Art's "background of flame" and the paterian temperament of art

This thesis examines how Walter Pater uses hot and cold imagery in his descriptions to further his understanding of art, arguing that it contains both beauty and commentary, whether social, political, etc. Beginning with Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater associates heat with the sensuality of the body and cold with the morality of the soul. Cold represents, more specifically, the monopoly of the Catholic Church on morality and its condemnation of the body, because of its sensual susceptibility to sin. His Imaginary Portraits "Denys L'Auxerrois," "Duke Carl of Rosenmold," and "Apollo in Picardy" explore the potential of microcosmic renaissances located in particular towns, with a singular instigator of the Renaissance spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, these instigators lack widespread support, because of the moral backlash to their progressive and uninhibited embrace of the sensual. Notably, each of these tales ends in the individual motivator's death. In Pater's final work, the posthumously published and unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour, heat loses its totally positive connotations and morality, whether codified in religion or not, proves to be a positive and negative motivator, depending on the actor. The novel epitomizes art in that the necessary balance between the body and the soul-the hot and the cold-will always remain incomplete for man. Art provides the arena for man to recognize and understand his whole self, physical, emotional, social, and political.

ART’S “BACKGROUND OF FLAME” AND THE PATERIAN TEMPERAMENT OF ART by Candace Oman A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The University of Utah In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Degree in Bachelor of Arts In English Department Approved: ____________________ Dr. Matthew Potolsky Supervisor ____________________ Dr. Barry Weller Chair, Department of English ____________________ Dr. Disa Gambera Department Honors Advisor ____________________ Dr. Sylvia D. Torti Dean, Honors College May 2014       ABSTRACT This thesis examines how Walter Pater uses hot and cold imagery in his descriptions to further his understanding of art, arguing that it contains both beauty and commentary, whether social, political, etc. Beginning with Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater associates heat with the sensuality of the body and cold with the morality of the soul. Cold represents, more specifically, the monopoly of the Catholic Church on morality and its condemnation of the body, because of its sensual susceptibility to sin. His Imaginary Portraits “Denys L’Auxerrois,” “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” and “Apollo in Picardy” explore the potential of microcosmic renaissances located in particular towns, with a singular instigator of the Renaissance spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, these instigators lack widespread support, because of the moral backlash to their progressive and uninhibited embrace of the sensual. Notably, each of these tales ends in the individual motivator’s death. In Pater’s final work, the posthumously published and unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour, heat loses its totally positive connotations and morality, whether codified in religion or not, proves to be a positive and negative motivator, depending on the actor. The novel epitomizes art in that the necessary balance between the body and the soul—the hot and the cold—will always remain incomplete for man. Art provides the arena for man to recognize and understand his whole self, physical, emotional, social, and political.   ii       TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii INTRODUCTION 1 THE RENAISSANCE FEVER 3 THE DUALITY OF EVEN PATER’S GODS 18 AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION—OR RESOLUTION? 35 CONCLUSION 41 WORKS CITED 43   iii   1     INTRODUCTION Today, the Italian Renaissance—its humanism, the art, and the artists themselves—is a golden age; an admirable time of great people, art, and history. No positive consensus exists among Walter Pater’s Victorian England contemporaries, foremost among them John Ruskin. Ruskin condemns the movement’s blasphemous aspiration to perfection, especially the perfection of the human form, believing instead that man’s best work happens when, “out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole” (176-177). In response to Ruskin’s accusation, Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance demonstrates the era’s warm humanist core that separated it, for the better, from other artistic movements. The recurring instances of hot or cold imagery in descriptions of various artworks and the aims of their respective artists in Studies in the History of the Renaissance continue in Pater’s subsequent works. Pater’s fondness of temperature imagery has not gone unnoticed by scholars of his work; for example, Denis Donaghue, in his biography of Pater, claims that “flame and fusion [are] Pater’s favorite metaphors when he wants to declare that unity has been achieved by can’t say how” (237). This essay will argue that Pater’s metaphors of contrasting temperatures describe the search for the unity of morality and sensuality, particularly in art, and the ultimate uncertainty about how man might accomplish it. Beginning in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater uses the Christian description of the Hellishly warm and recasts it as life-giving heat in defense of both the Renaissance and art as a whole. The opposing force, Christian morality, he then aligns with cold temperatures. The connections and connotations of these contrasting   2     temperaments pervade Pater’s account of the Renaissance and also his later narrations of other renaissances. He exploits existing meanings of temperature to add another layer to his commentary on art, its purpose, and its multi-faceted effects on viewers. Pater’s opinions about the balance between the seemingly opposed characteristics of sensuality and morality in art, and in humanity as its creator, shift from the publication of his first full-length work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in 1873 to the posthumously published Gaston de Latour (1900), his unfinished novel. His initial view of morality as nothing more than an oppressive regime gives way, through the course of the Imaginary Portraits, to a recognition of its potential as long as it does not condemn man’s body as despicable. With Gaston, heat also loses its unilaterally positive indication, because it makes no distinction between what it consumes. Together these texts describe an art inherently commenting on a period, a tool in the hands of man. Like temperature, art is the culmination of other forces, its creation and meanings are the, perhaps unconscious, machinations of man rather than nature. Pater’s metaphors of temperature, then, tell how art is used, providing a reflection of those wielding it and the temperament of their era. Man must strike a balance in his creational surroundings between hot and cold, sensuality and morality, body and soul, with art supplying the inspiration. Pater’s preface of Studies in the History of the Renaissance refutes the notion that beauty must be defined; it is not the definition of beauty that matters for art or its critics, but its “kind of temperament” (SHR 4). Prior to even beginning his work, Pater takes the time to establish temperament as an essential part of artistic criticism, but exactly what does he mean by the “temperament” of beauty? The term itself incorporates the “constitution or habit of mind” of an artist and an observer affecting the creation and   2   3     interpretation of the work, as well as a “condition with regard to warmth or coldness” (“Temperament” OED). The second denotation emphasizes the environments in which art is made and subsequently received. Pater uses temperature itself to expose the relative temperaments of man in different eras and the conflicts that arise through the opposition of hot and cold. The importance Pater attaches to temperament is underlined by the word’s original Latin meaning of “due mixture,” telling of a combination of traits—or temperatures—rather than a single, stable characteristic (“Temperament” OED). Temperament is in flux, a constantly changing aspect of art that alters observers’ perceptions. Therefore, they must become aware of it. Within Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the combining and conflicting elements of temperament are sensuality and Christian morality. THE RENAISSANCE FEVER Given Christianity’s condemnation of sensuality and the human body’s indulgence of it as sinful, Pater uses the inherent association of that sin with Hell and its flames to his rhetorical advantage. That conceptual tie is perhaps best displayed in the following quote: But Christianity, with its uncompromising idealism, discrediting the slightest touch of sense, has lighted up for the artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness a background of flame. SHR 111 Christian morality’s marginalization of art, as a vehicle for change or simply a method of communication between men, dramatically restricts its effectiveness, simply because art’s potential power frightened one of the most powerful organizations on Earth. Christianity’s limitation of art arises from the fear that art, if not limited to sponsoring   3   4     spiritually born ecstasy, inspires sin through its close relationship to the body. Rather than attempting to disassociate art from the warmth of sensuality, a trait Pater admires, Pater utilizes the positive connotations of heat to alter the perception of that “background of flame” and its purpose (SHR 111). Pater casts art and the artists that create it as illuminating torches, not the tempting agents of Hell. Christianity, which Pater tends to reduce to morality in general, then exemplifies cold, as heat’s opposite, because of the religion’s resistance to the influence of art and resulting oppression. Given his derisive view of the oppression of art, according to the dictates of Christianity, it comes as no surprise that Pater praises those “who have passed out of Christianity[‘s]” influence, especially in the field of art criticism (qtd. in Higgins, “Essaying ‘W. H. Pater Esq.’” 84). The