MR. PATER'S CRITICAL ESSAYS.*

WHAT is the use of criticism ? The question strikes us as something like this other, What is the use of conversation ? Social inter- course would be intolerable if we were to require ourselves or others to observe scientifically precise rules in discussion, and to establish certain definite propositions. If Coleridge's talk WAS a monologue to which a circle of disciples listened with a view to instruction, Hazlitt's sneer that it set out from no premisses and came to no conclusion is admirably pointed ; but if the talk was intended to be the pleasant entertainment of a leisure hour, there is no sting in the remark. Conversation with a person of sense and talent yields a pleasurable excitement to the faculties, and is probably more profitable as well as piquant when there is a spice of difference between the views of the speakers than when they quite agree ; but it yields no great harvest of demon- strated truth. From criticism, when it is good criticism, we expect similar advantages, with the corresponding qualification. The impressions derived by a man of intelligence from works of art are sure to be interesting and suggestive, but we have never been able to define the limits within which even intelligent and cultivated judges may differ in their decisions upon questions of literary or pictorial criticism. One of the ablest and best-read men of the century has given it as his opinion that Sterne is a greater humourist than Shakespeare. We have reflected upon this criticism for twenty years, and we have not found, and never expect to find, words strong enough to express our sense of its stupendous wrongness. Dr. Johnson was the literary lawgiver of his generation ; if anything he has left us besides his conversation is now worth reading it is his criticism ; and yet in his Essay on Milton, he pooh-poohs as of no account that statement of Richardson's respecting Milton's habits of poetical composition which enables us to distinguish him, as one of the last in England who have been visited by the inspiration of the true poetic seer, from the uninspired Drydens and Popes. Goethe we esteem one of the best critics, perhaps the very best, that ever lived, and yet he sometimes talks what we cannot but think great nonsense, even about his own books. Enough ; if criticism is a science, which we are neither maintaining nor disputing, it has not yet reached that degree of maturity which might enable one to predict what its ablest professors will say in particular instances.

But the critical observations of a man of sensibility and culture are sure to call our faculties into action, and to afford

an exquisite intellectual entertainment. Mr. Pater's volume of msthetic criticism has furnished us with this entertainment in rare perfection ; and yet Mr. Pater's mode of stating the problem of criticism, instead of permitting us to look for exact and final solutions in given cases, enables us to realise with new vividness the cause why critical decisions are diverse and unaccountable. The critic, says Mr. Pater, "regards 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 and unique kind. This influence he feels and wishes to explain, analysing it, and reducing it to its elements. To him the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, "La Gioconda," the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandula, are valuable for their virtues, as we say in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem ; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, unique impression of pleasure." The msthetic critic disengages the virtue, and notes it "as a chemist notes some natural element for himself and others." This is very clearly expressed, and we take no exception to the doctrine enunciated, but the impressions of which Mr. Pater speaks will obviously vary with every change in the temperament, education, and capacities of the observer, and must, in every case, be extremely difficult to describe. The eye sees, as Goethe said, what it brings with it the power of * Studies in the Ilistory of the Renaissance. By Walter H. Pater, Fellow of Braaenose College, Oxford. London : Macmillan and Co. 1878. seeing. There being a million subtle variations in the im- pressions made by a work of art upon a million different specta-

tors, nature has not provided a linguistic machinery fine enough to distinguish each from each. There may be a common element of impression, but this will generally prove too.

subtle to be imprisoned in a formula. A rose is quite different

from a camellia, and that from the magnolia-bloom ; but ate- there three men in the world who could distinguish and define.

the impressions produced by each in a manner to which all three would assent? Mr. Pater talks of herbs. We turn modestly to- kitchen vegetables, and ask what, expressed in words, is the special flavour of asparagus as distinguished from green peas, of cauliflower as distinguished from Brussel's sprouts? He speaks of gems. What is the special virtue of sapphire as distinguished from ruby, of agate as distinguished from jasper, of chrysoprase as distinguished from chalcedony ? We do not deny that these things have specific and invariable quality, or that there is, within certain limits, a unity in the impressions they produce. Everyone is pleased with a lily or with an amethyst. All healthy, hungry men like fresh fruit. But the distinctive property which causes the plea- stye is nature's secret. You cannot name it. The sensation of de- light with which a fine gem or a lovely flower affects us is an original fact from which we must set out. The flavour of a cherry is cherry- flavour,—you can say no more. At bottom it is so in the world of art. Every art-product, in the strict sense, is unique ; its charm, is its own ; and the probability is, especially if it is a work of high inspiration, that the producer does not know wherein its power consists. From the same studio, to the same exhibition, are sent the laborious piece of manufacture that is stone-dead, and the fleeting inspiration that is immortally alive ; and the artist him- self is likely enough to pride himself on the failure, and to be astonished to find that it impresses no one, while every heart. thrills to the power of the masterpiece. Criticism in an ideal state of perfection, and with a language perfectly adapted to its. needs, would discern and define the specific quality of the living work, distinguish it from the manufactured article, and classify it in relation to other masterpieces ; but criticism in this ideally perfect state is still a thing of the imagination, and we have a rooted conviction that it will remain so for an indefinite period.

