VERY little is recorded and still less is known about the pedigree of Pater. It is only in the main line of families that are established in ancestral estates, and whose home is inherited by a succession of heirs, that family traditions are apt to accumulate.
The name Pater is uncommon in England, and not at all uncommon in Holland, the Dutch frequently latinising their names; this, and the fact that a Dutch Admiral of that name settled in England at the time of William of Orange, made some members of the Pater family think they were originally of Dutch extraction; but this has never been verified. In a journey through Holland, Walter Pater was much interested in a picture at Amsterdam, by Van der Heist, of archers, with a tablet giving the names of the winners in a contest of skill; at the top of the list stands the name Pater.
The forefathers of Walter Pater were living at Weston-Underwood, near Olney in Buckinghamshire, the home of Cowper, in the eighteenth century, and some verses in the handwriting of the poet were preserved by their descendants. One of the Olney Paters emigrated to America; and here Richard Glode Pater, the father of Walter Pater, was born. Early in the nineteenth century the household returned to England, settling at Shadwell, between Wapping and Stepney; and here Richard Pater practised medicine, careless of money and success alike, a man of unobtrusive benevolence, labouring at the relief of suffering among poor people, who often could not afford to pay for his advice. Here he married a Miss Hill: four children were born to him, two sons, of whom the elder, William Thompson Pater, became a doctor and died in 1887, and two daughters. Walter Horatio Pater was born in 1839, on August 4th. Dr. Richard Pater died so early that his famous son could hardly remember him. After his death the household moved to Enfield, and here at an old house, now demolished, with a big garden, in the neighbourhood of Chase Side, the children were brought up. This quiet life was varied by visits to a place called Fish Hall, near Hadlow in Kent, the residence of Walter Pater’s cousin and godmother, Mrs. Walter May.
It is stated in biographical notices of Pater that for some generations the sons of the family had been brought up as Catholics, the daughters as Anglicans. But this has been too much insisted upon; as a matter of fact the Roman Catholicism in the family was of late date. Walter Pater’s great-grandfather was a convert, having married a lady of great piety and sweetness, whose mother’s maiden name was Gage, belonging to an old Roman Catholic family in Suffolk. Richard Pater, Walter’s father, quitted the Roman Church before his marriage, and adopted no particular form of faith; and Walter Pater was brought up as an Anglican.
At the age of fourteen the boy was sent to the King’s School, Canterbury, where he seems to have been regarded at first as idle and backward; but be was popular in spite of an entire indifference to games. Not till he entered the sixth form did his intellectual ambition awaken.
It would be interesting to know something of the thoughts of this grave, silent, and friendly boy through the impressionable years; but, like many boys of ability, he was affected by a sensitive shyness, a reticence about his inner thoughts. Cheerful, lively, chattering children, who too often, alas! degenerate into the bores of later life, can generally talk easily and unaffectedly about their tastes and interests, and blithely reveal the slender sparkling stream of their thoughts. But with boys of perceptive and meditative temperaments it is mostly far otherwise. They find themselves overmastered by feelings which they cannot express, and which they are ashamed of trying to express for fear of being thought eccentric. Pater was always apt to be reticent about his own interior feelings, and confided them only to the more impersonal medium of his writings. He had no taste at any time for indulging in reminiscence, and tended rather to be the recipient of other people’s thoughts, which he welcomed and interpreted with ready sympathy, than to be garrulous about the details of his own life, which, with characteristic humility, he was disposed to consider destitute of interest.
But one trait of character does undoubtedly emerge. He was instinctively inclined to a taste for symbolical ceremony of every kind. In the family circle he was fond of organising little processional pomps, in which the children were to move with decorous solemnity. He looked forward to taking orders in the Church of England; and this bias was strengthened by a visit he paid, as a little boy, to a house of some friends at Hursley. There he met Keble, who had a great devotion to children. Keble took a fancy to the quiet serious child, walked with him, and spoke with him of the religious life, in a way that made a deep impression on the boy’s mind, though they never met again.
There are two of Pater’s studies, The Child in the House and Emerald Uthwart, with, which it is obvious that a certain autobiographical thread is interwoven. But it is necessary to resist the temptation to take either of them as in any sense a literal representation of facts. Rather it may be said that Pater’s early years supplied him with a delicate background of reminiscence, upon which he embroidered a richer ornament of dreamful thought, using, in his own phrase, the finer sort of memory.