elevation of divine or natural beauty over that of the human form is particularly prevalent during the Middle Ages, due to the dominance of Christian ideals. Pater attributes that widespread degradation of the human form, both in art and in general, to the strength of the Christian belief that the human body and its sensuality are necessarily sinful. The “medieval religion…depreciates man’s nature” by “mak[ing] it ashamed of itself” (Pater, SHR 24). The encouraged shame teaches men to divorce themselves from their bodily senses, only leading to a cold wasteland. Further, the medieval style of art features an “abstract, disembodied beauty” “chilling” to viewers precisely because of its distantness and alienating nature (Pater, SHR 24-25). Pater’s description, “chilling,” incites an unconscious shiver in the reader, reproducing the medieval temperament concerning the nature of man (SHR 24). Despite the fact that man’s humanity remains an inescapable force, morality demands that he do his best to   4   5     resist it. The body is nothing more than a temporary host for the immortal soul and, as the entry point for sin, contemplation of its beauty only leads to Hell. Unlike the frigidity of the Middle Ages, Pater’s conception of the Renaissance exudes warmth and the appreciation of the individual and his or her body among artists as well as the general population that made up their audience. Fire and the heat it produces are primarily images of life, because heat enables survival and provides external evidence of life, absent upon the death of the body. In addition, heat accelerates decay, physically marking the passage of time. These connotations in mind, the Renaissance manifests for Pater as the “buried fire of ancient art” reemerging in the midst of the “frozen world” of the Middle Ages (SHR 89). The Renaissance and its “fire” give life to an artistic and philosophical transition away from condemnation of the body to an appreciation of beauty, all beauty (Pater, SHR 89). The “buried fire” melts away “men’s [studied] ignorance” of human beauty, exposing what Pater calls the “debris” of morality (SHR 89, 28). The assumption of comeliness as inherently sexualized, and therefore sinful, is precisely what Pater refers to with the derisive term “debris” (SHR 4). Christian morality’s growth from something marginalized to a monolithic glacier in its own right meant absorbing ideological “debris” along the way. As a glacier carves its way through a landscape, it melts and abandons some of that debris. An amount of debris always remains, however, until the glacier itself disintegrates. Morality begins pure in conception, but the creation collects other particles. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater sees the passing away of the glacier that is morality as impossible, but desirable—a position he later revises.   5   6     Along the same lines, art itself fails to live up to the genius of its conception. Even incredible artists like Goethe and Byron are not able to “cas[t] off all debris” (Pater, SHR 4). Having broken off from the Christian morality, the particles that soiled it in the first place remain. Thus, an artist’s genius, through heat, “crystallize[s] a part, but only a part” of his work, due to the necessary presence of morality in human nature, though not necessarily Christian morality (Pater, SHR 4). An artist’s “fus[ing] and transform[ing]” of some rock into crystal, the effort itself, better contrasts what he perfects to the remaining stone (Pater, SHR 4). Each artist’s efforts contribute to the heat and power of the movement known as the Renaissance, wherein the “‘spirit of humanity” returns to its senses” (Williams 118). While the body’s vulnerability to infection is primarily read as a weakness, Pater uses infection as a vehicle for widespread change. The body’s senses makes it susceptible to physical maladies, such as illness, and, as a vessel, affects the soul as well. Accordingly, Christian morality sees infection as a symbol of sin taking control of the soul through the body’s weaknesses. Infection’s propensity to spread only makes it more dangerous, much as an example of wrongdoing damnably encourages witnesses to similar bad behavior. Pater’s conception of illness is as a natural process, rather than a sign of corruption or disfavor. Infection’s fever reopens the mind to sensation, melting the artificially constructed controls of a supposedly immoral body. Pater’s illness, instead of sharing sin, spreads, as a fever, the Renaissance spirit. Today’s medical understanding knows that fever is one of the body’s many reactions to sickness, which accelerates the immune system’s response. The bodily primarily uses fever to defend itself and, thus, the soul. Fever does fatally fire the blood when the illness overwhelms the immune system.   6   7     As a man of the nineteenth century, Pater lacks this knowledge and uses other rhetorical methods to combat the negative understanding of the relation between fever and health. He categorizes the Renaissance as an “outbreak of reason and the imagination,” an illness that carries rationality and creativity, rather than death (SHR 16). The Renaissance fever burns away unnecessary limitations, freeing artists to create a new, more sensual artistic era. Artistic movements, like all expressions of human thought, share basic similarities, but the works and artists have their own individual traits within that style’s fuzzy sphere. The very real commonalities invalidates the claim popularized in Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” which persists even in Pater’s time, of the artist as an entirely isolated individual who cannot survive the company of other human beings. Renaissance artists’ attempts to make man “once again of both body and soul” unite them (Williams 67). Through their shared sense of community, their temperament, they “catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts” (Pater, SHR 6). They inhale in the heady “common air,” spreading the idea that art appreciates human comeliness without condemnation to Hell (Pater, SHR 6). Renaissance temperament believes “beauty [to be] wrought out from within upon the flesh,” and humanity exists beautifully, like the natural and the divine (Pater, SHR 70). The Renaissance artists’ fever frees minds from the idea that human nature necessitates damnation, melting the internalized cold of the Middle Ages. The spirit of Greek and Roman classics infects some individuals, like Joachim du Bellay, directly, but its revival during the Renaissance spreads to others through those initial artists. The infection “acts upon the artist” and, through him and his works, his audience (Pater, SHR 98). The artistic community, artists and audiences, perpetuate the   7   8     Renaissance. Alone, artists are “rays…pale and impotent,” but together their artistic theme of humanism “unite and begin to burn” (Pater, SHR 107). The unity burning among the artistic community ignites the “hard gem-like flame” Pater calls “success in life,” giving others the torch to crystallize their own art and lives (SHR 120). Pater sees his own work as a continuation of that flame, as evidenced by T.S. Eliot’s later observation that “it is as if [Pater’s] prose had been written in a low fever; there is a slight temperature to it” (qtd. in Higgins, “No Time for Pater” 52). Pater’s appropriation of illness does not end with his description of the Renaissance fever, as he tells a tale of love, another sort of desirable sickness. Love’s fickle and unavoidable nature intimately associates it with illness, an infamously incurable one. The similarity of the phrases “fallen in love” and “fallen ill” demonstrates love and sickness’ conceptual relationship. But, unlike general illness, people still want to experience love. In that strangely persistent desire lays a foundation for Pater’s further reversal of the metaphor of illness. The first chapter of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, “Aucassin and Nicolette,” twice describes Aucassin’s love for Nicolette as a “malady.” The first occurs when Aucassin’s love causes him to “neglect all knightly duties” (Pater, SHR 15). Later, however, his “malady” “induce[s him] to put himself at the head of his people that they…might have more heart to defend themselves” (Pater, SHR 15). Aucassin, then, does not disappoint either the standards of his knightly order or his people; he fulfills his obligations as the leader in spite of, or because of, his loving dedication to finding Nicolette. On the second occasion, Aucassin’s feelings “carried [him] into the midst of the enemy” (Pater, SHR 16). As he is in the enemy’s camp, Aucassin overhears them “talking together how they might most conveniently kill him”   8   9     (Pater, SHR 16). The foolish, and presumably fatal, action of leaving his company gives Aucassin the advantage of surprise over his enemy. Aucassin certainly has little to no control over the effects of his ardor, either for himself or others, but that is why love is an illness. In the narrative, the surrounding community warns Aucassin that in making Nicolette his mistress he will experience the “pains of hell,” undoubtedly caused by some manner of flame (Pater, SHR 17). The moral threat fails to dissuade the knight, and Aucassin replies that he would prefer Hell. The sensual and emotional experience of Aucassin and Nicolette’s love holds more sway for them than any suggested damnation. The persistence of Renaissance artists echoes Aucassin’s example: despite the condemnation of some of their peers (as well as posterity), both choose to employ their senses rather than deny them completely. The spirit of the Renaissance, like any sickness, is not without its dangers. However, the unique sensations that spirit offers outweigh those dangers. Pater’s chapter on Sandro Botticelli discusses the medieval denial of human urges and its epitome in Mary’s virgin birth of Jesus. The Biblical tale of the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy completely separates sex from the act of procreation, establishing an unachievable ideal. The Catholic Church’s veneration of this extraordinary evasion illustrates its desire to detach the physical pleasure of coitus from the necessity of childbearing. Mary subverts the necessity of damage to her virtue, and her hymen, by procreating through divine penetration, instead of physical. Botticelli’s