WALTER PATER.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20790, 25 February 1933, Page 13

WALTER PATER.

the greek spirit. (HfCim/r WKITTIH T0» THB PRESS.) [By M. H. Holchoit.] I aotico that it has become customary to refer to Walter Pater with a sort 4t nffeetionate deprecation, as if he Trero m intellectual influence to be encountered in youth, liko radicalism or achoism. He is not alone in this treatment, and I think the levelling of liter-

ary gods (who will receive a new apotieosis to-morrow) is nothing more than 3 healthy reaction from an excess of praise- We are still close to Pater's Jay in time, and when enthusiasm and depreciation have both done their work ho will have his duo place among the lesser immortals —if, indeed, it has not Jong since been given to him by those bookish people who decide their own loyalties and are unaffected by the sur- . /ace disturbances of criticism. "The csscneo of all good style," wrote Pater in his study of ' Pascal, "whatever its accidents may bo, is expressiveness"; and it seems to me that little more need be said of his own style than that it holds true to this dictum. Pater has an unusual scale of nuances of thought and feeling, and ho expresses them in a prose full of colour. It is nsTcr quite possible to escape an impression of pictures that have been too deliberately posed, and even in his happiest descriptions of natural beauty lie rives an effect of artistic grouping rathsr than tho accidental and changing effects, of earth; but I do not think this attribute is factitious. He is true to his o wn conception of things; and his i 3 a world that needs constant arraugeafflit, and a movement towards order.

Marios. Although I think George Moore was 100 enthusiastic when he claimed Marius the Epicurean to be the greatest prone narrative in the English language, I believe it clearly demonstrates Pater's talent for re-creating personalities and places from slender evidences. There is not the constant creativeness of the true story-teller. His talent functions only at intervals and as it were in sudden clarities; but this fragmentary expression is of the essence of Pater's work. I have fancied that in this book he expressed something beyond his original intention. There is evidence of a co-ordination of thought actually talcing place during the process of writing, aa experience by no means unfamiliar to the thinker who sets out to give form to his ideas, even when ho believes them to be enduringly stable. Tko Epicurean fronts us with certainty, as ifrhe means to express his philosophy ia the full colours of a life devoted temperately to the senses, and to that paler (but not less pleasurable) innor Life for which the senses provide so .much raw material. But as the chapters are written, the Epicurean finds ' that movement and change within a

system are not sufficient guarantees of growth. Therq must be no boundaries, and the impatient overflowing of the spirit towards new satisfactions is an inevitable reaction of the personality to the increasing pressure of time. At first there is a danger of extremes, and Marius seems to be evolving naturally from an Epicurean into a Cyrenaic; but this is merely a dip of the wings before a brave flight upwards. We are not surprised to find Marius among the Christians as the book neara its end. Unlike 'Browning's Cleon, ho is tfble tQ accept a faith that showed £ its first energy. among the common ) people, although he is true te his ternpersmont in his response to the quiet ; beauty of Cecilia's house. All through these pages we may tract a little of the constructive finality of Pater *s thought. Ideas that have long had a quiet acceptance are displaying' unexpected vitality, and iron ;l waywardness, as they are reteajied into the forms of expression, "flicro are new grqupinga, and sometimes a little hesitation. The flexible prose moves on without faltering; but qrneath it ore'little' undercurrents and eddies of thought that can be discwered in moments of insight. It is possible to feel a sympathetic nearWin to a mind that is quietly becom'H dear to itself*'' The Greek Wcrld. Pater had a remarkable sympathy with tbe Greek spirit. I would not like to say too definitely that he had ' the vo wer to re-create that young world of likillas; I have come to, suspect that the true Greece of the days of intellectual ! beauty and vigour is beyond our attainment, and we must be satiaU Wto have its energy and only a iWgreentary conception of its outer form*. However this might be, Pator )* Ittd a delicate Greek world of his own, i 'waled from "a multitude of stray , Jiiota in art and poetry and religious ' fWjtem. through modern speculation on the tendencies ol early thought, f tferoush traits and touches in our own states of mind, which may Sv,~m , wmpathetic with those tendencies." '' J&'a subtle way he shades in the outline, sad wonts upon it with his shy gift of creativeness. This is shown in his essentially poetic ' i&warwetation of the myth of Demetcr sod Persephone. He is always awo >. fld the slow growth of the Greek myths »na their nearness to the soil; and in i mnarkabl© way he goes back in < spirit to the outfoojs of those times, 1 w full of an awakening' poetry, and J If under a shadow of supor- ■ 5 1utioai fear. Demeter was the earthBjlMhcr, slowly becoming tho protective 1 mtf of crops and seasons, and Pater *M able to see her in the mysterious M-lighfc of Pagan mythology: in her , mode carthiness, before the Greeks 4 " sophisticated and the demesman [i 'loserted his spur of wooded hill or his flflltasr with its grove and spring and ■. ituU white buildings, and went to livo i-VAtlum. • 'Mm ti the goddess of dark caves, and is ®»|i wholly free from monstrous form, one £' men. the first fig in one place, tho flrßt ' S'Wy in Mother; in another, nhe first f the old Titans, to mow. She is tha ■* fotiuuf of the vine also. . . She knows tho T Dowers of certain plants, cut from her to bans or blots; and, under one %. epithets, herself presides over tho '' 9™**! M also coming from the secret places , if'. Ibs earth. 1 " * j n 8 ta&in to see the way in which ' f Wenieter came from the shadowy race k into a personality of »ad legend. There is no sudden It" the myth seems to he a | gradual expression of a growing aware- ' 8 u SS natural background. The i seasons are in her story ; the Bwwght* and floods must be attributed. ' JJf h#r anger or negligence; arid sad • awa T of all the summer ;,Mrt find, in the imagination of a J P'y people, its explanation of , a !> " !j|f™ daughter who has been carried gJh king of the underworld, and ' k® restored to her sorrowing a, ™Whfir on condition that she returns ! Jflar" 1 " 01 a P °f ever y ft?/ 1 part of hia study, • to separate himself from 1 ,? e motora standpoint, and tells ot Hrf the myth upon the de- (!* P° c tic consciousness "of the , ,2™*- traces the growth of the 'Oil'- • m a TUvt ' l l ' lat was really an •riTictivo racial representation of a 1 Kra? 0111 ®^ ea a nn rrntire of many ' £,,| ', coacern ®d with divine persons, ; open to bold,, poetic inter.-