It is clear, however, that he was instinctively alive to impressions of sense, and that his mind was early at work observing and apprehending a certain quality in things perceived and heard, which he was afterwards to recognise as beauty. He had few outbursts of high spirits or unreasoning glee; it was rather a tranquil current of somewhat critical enjoyment; but he was sensitive to a whole troop of perceptions, of which the normal child would hardly be conscious — the coolness of dark rooms on hot summer days, the carelessly ordered garden, the branching trees, the small flowers, so bright of hue, so formal of shape, the subtle scents of the old house, the pot-pourri of the drawing-room, the aroma of old leather in the library; for it was about the house, the familiar rooms, that Pater’s memory persistently dwelt, rather than on the wider prospect of field and hill.
There is a beautiful and interesting passage in which Pater embalmed his view of the permanence of these early impressions: —
“The perfume of the little flowers of the lime-tree fell through the air upon them like rain; while time seemed to move ever more slowly to the murmur of the bees in it, till it almost stood still on June afternoons. How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so, in the environment of early childhood. How indelibly, as we afterwards discover, they affect us; with what capricious attractions and associations they figure themselves on the white paper, the smooth wax, of our ingenuous souls, as ‘with lead in the rock for eve,’ giving form and feature, and as it were assigned house-room in our memory, to early experiences of feeling and thought, which abide with us ever afterwards, thus, and not otherwise.”
But he points out clearly enough that very little that is critical is intermingled with the perceptions of childhood: —
“It is false to suppose that a child’s sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life.”
There were two strains of sentiment which he discerned to have chiefly coloured his childish thoughts. One was “the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of things... marking early the activity in him of a more than customary sensuousness... which might lead him, one day, how far!”
And then, too, the sorrow and suffering of the world came home in dim glimpses to the child, as a thing which was inextricably intertwined with the life of men and animals alike. There was as yet no attempt to harmonise the two dominant strains of feeling; they were the two great facts for him — beauty and sorrow; they seemed so distinct from, so averse to each other, sorrow laying her pale hand so firmly on life, withering it at its very source, and striking from it what was lovely and delectable. And yet he noted the pathetic attempt of beauty to reassert itself, as in the violets which grew on the child’s grave, and drew their sweetness from sad mortality. And there came too the terror of death, the sad incidents of which imprint themselves with so sinister a horror on the tender mind. “At any time or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself.”
These were the dreams of childhood, the unchecked visions of the sheltered and secluded home; at Canterbury came a wider, nobler, richer prospect of beauty. He found himself in that exquisite, irregular city, with its narrow streets; the mouldering gateways leading to the Close, where the huge Cathedral rises among a paradise of lawns and gardens; with the ancient clustering houses, of which some contain the gables and windows of the old monastic buildings, while some are mere centos of ancient stone, the ruins having been used for a quarry; some of mellow brick, with a comfortable Erastian air about them, speaking of the settled prosperity of eighteenth-century churchmanship; the whole tenderly harmonised by sun and rain into a picture of equable, dignified English life, so that wherever the eye turned, it fell upon some delicate vignette full of grace and colour.
It is of this period that Emerald Uthwart, that strange fanciful story, holds certain reminiscences, but reminiscences coloured and tranquillised by the backward-looking eye. “If at home there had been nothing great, here, to boyish sense, one seems diminished to nothing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently-wrought stone; the daring height, the daring severity, of the innumerable, long, upward, ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last, in due place, into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic arch; the peculiar daylight which seemed to come from further than the light outside.”
But still it must be borne in mind that all this was rather perceived, noted, and accumulated in the boyish mind than expressed or even consciously felt. The scenes, the surroundings, of boyhood just inscribe themselves upon the mind, which seldom pauses to reflect or to criticise; it is long after, in maturity, with the wistful and tender sense of the past, that the recollection, tranquilly recalled, is tinged with poetry and sweetness. There was little consciousness in Pater’s boyish days of how deep these things were settling into his mind, and still less foreshadowing of the magic power that would enable him to recall and express them in melodious words. The only definite artistic influence under which he is known to have fallen in his school-days is the influence of Ruskin, whom he read as a boy of nineteen. It is possible to trace this influence in Pater’s mature style; there is something of the same glowing use of words, something of the same charming naïveté and transparency in the best passages of both; but whereas Buskin is remarkable for prodigality, Pater is remarkable for restraint; Buskin drew his vocabulary from a hundred sources, and sent it pouring down in a bright cascade, whereas Pater chose more and more to refine his use of words, to indicate rather than to describe. Buskin’s, in fact, is a natural style and Pater’s is an artificial one; but he undoubtedly received a strong impulse from Buskin in the direction of ornamental expression; and a still stronger impulse in the direction of turning a creative force into the criticism of beautiful things — a vein of subjective criticism, in fact.