painting of Mary provides, for Pater, a demonstration of “chilling…abstract, disembodied beauty,” because Catholic dogma’s promotion of her divinity and purity erase her physical beauty and humanity (SHR 25). In recognition of that cover-up, Botticelli’s Madonnas highlight the   9   10     exchange of human beauty for divinity; the moral judgments she embodies freeze her growth, trapping her in physical and spiritual stasis. The “high cold words” of her exaltation as the mother of Jesus “have no meaning for her,” precisely because those words contain no questions, only belated explanations (Pater, SHR 33). Mary’s virtuous life unintentionally results in a son, Jesus, she did not ask for and perhaps did not want. Informing Mary of her pregnancy after the fact, God wrests her sexual, personal, and maternal choices away from her in the bestowal of a dubious honor. Mary continues to exist as an abducted cryogenic symbol, a saint because of the religiously idyllic sexual purity she maintains. Botticelli’s depictions of her illustrate how empty the role actually is, tainting that ideal. His Madonnas’ faces have “little nobleness and…color[s that are] wan” (Pater, SHR 32). Being the “Virgin Mary” is not noble, not a fulfilling reward— mostly, it’s deadening, which is why Botticelli paints her with the bloodless skin color of a corpse. The very deed, or restraint, for which Christianity celebrates her confers no life; it is a “hard and cheerless” light from the “strange whiteness” of heaven, putting her on display (Pater, SHR 32). Pater recognizes in Botticelli’s paintings his own warning: Mary’s state is not one to aspire to, because the role as the mortal mother of God is not a human one, but coldly moral. While Mary is Christianity’s ideal, Venus instead represents the moral dangers and shame of the human body’s sensuality. The “grotesque emblems of the middle age” Botticelli depicts in The Birth of Venus set the Christian moral context of Venus’ portrayal (Pater, SHR 33). Through these “emblems” Botticelli recognizes Venus’ plight and provides an alternate interpretation of her. Performing the shame for the human form as taught by Christianity, Venus seeks to cover her nakedness. In the Roman pantheon,   10   11     the apparent sexuality of her body represents her power as the goddess of love. Here, Venus’ infantile lack of clothing becomes sinfully erotic, because the ocean’s sea foam births her as a sexually mature adult. Born without the physical and moral helplessness of a babe, Christians believe Venus’ virtue to be irredeemably lost. Accordingly, her acceptance of the proffered blanket is too little, too late. The “hard and cheerless” light heaven shining upon Mary also illuminates Venus in “cold—mere sunless dawn” (Pater, SHR 32, 34). Venus’ pagan version of love, including beauty and sex in addition to fertility, establishes her, in the Christian conception, as the epitome of sensuality’s wickedness. Christian dogma’s narrow categorization robs Venus of her choices, just as it does Mary. The other figures in The Birth of Venus exhibit their vitality in their healthy skin tone or their movement. Venus, however, stands frozen and her color is “cadaverous, or at least cold” (Pater, SHR 33). Venus, like Mary, exists only as a warning, but of where sensuality leads: Hell. Venus perishes in all but form, frozen by, in Paul Tucker’s words, the “chill reflex of centuries of repression intervening between the dawn of Desire and Botticelli’s own epoch” (“Reanimate Greek” 126). Christian morality admires the divine gift of Mary’s chilling spiritual model, though impossible, and simultaneously steals Venus’ warmth to transform her into Mary’s antithesis. By “fixing itself in frozen orthodoxy[,] the [C]atholic [C]hurch,” much like Mary and Venus, defines the appreciation of human beauty as a terrible sin (Pater, SHR 51). As a consequence, the instruction of Biblical lessons fulfills art’s only moral potential. This immovable stance of Christian morality clearly displays a connotation of coldness: the stationary nature of frozen things. Colder temperatures stave off the effects of time by making areas   11   12     uninhabitable for the living agents of decay. Frigidity, however, prevents all growth, positive or negative. The rest of the world progresses, chronologically and physically, while leaving what is frozen behind. From Botticelli’s proto-Renaissance work, Pater continues to Michelangelo and other High Renaissance artists. Pater describes Michelangelo’s art as “penetrate[ing] us with a sense of that power which we associate with all the warmth and fullness of the world,” evoking a sort of artistic pregnancy for viewers (SHR 43). Unlike Mary’s divine experience, this humanist pregnancy births, through both “warmth and fullness,” a unique amalgamation of viewers and Michelangelo’s work—the Renaissance spirit (Pater, SHR 43). Michelangelo’s portrayal of that spirit contains, continuing the theme of conception and procreation, the “brooding spirit of life itself” (Pater, SHR 43). “Brooding” incorporates connotations of warmth and incubation, as well as denoting “contemplates with feeling” (“brood” OED). With that single word, Pater transforms Michelangelo’s art into a reliquary of warmth, but, more importantly, the birthplace of individuals’ artistic experiences. The imagery of “brooding” vividly depicts the intimacy between art and viewer. Artists plant in their art seeds that flower into “receptacles of powers [of conception] that they in turn relay to the beholder” (Adams 5). Pater’s perception of austerity in Michelangelo’s work alters the perception of simplicity as coldly strict. Austerity, particularly in relation to the beauty of the human body, highlights the simple and warm attraction of the unadorned human form. Excessive decoration, rather than enhancing beauty, disguises its natural qualities. The surfeit of religious symbols in Botticelli’s Madonnas buttresses Mary’s moral beauty, but buries her physical attractiveness. Similarly, the “grotesque emblems of the middle age” mock   12   13     Venus’ blatantly displayed comeliness, “subdu[ing] and chill[ing]” her sexuality in condemnation (Pater, SHR 33-34). The transition from the ornamentation of symbolism to the naked, heroic human form demonstrates the melting influence of the Renaissance. The Classical “fire still smoulders,” reborn from beneath the icy casing of religious orthodoxy (Pater, SHR 36). Adam, as a Biblical subject, has particular importance through his role in original sin and in populating the Earth. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco of him, which Pater describes, precedes Adam’s placement in the Garden of Eden: In that languid figure there is something rough and satyr-like, something akin to the rough hill-side on which it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectation and reception; he hardly has strength enough to lift his finger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice. SHR 42 Made in His image, Adam is God’s own creation, but Pater simultaneously allies him with the pagan through the description of him as “satyr-like” (SHR 42). Half-human and half-goat, satyrs are the companions of the pagan god of wine and celebration, Bacchus. At the moment Michelangelo depicts, Adam does not yet exist, the warm, life-giving touch of the creator still to come. He stands on the precipice between his cold preexistence and the beginning of the heat of mortal life. Adam, as the epitome of humanity, combines the pagan conception of the body and the Christian belief in the immortal soul. Accordingly, Michelangelo’s depiction of the first man reminds audiences what mankind, as an ideal in both art and life, consists of: a body and a soul. Viewers, when filled with   13   14     the “expectation and reception” necessary to Pater’s artistic criticism, recognize the qualities of sensuality and morality within themselves and art (SHR 42). The Renaissance infection alters the conception of art through a fever which gives birth to the critical qualities of “expectation and reception” (Pater, SHR 42). The infection certainly has its dangers, but yields an extraordinary new life for those individuals that suffer from it. Joachim du Bellay’s experience, for example, demonstrates the sickness, which “attacked him…[and] brought him cruel sufferings and seemed likely to be mortal” (Pater, SHR 78). While ill, du Bellay reads for the “first time…the Greek and Latin poets,” reaching beyond the restrictive temperament of his time to the Classical era (Pater, SHR 78). Through his exposure to Classical poetry he comes to love not only words of the past, but also “his own homely native tongue” (Pater, SHR 78). The Renaissance strain of illness emphasizes the ephemeral nature of the human existence, stressing the importance of both the majesty of the past and the potential of the present for the same. Pater believes art to be the path away from Christianity’s “uncompromising idealism” toward a frank appreciation of what is (SHR 111). The discussions of the Mona Lisa and Apollo, though in separate chapters, come together through both figures’ dichotomy of morality and sensuality. The Mona Lisa is certainly Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous work, due in large part to the subtle ways he paints humanity onto the canvas of her face. Pater utilizes Heine’s tale of Apollo attempting to adapt to the Christian-dominated medieval period to discuss how the Renaissance, with the Mona Lisa as an example, returns artistic freedoms not seen since the Middle Ages began. The Mona Lisa and Apollo demonstrate those freedoms through   14   15     descriptive connections of each to a mythological and Biblical figure, illustrating that the whole of art includes qualities of the soul and the body. Heine’s essay, “Gods in Exile,” tells of the medieval atmosphere that forces the Greek god, Apollo, into hiding. As the god of the sun, Apollo’s mythology obviously connects to warmth. The pagan gods are familiar with human sensuality, as they experience the same sensations and emotions, making clear why Pater finds Apollo an interesting figure. To escape religious persecution, Apollo takes on the inconspicuous, but Christ-like, disguise of a shepherd. Apollo’s adjustment to the strictly religious temperament of the Middle Ages comes to a halt when his “beautiful singing” makes a nearby “learned monk” suspicious of him (Pater, SHR 19). Despite the fact that Apollo does not violate any Christian principle, the monk’s recognition of Apollo’s pagan beauty condemns the god to torture. After confessing his true identity, the convened spiritual tribunal sentences Apollo to execution. Though the village carries out the judgment, Apollo literally escapes the village’s grave for him. Upon the discovery of his empty grave, the villagers denounce Apollo as a vampire. Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, a vampire? Even the villagers knew the ludicrousness of the accusation. Unable to understand Apollo’s escape, however, vampirism becomes the most logical interpretation for the village. With Apollo’s story, Pater pokes fun at this type of interpretation of art. Critics lacking “mere expectation and reception” refuse to recognize art’s moral and sensual influence and, instead, marginalize some artworks as monstrous (Pater, SHR 42). Art is a tool cast into a specific form by an artist, but the varieties of uses for it remain subject to the interpretation of its audience.   15   16     As with Apollo, Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa incorporates both mythological and Biblical elements. La Gioconda, or the Mona Lisa, “as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary” (Pater, SHR 70). She, in Pater’s conception, subsumes two other individuals into her identity as an artwork. The myth of Leda and the Biblical tale of the Virgin Mary’s childhood tie the past—both the Classical and medieval periods—into the rebirth of art, specifically the Mona Lisa, in the Renaissance. The Mona Lisa exudes the heat of sensuality through Leda, a mortal beautiful enough to tempt Zeus. Her connection to morality arises from the comparison to Saint Anne, who raises Mary to live so righteously that her religious dedication draws similar attentions from the Christian God. The particular examples of Leda and Saint Anne, as opposed to Mary or Helen of Troy, emphasize art’s indirect role in the course of both eras. Leda and Saint Anne, like artists, mold Mary and Helen of Troy, as a sort of human art. As a consequence, both figures enact great change—good and bad. Art provides man with the path to change. Viewers decide where it leads according to their interpretation. In addition to the metaphor of illness, Pater uses volcanoes as a natural phenomenon to describe how previous artistic movements leave enriching residue for those that follow. The image of a volcanic eruption harnesses the cataclysmic power of nature, but also its natural cycle: New life emerges from the ashes of the old. Pater’s chapter on Winckelmann establishes the artist and his work as an initially decimating, but ultimately enriching, volcanic force. Winckelmann’s influence fertilizes the land with an “undiminished freshness,” specifically for his artistic heir apparent, Goethe (Pater, SHR 86). Winckelmann personally rediscovers the Classical artists and their works, much like   16   17     Joachim du Bellay, finding that, “in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil” (Pater, SHR 89). Fire rising up from the ground clearly invokes a volcanic eruption and its dramatic effects. Further, Pater’s description connects Winckelmann’s dedication to Classical art to the Earth’s own heat fighting to the surface. The burning of his enthusiasm “like lava” revitalizes the artistic landscape even as it devours him (Pater, SHR 90). Through Winckelmann’s work, the “seed” of classicism becomes an “element of the very soil out of which [all following art] springs” (Pater, SHR 99). The most important aspect of artistic movements, which Pater credits Winckelmann with recognizing, is their “limit to duration, of the inevitable decay” (SHR 113). Artistic styles rise out of the temperaments of particular time periods for a reason, because artists are attempting to convey to contemporary viewers a specific understanding or recognition. Artworks’ value never expire, but the social, political, and moral influences of art decay in tandem with the cycles of human existence. Winckelmann accepts that, understanding that the meanings for contemporary audiences will differ radically from future interpretations. The essence of a work lives on as it continues to be interpreted, but new chronological contexts and viewers born in that context void “the possibility of a stable identifiable meaning” (Moran 173). The Renaissance’s heat “starts to the surface,” ending the artistic ice age of the medieval period, paving the way for the resumption of humanity’s, and art’s, natural cycle (Pater, SHR 98). THE DUALITY OF EVEN PATER’S GODS Unlike the artists and artworks in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater describes the characters in his Imaginary Portraits in relation to both warmth and cold.   17   18     Rather than defending the heated qualities of the Renaissance and its artists, the tales of renaissance in the Imaginary Portraits use the imagery of temperature to describe microcismic efforts at engendering the fever. The portraits “Denys l’Auxerrois,” “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” and “Apollo in Picardy” each tell the story of an individual attempting to establish the Renaissance spirit in their respective communities. Significantly, every attempt fails, with one exception, and at a fatal cost to the aspiring individual. Like Winckelmann, these fictional characters personally catch the fever for artistic and social change, either through meaningful contact with the Classical past or the Renaissance itself. For one reason or another, however, their efforts fall short. The resulting tension between tradition and the attempted rebirths erupts into personal disaster for these characters. Characters’ physical, intellectual, or artistic remains linger and, later, provide the impetus for a resurgence of the Renaissance spirit in that community. Narrators discover fragments—in the form of remains, stained glass depictions, and unfinished writings— which tell these men’s renaissances and their failure to create a community. The individuals these tales portray are just that: individuals, working alone to create a community, rather than from within an existing artistic or social structure. The temperament of their times resist the fever, simply not ready for the revolution of the fever these men carry. Their efforts pave the way forward and, as with the volcanic imagery of Winckelmann, their deaths fertilize the intellectual ground such that the Renaissance seed later germinates and grows into a movement. All of these characters even the gods, are “beings of divided consciousness, caught between death and life, guilt and joy, the sensual and the spiritual”—and one more   18   19     division representing the rest: that of hot and cold (Moran 180). Heat and chill no longer act as unendingly combating forces in the Imaginary Portraits and neither do the traits of morality and sensuality. Instead, the portraits detail searches for a way to harmonize these seemingly contradictory characteristics in art and in communities fostered by it. Despite the instinctual urge to “repress [these powerful forces]…which they cannot control,” these characters realize, perhaps much as Pater himself realizes, that they cannot choose one or the other. Life and death walk hand in hand, one unable to exist without the other. The realization of the sensual and the spiritual in man and his art functions in a similar manner. Even Pater’s title for this volume of works, Imaginary Portraits, has a history of combining the sacred and the profane. When an artist had no model to work from while depicting a long-dead historical figure or a saint, he could base his painting on a model from his own time, creating an amalgamation of what he thought the person would have looked like (Lambert-Charbonnier 208). The idea of basing a sacred person’s depiction on a mortal human being makes the practice controversial, even blasphemous. In trying to bring the inspiring heat of the Renaissance fever to their communities, the characters of “Deny l’Auxerrois,” “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” and “Apollo in Picardy” cannot create the delicate balance between the traditional spirituality and the rebirth of Classical sensuality. The legacy of their efforts, however, reemerges in a new, subsequent temperament, providing new opportunities to succeed. The portrait of Denys l’Auxerrois, as a work of literary art itself, has both secular and religious sources for the first person narrator. In the narrator’s experience the two halves literally make the whole of Denys’ tale. The narrator’s perspective, likely chronologically contemporary with Pater himself, travels backwards through Denys’ tale   19   20     to a medieval Auxerre. Whatever changes the town experiences, it does so as an isolated community; its general surroundings remain in winter, metaphorically or literally, throughout the tale. The narrator discovers the first piece of Denys’ story in a fragment of stained glass in the display of a local shop. The subject of the fragment, the yet unnamed Denys, is “not exactly conformable to any recognised ecclesiastical type” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 52). Given the religious nature of stained glass, due to its use in churches and its convention of depicting Biblical themes, the presence of a personage not explicitly religious is strange. Denys’ tale continues in tapestries collected by the town’s priest. The fragments of Denys’ story are spread across religious and secular settings, appearing in a commercial shop setting and in a religious officer’s collection. As he had with the stained glass figure, the narrator notes that the Denys in the tapestries has the “beauty of a pagan god,” but he appears to have “suffered after a manner of which…pagan gods [are] incapable” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 54). Denys exhibits traits of both a pagan god and an ecclesiastical authority, but cannot embody either entirely, being physically beautiful but also in possession of a personal understanding of human suffering. The narrator’s experience with Denys arises wholly out of his interaction with two separate artistic mediums: stained glass and tapestries. Whatever understanding or experience the narrator gleans from that interaction is bestowed through art; art, then, is a means