pretations and a reasonable license ot art. Theme and Development. It is in Pater's studies of Dionysus, however, that I find his creativeness most effectually at work upon those old Greek materials. They also show, I think, a continuity o? theme that sets them apart from his other essays, for in the main these essays are complete in themselves, and often little more than fragments. Certain ideas show a noticeable development in his treatment of Dionysus, returning in new forms in threo different studies and seeming to await some process of integration. His examination of Dionysus as the god of the vines is continued in The Bacchanals of Euripides, and we are shown another side of a deity who was also the patron of drama. Pater enters that wild atmosphere of this tragedy of Euripides' old age for a little more of the humanity of Dionysus; for I do not think it unreasonable to speak of the humanity of a god so obviously anthropomorphic. It is a strange, wayward humanity, that emerges, filled with much that Pater must have felt of the mystic wildnoss of the groves and the mingling fears and aspirations of- the people; but he is still a figure of the legends, and we do not find him fully-dimensioned until Denys l'Auxerrois, in the Imaginary Portraits.

The Study of Dionysus was written in 1876, The Bacchanals of Euripides two years, later, in 1878, and Denys l'Auxerrois in 1886. Thus it can be seen that Pater was actively interested in his Dionysus for ten years. He did not writo his last words ,on a fascinating being until eight years after completing his first compact studies; and in the interval the "multitude of stray hints" had drawn together, in the wonderful selective processes of the mind, into new ideas and combinations of ideas.

Denys l'Auxerrois is the curious and imaginative study of a Dionysus reincarnated into Prance of the middle thirteenth century, and tho two sides of his nature —the youthful joyousneas that borders on abandon, and the darker, Thracian side that has in it something of the depths of reaction —are developed in the story of his sudden popularity with the people of tho country, their changing attitude, filled with suspicion and vague • hatp, and the final tragedy, when he is seized by those who formerly have loved him, and torn to pieces. The completed Dionysus stands out from the beautiful prose of this study. All the elements of the earlier analyses are still here; but they have received his creative energy at full heat. I do not think it too much to say that Denys l'Auxerrois is the most satisfying and the most beautiful ol all Pater's work.

Hippolytua Veiled. An effective contrast to Dionysus is Pater's Hippolytua. The old story ot the immaculate young votary of Artemis who resists the unlawful love ot his stepmother Phaedra and is destroyed by the curse of angry Knife, Theseus, takes a new ireshness. But the particular charm of the study always seems to me to rest in the skin with which Pater holds the balance between myth and reality, lender llis treatment, Hippolytus ceases to be » red-and-white creature of the legends, always hovering near that margin where mortal and divinity make dangerous contact, and becomes a credible being, mysterious only in a withdrawn contemplativeness tftat sends him out for lqnely nights.on the hills—a habit of watching thought that is often a mark of the true religious. And in the end, when the curse of Theseus is fulfilled we are still free from the frank myth atmosphere so persuasively used in Browniug'g poem on tlie same tliciDG,

Through all the perils of darkness he had •raided the chr.rlot safely along the enrved shore; the dawn was come, and a little hreezo astir as the grey level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, when in a moment an earthquake, or Poseidon the eart "' shaker himself, or angry Aphrodite awake from the deep betimes, rent the wannull surface; » ereat wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of th? Att.o shore and was surging here to the very necks of the plunging horses. . . .

You may not need the word earthquake" : but it is there to hold you safely to reality while the fascinating region of Greek divinities opens above Vo ur head like an inhabited space ot sunset - cloud. There's a union ot worlds in this study that epitomises ty me the true individuality of Pat ; er s work. The lover of earthly things, so reverent of the senses. is withui reach of the aupraßeiisunl. Pater writes lovingly of this world: but"l think the truest appreciation of his work is a conviction it leaves that, consciously or not, he sees all the varied bea « t y„" B the uncertain light of a. greater beauty beyond;