Avowals, Chapter 10

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 188-202, 5,366 words

Avowals is a nonlinear volume of sixteen chapters. Chapters 12 and 15 are essays in worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the GMi Kindle edition of Avowals.

CHAP. X.

After that day I often went to his house to be absorbed in its soothing greys: a quiet harmony where conversation was always kind; a little too formal, perhaps, for my taste. He lived with his two sisters, writing, I think, in a room above the drawing-room; one heard him walking to and fro, for his tread was heavy, but when he came down all trace of literary anxiety had disappeared from his face; and picking up the thread of the conversation that his sisters and I were dragging to and fro he continued it, each sentence carefully poised, many of them containing the words: no doubt.

I went to his house to luncheon and to dinner, and in the afternoons had long talks with him, and sometimes we went out to walk together. But before I relate our friendship let me tell how Pater appeared to me: almost as one of those ugly uncouth figures one meets with at the end of terraces, in lead rather than in stone, with large overarching skulls. I thought of the poet Verlaine, and while contrasting the disorder of the poet's jacket with the scrupulous refinement of the neck-tie evocative of long minutes of careful consideration, I pondered on the great military moustache that had seemed at first a discrepancy, but which had now begun to seem an essential part of him who wished above all things to preserve his real self for himself and to present to the world, even to his friends, a carefully prepared aspect — a mask. The beginning of each visit was always a little frigid, but at the close of the third Pater proposed we should go for a walk, and it was while sitting on a seat in Kensington Gardens in the Long Walk that I noticed the yellow dog-skin gloves that he wore punctiliously. There is something of the vicar in Pater, I said, a vicar who has got somehow mixed up with a cavalryman, and immediately after this thought crossed my mind I remembered that he had always appeared to me as an ugly man, which was strange. For whosoever bears a great intelligence within him is never ugly; the intelligence illumines and informs, real ugliness is found only in small, narrow, arid brows, I said, and looked up with the intention of finding justification in his features for my belief in his almost fantastic ugliness, but none was apparent in them; and it was not till I withdrew my eyes from his moveless countenance that I apprehended the cause — a mask, I cried, to myself; and fell to seeking his reasons for the assumption of so hideous a disguise, and why it was never dropped, not once during the first few weeks of our acquaintanceship.

It was on that seat in the Long Walk that I became aware I was sitting by a master, and it was on that seat in the Long Walk that I became aware that I was spying on him, which was unavoidable, for knowing how rich and varied his mind was in his writings the temptation was great to continue his friend, waiting, however difficult the waiting might be, till he could no longer withhold himself aloof, when, out of sheer weariness, he would lay aside all parade of courtesy and politeness — in other words, lay aside his mask. He has, as I have said, lifted so many veils in his writings, revealed so much, that I must have patience, but it will take years; even so I must continue to spy upon him — the word spy is a hard one, but I like hard words. The word seems exaggerated, and caused a little shudder, but it is the only word that depicts the situation that Pater's shyness placed me in.

