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

48
nor in the untempered evil of Orcagna'c Inferno;
but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain
condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by
passion with a character of loveliness and energy,
but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them
of the great things from which they shrink. His
morality is all sympathy, conveying into his work
more than is usual of the true complexion of
humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so
forcible a realist » 22
Pater only advocates a withdrawal from life by the nrtist, in
BO far as he regards detachment a part of the process by which
life may be described.
The next piece on Shakespeare finds in Love's Labour's
Lost a similar ambivalence - the dramatist has succeeded in
bringing " a serioi s effect out of the trifling of his characters";
A dainty love-making is interchanged with the
more cumbrous nlny; below the many artifices
of Biron 1 s amorous speeches we may trace sometimes
the "unutterable longing"; and the lines in which
Katherine describes the blighting through love of
her younger sister are one of the moat touching
things in older literature*
( Macmillarj * s Magazine . LIII (1885)
89-91; p«»9).
Pater focuses attention on Biron, as a figure alternately the
instrument and butt of satire:
In this character, which is never quite in touch
with, never quite on a level of understanding,
with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps,
a reflex of Shakespere himself, juit become able
to stand aside from and entin;*te the first period
of his ooetry.
He is compared v/ith riercutio and similar figures who "resemble
those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or
imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material". Pater does
not develop the discussion of Biron, but in Ilarius the Epicurean
we find a similar detachment in tiie hero's attitude towards the,
"golden youth of Rome":
In spite of, perhaps tartly because of, liis habitual
reserve of manner, he had become "the fashion", even
among those who felt instinctively the irony which
lay beneath that remarkable self-possession, as of
one talcing things v/ith a difference fro:;: other
people, perceptible in voice, in expression, and
ev;,n in dress, o-i