of communication, regardless of what it specifically communicates. Further, the narrator believes that the “figure [of Denys] in the stained glass explain[s] itself” to him, not that he discerns the figure’s story himself (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 76). Thus, as Pater argues in previous works, the ideal state for an art critic is not as an impartial observer,   20   21     but as a “curious participant in the events of the tale itself” (Moran 186). To make “the tale itself” habitable for a critic and to best convey its message, art must not be an extreme of either hot or cold and the traits they embody in Pater’s work, but the median between them. Explicit heat first emerges in Auxerre with the masons’ excavation of a Greek coffin, appearing to them as “art achieved” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 56). That achievement of Classical art, in the end, does not directly translate to the medieval French town. The “most skilful” of the carvers struggles with making his work “equal to the vision within him,” and the Greek coffin appears to him whole, artistically and functionally, in a way his own work does not (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 56). The coffin, as an artistic piece, “lay beyond the hand of the medieval workman,” but he has a “seriousness of conception lacking in the old Greek” creation (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 56). Each temperament, the medieval and the Classical, has valuable qualities which contribute to the further progression of art. Art is always inspired by what precedes it and the Renaissance, though a rebirth of the Classical spirit, is born into a different temperament and, correspondingly, grows into a different style. Within the coffin the workers find a “flask of lively green glass” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 56). Despite sensing elements of the “riotous and earthy heat of old paganism itself” in the flask, the workers also compare it to the Holy Grail (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 56). The flask shares the mysterious appeal of a lost Christian treasure, but simultaneously preserves a measure of the Classical period’s heat. The tactile chill of the glass and the alcoholic burn of the wine within the flask physically demonstrate the flask’s combination of the two temperatures. The masons celebrate the completion of   21   22     their work by drinking their local wine from the flask, which gives new life and heat to the liquor. Their intimate contact with relic alters them and they spread that altered state to the rest of Auxerre as a sort of epidemic. The first manifestation of this change in the town’s spirit occurs during the Easter service. Unusually, a game of ball spontaneously erupts among the boys in the chapel. Gradually drawing in the priests and even the Dean of the Chapter, they play the lighthearted game “with all the decorum of an ecclesiastical ceremony” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 58). The game exhibits the simple joy of temporal life and the seriousness accorded to the living of it while it lasts, as art should. In the midst of the celebration of the moral and the sensual, Denys l’Auxerrois appears. His arrival on Easter is reminiscent of Christ’s emergence from the tomb, signifying the rebirth of someone thought to be dead. The “delightful glee” the game inspires becomes “contagious,” and even the laity join in (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 58). Denys quickly becomes the physical manifestation of that contagion of change; his mere proximity spreading the heat as the townspeople “took fire…as if at his presence” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 60). Such was Denys’ fire that the inhabitants of Auxerre feel it “w[ill] be winter no more” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 62). When Pater calls these changes a “revolution in the temper” of the town, however, he draws on the negative connotations accorded to the term in the wake of the French Revolution (Works Vol. 4: 60). The wine that initiates the town’s “delightful glee” “sour[s] in the cup” and Denys, as the most affected, begins the descent into “mere wantonness” first (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 58, 66-67). Denys’ “simplicity…in living” falls apart as he discovers, for the first time, a greed for wine and meat (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 64). Auxerre   22   23     follows his example, overindulging itself in a manner likely equal to the Catholic Church’s nightmares. In a reaction to the town’s new extremist activities, the local clergy decide to reinter a local saint. Thereafter, the town wakes “again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 67). Thus awoken from their material excess and unprepared to deal with the consequences, the townspeople turn wholly to religion, “blam[ing] Denys for their troubles” (Dellamora 185). For Denys, the “shocking sight” of the “every feature of [the saint’s] face” visible during the procession between graves banishes his personal madness (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 69). Following one unsuccessful murder attempt on the part of the townspeople, Denys seeks and receives refuge with the monks of Saint Germain. Denys, the newly accepted monk, has his own part to play as the town resumes work on the cathedral of Saint Étienne. His most valuable contribution is unconscious, because by his “visible presence [Denys] ma[k]e[s] himself felt in all the varied exercise around him of those arts which address themselves first of all to sight” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 70). The town itself cannot any longer “grasp the joy that Denys embodies” in his graver state, but the craftsmen and artists unknowingly effect that joy in the work on the cathedral (Dellamora 185). The seemingly strange combination of the religious space and its sensuously visual decoration make it feel as though “the gay old pagan world had been blessed in some way” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 71). Denys’ own project in the cathedral’s construction does not primarily concern itself with sight, but instead the ears: the construction of an organ. Auxerre becomes well-known for its litigious music because of the organ and Denys’ skill at playing it. The pagan figure of Apollo with his lyre painted on the organ’s case reminds the organist of the sensual pleasure of music.   23   24     Denys also employs himself in “digging, by choice, graves for the dead,” the recurring reminder of mortality staving off his tidal madness or “fits” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 74). The “sun-gold” beauty of his form does not stop the empathetic tears for the “grim [human] relics” he administers (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 74). The character of Denys is, as with all of Pater’s significant figures, “a double creature, of two natures difficult or impossible to harmonize” (Works Vol. 4: 66). He, like the narrator observes, has pagan beauty, but an understanding of human suffering. The tale of Auxerre demonstrates the difficulty of balancing the spiritual nature of the soul and the physical nature of the body, having proceeded from one extreme to the other. Denys, as an individual, achieves a personal balance of the soul and the body when, for the celebration of the local Lady Ariane’s marriage, he automatically attires himself with the raiment of the “person of Winter” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 75). During his time of favor, Denys plays the role of the “God of Wine” in a town festival and comes full circle as the person of Winter (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 63). Even as the town, in recognition of him—the supposed cause of their previous troubles—slaughtered him in the course of that role, Denys’ soul and, later, his body, come to “rest” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 76). The time for this town’s renaissance is not yet ripe. Thus, the wine it produces, no matter from what Classical source it is drunk, is “apt to sicken and turn gross” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 66). Denys’ efforts and his murder, like Winckelmann’s efforts and murder before him, serve to enrich the town’s literal and intellectual soil. In a manner more explicit than Denys, Carl, the main character of the portrait “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” wants to transplant the Italian Renaissance and its spirit into Germany. The plea, “To Apollo, praying that he would come to us from Italy, bringing   24   25     his lyre with him,” inspires Carl (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 123). Apollo represents the Renaissance Carl hopes to bring north, with Italy as the source of that warming spirit. Initially, Carl’s primary source is the “contemporary French ideal” of the Renaissance, which places “Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis the Fourteenth” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 124). Given its proximity to the Italian peninsula, France has already adapted its own Renaissance from the Italian original. Carl wants a German renaissance, not a French adaptation, directly tied to the Italian inspiration in its own right. Even when forced to use the French as middlemen, Carl’s German renaissance “lost all…affectation” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 124). Carl’s sincere desire to incite a renaissance in Germany makes his efforts truer in spirit to the Italian Renaissance than even the French conception. Carl’s one attempt to bring Italy’s Renaissance directly to Germany ends dismally, however, indicating the countries’ difference in temperaments. Carl commissions a masterpiece from the Italian “Urbinate,” hoping that the painting will bring legitimacy to his efforts (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 127). The painting that arrives, however, comes “with all the grotesqueness of the Middle Age,” wherein Mary appears “no better than an unpretending nun” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 127). The Urbinate’s practice of imaginary portraiture fails, resulting only in a staid reproduction of his living model. Disappointed by the painting’s inability to “stimulat[e], enwra[p], [or] absor[b]” viewers, Carl returns