Moreover the artist considers nothing but his art, and it behoved me to understand Pater, but despite my genius for intimacy, I did not begin to feel that I had advanced myself in his till I told him how much I admired a certain paper, almost a story, in which a child recovering from a long illness takes pleasure in listening to the rustling of a flowering branch beyond his window. The title of your story was The Child in the House. It is many years since I read it, but while reading, those pages were my world. In his quiet, old-maidish way Pater said: I'm glad you like that paper, and as some of it seems to have passed out of your mind I will give you a proof, I've some upstairs; and when he returned with the proof in his hand, two long strips of paper, pulls the printer would have called them, it seemed to me that a favour beyond anything I had ever hoped to receive was about to be conferred upon me. Nor was I altogether wrong, for no more beautiful thing could be put into anybody's hands than that story, if one could call it a story, for Pater, knowing himself not to be altogether a story-teller, never plunged into story, but remained always a little outside, on the eve, as it were, and his imaginary portraits gain a dim subdued beauty from his scrupulous reverence of an art that was not his and which he did not wish to be his, preferring to glance into life and to dream on what he had half seen, half defined, rather than to pry and to take notes. And looked at from this side, the imaginary portraits are intimations of life rather than life as it seems in its passing. In The Prince of Court Painters he gives us a soul apart, lighting no other soul, lit with no light of its own, and visible to us through borrowed light: Watteau is away in Paris, and Jean Baptiste's sister dreams of Watteau's art and a little of her brother's. A satellite soul truly, as was Rembrandt's wife, but her pilgrimage was in person, and the sorrow we read on her face is real sorrow, but in Pater's portrait of Jean Baptiste's sister, only an illusive regret appears, if as much. Jean Baptiste's sister is not conscious of her regret; her sorrow, if it be one, is a dim radiance, the moon's sorrow, so to speak. So I was thinking one evening as I came away from the Robinsons, already absorbed in meditations, for it was just as I turned out of Earl's Terrace into the High Street that I met Pater, and accosting him impulsively, I said: I've been reading you all this morning and talking about my reading to Mary, for you've written the most beautiful thing ever written. Astonished but not displeased at this abrupt interjection of myself into his life, Pater took my arm. The most beautiful thing, I continued, and began to tell of the woman who loved Watteau all her life almost without knowing it, for the word love is not pronounced in the story, till my store of words were exhausted; and in return for my cordial admiration of The Prince of Court Painters Pater walked a little way up the High Street with me. We returned to Earl's Terrace together, and it was at the opening of the Terrace from the High Street that I said: the woman in your story (Jean Baptiste's sister, if I remember right) is the only one in English fiction that I recognise as a woman by something more than mere external signs, beard, moustache or certain roundnesses, She is spiritually a woman, the being that Rembrandt painted. Pater's face changed expression and I saw that my meaning escaped him. But an east wind was blowing at the time, and thinking he might prefer to go indoors than to listen to my admiration of his writings any longer, I turned towards the Kensington railway station, but had not gone more than half-way when an overwhelming temptation seized me to go back and make plain my meaning. For some time I stood irresolute, unable to summon courage to knock at the door and explain to the servant that I should not detain Mr Pater long, but had something of great importance to tell him. It will seem rather silly, I murmured, but I could not do else than retrace my steps. The servant seemed a long time coming, but she did come and I was shown up to the drawing-room. Mr Pater will be down presently, sir. He entered the drawing-room a little flurried. My dear Moore, what is —

I've come back for no better purpose than to tell you why your portrait of Jean Baptiste's sister is like Rembrandt's portrait of his wife. Your face told me you did not understand me, and as it is important to me not to seem a fool in your eyes I came back. My dear Moore! He put his hand upon my shoulder, and the mask dropped a little. In my opinion, I continued, it was Rembrandt who intro­duced women into art. But the Renaissance? said Pater. The Renaissance, I answered, understood women as odalisques, mere instruments of pleasure; and Dürer caricatured women, but it was Rembrandt who first saw woman as man's satellite, pale and pensive, aware that man and not woman had created the world; and when he was inspired he painted them a little saddened by the knowledge, but kindly disposed withal. But do not think, Pater, that I wish to depreciate women or their influence in life. Few men have admired women more than I have. A very gracious woman once said in my presence: trust G.M. to find something to say in favour of a woman, whatever her faults may be. All things certainly I would say in favour of women, and all things do for a woman, all but one, I would not lie for a woman; and however needful they are in our lives, and however delightful their influence is, still a woman is a satellite and it is to her honour that she is not ashamed to be one, no more ashamed is she than the moon; only man is ashamed — in other words, only a man is Christian.

Women have done some very pretty painting and written some delightful poems, but if we look into their faces we read there the sadness of the satellite; and this sadness Rembrandt painted in 1660 or thereabouts, but nobody has written it. Balzac, who read nature from end to end? But he did not realise it — not altogether in any work that I can remember at the moment. Not as you have done. And it was your genius that led you to place her in the town of Lille or Valenciennes, near to the country of Rembrandt. Or was it that Watteau came from some frontier town — which? It doesn't matter, Lille and Valenciennes are frontier towns, and there she is in one or the other, dreaming of Watteau's art, the only real woman in English literature. All you say, Moore, is very kind, and although your point of view escaped me in the High Street — a wind was blowing at the time, a keen wind, and I was in a hurry to get home — I do apprehend your meaning, and would like to ask you a question: have I done in any other work of the kind that you perceive in The Prince of Court Painters? Of course you have, Pater; the same art is in Marius. Pater's face changed a little, and I said to myself: he thinks that I have not understood his question; and I began to tell him' that the difference between Marius and every other prose narrative in the English language was its seriousness. You have given us a prose narrative, Pater, as serious as The Excursion, and have thereby done a great service, though it will be a long time before criticism will become aware of what you have done and your influence be felt. And there is another thing I'd like to say, Pater. You were upstairs dressing for dinner, no doubt, so I shall not detain you: a few sentences, that is all. Pater assured me that he was in no hurry; he was dining at home, and had an hour to spare if I cared to avail myself of it. What strikes me, I continued, apart from the seriousness that I find in your book, a seriousness which you must yourself be aware of and which contrasts with the triviality of Dickens and Thackeray and all the other hirelings in the pay of the circulating libraries, is that in writing about Marius you write about mankind rather than about the mere individual. For we have had story-tellers who have related fairly well how a man pursued an enemy down passages and through tapestried halls to see him at last disappearing through a panelled door; and there have been other story-tellers, a more numerous class, perhaps, who have related domestic estrangements, divorced wives who return to their old homes to rock an ailing child or to nurse a husband whose bones have been broken in a hunting accident. In the first instance the unfortunate wife takes advantage of her late relative's absence from home to see her child; in the second she has recourse to some trivial disguise, make­ believe, but no writer except yourself, my dear Pater, has written a serious story in which jokes good and bad do not occur, in which the quality known as humour is omitted.