In June 1858 Pater entered Queen’s College, Oxford. He was a commoner, but held an exhibition awarded him from Canterbury.
Queen’s College was founded in 1340 by Robert Eglesfield, a chaplain to Queen Philippa, who largely supplemented her priest’s endowment. The medieval buildings have entirely disappeared, and the college consists of a great Italian court, designed by Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, with a fine pillared screen dividing it from the High Street, and a smaller court behind. The Chapel is a stately classical building, designed by Wren himself, and considered by him one of his most successful works. It is rich with seventeenth-century glass by Van Linge, and dignified woodwork. The Library is a magnificent room, with much carving by Grinling Gibbons, certain panels of which are almost perfect examples of freedom of form with an underlying serenity of design. The lofty Hall might have come straight out of an Italian picture, and the mysterious gallery at the west end, opening by curtained porches on balconies of delicate ironwork, seems designed to be crowded by fantastic smiling persons in rich garments.
It was a definitely ecclesiastical foundation, and preserved a larger number of quaint names and symbolical customs than are preserved at other colleges; such as announcing dinner by the sound of the trumpet, and the retention of the name Taberdar for scholars. Pater lived a very secluded and unobtrusive life in the back quadrangle, associating with a few friends; he worked at classics with moderate diligence, amusing himself with metaphysics, which even in his school-days had begun to exercise an attraction over him. There is nothing which would lead one to suppose that his thoughts turned in the direction of either art or literature. It has been stated in some notices of his life that Jowett discovered Pater’s abilities, and gave him gratuitous teaching. From this it would seem to be inferred that Pater found a pecuniary difficulty in providing himself with adequate instruction, which was not the case. The explanation is simply that Jowett, as Professor of Greek, offered to look over the Greek compositions and essays of any members of his class who cared to submit them to him, and Pater took advantage, like many other men, of the offer. Jowett indeed divined a peculiar quality in Pater’s mind, saying to him one day, in one of those lean simple phrases that seem to have exercised so remarkably stimulating a power over his pupils’ minds, “I think you have a mind that will come to great eminence.” But Pater failed to do himself justice in his examinations, taking only a second-class in the Final Classical Schools in 1862. For a couple of years he lived in lodgings in High Street, and took pupils. In 1864 he was elected to a Fellowship at Brasenose, where he immediately went into residence.
Pater’s mother had died while he was at school at Canterbury. His aunt, an unmarried sister of his father, came to take charge of the family in her place. When Pater went up to Oxford, his aunt took his sisters to Heidelberg and Dresden, to complete their education, and it was there that Pater spent his long vacations. But he made no German acquaintances, and lived a life of quiet work and interior speculation; he did not even acquire a conversational knowledge of German. In 1869 he took a tour in Italy with Mr. Charles Lancelot Shadwell, his closest and most intimate friend. They visited Ravenna, Pisa, and Florence, and it was then that art became for him the chief preoccupation of his inner life.
Up till this time there is little hint of the line on which he was afterwards to develop. Such attempts as he had made in the direction of literary expression were mostly destroyed by himself at a later date; the only thing which survives is a curious little study called Diaphaneitè, which is dated July 1864, and is now included in the Miscellaneous Studies. This was written as a paper to be read aloud to a small society called the “Old Mortality,” of which he was a member, and to which many remarkable men belonged. The germ of his later writings can here be clearly discerned, but there is a certain dry compression about the little essay which is very unlike the later ornate manner. It is crammed almost too full of thought, and the evolution has a certain uneasiness arising from the omission of easy transitions. In the essay Pater endeavours to indicate a certain type of character presenting neither breadth nor colour, but a narrow and potent sincerity.
“That fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point.”
“It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may have for or against its own special scheme of life.”
“Its ethical result is an intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear, lest one’s own confusion and intransparency should hinder the transmission from without of light that is not yet inward.”
In such strict compressed sentences Pater traces his ideal of intellectual and moral sincerity; but the value of the paper is that, in the first place, it shows a power of acute and subtle psychological analysis, and in the second place it expresses with difficult wistfulness the ideal with which the young student meant to approach the world. To that ideal he was unfailingly true. He meant to know, to weigh, to consider; not to see things through the eyes of others, but to follow step by step the golden clue that ran for him through the darkness. It indicates a fearlessness, an independence of mind, which few achieve so early, and which fewer still have the patience to follow out.