On the whole, we are inclined to pronounce it a satisfactory arrangement that critics do not lay down the law like mathema- ticians. Place ten of the best critics in Europe before Correggio's " Antiope" or Turner's "IEsacus and Hesperie," and bid them, without naming the pictures or describing their composition, and without communicating with each other, to state what is the- " special impression of beauty or pleasure" they experience,

and what the "peculiar and unique virtue or property " which belongs to each picture ; the chance, or rather the- certainty is that no two of the statements will minutely coincide, and that no second company of ten critics can be selected who, from the definitions of their predecessors, will' unanimously identify the pictures. But we can affirm still more.

decisively that the intelligent reader of the ten critical estimates- would find in one and all some revealing glance, some suggestive.

hint, enabling him to see more in the pictures than he had ever seen, before, and lending a singular interest and instructiveness to the- documents.

Considered in the way which we have perhaps superfluously illus- trated, Mr. Pater's criticism is possessed of rare excellence. His.

powers of perception are delicately sharp, his sensibilities exquisite- in their refinement and catholic in range ; his language is carefully pure, and used with great skill to distinguish between shades of meaning. Occasionally, indeed, he strikes us as drawing out his- meaning into a tenuity too thin and aerial. Some witch or fairy that we have beard of used to sit at the opening of her cave and blow bubbles or spin gossamers so fine that at last they were indistinguish- able from air. We have thought of her in connection with Mr. Pater's book. Nature does not afford imagery quite fine enough for his shades of meaning, and in an extreme case he supplements- nature by fancy. He speaks of "the curves of the head of the child, following the little skull within, thin and fine as some sea- shell worn by the wind." If Mr. Pater asks his geological friends,

they will tell him that no sea-shell was ever worn by the wind. Before the wind could wear it down, the chemical action of the

rain and the air would disintegrate it. It is the roll of the sea- wave in the shingle that wears the shell. The hurricane will rend a sail into ribbons, but no wind that ever piped would blow a film of colour from a shell.

Mr. Pater's criticism is not unfrequently so imaginative that we are tempted to regard it as vieing with, if not excelling, in artistic quality, the painting or poem criticised. When Rogers published his somewhat languid and laboured poem on Italy, accompanied with Turner's illustrations, Moore gave to the town this wickedly- veracious stanza :—

" Rogers' Italy, Luttrel relates, Had been totally dished, were it not for the plates." •

We shall not say that Mr. Pater's criticism totally eclipses the interest of such painting as Botticelli's, or of such poetry as Joachim du Bellay's, but we suspect that in strength and vividness of description it approaches the one, and in force of thought and depth of sentiment surpasses the other. His best passages, which are perhaps too visibly laboured, have subtle touches of lovely colour, and a sweet, quiet cadence, hardly amount- ing to rhythm, which are distinguishable from those of poetry only in form. We shall not, however, call Mr. Pater a poet,—he has his enthusiasm always in rein, and his warmest feeling never strikes us as inspiration. There is a vein of sadness traceable in his writing of which, we fancy, he is but half conscious, or wholly un- conscious. He finds and dwells upon the element of sadness where- ever he meets it. The Madonnas of Botticelli are for him incar- nations of life-weariness. They are wan in colour, not caring ardently for anything, not even for the divine child. "The white light on it (the Madonna-face) is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her." In Lionardo da "La Gioconda," which Mr. Pater considers as Lionardo's masterpiece, he also finds a subtle, inexpressible melancholy. He describes the picture in a highly-wrought and characteristic passage, which the reader will probably like to see entire :—

" 'La Gioconda' is, in the truest sense, Lionardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness only the Melancholia of Diirer is comparable to it, and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks' as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limit, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that ines- timable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari' were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Lionardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, .which plays over all Lionardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams ; and but for express his- torical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thoughts ? By what strange affinities had she and the dream grown thus apart, yet so closely together? Present from the first, incorporeal in Lionardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really com-

pleted, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected ? The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the

waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the earth 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 experi- ence of the world have etched and moulded therein that which they have of power to refine and make expressive 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 secret of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their falien 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 eylids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweep- ing together ten thousand 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. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."

Criticism like this, whether we agree with it or not, affects us like a tune skilfully played on a fine violin.

We have not touched upon the weightier critical questions which are started by Mr. Pater's book, and in fact their adequate dis- cussion is not possible within the limits of a newspaper article. His particular subject is the Renaissance, but he takes liberty to give the word "a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival of classical

antiquity in the fifteenth century," which was occasioned by the fall of Constantinopo in 1453. "For us," he says, "the Renais- sance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the tLing,s of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the thaire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make Vceinselves felt." Of this "many-aided movement" he finds traces both in the middle-age and in recent times. Such procedure is, ca obvious grounds, questionable. It mixes up things which were distinct. The poetry of Provence may be called a "Renaissance within the middle-age," but it had really nothing to do with the Renaissance. It was no doubt separate and distinct from ecclesiastical art and poetry, and there was something erect and even rebellious in its attitude; but may we not say this of the poetry

of Burns It is by distinguishing, not by confounding remarkable manifestations of human activity, that we learn to know them in their specific character, and after most carefully perusing Mr. Pater's book, we find ourselves gravely doubting whether he has rightly apprehended the Renaissance at all. He may have a fairly correct notion of its vitality, but he says nothing of its artificial elements, and to the Renaissance expressly so called these contributed an important if not an essential part of the character. In so far as it was a resuscitation, the Renais- sance was artificial, and it never seems to have occurred to Mr. Pater that there is an artificial way in which Greece may be resuscitated. He might have learned the fact from Goethe, whom he has read carefully, but yet not quite so carefully as to pene- trate beyond Goethe's dilettantism into his heart of hearts.

Goethe would have told him that no artist can be a Greek in spirit and power who " Grecises," and this was to a large extent at least, what the Renaissance did. Goethe, whatever may be said to the contrary, set life above art, but we are not sure that Mr. Pater does so.