now, right?  Pater was an early Hybridist.

Two of the Imaginary Portraits are about artists.  “Sebastian von Storck” is about a Dutch painter who dies young from excessive objectivity and exposure to Spinoza, while “A Prince of Court Painters” is Jean-Antoine Watteau, another painter who dies young, a real painter, I will note.  The narrator ends her account of Watteau’s life with:

He has been a sick man all his life.  He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.

Pater was, or thought he was, related to Watteau, and the story is narrated by a Pater.  Little autobiographical details show up in surprising place in the Portraits.   “Sebastian von Storck” has autobiographical touches, too, often I think inverted:

For though Sebastian von Storck refused to travel, he loved the distant – enjoyed the sense of things seen from a distance, as on wide wings of space itself, far out of one’s actual surroundings.

His ideal is “an intellectual disinterestedness, of a domain of unimpassioned mind,” which hardly sounds like the champion of subjective criticism, yet what are the Imaginary Portraits if not things seen from a great distance?

“Denys l’Auxerrois” is about a werewolf, sort of.  You would think that would make it more exciting than it is.  The story is set in early modern Auxerre, which Pater calls “the prettiest town in France,” an opinion I find plausible.  It is also the center of the production of Chablis, which is why Pater uses it, the combination of beauty and wine.  But I want to save this one.

Finally – Imaginary Portraits is a short book – “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” begins as if it is a German novella, with a pair of skeletons, male and female, discovered when a giant tree comes down in a storm.  Could it be the mysteriously vanished Duke? (Sure, why not).  But then the bulk of the story, the flashback, is about the Duke’s failed half-measures to improve and civilize his duchy with “French plays, French architecture, French looking-glasses,” to be the “Apollo of the North.”  German literature fails him – “Was German literature always to remain no more than a kind of penal apparatus for the teasing if the brain?” – while German music does better.  He travels, pursuing the ideals of Greece and Italy, but somehow never sets foot outside of Germany.

The story is a parody of the life of Goethe.  First, assume Goethe is himself the Duke of Weimar, or the Duke of Weimar is somehow Goethe, and that he is born too soon, active at the beginning of the 18th century rather than the end, when the aesthetic and intellectual ground for his ideas have not been prepared, Goethe without Lessing and Herder.  This is all stated plainly on the book’s last page.  The story actually ends with the image of young Goethe skating.  He was a perfect ice skater,  He did everything well. 

“There skated my son, like an arrow among the groups.  Away he went over the ice like a son of the gods.  Anything so beautiful is not to be seen now.  I clapped my hands for joy.  Never shall I forget him as he darted out from one arch of the bridge, and in again under the other, the wind carrying the train behind him as he flew.”

absolutely the reddest of all things - Pater's imaginary self-portrait - this pressure upon him of the sensible world

Walter Pater developed a strange, oblique form of fiction he called the “imaginary portrait.”  Writing about Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater’s only attempt at a novel-length “portrait,” I wrote that he had no gift for character or story.  His “portraits” are fictions merged with essays, so their pleasures are closer to those of criticism.  In fact, much of his criticism – a startling amount, I thought – consists of imaginary portraits created from life, or literature, Leonardo da Vinci or the Hippolytus of Euripides turned into the subjects of not short stories, exactly, and not biographies, but “portraits.”  Whatever those are.

I am honestly not sure that I quite know how to read them yet.

“The Child in the House” (1878) is Pater’s most plainly autobiographical example.  The narrator describes a man remembering, in various ways, his early childhood in a particular house, and how a range of sensory experiences formed his aesthetic and ethical sense.

Sensibility – the desire of physical beauty – a strange biblical awe, which made any reference to the unseen act on him like solemn music – these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about the age of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in another place.

Anyone who ever wonders what Pater means, or what I mean, by the link between ethics and aesthetics, “The Child in the House” is not a bad place to go.  Sometimes the idea is as simple as the character learning about kindness or dignified death from this pets – “the white angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a flower, who fell into a lingering sickness, and became quite delicately human in its valetudinarianism, and came to have a hundred different expressions of voice” – and sometimes something more complex, like the discovery of the sublime, when “this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death – the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty.”

Much of the child’s aesthetic development is attached to specific sensory impressions, as he is “played upon by them like a musical instrument.”  The light on the snow, an illustration of Jacob wrestling the angel, an encounter with the open grave of a child, “this pressure upon him of the sensible world.”

If this sounds like something out of Proust, yes; “The Child in the House” is the most Proustian bit of pre-Proustian prose I have ever seen, most blatant in the child’s encounter with a “a great red hawthorn in full flower,” a clear reference to Marcel’s tearful embrace of his beloved hawthorn in Swann’s Way (1913), the most pathetic scene in literature.

… the beauty of the thing struck home to him feverishly; and in dreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about his feet, and fill softly all the little hollows in the banks on either side.  Always afterwards, summer by summer, as the flowers came on, the blossom of the red hawthorn still seemed to him absolutely the reddest of all things; and the goodly crimson, still alive in the works of old Venetian masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out always from afar the recollection of the flame in those perishing little petals, as it pulsed gradually out of them, kept long in the drawers of an old cabinet.