In these years Pater’s chief interest, apart from his prescribed work, was in philosophy, which naturally led him to the study of German authors; and here he fell under the influence of Goethe. Goethe came to be for Pater the “true illustration of the speculative temper,”
“one to whom every moment of life brought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.”
It is necessary to bear in mind that there were two distinct strains in Pater’s mind: there was on the one hand a strong impulse towards transcendental philosophy, a desire to discern as far as possible the absolute principles of life and being. He hankered after a certain clearness of view, a theory which could explain for him the strange confusion of the intellectual life, where so many currents of the human spirit seem not so much to blend, as to check and oppose each other. The human mind seems to be haunted by a conception of ultimate truth, and to deal in intuitions which appear to hint at a possible solution; but the higher in the scale of perception that a mind is, the more complex are the influences which seem to distract it.
On the other hand there was a strong attraction to precise and definite types of beauty. Pater was checked in his metaphysical researches by his acute sense of the relativity of thought, by his apprehension of the sacredness of beauty, by his deep sensitiveness to art. What he longed for was a reasonable formula, which, could connect the two, which could make him feel that the same law was at work both in the region of beauty and in the region of philosophical truth. “It is no vague scholastic abstraction,” he wrote, “that will satisfy the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that... colourless, formless, intangible being Plato put so high?”
The influence of his metaphysical studies is seen in his first published writing, a fragment on Coleridge, considered as a philosopher, which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1866. This was afterwards reprinted in the Appreciations in 1889, with a passage added on the poetry of Coleridge, which he had contributed, in 1883, as a biographical introduction to the selections from the poet in Ward’s English Poets.
The first part of this essay traces the retrograde character of the philosophy of Coleridge, his rebellion against the patient generalisation of the scientific method. There are flashes of acute criticism, as when he points out that the chief faults of Coleridge’s philosophical writings are in the first place their roughness, their lack of form; and in the second place the writer’s excess of seriousness, “a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner.”
No doubt the reason why Coleridge as a philosopher won such an influence in England was that he joined to a deep grasp of transcendental metaphysics a somewhat tame acceptance of the orthodox religious position. Here emerges the essential weakness of his philosophy. He accepted as reasonable assumptions the orthodox views of revealed religion. He made no attempt to treat in a critical spirit the sources through which this revelation was made; the result was that the religious writers of the day — and it must be borne in mind that the main current of intellectual interest was in Coleridge’s time religious rather than philosophical — welcomed Coleridge as a man who had sounded the depths of metaphysical and speculative inquiry, and had returned from his quest not a sceptic nor a rationalist, but a convinced Christian. After such a triumph for religious feeling, his lesser heterodoxies were eagerly forgiven.
Pater does not dwell upon this side of Coleridge’s influence; but there is no doubt that it deeply affected his own religious thought. He is believed at this time to have cherished the scheme of becoming a Unitarian minister; his metaphysical studies did not in fact destroy his strong religious instinct, but only drew him away for a time from the spell of association and tradition which the Church exercised over him, and to the domain of which he was eventually to return.
The essay on Coleridge is mainly interesting, not for its substance, subtle as it is, but for the fact that it reveals the beginnings of Pater’s style. It is clear that he is struggling hard with the German influence; the terminology is technical, and a vague and dreamy emotion seems to be moving somewhat stiffly in the grip of metaphysical ideas; the sentences are long and involved, and there is a great lack of lucidity of construction, combined with a precision of expression, that produces a blurred and bewildering effect upon the mind.
It is impossible to believe that one who, like Pater, felt so strongly the sensuous influence of external beauty in art and nature, can have lingered long among abstractions. He never lost his interest in philosophy, but it became for him not so much a region into which he escaped from the actual world, as a region in which he could bring into line the vague suggestions of beauty and the laws of pure thought. He felt that beauty, while it haunted him, also distracted him; and while he could not resist its appeal to his emotional nature, he longed to be able to stand above it as well, and to see how it harmonised with more abstract conceptions; to arrive, indeed, at a certain serenity and tranquillity of thought, in which the perception of beauty might set, as it were, a sweet and solemn descant to the reasonable and sustained melody of the intellectual ideal.
Contact with practical life, together with his first sight of Italian art, turned Pater’s thoughts gradually away from metaphysical speculation; and the final conversion came in his discovery of Otto Jahn’s Life of Winckelmann, which opened to him a new prospect. The teaching of Goethe had begun to seem too passionate, too sensual; the idealism of Ruskin degenerated too much into sentiment, and forfeited balance and restraint; Hegel and Schelling were too remote from life, with all its colour, all its echoes; but in Winckelmann he found one who could devote himself to the passionate contemplation of beauty, without any taint or grossness of sense; who was penetrated by fiery emotion, but without any dalliance with feminine sentiment; whose sensitiveness was preternaturally acute, while his conception was cool and firm. Here, then, he discovered, or appeared to himself to discover, a region in which beauty and philosophy might unite in a high impassioned mood of sustained intellectual emotion.
