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The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

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THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY
WALTER HORATIO PATER

London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)


NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:

Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, a
style inconvenient in an electronic edition. I have therefore
placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater's footnotes
and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each chapter's
notes at that chapter's end.

Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy,
I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketed
numeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediately
following the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. I
have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.

Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an
e-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.

Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it
can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.




THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART AND POETRY
WALTER HORATIO PATER



CONTENTS


Preface: vii-xv

Two Early French Stories: 1 -29

Pico della Mirandola: 30-49

Sandro Botticelli: 50-62

Luca della Robbia: 63-72

The Poetry of Michelangelo: 73-97

Leonardo da Vinci: 98-129

The School of Giorgione: 130-154

Joachim du Bellay: 155-176

Winckelmann: 177-232

Conclusion: 233-end



DEDICATION

To C.L.S
February 1873



PREFACE

[vii] Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to
define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general
terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these
attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating
things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to
enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate
between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use
words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise
meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other
qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the
definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to
its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in
the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal
formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or
that [viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student
of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to
be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic
criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is,
is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it,
to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism
deals--music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human
life--are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they
possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities.
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented
in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on
me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of
pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under
its influence? The answers to these questions are the original
facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study
of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data
for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these
impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination
and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the
abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact
relation to truth or [ix] experience--metaphysical questions, as
unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass
them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he
has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and
human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations,
each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he
feels, and wishes to explain, by analysing 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 Mirandola, 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, a unique, impression of pleasure.
Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.
And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to
analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a
picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book,
produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate
what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions
it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that
[x] virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element,
for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach
this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent
critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner à connaître de près les
belles choses, et à s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en
humanistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a
correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain
kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the
presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that
beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools
of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been
some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The
question he asks is always:--In whom did the stir, the genius, the
sentiment of the period find itself? where was the receptacle of
its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal,"
says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination.
Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly,
casting off all débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their
imagination has wholly [xi] fused and transformed. Take, for
instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius,
entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part,
but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much
which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it,
sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the
Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random,
depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not
wholly search through and transmute, we trace the action of his
unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a
life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature,
drawing strength and colour and character from local influences,
from the hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds.
Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's
poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to
follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree
in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history
of the Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that
complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of
them what I understand by the word, [xii] giving it a much wider
scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote
that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which
was only one of many results of a general excitement and
enlightening of the human mind, but of which the great aim and
achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to
the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak of the human
spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives
already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the
worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this
earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an
expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early
French; not because they constitute the best possible expression
of them, but because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch
as the Renaissance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a
phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay are in many
ways the most perfect illustration. The Renaissance, in truth, put
forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate
sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely [xiii]
decadence, just as its earliest phases have the freshness which
belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascêsis, of
the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which
can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results
in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete
works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their
profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character,
for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make
up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different
starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the
same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and
unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers
themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or
disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and
poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of
refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the
world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and
those who prosecute either of them are generally little [xiv]
curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from
time to time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the
thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont, and the
many interests of the intellectual world combine in one complete
type of general culture. The fifteenth century in Italy is one of
these happier eras, and what is sometimes said of the age of
Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is an age productive in
personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists
and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has
elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a
common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts.
There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which
all alike communicate. The unity of this spirit gives unity to all
the various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate
alliance with the mind, this participation in the best thoughts
which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth
century owes much of its grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with
the studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in
the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age.
By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect [xv] and the
imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long
struggle to attain the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the
humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and
tendencies.

1873.



TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove.

[1] THE history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us
away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire.
But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the
Renaissance had begun. French writers, who are fond of
connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin,
who tell us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only,
but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so
deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how
Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old
French fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the
origin of the art of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have
often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the
twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance
within the limits of the middle age itself--a brilliant, but in part
abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what
was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance,
indeed, is now generally used to denote not [2] merely the revival
of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century,
and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex
movement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but
one element or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of
a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the
things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the
desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make
themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search
out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative
enjoyment, and directing them not only to the discovery of old
and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of
fresh sources thereof--new experiences, new subjects of poetry,
new forms of art. Of such feeling there was a great outbreak in
the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the following century.
Here and there, under rare and happy conditions, in Pointed
architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of
Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns to sweetness;
and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of
the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the
springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming
after a long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that
true "dark age," in which so many sources of intellectual and
imaginative enjoyment had [3] actually disappeared, this
outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance, a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of
thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry,
which the narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose
to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are
almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a
Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a
continuity between the most characteristic work of that period,
the sculpture of Chartres, the windows of Le Mans, and the work
of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin and Germain
Pilon, thus healing that rupture between the middle age and the
Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not
so much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and
painting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's
sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays
itself--but rather its profane poetry, the poetry of Provence, and
the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France,
which those French writers have in view when they speak of this
medieval Renaissance. In that poetry, earthly passion, with its
intimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makes
itself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great scholar and the
great lover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with
the free [4] play of human intelligence around all subjects
presented to it, with the liberty of the intellect, as that age
understood it.