to his reinterpretation of French renaissance works, particularly Peter Paul Rubens (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 127). Rubens’ lack of the “gold of Titian’s Italian sun” proves an asset rather than a loss, because he has already begun to adapt the Renaissance to a more northern temperament (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 127). The Urbinate’s work clearly demonstrates that, while Italy’s sun might serve as an inspirational force, it never really   25   26     shines in Germany anyways. Accordingly, Carl needs to sow something he can reap in his own country. Much as Denys had for the town of Auxerre, Carl embodies the warmth of the Renaissance, emanating the “quiet physical warmth of a fire or the sun” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 125). Which is he, the quiet but warm fire or the blinding heat of the sun? Carl’s decision to fake his own death, in some measure similar to the rumor of Denys’ demise, is largely an attempt to answer that question. Is he really the Apollo of Germany or no? The ways in which Carl’s escape from his own grave is also reminiscent of Heine’s Apollo in Studies in the History of the Renaissance provides interesting possibilities. As the villagers who execute Apollo decide that he must be a vampire, the people of Carl’s town turn his funeral into a parade of exaggerated magnificence, even knowing he did not want such a procession. The ability to willfully misinterpret a situation and, Pater’s metaphor illustrates, an artwork certainly exists. The expectation so valuable in artistic criticism can lead one astray if a specific expectation hinders the reception of what an artwork seeks to impress upon a viewer. Carl has the Renaissance fire, but uses it to fuel a different sort of sun, the German sun. He is not the first, nor will he be the last, to contribute to that source of light and heat. While Carl despairs that, “at times the whole world almost seem[s] buried thus— made and re-made of the dead—its entire fabric of politics, of art, of custom,” his faked demise enables him to discover himself and what he wants (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 136). His death creates the opportunity to finally see France and Italy, something his duties as an heir and a Duke otherwise bar him from. His return from the grave also fuels the relationship he develops with the “beggar-maid,” Gretchen (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 148).   26   27     Gretchen, like Carl’s grandfather, sincerely mourns his passing rather than celebrating the occasion of it. By pretending to journey into the final chill of death, Carl can now sense his own heat, which, previously, only others felt. Free of the “offence of death[’s]…trappings,” Carl sees the realities of mortality without the gaudiness of temporal ceremonies (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 137). The descriptive austerity of Michelangelo’s work reemerges through the frigid specter of death to bare the simple beauty and warmth of both art and life. Carl is the “hyperborean Apollo, sojourning, in the revolutions of time, in the sluggish north for a season” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 132). Though his season comes to an untimely end, Carl’s impact does not die; instead, it is temporarily buried and eventually unearthed to re-make the “great historic symphony” of art, continually revised and replayed (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 144). Rather than a volcanic force, Carl is the foundation, albeit a fictional one, for later countrymen, most notably Winckelmann and Goethe. He plays the role of an influential German doing his part to awaken his fellows to the “permanent reality of a poetic ideal in human life” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 152). Man’s journey through art never really ends, as he can never achieve its ideal. All those artists who come before, then, further or inspire all that follows. There are three main figures in “Apollo in Picardy,” and each of them experiences, mainly through interactions with one another, the sensuality of the body and the conscious morality of the soul. Their tale resurfaces, in the disjointed last writing of Prior Saint-Jean, for an unnamed narrator to recognize their contributions. Due either to death or house arrest, they all fail to affect any others with their personal feelings of heat or chill—except Apollyon. Apollyon, through the support of the community of Picardy,   27   28     escapes, presumably to further spread the Renaissance spirit. The many interpretations of Apollyon, Hyacinthus, and Prior Saint-John—particularly the combination of pagan and Biblical allusions—mean that Pater’s characters are no longer exclusively warm or cold. The prevailing temperature depends largely on perspective, or the temperament of an era or critique. Given his location in Picardy, France, Apollyon serves as a colder, hyperborean Apollo. The direct tie his name has to a pagan god does not prevent fellow characters from repeatedly likening him to Christian figures. Apollyon, when Prior Saint-Jean first sees him, is “the human form,” but also Adam, God’s first creation (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 149). By placing the description of his form first, Saint-Jean does not appear to be discussing how Adam was the first human form, but his embodiment of the physical. Apollyon has a body immediately and a soul, a moral core, only belatedly. Apollyon’s introduction of himself to Saint-Jean and Hyacinthus seems to them “scarcely a name at all, in the diffident syllables he uttered” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 152). Unable to discern what he actually says, the two visitors ascribe him the closest name they know: Apollyon, a maleficent character in the Bible. Apollyon’s name, like his physical form, connects to the Biblical and pagan. A likeness of Apollyon decorates Prior Saint-Jean’s completed monastic barn, but the narrator imparts that contemporary tourists frequently mistake the figure as either King David or an angel. While voluntarily attending a Midnight Mass, Apollyon wears “strange attire” composed of spotted and striped fur (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 162). In this unique instance Apollyon’s appearance does not support a Biblical interpretation of his character, but, instead, his penitent action of attendance does.   28   29     Apollyon’s bestial clothing preserves his own warmth even as he seeks religious absolution. Unlike previous characters of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Apollyon demonstrates instances of both warmth and cold. His physical form appears “rich, warm” to the Prior, but when touching the ill Saint-Jean’s forehead his “ice-cold hand…might have been a dead one” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 149, 155). Similarly, the Prior feels “inexplicable misgivings” towards Apollyon, but the townspeople of Picardy “love him, in spite of themselves” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 149, 169). Apollyon represents art in his possession of an inexplicable influential power over his viewers. Because of that power, like the flame Pater uses as its metaphor, art appears particularly dangerous. The appropriate response seems to be cautious, to prevent that flame from spreading, becoming uncontrollable. Fire can be tamed to an extent, but, like the fires that raze a forest to let it grow anew, fire’s—and art’s—ultimate power lies in its unbridled nature. Just like the villagers who act “in spite of themselves,” viewers of art must embrace the risk along with the potential (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 169). The evening before Saint-Jean made his journey to Picardy, he dreams of a “harmless, beautiful” flame (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 147). The dream-version of his friend, however, condemns this flame as “hell-fire,” a description that echoes the background of flame Pater charges the Catholic Church with casting on art’s sensuality (Works Vol. 8: 147). Before leaving the monastery, the Prior climbs a tower and “shudder[s]” at what lays beyond the walls, as though chilled (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 146). Upon arriving in Picardy, Saint-Jean repeats his ascent in a tower there and “beholds the human form for the first time” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 149). Having left the “medieval town that barred in”   29   30     its inhabitants, Saint-Jean finds himself wondering if the human body “could…be diabolical, and really spotted with unseen evil, which was so spotless to the eye?” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 145, 149). Free of the medieval town that was his home, Saint-Jean opens his eyes to the beauty of man’s physical form. No longer fenced away from everyday exercises of the senses, the Prior experiences a different sort of life. Though the Prior does liken Apollyon’s figure to Adam, he subsequently describes him as “godlike,” rather than God-like. Apparently one can be both God-like in spirit, as indicated by a comparison to God’s first human creation, but also godlike in form. The combination of the two characteristics seems to present Apollyon as an ideal, a continuation of Saint-Jean’s observation of this man that establishes pagan and Christian identities. The dual connections of the Prior’s own name reinforce the juxtaposition. As Richard Dellamora explains, “the prior’s name is that of Saint John, who, in a legend that Pater draws on earlier in describing Leonardo’s The Last Supper, is Christ’s lover. The name, however, is equivocal, alluding as well to the body-hating precursor of Christ, Saint John the Baptist. One finds aspects of both saints in the prior” (188). When Saint-Jean undertakes the architectural task of building a monastic barn, he unconsciously effects his new “change…of temper” by establishing a “classical harmony” in it, much as Denys does in his Apollo-adorned organ (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 153, 152). Setting aside the enclosed style of the medieval monastery, he incorporates classical ideals into the unique Gothic qualities. Further, the Prior’s “bodily health” is now a “positive quality,” not constantly holding him back (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 155). The