Brasenose College, with which Pater’s life was to be identified, is one of the sternest and severest in aspect of Oxford colleges. It has no grove or pleasaunce to frame its sombre antiquity in a setting of colour and tender freshness. Its black and blistered front looks out on a little piazza occupied by the stately mouldering dome of the Radcliffe Library; beyond is the solid front of Hertford, and the quaint pseudo-Gothic court of All Souls. To the north lies a dark lane, over the venerable wall of which looms the huge chestnut of Exeter, full in spring of stiff white spires of heavy-scented bloom. To the south a dignified modern wing, built long after Pater’s election, overlooks the bustling High Street. To the west the college lies back to back with the gloomy and austere courts of Lincoln. There is no sense of space, of leisureliness, of ornament, about the place; it rather looks like a fortress of study.
You enter the first court by a gateway under a tower. The interior of the buildings is still more sombre, with the smoke-stained walls and gables of friable stone. The Hall is on the south side, a lofty, dark-panelled place, with some good portraits. Beyond the Hall on the first floor is the Common-room, whither the Fellows adjourn after Hall, and which by day answers the purpose of a club-room. This is also an ample panelled chamber, with an air about it of grave and solid comfort.
The further court, to the south, which is entered by a flagged arched passage under the southern wing of the first court, is an irregular place, having been of late years considerably extended. The Chapel at once attracts the eye. It is a Renaissance building, of the same crumbling Headington stone, with broad classical pilasters, and windows of a clumsy Gothic tracery. The designer appears to have wished the tone to be classical, with a Gothic flavour. The very incongruity has a certain sober charm. A beautiful Renaissance porch admits to the ante-chapel; a fine classical screen of dark wood, with large smooth columns, supports an organ, into the carved woodwork of which are worked gilded swans and peacocks. There is a noble classical western window, under which is set the memorial to Pater. This is not wholly satisfactory, looking like a little tray of coins. It has four medallions — Leonardo, Michel Angelo, Dante, and Plato — with a fifth in the centre containing a has-relief of Pater’s head; but the expression is irritable and the chin is exaggeratedly protruded. The mottoes above and below, in uncial Greek, are beautiful and appropriate: ΩΟ ΦΙΛΟΘΟΦΙΑβ OYOHO THO ΜΕΓΙΟΤΗΟ MOYCIKHO (since philosophy is the greatest music) above; and OCA ECTIN ΑΛΗΘΗ OOA CEMNA OOA ΑΓΑΘΑ below (whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are holy, whatsoever things are pure).
The interior of the chapel has the same simple gravity. There is a plain marble reredos; the stall-work is Jacobean of dark wood, the heavy cornice and the balls which serve for poppy-heads being conspicuous. There is a great brazen chandelier and a noble eagle lectern. The roof, taken from the destroyed chapel of St. Mary’s College, which stood on the site now occupied by Frewin Hall, is of a rich Gothic, brightly painted. The east window is a fine piece of classical glass, but there are some poor ecclesiastical windows at the side; of which it may be recorded that when the question of replacing them was mooted, Pater said that he would not have them removed, as they provided a document of taste. The velvet cushions, the tall prayer-books, give a dignified eighteenth-century air to the whole.
There is something in these classical Oxford chapels which lends a curious and distinct savour to the offices of religion. It has been said that Gothic represents the aspiration of man to God, classical architecture the tabernacling of God with men. There is a species of truth in the statement. But it would perhaps be truer to say that in Gothic one sees the uncultivated instinct for beauty feeling its way out of barbarism into a certain ecclesiastical and traditional grace. But the classical enshrinement of religious worship seems to hint at a desire to bring the older and loftier triumphs of the human mind, the Greek and Roman spirit, into the service of the sanctuary. Gothic seems to depict the untutored spirit of man, nurtured on nature and religion, working out a wild and native grace in intricacy of tracery and ornament. But the classical setting brings with it a sober and settled air, a wider and larger range of human interests, a certain antiquity of mental culture.