It is as if Pater is tracing his career, his affinity for Renaissance art, to the color of childhood hawthorn petals.

Pater analyzes and reduces - What effect does it really produce on me?

Rummaging through the poets of the 1890s, and reading the letters of Oscar Wilde, I had one constant thought: “I need to read more Walter Pater.”  These Decadents and their Walter Pater.

Now I have read more Pater, four books on top of The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), and I am baffled.  What seems to have happened is that Pater’s disciples pulled a handful of passages – more like lines – out of The Renaissance and built an aesthetic out of them.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life…  For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.  (“Conclusion”)

And similar Greatest Hits of the Art For Art’s Sake aesthetic, not exactly out of context, but getting there.  For Pater himself was by temperament nothing like a decadent, a scholar more than an aesthete, an Epicurean of the ascetic kind.  He is devoted to nothing but beauty and pleasure, and what is more pleasurable than analyzing poetry?

What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?  What effect does it really produce on me?  Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure?  (“Preface”)

We are almost all Paterian critics now – in my case, much more so than I had realized – but many of his descendants, knowing and otherwise stop here.  But Pater keeps going:

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind.  The influence he feels, and wishes to explain, by analysing and reducing it to its elements…  His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others…  (“Preface”)

So Pater is one of those critics who wants to be “scientific” somehow?  No, not remotely.  He is a sincere devotee of pleasure and beauty.  The chemistry business is just a metaphor.

Some of Pater’s rhetoric makes more sense set against Matthew Arnold’s guff about “objective” criticism, all of his bluster about “high seriousness” and understanding the “truth” of the artistic object.  Any given piece of criticism by Arnold has plenty of insights, but I find his rhetoric hard to take.  Pater, the “subjective” critic, is just as interested in the truth of the work of art, but is open about the process of aesthetic experience, the steps it takes to reach that truth.  Pleasure in one aspect of art pulls him, and me, in to others.  An exciting plot leads me to an interesting character who tricks me into thinking about an ethical question which directs me to the author’s rhetoric.

Arnold does this, too, everyone does.  Pater’s transparency does make clearer the possibility of other ways into a work of art, responses from other directions.  But everyone, in the end, is studying the object.  In practice, Pater’s criticism looks a lot like Arnold’s.  The “me” is hardly visible.

Or it is channeled elsewhere.  Pater uses a strange, original form for that purpose.  I will write something about it, something even more shallow and uncomprehending than this post.

The Renaissance is a great book, by the way, a great book about Renaissance art.  Just ignore everything I wrote here.  The Leonardo chapter, the Winckelmann chapter – so rich in ideas. 

Walter Pater's Rome - at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red

Marius the Epicurean is in form a historical novel about 2nd century Rome, but a historical novel that allows itself lines like:

And the scene of the night-watching of a dead body  lest the witches should come to tear off the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of Théophile Gautier.  (Ch. 5, describing The Golden Ass)

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it does but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all times.  (Ch. 6, from a rich argument about style and literary decadence)

A phrase from Goethe’s Faust, a long quotation from Rousseau’s Émile, offhand references to Cardinal Newman and Walter Savage Landor – one might think the book is in fact some kind of work of literary criticism.  In part it is.  Part of the challenge of reading Pater is that the art criticism, literary essays, and fiction are all in service of a long continuing argument.  The imaginary portrait of Marius is different in form than the historical portraits of Leonardo and Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1873), but not in purpose.

I am not convinced that all of these forms should be used like this.  Maybe they should have different purposes!  All part of learning to read Pater.

Regardless, if the historical novel is rarely convincing, the novelized history is often excellent, especially in the chapters about Rome, “that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people… heroism in ruin” (Ch. 12), as in the descriptions of the horrific “games” involving the slaughter of men and animals in Chapter 14 – Marius rejects Stoicism in large part because of Marcus Aurelius’s indifference to the cruelty of the arena combats – or the marvelous “day in the life of Rome” in Chapter 11:

They visited the flower-market, lingering where the coronarii pressed on them the newest species, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like painted flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their togas.  Loitering to the other side of the Forum, past the great Galen's drug-shop [another celebrity cameo], after a glance at the announcements of new poems on sale attached to the doorpost of a famous bookseller [there is more reading, more book-buying in Marius than I would have guessed], they entered the curious library of the Temple of Peace, then a favourite resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the Diurnal or Gazette of the day…

I began to wonder if Pater was secretly describing a day in London.

The twelfth chapter is one of the book’s hybrids, a “speech” by Marcus Aurelius that is – I think – an ingenious hodgepodge of Meditations, Ecclesiastes, and Shakespeare. The speech somehow ends with not just the fall of night but the coming of winter, “the hardest that had been known in a lifetime.” 

The wolves came from the mountains; and, led by the carrion scent, devoured the dead bodies which had been hastily buried during the plague, and, emboldened by their meal, crept, before the short day was well past, over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna.  The eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds across the dusky sky.  Only, in the city itself the winter was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who could pay for light and warmth.  The habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red.