You were the first to discover in English literature that life is neither jocular nor melodramatic, and in that most beautiful of all chapters, White Nights, your object was not to tell a mere story, which when read is not worth reading a second time, but to relate the states of consciousness through which Marius passes, his hopes, fears, aspirations and dreams, his interest in common things, those that always have and always will interest mankind, his interest in the culture of the vine and olive which has a peculiar grace of its own, and might well contribute to the production of an ideal dignity of character like that of nature itself in its gifted region. I wonder if you know how beautiful the page is on which those words occur. On the next page you relate that the ancient hymn, Luna Novella, was still sung by the people as the new moon grew bright in the west, and then those lovely words, almost fragrant words: the life of the widow, languid, shadowy, but with the poignancy of regret. And if I do not speak of his description of the slopes of Luna, it is because it does not throw light upon a side of your art that I wish to elucidate as well as the page in which you tell that a certain vague fear of evil, constantly in him, enhanced still further the sentiment of home as a place of tried security. And then you illustrate Marius's sense of some unexplored evil ever dogging his steps with an anecdote: how one fierce day in early summer he came upon some snakes breeding as he walked along a narrow road and avoided that place ever afterwards. It made his sleep uneasy for many days; but best of all for my purpose is the passage in which you compare Marius to the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the play by Euripides, for this passage is applicable not to one man but to nearly all men. You were not writing about any individual but about mankind.

Pater waited till my vehemence had spent itself, and then he asked me if in doing all I said he had done he had not lost something of Marius's individual character. Of course you did, Pater, but you contrasted Marius with his friend Flavius, who is highly individualised. I am glad you think so, Pater said, but I did not do it for that reason or any particular reason. If you had you would not have done it so well, I answered, and next morning I wrote to him, saying that Marius was the great atonement for all the bad novels that have been written in the English language. And having put off all that lay heaviest upon my mind, I fell to thinking that in writing about Pater, critics of all sorts, high and low, big and small, have spoken about the inevitable word without having considered what they wished to say, content to repeat a set phrase. The inevitable word was Flaubert's invention, and was forced upon him because of his inability to write a long sentence, only short ones relieved by the startling adjective, and these are apt to get tiresome. Pater's complaint that Plato's sentences are long may be regarded as Pater's single excursion into humour, for however long Plato's sentences may be we can affirm with safety that none are longer than Pater's. It is true that Landor did not write long sentences, maybe for the sake of the dialogue; that may be the reason; but it was Pater's wont to include long parentheses and to continue his sentences with the aid of conjunctions, in the hope, and no vain one, of getting his prose to flow to a murmurous melody, rising and disappearing like water mysteriously. He said in The Renaissance that the tendency of all the arts is to aspire to the condition of music, his theory and his practice was the same, and if he had lived to hear L'après-midi d'un Faune, he could not have done else but think that he was listening to his own prose changed into music by some sorcerer or sorcerers, malign or benevolent.

The inevitable word, which has proved of so much use to critics in filling up columns, was not sought by him, he found it without seeking; he sought the paragraph, and afterwards the page, and after the page the chapter. And the chapter was sought in its relation to the book; the book was always in his mind, and it was because he could concentrate on it that he is a greater writer than any of the Frenchmen we have fallen into the habit of talking about — the unfortunate Flaubert, whose power over words was so stinted that he found himself obliged in the end to limit his dialogue to How are you? or to Good-morning! And such repudiation of dialogue helped to formulate the naturalistic doctrine that dialogue was illiterate; despite Rabelais, Shakespeare and Balzac; all and sundry forgot that they must not only conquer dialogue, but, what is more difficult, patter.