opportunity to appreciate the human form in general allows Saint-Jean to value his own   30   31     body. His newfound respect for himself—including his physical form as well as his soul—engenders the care that it might serve him better. Following the accidental death of his companion, Hyacinthus, Saint-Jean is forcibly returned to his home under a sort of house arrest. The appearance of his religious brethren saves the Prior from the villagers’ accusation of murder, but, in the monastery, his experiences from Picardy do not serve him well. His experiences there succeed “in dividing hopelessly against itself the well-ordered kingdom of his thought,” evident in his sporadic efforts to complete the final book of his treatise (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 143). Saint-Jean finds himself cold and alone, imprisoned in what he had once thought of as his home. Kept from Picardy for so long, the Prior unfortunately dies before his long-awaited return began. Prior Saint-Jean’s companion, Hyacinthus, also discovers a more physical side of himself in Picardy. Hyacinthus “found his true self for the first time,” largely through his interactions with his newfound friend, Apollyon (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 150). He “bec[o]me[s] really a boy at last, with immense gaiety” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 156). Hyacinthus’ extensive religious studies in the monastery make him prematurely serious. Free to physically exert himself in Picardy, Hyacinthus’ “eyes, hands, and feet awake” at long last (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 156). The journey to Picardy gives Hyacinthus the opportunity to be nothing more than a boy, exploring for the sheer pleasure of it. He satisfies his intellectual and sensual curiosity, most notably in sports-like games with Apollyon. Unfortunately, during such a game, the wind catches the discus after Apollyon throws it and the resulting impact to Hyacinthus’ head kills him.   31   32     The character of Apollyon in “Apollo in Picardy” is an embodiment of the Greek god of the sun, Apollo. Correspondingly, he serves as the personal contact with the Classical past, a carrier of the Renaissance fever, for Prior Saint-Jean and Hyacinthus. He profoundly affects both individuals in their interactions with him, despite their vastly different nature. Prior Saint-Jean, who the town mistakenly believes to be the murderer of Hyacinthus, is saved by his monastic brethren, but he becomes their prisoner in the process. Apollyon manages to flee, much like his counterpart in Heine’s story, but with the support of the villagers. Isolated in his former community, Saint-Jean flounders, hoping only to return to Picardy. The Prior’s last sight is a field of hyacinthus flowers, the “color of hope, of merciful omnipresent deity” (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 170-171). Neither Hyacinthus nor Saint-Jean truly survives their run-in with Apollyon. Despite the fact that Saint-Jean returns to the monastery, he is not free to pursue the Renaissance spirit Apollyon infects him with. The two individuals, then, live on as “hope,” either in floral form—a living reminder of the moral and physical beauty of nature, including man—or through the architectural and literary projects that incorporate that spirit (Pater, Works Vol. 8: 170). Apollyon escapes, not as an individual, but as a nomadic artistic inspiration. His time in Picardy comes to an untimely end and, accordingly, he proceeds elsewhere. Pater, in his Imaginary Portraits, does not paint morality, particularly Christian morality, as the uncompromising oppositional force to the Renaissance spirit. Instead, as Hilary Fraser puts it, “moral virtue is…one beauty among many” (qtd. in Tucker, “Pater as a Moralist” 109). While the oppressiveness of religious structures is something that a few of the characters continue to struggle against, it is not the primary force that thwarts their efforts. Instead, the simple resistance to change—shown in the continuity of the   32   33     connotations of cold—proves the most frustrating. Each individuals attempts to sponsor an adaptation of the Renaissance spirit in his particular location, town, or state, but he cannot successfully establish a community to support that spirit because of that resistance. These men’s personal failures do not signal the end of the adaptation, however, as their efforts persist as foundations for subsequent attempts. The heat of the sensual emerges, but sometimes the incubation period of the fever is longer than others. AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION—OR RESOLUTION? Through Pater’s works his conception of morality in art undergoes a change from something to be avoided when possible, to a quality as necessary to the human experience, including art, as the sensuality he praises all along. The renovation of a church within Gaston de Latour architecturally demonstrates Pater’s change of heart. The church of Saint Hubert, the parish church for the La Beauce district, initially causes “the heart, the heart of youth, at least, [to] s[i]nk, as one enter[s], stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral stones which form the entire pavement of the church” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 165). The removal of the sunshine and the mortal chill of the church’s foundations epitomize Pater’s early criticism of Christian morals: they steal the light and its warmth because of the unwavering focus on death. When Gaston returns to the church later on, he finds it greatly altered, as “not a space was left unsearched by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted glass mimicking the dearness of the open sky” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 166). The parish church and its application of morals have been renovated, or “opened,” to better accommodate the humanity of its congregation as a whole—both soul and body (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 166). In what ways   33   34     does acceptance of the body restore the wholeness of the church? Pater’s description focuses on the “painted glass” as the most significant change, subtly arguing that art is the primary method of connecting the spiritual to the sensual. Particularly in this instance, stained glass, very closely associated with the Biblical as a pictographic form of scripture, instead echoes the freedom of the natural world. The restructured church, then, provides a supporting and sheltering haven in the midst of that tempestuous natural world, but no longer seeks to shut it out completely. Morality and sensuality may appear to be disparate and even antagonistic characteristics, but combine in humanity, by forces divine or evolutionary, men must recognize them as “two neighbourly apprehensions of a single ideal” for mankind and, through it, art (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 183). The single ideal being a good and full life. The combination of both soul and physical beauty creates art, through which man can truly experience his mortal life. Art—whether poetry, painting, or performance— “shed[s] upon the body of the flower the soul of its beauty” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 214). Art makes the beauty of the soul, its goodness or morality, visible to the human senses. The fact that the human senses focus primarily on external facets of objects presents no difficultly to Pater, because to him the “worship of physical beauty [is] a religion, the proper faculty of which would be the bodily eye” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 230). Pater believes that the physical beauty of objects or even other human beings are “moral facts” of any religion, because of the combination of soul and body that absorbs and appreciates that beauty (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 220). Man enjoys the physical world, through his physical form, and art, in accordance with his moral soul. The type of morality a viewer   34   35     looks for in a work of art depends on what he’s looking for. But, as Giordano Bruno’s character states in Gaston de Latour, There is nothing purely corporeal, or purely spiritual. ‘Tis an inhuman wisdom that would have us despise and hate the culture of the body. ‘Tis not a soul, ‘tis not a body, we are training up, but a man; and we ought not to divide him. Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being. Pater, Works Vol. 4: 271 The conception of “inhuman wisdom” here does not reference the divine, but instead a consciousness that incorrectly conceives humanity as something that can survive a separation into its parts. In striving for perfection, whether religious or sensual, man must remember that he is not one or the other, but both, and that to hate either part is to hate the whole. With his condemnation as a heretic and subsequent burning at the stake, the admiration that Pater’s British contemporaries harbor for his adherence to a religious and a scientific cause, Bruno makes a powerful figure for Pater. The Bruno within Gaston de Latour actually “combin[es] the religious and rationalist elements of other commentators” (Spirit 224-225). Like most of Pater’s characters, Bruno has elements of both the secular and the moral. His unwillingness to renounce either his controversial scientific or religious beliefs, even in the face of the tremendous power of the Catholic Church, illustrates Bruno as a historically Paterian figure. Particularly significant for this later stage of Pater’s writing, Bruno manages to attain a personal balance between his piety and his scientific interests in his antinomianism; something Pater himself aspires to as he “find[s] more and more reasons for respecting [Christianity]” (Donoghue 80).   