Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

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This view is re^-examined by the author in Marius the Epicurean,
published in 1805: in chapter sixteen Harius ponders what may
be salvaged from the "Cyrenaic" attitudes he had adopted. Some
similarities exist between the "old morality" and "Cyrenaicism":
In the gravity of itc conception of life, in its
pursuit after nothing less than a perfection, in
its apprehension of the value of time - la
passion e.t le serieux quiconeacrent - iT~may be
conceived, as regards its 'main drift, to be not
oo much opposed to the old morality, ae an exaggeration
of one special motive of it.
Glaudio is cited as an example of a man who, while ambitioj£ to
enjoy the most pleasurable sensations life can yield, feels "an
inward need of something permanent in its character, to hola by":
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Pater calls him "the brilliant Claudio" in -.larius . and in his
essay on the play claims for him "thoughts as profound and
poetical as Hamlet's".
Shakespeare's attitudes towards the characters of his play
coincides vdth Pater's ideal of sensitive justice:
this finer justice, a justice based on a more
delicate appreciation of the true conditions
of men and things, a J;rui resp0ct of persons
in our estimate of actions.
It is for this that "the people in Measure for Measure cry out
as they pass before us" (p.658). Shakespeare's judgements are
those of an observer,
...of one who sits as a spectator, and knov:^
how the threads in the design before -in hold
together under the surface: they are the
judgements of the humorist also, who follows
with a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy,
the various ways of human disposition, and sees
less distance than ordinary men betv/ecn what are
nailed respectively great and little things.
Pater's v/ork is full of such figures - in the Inncinary j-ortraits.
collected in IT'87, in The ilenaissance and in Harius the Epicurean.
where Flavian (fictional author of the °crvi.n:ilium Veneris).
Marcus Aurelius, Aouleus, Fronto and the hero are variations
on a thome. Of many examples, that of Botticelli may suffice:
tno painter, we are told,
sets for himself the limits within which art,
undisturbed by any moral ambition, (."iocs its most
sincere and surest work, 'lie interest is neither
in the unteinpered goodness of Angelico's s: ints,