Pater’s own rooms are approached by a staircase in the south-east corner of the first court, which leads to a little thick-walled panelled parlour, now white, then painted a delicate yellow, with black doors; an old-fashioned scroll round the mantelpiece was picked out in gold. The deeply recessed oriel window looks out upon the Radcliffe. Some trace of Pater’s dainty ways lingers in the pretty and fantastic ironwork of the doors, brought by him from Brittany. The room was always furnished with a certain seemly austerity and simplicity, never crowded with ornament. His only luxury was a bowl of dried rose-leaves. He had little desire to possess intrinsically valuable objects, and a few engravings served rather to remind him of the noble originals than to represent them. Thus there exists, now in the possession of the Principal of Brasenose, a little tray of copies of beautiful Greek coins, bearing large heads with smooth and liberal curves, and other dainty devices, on which Pater loved to feast his eyes. Mr. Humphry Ward writes: —
“I well remember my first visit to his rooms — small, freshly painted in greenish white, and hung with three or four line-engravings. All dons had line-engravings then, but they were all after Raphael. Pater had something more characteristic: the ‘Three Fates,’ attributed to M. Angelo; a head after Correggio; and I think something of Ingres — a new name to Oxford! The clean, clear table, the stained border round the matting and Eastern carpet, and the scanty, bright chintz curtains, were a novelty and a contrast to the oaken respectability and heaviness of all other dons’ rooms at that day. The effect was in keeping with his own clear-cut view of life, and made, in a small way, ‘the colours freshen on this threadbare world.’”
But there was no luxury, no sumptuousness, no seductiveness of comfort, about his surroundings. That might be left to those who misinterpreted him. To the serious student, pleasure and joy must always have a certain bracing austerity; might be sipped, perhaps, held up to the light, dwelt upon, but not plunged into nor rioted upon.
Out of the little panelled sitting-room opened a door, which led into a narrow passage full of cupboards, and admitted the occupant, by a low, ancient, stone-framed Gothic doorway, into a tiny slip of a bedroom, only a few feet wide. At one end a little window looked out into the court; at the other end was an odd projection, like a couple of steps, above the floor, forming the roof of the small cramped staircase below. Considerations of space were so exacting that the head of the bed had to rest, without legs, on the projection. The rest of the room only just admitted a chest of drawers and a simple toilet apparatus. In this miniature room Pater slept through the whole of his Oxford days. He went to bed early, but in later days was an indifferent sleeper, and to beguile the time before he could close his eyes, worked slowly through the Dictionary of National Biography, volume by volume. He had frequent opportunities of changing these rooms for a better set; but partly from economy, and partly from the extreme simplicity which characterised him, he preferred to stay. It is indeed almost inconceivable that a man engaged on literary work requiring such delicate concentration, should have lived so contentedly in rooms of such narrow resources. The little sitting-room gave straight upon the free air of the open passage. On a small square table his meals would be spread. His outer door was always open; he was always accessible, never seemed to be interrupted by any visitor, was never impatient, always courteous and deferential; rising from a little round table near the fire, in the middle of the most complicated sentence, the most elaborate piece of word-construction.
His habits were marked by the same ascetic simplicity. He never took afternoon tea, he never smoked. His meals were plain to austerity. But he took great pains with the little entertainments he gave, ordering every item and writing the menu-cards himself. The morning, he used to say, was the time for creation, the afternoon for correction. He did very little work in the evening. His habits were absolutely regular; few days were without their tale of quiet study. He concerned himself very little with college matters, though he held various college offices; he was at one time Tutor and at the end of his life Dean. He lectured to the passmen, and later gave public lectures, of which the volume Plato and Platonism was the fruit. One of his friends remembers attending these lectures: a number of undergraduates arrived, spread out their notebooks and prepared to take notes; but the attempt was soon abandoned, the lecturer reading, slowly and continuously, in a soft mellow voice, one carefully turned phrase after another. Mr. Humphry Ward writes: —
“Then, I suppose about May 1867, came his first lectures. Only six or eight Brasenose men were then reading for classical Greats; the system of ‘combined’ college lectures, to which afterwards Pater owed the large audiences that came to hear him on Plato, was not yet invented. We were six men, some novices, some dull, all quite unprepared for Pater. He sat down and began — it was the ‘History of Philosophy,’ We expected the old formulae about Thales, and some references to Aristotle that we could take down in our books and use for the Schools. It was nothing of the kind. It was a quickly delivered discourse, rather Comtian, on the Dogmatic and Historical methods: quite new to me, and worse than new to some others. I remember, as we went out, a senior man, F — , who used to amaze us by his ready translations of Thucydides in ‘Mods’ lectures, and who passed as extremely clever — as he was in that line — F. threw down his note-book with the cry, ‘No more of that for me: if Greats mean that, I’ll cut ’em!’ (as he wisely did).”