Now, this is not London, right?  This is Rome, Pater’s Rome.

So next, the Rome of Henry James.

living in that full stream of refined sensation - notes on Marius the Epicurean

This is the week – well, a week – in which I write about authors no one cares about, burning off any interest generated by my previously untranslated César Aira story (actual interest generated: none).  This is all leading up to Henry James, to The Portrait of a Lady.  But now, Marius the Epicurean (1885).

As a novel, a total failure.  Walter Pater had no gift for character or story, and as a result Marius was hard to read and will be harder to remember.  A young Roman explores a range of ethical systems, not just the Epicureanism of the title, before dying as a kind of non-Christian Christian martyr.  Characters include every celebrity of the time – meaning people I had heard of: Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius (a translation of the Cupid and Psyche section of The Golden Ass is inserted into the book), and Lucian, who stars in a fine, amusing Lucianic dialogue.

The novel is a hybrid, and should perhaps be more read than it is for that alone, since hybrids are in vogue now.  But how many readers at this point will care which ethical system Marius adopts?  Especially when the choice is an idealized, aestheticized early Christianity.

He has a strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things around him; their fading, momentary graces and attractions.  His natural susceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience, seems to demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of things; with their aesthetic character, as it is called – their revelations to the eye and the imagination; not so much because those aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because to be occupied, in this way, with the aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature, and of theirs, which, for him at least, are matter of the most real kind of apprehension.  (Ch. 16)

The passage perhaps makes Pater seem even less readable than he really is.  I need two more lines:

As other men are concentrated upon truths of number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of refined sensation.  And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he claims an entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above all, from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.

In other words, aesthetic concerns are ethical concerns, and are just as real as any other aspect of reality.  Even the turn to the early Church at the novel’s end is based on an aesthetic response to the service and music and iconography (see Chapter 23), much like the aestheticized defense of Catholicism Chateaubriand makes in The Genius of Christianity (1802).  For Pater’s Marius, his interest in Christianity is ethical because it is aesthetic.

I do not know if anyone else was thinking, when I was messing around with the English poets of the 1890s, “this dude needs to read more Pater,” but that is certainly what I was thinking, and here we have 500 words demonstrating that I have been reading more Pater.

Nobody reads it. - Henry Esmond, Thackeray's best book - a survey of opinion

Kind-hearted commenters have directed me to many other writers who have expressed their high opinion of The History of Henry Esmond.  Virginia Woolf thought it was Thackeray’s best novel, as did Anthony Trollope.

Walter Pater, in Appreciations (1889) calls it “a perfect fiction” (Newman’s Idea of a University is, in the same sentence, “the perfect handling of a theory”, and the Mallomar is “the perfect marshmallow-filled cookie”) – “Thackeray’s Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests.”  By its what, now?  Pater often loses me somewhere along the way.

Oscar Wilde declares that “Esmond is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.”*  That “because” should make a fellow nervous.  I refer readers to the not-so-brief quotation from Henry Esmond I posted yesterday, and would be delighted to read a defense of its “beauty.”  Not what he meant; I know.

What all of these writers, even Trollope, a true follower of Thackeray, have in common is a particular interest in style, in writerly tricks and effects, in difficulty, what John Crowley calls “a skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction.”  Other writers, and critics like me, are delighted with the “how” of the book, while the “what” slips into the background.

Henry Esmond is, after all, filled with duels and deathbed confessions and kings in disguise, the usual melodramatic claptrap.  Am I supposed to take all of that seriously?  I do, actually, but that’s because of Thackeray’s writerly skill – all that fuss seems surprisingly natural.

Trollope, again, in Thackeray (1879):

I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much the best, that there was none second to it.  “That was what I intended,” he said, “but I have failed.  Nobody reads it. After all, what does it matter?” he went on after awhile.  “If they like anything, one ought to be satisfied.  After all Esmond was a prig.”  Then he laughed and changed the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. (Ch. V, 124)

Gee, poor Thackeray.  Trollope, as I mentioned yesterday, was impressed by the difficulty of Thackeray’s task, his simulation of the language of the early 18th century, of Addison and Steele and Swift, all of whom are actually characters in the novel.  Trollope suspects that the feat was so difficult that it actually damaged Thackeray’s later books – once he had mastered this new hybrid style, he was never able to free himself from it.

I will never know, because I am never going to read those later novels.  Who are we kidding?  I’m just glad I somehow was convinced to read Henry Esmond.  It’s a bit like Melville’s Clarel – it’s hardly an injustice that it is read less, even a lot less, than Vanity Fair.  Esmond is a prig, and his story has no Becky Sharp.  It’s a specialized novel.  Modernists and postmodernists should all read it carefully, even if it damages their sense that they invented everything valuable in literature.

I had sort of planned to move back to Hawthorne tomorrow.  No one will complain is I spend one more day on Henry Esmond, will they?  After all, blog posts are awfully easy to skip.

* "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) in The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1968, p. 280.