Of what is known as purple passages, Pater is almost guiltless; only one is to be discovered, a flagrant sentimentality written about the Gioconda, a lady who never ceases to smile, as somebody has said, at the nonsense she hears talked about her every day in the Louvre. But Pater received compliments for his interpretation of her smile with a certain bland courtesy all his own. I was always sorry for him in those moments, and once took pity, interrupting an admirer with the assurance that the repaint was answerable for the plunger in deep seas, etc. A regrettable incident it is, truly, this passage, in a writer in whom exaggeration and emphasis are, and should be, almost absent. We would not wish, however, the passage away, for a little vulgarity is needed, surely, if a great writer must be made known to the public. It would not be easy to give reasons why a great writer should be made known to the public, but admitting that he must be made known, the purple passage in question will take the place of the jam that helps down the Gregory powder. And having explained away the plunger in deep seas as well as my small talent allows me to do, I should like to say that pictures of this sentimental kind cannot be considered otherwise than as literary misfortunes; for it is not true that bad pictures give birth to good literature. It may be well, or it may be ill to add to this a word of advice: that it is not wise for men of letters who have not painted themselves, who have never had their fingers in the gallipot and spent half their lives in studios in the company of painters to express opinions about particular pictures. It would do better, it seems to me, for them to write about the plastic arts remotely, as Pater did about the Greek marbles, especially about those with whom they are not acquainted directly, for direct acquaintance may lead us into direct appreciations, and these always seem foolish in the studios. It is true that the studios have their own mistakes in appreciation to explain away as best they can, so whichever way we turn we drop into paradox. Who would have thought that Pater would have seen a masterpiece in the Blenheim Raphael, and committed himself to the opinion that it is in this one that all Raphael's gifts came to perfect flower? One of Pater's biographers mentions that Pater hankered after Burne-Jones's pictures, an indiscretion on a par with a valet who betrays the fact that his master wears a wig. The episode about the plunger in deep seas humanised Pater sufficiently — that and his admiration of the Blenheim Raphael — and we might have been spared the too human tale of a fascination little short of disreputable. It will be said in Pater's defence that the picture was brought to London with much hurraying and shouting and asseverations that seventy thousand golden guineas were paid for it. And this defence should not be looked upon as special pleading; in such moments of popular judgment the best of us lose our heads; and Pater's admiration of Burne-Jones can be dealt with more summarily.  For we do not read of it in his own words, but in those of a biographer who was, no doubt, recording some memory. But the biographer's memory is often untrustworthy, and we prefer to regard him as such, rather than to believe that a man could hanker after Burne-Jones and appreciate Botticelli as Pater certainly seems to have done in his too brief essay, the most beautiful thing, perhaps, in a book full of beautiful things.

Botticelli rises out of Pater's prose like a dream out of sleep, a young man inspired in his youth, in the April morning of the Renaissance, and in the prose moving along to a music fresh as flowers we see him painting his own portrait in the story of his own age in The Prima­-vera, and doing it so succinctly, we may say so pointedly, that it is hard to discard the idea that he was aware of the Renaissance, and that he deemed himself the chronicler of it, though it may be, of course, that Botticelli was concerned only with the thought of the springtide that returns every year, but if this were so, and he was without any thought of the paganism that was returning to the world, why should he have introduced fauns and dryads into his picture? It is delightful to think that somebody knew he was born on the eve of a great age, a precursor of wonderful things to come, but of none more lovely than the early blossoms himself was bringing. What came after may be said to be more perfect, but none can be said to be more enchanting than the sweet girl advancing with all the gaiety of the season in her face, her white hand filled with flowers. In my memory of the essay there is little doubt that Pater must have often walked immersed in thoughts of a young man rejoicing in a world grown suddenly young again, who looked on himself, as I have said, as the chronicler of its beauty, his own genius seeming to him, not so much a personal gift, as one bestowed upon him for an almost divine purpose, that of making known to men their own wonderful beauty and the beauty of women and children, of mountains, flowers, of all things that the eye can see, and applying his gift with extra­ordinary joyousness to its task of calling on the sleepers, prone to turn round and fall back into the sleep of monasticism, to awaken and rejoice in the beauty of the morning. It is thus that Pater presents Botticelli to us, a young man between the ages of twenty and thirty, blithe, debonair, with smiling eyes, long curls on his shoulder, and wearing a crimson vest. After thirty we lose sight of him.  He does not seem to have had any middle age, and Pater avoids dwelling upon his old age when this first,flower, and in many ways the most beautiful flower of the Renaissance, withered in the influence of a cruel theology that seemed to have passed away, but which had again stretched forth a claw setting this glad spirit illustrating Dante's monastic dream with a pencil that could not wholly forget the humanities of the Renaissance. Alas! Savonarola had gotten hold of him and the monk would have brought back the Middle Ages in all its ugliness if the good Pope Alexander had not ordered his burning. Of this monk there is little, it may be there is no mention of him in the essay, Pater's purpose being to set us dreaming of the young man who begins life so happily and ended it so sadly. The essay reads gaily, like an opera by Mozart, the prose rhythms rising and falling amid delightful suspensions of thought, each ordained to carry the music on till the book drops on the reader's knee and he sits asking himself if Pater has lost anything that literature can give, and if the noble pages that Fromentin consecrates to the genius of Ruysdael be not more legitimate. The temptation is sore within me to talk about Fromentin, but it will be more legitimate to continue telling Pater, a greater writer than Fromentin, whose name rises up in my mind only in his essay on Ruysdael, for in none other does he give us the painter as part and parcel of his works, inseparable as body from soul. Nor does Pater succeed twice in this great achievement; we get glimpses of Michelangelo, Leonardo and the residue, but no more. And it may- be that after Botticelli, Pater's best portrait is Winckelmann, whose death is thrilling, and sheds a light upon his human nature and the origin of his love of Greek sculpture.