Among Pater’s chief friends were, in early days, Professor Ingram Bywater, his contemporary at Queen’s, Dr. Edward Caird, now Master of Balliol, Professor Nettleship, Mr. W. W. Capes, tutor of Queen’s; but his closest friend and lifelong companion was Mr. C. L. Shadwell, then of Christ Church, now Provost of Oriel, who had been for a short time his private pupil. Pater often travelled in his company, and on Pater’s death he undertook to act as his literary executor, a task which he has fulfilled with a rare loyalty and discretion.
The friends of a somewhat later date were Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln; Bishop Creighton, then a Fellow of Merton; the present Provost of Worcester, Dr. Daniel, and Mrs. Daniel; Mr. Humphry Ward, a Fellow of Brasenose, and his future wife, Miss Mary Arnold; Mr. Warren, now President of Magdalen; of the larger world, Mr. Swinburne, who often visited Oxford, Dr. Appleton, then editor of the Academy, Mr. Basil Champneys and Mr. Edmund Gosse; in more recent days Mr. Douglas Ainslie, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Mr. Lionel Johnson; but in later years Pater was perhaps more often cheered and encouraged by the devoted companionship of Dr. F. W. Bussell, now Vice-Principal of Brasenose, than by any other of his friendships.
But, though one may enumerate his closer friends, Pater did not make friends easily, unless he was met with a certain simple candour and ready sympathy; what he valued was a quiet domestic companionship, in which he could talk easily of what was in his mind. To those that were without he showed a certain suave and amiable deference; and even to his intimates he was often reserved, baffling, and mysterious, from a deep-seated reticence and reserve.
When Pater was settled at Brasenose, he took a house, No. 2 Bradmore Road, in Norham Gardens, which gave him opportunities for simple hospitality and the easy domestic background that he loved.
He liked to have friends to stay quietly with him, and always manifested an extreme solicitude about the comfort of his guests down to the smallest details, planning the days that they spent with him so that they should be entertained and amused. “Are you comfortable?” was a question, uttered with the delicate and deliberate precision of pronunciation, that was constantly on his lips. But the entertaining of guests tired him, partly because it interfered with the simple and leisurely routine of the day, and partly because, with his scrupulous considerateness, it put a great strain on his sympathy. He could not pursue his usual habits and leave his guests to amuse themselves; he was always conscious that they were in the house, and felt the responsibility for their comfort and amusement very deeply.
To give an impression of him in those early days, I will quote Mr. Ward’s words: —
“When I entered Brasenose as a freshman-scholar in October, 1864, W. H. Pater was junior Fellow. I did not make his acquaintance till long afterwards, but from the first I was struck with his appearance, his high, rather receding forehead; his bright eyes, placed near together, his face cleanshaven except for a short moustache (this was rare in those days), his slight stoop, and his quick walk with a curious swing of the shoulders. As I got to know senior men, especially of other colleges, I gradually became conscious that Pater was already vaguely celebrated in the University. He was supposed to have a new and daring philosophy of his own, and a wonderful gift of style, owing his Fellowship to these two, for he was no scholar, as the Universities understand the word.”
That Pater was no scholar, in the technical sense of the word, is true enough; but he answered rather to Lord Macaulay’s definition of a scholar, as one who read Plato with his feet on the fender. He was not at any time a great reader or a profound student; he was on the look-out for quality rather than for definite facts. He was very fastidious about the style even of authors whose matter and treatment he admired. “I admire Poe’s originality and imagination,” he once said, “but I cannot read him in the original. He is so rough; I read him in Baudelaire’s translation.” Indeed he read less and less as time went on; in later years, apart from reading undertaken for definite purposes, he concentrated himself more and more upon a few great books, such as Plato and the Bible, which he often read in the Vulgate; he made no attempt at any time to keep abreast of the literature of the day.
Pater regarded his Oxford life primarily as a life of quiet literary study; this was his chief object; he had a strong natural dislike of responsibility; he did not consider himself a professional educator, though he thought it a plain duty to give encouragement and sympathy in intellectual things to any students who desired or needed direction. But he did not conceive that there ought to be any question of disciplinary training or coercion in the matter; to those who required help, he gave it eagerly, patiently, generously; but he never thought of himself as a species of schoolmaster, whose business it was to make men work; on the other hand he realised his personal responsibility to the full. He was always ready to give advice about work, about the choice of a profession, and above all laboured to clear away the scruples of men who had intended to enter the ministry of the church, and found themselves doubtful of their vocation. He had a special sympathy for the ecclesiastical life, and was anxious to remove any obstacles, to resolve any doubts, which young men are so liable to encounter in their undergraduate days.