Every one knows the legend of Abelard, a legend hardly less
passionate, certainly not less characteristic of the middle age,
than the legend of Tannhäuser; how the famous and comely
clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed, pleasant, and
discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in the house of a
canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girl, Heloïse,
believed to be the old priest's orphan niece; how the old priest
had testified his love for her by giving her an education then
unrivalled, so that rumour asserted that, through the knowledge
of languages, enabling her to penetrate into the mysteries of the
older world, she had become a sorceress, like the Celtic
druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloïse sat together at home
there, to refine a little further on the nature of abstract ideas,
"Love made himself of the party with them." You conceive the
temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amid
the bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world of
something like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how
to assign its exact value to every abstract thought, those restraints
which lie on the consciences of other men had been relaxed. It
appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue:
already the young men sang them on the quay below the house.
Those songs, says M. de Rémusat, [5] were probably in the taste
of the Trouvères, "of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so
to speak, the predecessor." It is the same spirit which has
moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the
middle age.

At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the next generation
raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the
"Mountain of Saint Geneviève," the historian Michelet sees in
thought "a terrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone,
fifty bishops, twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of
scholastic philosophy; not only the learned Heloïse, the teaching
of languages, and the Renaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is
to say, the revolution." And so from the rooms of this shadowy
house by the Seine side we see that spirit going abroad, with its
qualities already well defined, its intimacy, its languid sweetness,
its rebellion, its subtle skill in dividing the elements of human
passion, its care for physical beauty, its worship of the body,
which penetrated the early literature of Italy, and finds an echo
even in Dante.

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear
a singular omission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have
inwoven into the texture of his work whatever had impressed him
as either effective in colour or spiritually significant among the
recorded incidents of actual life. Nowhere in his great poem do
we find the name, nor so much as an allusion to the story of [6]
one who had left so deep a mark on the philosophy of which
Dante was an eager student, of whom in the Latin Quarter, and
from the lips of scholar or teacher in the University of Paris,
during his sojourn among them, he can hardly have failed to hear.
We can only suppose that he had indeed considered the story and
the man, and abstained from passing judgment as to his place in
the scheme of "eternal justice."

In the famous legend of Tannhäuser, the erring knight makes his
way to Rome, to seek absolution at the centre of Christian
religion. "So soon," thought and said the Pope, "as the staff in
his hand should bud and blossom, so soon might the soul of
Tannhäuser be saved, and no sooner"; and it came to pass not
long after that the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried
in his hand was covered with leaves and flowers. So, in the
cloister of Godstow, a petrified tree was shown of which the nuns
told that the fair Rosamond, who had died among them, had
declared that, the tree being then alive and green, it would be
changed into stone at the hour of her salvation. When Abelard
died, like Tannhäuser, he was on his way to Rome. What might
have happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; and
it is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the general
beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things,
he prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in
[7] which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new
kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to but
only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually
realised. The opposition into which Abelard is thrown, which
gives its colour to his career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a
no less subtle opposition than that between the merely
professional, official, hireling ministers of that system, with their
ignorant worship of system for its own sake, and the true child of
light, the humanist, with reason and heart and senses quick, while
theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, he attains,
modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of that
system, though in essential germ, it may be, contained within it.
As always happens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower
culture had no sympathy with, because no understanding of, a
culture richer and more ample than their own. After the
discovery of wheat they would still live upon acorns--après
l'invention du blé ils voulaient encore vivre du gland; and would
hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity with
instruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong
for them. Abelard and Heloïse write their letters--letters with a
wonderful outpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard,
though he composes songs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in
Latin those [8] treatises in which he tries to find a ground of
reality below the abstractions of philosophy, as one bent on
trying all things by their congruity with human experience, who
had felt the hand of Heloïse, and looked into her eyes, and tested
the resources of humanity in her great and energetic nature. Yet
it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century, that French
prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes of the
Bibliothèque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of
it may be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of these
thirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free
play of human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is
an assertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great
friendship, a friendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of
passionate exaltation, and more than faithful unto death. Such
comradeship, though instances of it are to be found everywhere,
is still especially a classical motive; Chaucer expressing the
sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale, that one knows not
whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite for Emelya, or of
those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of the Knight's
Tale--

He cast his eyen upon Emelya,
And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah!
As that he stongen were unto the herte.

What reader does not refer something of the [9] bitterness of that
cry to the spoiling, already foreseen, of the fair friendship, which
had made the prison of the two lads sweet hitherto with its daily
offices?

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romantic
circumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two
heroes, through which they pass for each other again and again,
and thereby into many strange adventures; that curious interest of
the Doppelgänger, which begins among the stars with the
Dioscuri, being entwined in and out through all the incidents of
the story, like an outward token of the inward similitude of their
souls. With this, again, is connected, like a second reflection of
that inward similitude, the conceit of two marvellously beautiful
cups, also exactly like each other--children's cups, of wood, but
adorned with gold and precious stones. These two cups, which
by their resemblance help to bring the friends together at critical
moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized
them at Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that
purpose, in gratitude for their birth. They cross and recross very
strangely in the narrative, serving the two heroes almost like
living things, and with that well-known effect of a beautiful
object, kept constantly before the eye in a story or poem, of
keeping sensation well awake, and giving a certain air of
refinement to all the scenes into which it enters. That sense of
fate, which [10] hangs so much of the shaping of human life on
trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief, is thereby
heightened, while witness is borne to the enjoyment of beautiful
handiwork by primitive people, their simple wonder at it, so that
they give it an oddly significant place among the factors of a
human history.

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