There are pages in The Renaissance as beautiful as any he has written, and the perfection is so flawless, that it is difficult to perceive while reading that all are not equally inspired. Therefore the moral of the book is, though the inspiration be not always by us, it is our business to write beautiful pages, so that we may be prepared to receive the sacred flame when it shall choose to descend into our lantern; our care should be that the lantern be worthy of the flame when it comes. And these words lead me right up to the question that has been on the lips of whomsoever reads me.

Whence came that style, unlike all other styles? We know that Pater did not receive it from the moon, nor from a fairy, and through the indiscretion of a biographer we know it was not in the first paper that he wrote. So Pater's style was born of this earth, and may be traced back to its source, a thing, however, that the critics of great reading have not yet succeeded in doing; but what is may be discovered, and months and years went by in the quest of Pater's spring-head and source, but not till ten years ago was my hand guided by what we term accident to Goethe's Italian Journey, a book given to me by dear Edward, one that I had read here and there and wearied of, it seeming to me a pompous, empty narrative of a journey in Italy, lacking character, life and movement; the sort of book that our fathers and grandfathers used to put together when they returned home from the grand tour. And it was with casual eyes that I wandered once more through the pages, reading that Goethe was received by the flunkeys of a certain duchess, who conducted him up a staircase which he thought rather fine; on the next page that somebody put a carriage at his disposal so that he might drive out in the afternoon and admire the views; like the staircase, these seemed to him very fine; the next day he visited the museum, not to meet a lady, which would have been admirable, but to make a drawing of the Apollo, and I was about to lay the book aside wearily when my eyes alighted on a chapter entitled Saint Philip Neri. The first sentence of it caught my attention, and I finished the page easily; the book then dropping upon my knees, I saw in a vision Pater in a great library, standing on the library steps reading a book he had taken from the shelves above him, and he continued reading for what seemed to me a long while, returning the book suddenly, but remaining (it was this that seemed strange), absorbed in thought, on the fifth step of the ladder. For what does he remain standing on the fifth step of the ladder? I asked myself. And of what is he thinking? In visions, however, almost everything is revealed to us, and I very soon began to learn, or it was borne in upon me, that he had been reading Goethe's study of Saint Philip Neri. Thoughts were flocking in his mind, and at last some of these were carried over into my mind, and I learned that he was not certain whether he should write an article on Goethe's style with special reference to Saint Philip Neri, or say nothing about it. He will never speak about it, my soul answered me, and my delicious faith in human nature was rewarded, for Pater woke from his reverie looking round to make sure he was not being watched, and finding himself alone in the library he returned the book to its place, and having fully satisfied himself he had returned it to its exact place, he removed the steps to another part of the library and called to the librarian, to whom he put some questions regarding books dealing with the life and time of the troubadours.

My vision ended abruptly, which is the way of visions, and I said: how human, so human, that it must have been as I dreamt it, and picking up the book that had slipped from my knees to the floor I continued Saint Philip Neri a little further, stopping again and again to indulge myself in meditation, saying to myself: I have come upon Pater's origins, but if I make it known to the world it will be said that I have robbed Pater of part of his glory. On the other hand it will seem to many that my discovery will give Pater a literary father, a thing he needs; and how much greater than his father he is — his father redeemed from pomposity and endeared to us by a touch of nature as Wagner was by the publication of the Vasendonck letters. And to attach Pater to other human beings, to rescue him from isolation, shall be my task. I see it all, and, I think I see it clearly.