As Dr. Bussell, in a Memorial Sermon preached in Brasenose Chapel after Pater’s death, finely said, we may see in Pater “a pattern of the student life, an example of the mind which feels its own responsibilities, which holds and will use the key of knowledge; severely critical of itself and its own performances; genially tolerant of others; keenly appreciating their merit; a modest and indulgent censor; a sympathetic adviser.”
His attitude towards younger men was always serious and kindly, but he never tried to exert influence, or to seek the society of those whose views he felt to be antipathetic. That a man should be ardently disposed to athletic pursuits was no obstacle to Pater’s friendship, though he was himself entirely averse to games; it rather constituted an additional reason for admiring one with whom he felt otherwise in sympathy, though it was no passport to his favour. He took no part in questions of discipline, which at Brasenose are entirely in the hands of a single officer; indeed it is recorded that on the only occasion when he was called upon to assist in quelling an outbreak of rowdyism, he contrived to turn a hose, intended to quench a bonfire, into the window of an undergraduate’s bedroom, to whom he had afterwards to give leave to sleep out of college in consequence of the condition of his rooms.
Besides delivering lectures, it was a chief part of Pater’s work to look over and criticise the essays of his pupils. He spent a great deal of pains on the essays submitted to him; he seldom set subjects, but required that a man should choose a subject in which he was interested. It is usual for a lecturer to have an essay read aloud to him, and to make what criticisms he can, as they arise in his mind, without previous preparation. But Pater had the essays shown up to him, scrutinised them carefully, even pencilling comments upon the page; and then, in an interview, he gave careful verdicts as to style and arrangement, and made many effective and practical suggestions. Mr. Humphry Ward says, “He was severe on confusions of thought, and still more so on any kind of rhetoric. An emphatic word or epithet was sure to be underscored, and the absolutely right phrase suggested.” Pater always followed a precise ritual on these occasions. He always appeared, whatever he might be doing, to be entirely unoccupied; he would vacate his only armchair and instal the pupil in it; and then going to the window, he would take his place on the window seat and say, “Well, let us see what this is all about.”
Though his own literary bent was so clearly defined, he never had the least idea of forming a school of writers on the model of his own style; all such direct influences were distasteful to him; he merely aimed at giving advice which should result in the attainment of the most lucid and individual statement possible. He had no sort of desire to be a master or a leader, or to direct disciples on any but the old and traditional lines. His principle indeed was the Socratic ideal— “to encourage young men to take an interest in themselves.”
He would sometimes ask a student to join him in the vacation, which must have been a severe tax on one so independent and fond of seclusion as Pater, when he would coach him and walk with him. At the same time, says one of those who came within his circle in later days, it was felt that his relations with younger men were guided more by a sense of duty than by instinct. He was like Telemachus, “decent not to fail in offices of tenderness.” He was careful, says the same friend, to write and inquire about one’s interests and one’s progress. But it was clear that he was in a way self-centred, that he depended on no one, but lived in a world of his own, working out his own thoughts with a firm concentration, and that though he was endlessly kind and absolutely faithful, yet that few made any vital difference to him. He was a steady friend, and always responsive to the charm of youth, of sympathy, of intellectual interest. But even those who were brought into close contact with him were apt to feel that far down in his nature lurked a certain untamed scepticism, a suspension of mind, that lay deeper than his hopes and even than his beliefs. But it was impossible to doubt his real tenderness of heart, his fellow-feeling, his goodness.
Mr. Ward, who spent part of a summer vacation at this time in Pater’s company, writes: —
“The month at Sidmouth made us rather intimate, and afterwards I often walked and lunched with Pater at Oxford. He had begun to publish then: the articles on i Coleridge’ and ‘Winckelmann’ in the Westminster Review had appeared, and had made a great sensation in the University. Unfamiliar with Goethe at first-hand, and with the French romantics such as Théophile Gautier, the men of about my standing had their first revelation of the neo-Cyrenaic philosophy and of the theory of Art for Art, in these papers. None the less, even those of us who were most attracted by them, and men like myself to whom Pater was personally very kind, found intimacy with him very difficult. He could be tremendously interesting in talk; his phrases, his point of view, were original and always stimulating; but you never felt that he was quite at one with you in habits, feelings, preferences. His inner world was not that of any one else at Oxford.”