35   36     In his previous attempts to fight the idea that sensuality necessarily condemns a life as sinful, Pater merely reverses the wrong in many ways by narrowly categorizing a moral life as an unfulfilled one. The different, at times negative, uses of the imagery of heat in the unfinished Gaston demonstrates Pater’s shift in recognition of the desirability of balance rather than the domination of one characteristic over another. The first, and most damning example, is the description of France’s religious unrest in the Reformation, the background of Gaston’s story: “Religious Wars, flaming up here and there over France, and never quite put out, during forty years [emphasis added]” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 173). Transubstantiation was one of the primary differences between Catholics and the Huguenots, which describes whether the bread and wine literally or symbolically become Christ’s flesh and blood. The sects’ argument is a sensual issue, thus Pater’s use of warm imagery. The conflicts between these citizens of the same country spark spontaneously; there is no discussion of infection and the community that necessarily accompanies the process, as there is in Studies in the History of the Renaissance. These “Religious Wars” do not compose a movement, despite the disagreement over the definition of transubstantiation, but simply individual quarrels that follow a similar destructive pattern. A later example of such a clash, where “two atheists part, to take opposite sides in the supposed strife of the Catholic and Huguenot,” illustrates individuals’ use of religious differences to further their own ends under the guise of a sanctioned conflict (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 178). The flames from the supposedly religious disputes do not inspire acceptance of the body or a community feeling as the infection of the Renaissance does, but instead sever the bonds between men, not drawing them together. The heat of men, so prized by Pater in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, combusts into injurious   36   37     flame when they attempt to appease only the body with no thought of anything or anyone else. In the description of Gaston’s experience of Chartres, Pater further demonstrates the capricious nature of flames by associating them with the dual meaning of the word “awful,” so often applied to Gothic art and architecture, which is “for once really applicable” (Pater, Works Vol. 4:187). Upon entering Chartres, Gaston observes that “the placid sunshine of La Beauce seems to have been transformed in a moment into imperious angry fire” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 187). Just as the word “awful” can describe either wonder or terror, warmth can either encourage growth or merely consume. Despite the “sad, patient images by the doorways of the crowded church seemed [to be] suffering now chiefly from the cold,” the church also holds warmth—its “imperious angry fire” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 188, 187). With the characterization of the exterior of the church as chill and the interior as a place of heat, Pater moves his objections from categorizing Christianity as a whole as “debris” to disagreeing primarily with the outlying, bodyhating doctrines, rather than the faith itself. Pater also uses the fictional character of the novel, Gaston de Latour, and his story to portray a human attempt to balance sensuality and spirituality—and establish a community based on that balance. The reader’s first glimpse of Gaston’s inherent duality occurs after his ordination as a monk, in the midst of a ritual performed looking out on the world: Gaston alone, with all his mystic preoccupations, by the privilege of youth, seemed to belong to both [those distant spaces and the monastery],   37   38     and link the visionary company about him to the external scene. Pater, Works Vol. 4: 170 Gaston’s mere presence connects his fellow monks to the physical world as they tie themselves to the spiritual. He literally grounds them. Perhaps unknowingly, Gaston enacts harmony within himself and his surrounding community. With his ecclesiastical fellows, Gaston’s connection to the sensuous progresses from the instinctual to an outright perusal of books such that the “classical enthusiasm laid hold on [him] too” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 197). His exposure increases after receiving from his friend a book “with a special closeness to visible or sensuous things” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 210). His newly found explicit knowledge of the sensuous and his daily encounters with the moral make him aware of the “two rival claimants upon him” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 231). The effort to “harmonise…’the sacred and the profane loves’” characterizes his experiences from then on, which is Pater’s goal (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 232). Pater wants critics and viewers in general to be aware of the dichotomy present in both art and themselves as they strive to interpret various artworks as whole, soul and body. Gaston coincidentally escapes Paris and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in his haste to see his dying grandfather one last time, but leaves his wife, Colombe, and their unborn child alone and vulnerable in the midst of the impending conflict. Given Gaston’s ignorance of the King’s plans it is apparent to the reader that Colombe’s abandonment in such a situation was nothing more than extremely unfortunate circumstance. Colombe’s kinsmen, however, “supposed herself treacherously deserted” (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 280). Even understanding his own lack of knowledge, years later Gaston continues to feel guilty knowing Colombe’s fate, “the cruel picture driven…as   38   39     with fire into his soul,” as he looks at her grave (Pater, Works Vol. 4: 290). Gaston’s selfinflicted flame is not the inspiring force known to artists of the Renaissance, but a painful brand, burnt into his soul. Gaston, in his pain, creates an artwork for himself, which he never ceases to interpret as an internal punishment for the physical and mental anguish his wife and child experience with his unintentionally final departure. The danger of fire comes from individuals seeking to use it and mistakenly feed it themselves or their morals, rather than enjoying the warmth it provides from a safe, artistic, distance. Fire’s utility and positive effects, as portrayed in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, depend on the individual wielding it and to what artistic purpose, appropriately or misguidedly. CONCLUSION In Gaston de Latour, Pater argues for a more complete balance between body and soul in humanity, an argument that spills over from previous works: Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the Imaginary Portraits. For Gaston, “an older ideal moral and religious…still haunted humanity,” and, Pater believes, continued into modern times (Works Vol. 4: 242). The unfinished nature of the work reinforces Pater’s idea that the battle to balance the two characteristics, whether in man or art, remains incomplete— perhaps eternally so. Beauty must be accepted for what it is, good or bad, but in harmony, not competition, with morality. The end of physical experiences that is death necessitates the warmth of sensuality to balance out the chill of a mortal life. The open-ended future of the character of Gaston leaves his establishment of a successful community based on that balance, or the search for it, equally uncertain.   39   40     Pater demonstrates the overall uncertainty of equilibrium and community through Gaston’s description of the discovery of Christ’s body in the tomb: “There was no human warmth in the ‘spiritual body’: the white flowers, after all, were those of a funeral, with a mortal coldness, amid the loud Alleluias, which refused to melt at the startling summons, any more than the earth will do in the March morning because we call it Spring” (Works Vol. 4: 294). The warmth Gaston searches for in this scene, as represented with the Easter morning service, lies within, through the melding of soul and body through art, as the vehicle of both sensuality and morality. The promise of an afterlife, while comforting, cannot warm the earthly life that necessarily precedes it. Thus, while Spring has yet to arrive, and the balance has yet to be achieved, the importance of living the most harmonized mortal life possible, while one can, is all Pater asks of those willing to listen.   40   41     WORKS CITED Adams, James Eli. "Transparencies of Desire: An Introduction." Introduction. Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Eds. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 2002. 1-11. Print. "Brood, v." OED Online. London: Oxford University Press, March 2013. Web. 1 April 2013. Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Print. Donoghue, Denis. Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. New York: Knopf, 1995. Print. Higgins, Lesley. "Essaying ‘W. H. Pater Esq.’: New Perspectives on the Tutor/Student Relationship Between Pater and Hopkins." Pater in the 1990s. Eds. Laurel Brake and Ian Small. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1991. 77-94. Print. ---. "No Time for Pater: The Silenced Other of Masculinist Modernism." Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Eds. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 2002. 37-54. Print. Lambert-Charbonnier, Martine. "Poetics of Ekphrasis in Pater's Imaginary Portraits." Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Eds. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 2002. 202-12. Print. Moran, M. F. "Pater's Mythic Fiction: Gods in a Gilded Age." Pater in the 1990s. Eds. Laurel Brake and Ian Small. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1991. 169-88. Print. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. ---. The Works of Walter Pater. Vol. 4. London: Macmillan, 1900. Print.   41   42     ---. The Works of Walter Pater. Vol. 8. London: Macmillan, 1900. Print. Ruskin, John. The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writing.. Ed. John D. Rosenberg. New York: G. Braziller, 1963. Print. Spirit, Jane. "Nineteenth-Century Responses to Montaigne and Bruno: A Context for Pater." Pater in the 1990s. Eds. Laurel Brake and Ian Small. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1991. 217-27. Print. "Temperament, n." OED Online. London: Oxford University Press, December 2012. Web. 10 February 2013. Tucker, Paul. "Pater as a ‘Moralist’.” Pater in the 1990s. Ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 1991. 107-25. Print. ---. “‘Reanimate Greek’: Pater and Ruskin on Botticelli." Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Eds. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams. Greensboro, NC: ELT, 2002. 119-32. Print. Williams, Carolyn. Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989. Print.   42