








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.1 (2009) 23–40] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.23 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890 (Part II)

GERALD MONSMAN

University of Arizona 
monsman@email.arizona.edu

Abstract

In conjunction with Walter Pater’s unfinished manuscript, “Gaudioso, 
the Second,” recently published in Expositions (Monsman 2008), a sec-
ond manuscript fragment from among Pater’s papers is now also printed 
here for the first time: “Tibalt the Albigense” (circa 1890). Not long after  
Pater began research for his never-finished second novel, Gaston de Latour 
(1888/1995), he simultaneously began reading for his imaginary portrait 
of “Tibalt,” dealing with the prelude to the bloody Albigensian crusade. 
Like Gaston, “Tibalt” was to be set in France against the turbulent back-
ground of religious warfare. But in contrast to the brutality of sectarian 
slaughter in Gaston, Pater elevates aesthetic experience to a mystical and 
Platonically mythic level of enchantment. From his first aesthetic portrait, 
“The Child in the House” (1878)—a defense of his aestheticism in Studies 
in the History of the Renaissance (1873)—to “Tibalt the Albigense,” 
Pater’s fascination with the transformative power of beauty at the turning-
points of religious/cultural history is the major thrust of all his writings. 

Keywords: Albigensian Heresy, Aesthetic Hero, Walter Pater,  
Aestheticism, Medieval France

Walter Pater, essayist and critic, began publishing fiction belatedly 
in his career, in his thirty-eighth year, when he wrote the poetically 
evocative allegory of “The Child in the House” (1878). It is a covert 
self-portrait of his fascination with beauty and pain that developed as 
he grew up in a quintessentially Victorian home. Prompted in large 
measure by the earlier outcry against the hedonistic aestheticism of his 
Studies in the Renaissance (1873), Pater felt it was incumbent to defend 
“the depth of the charm or spell” he felt for “beautiful physical things, 



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a kind of tyranny of the senses over him” (1895, 189, 186). From this 
first “imaginary portrait” (his generic characterization of the fiction 
he wrote) until one of his last, “Tibalt the Albigense,” Pater’s program 
was to describe the mystical rapport of a sensuous beauty with a hier-
atic purity of spirit expressed within the transitions of Western higher 
culture. The protagonists of these two portraits are constructed from  
Pater’s own autobiographical circumstances: Florian is Pater the child 
at his Enfield home whereas Tibalt, who is about to become a physi-
cian, prefigures the occupation of both Pater’s early deceased father, a 
medical doctor, and his recently deceased brother, licentiate and fel-
low of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons–and to whom Pater, at 
about the time he commenced “Tibalt,” dedicated his Appreciations, 
with an Essay on Style (1889).

It has been a commonplace in Pater criticism that his aesthetic heroes 
all have a strong sense of home, perceiving it as a refuge both physi-
cal and psychic. In the child’s developmental psychology, home repre-
sents the consubstantiality of the sensuous with the spiritual, elevating 
aesthetic experience to an almost mystical and certainly mythic level. 
Both in “The Child in the House” and in “Tibalt,” there is a magical 
moment of enchantment with beauty. Pater’s persona, Florian, comes 
upon:

a great red hawthorn in full flower, embossing heavily the bleached 
and twisted trunk and branches, so aged that there were but few green 
leaves thereon—a plumage of tender, crimson fire out of the heart of 
the dry wood.... [I]n dreams all night he loitered along a magic road-
way of crimson flowers, which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh 
masses about his feet, and fill softly all the little hollows in the banks 
on either side.... Also, then, for the first time, he seemed to experience 
a passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable 
excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and from which he 
half longed to be free. (Pater 1895, 185–86)

This pivotal moment of aesthetic puberty also has its echo in Tibalt’s 
gathering florets of curative herbs: 

And one spot there was—he detected it by its ring of molten snow—
where those old volcanic fires lay not yet quite extinct amid the cin-
ders. Here, like the relics of a warmer, more florid and genial world, 



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certain odd, exotic, miraculously fresh flowers were begotten as by 
natural magic, erect in the dark clefts, their roots deep down in the 
medicinable salts. 

Florian and Tibalt both encounter sensuous physical beauty fraught 
with a great power of fertility and renewal—“magic” in both passages.

The covert aesthetic eroticism in these passages—that “inexplicable 
excitement” in “Child” of the gnarled hawthorn’s tender fire filling 
surreal crevices and in “Tibalt” the image of the flowers “erect in the 
dark clefts” within the “ring” of old fires—points toward a confused or 
repressed desire for beauty that recalls Plato’s distinction in the Phaed-
rus between eroticism (eros) and its contrasting virtuous love (anterota), 
the latter inspired by Beauty standing on a pedestal of chastity (1871a, 
254b). Plato personifies this theory of beauty in the Phaedrus as an  
amorous relationship in which the devotee finds in beauty a reminis-
cence of the primordial loveliness of the divine; he reflects this love-
image back to the beautiful one as in a mirror and, ideally, should 
come to be loved in return by beauty’s awakened soul (1871a, 255c–e). 
Plato’s ideal of a sensuous/spiritual beauty and love had been ignored 
by Greek and Roman poets but was embraced in medieval-Renaissance 
philosophy and art by the Neoplatonists of Florence and north Italy; 
however, many of the more-conventional Neoplatonists feared the con-
tamination of the spiritual by its reflection in an erotic love, a carnal 
beauty (Panofsky 1939, 100; Plato 1871b, 201d et seq). When Pater in 
Plato and Platonism (1893) characterized Neoplatonism as “a kind of 
prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism” (1893, 149), he would 
have been thinking of a similar Victorian opposition of sense to spirit. 
But as postulated by Pater, J.J. Winckelmann was among the first in 
modern times to replace this conventional Neoplatonic antithesis with 
the more ancient ideal of a Platonic mutuality (1873, 194–196), a 
blending of sensuous physical beauty with soul. This humanistic ideal 
would have been foreshadowed by Tibalt the Albigense, an avatar both 
of the Reformation and of the spirit of the Renaissance.

Almost as if Pater had anticipated his later figure of Tibalt in “The 
Child in the House,” he defined how Florian, like Tibalt, stood outside 
the narrow puritan oppositions of his cultural environment, “inward 
and outward being woven through and through each other into one  



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inextricable texture—half, tint and trace and accident of homely col-
our and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, 
floated thither from who knows how far” (1895, 172–173). After the 
climatic description of Florian’s hawthorn, Pater continued:

In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in 
the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements 
in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his intel-
lectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract thought, and 
much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.... [H]e remembered gratefully 
how the Christian religion, hardly less than the religion of the ancient 
Greeks, translating so much of its spiritual verity into things that may 
be seen, condescends in part to sanction this infirmity, if so it be, of 
our human existence, wherein the world of sense is so much with us.

(1895, 186–187)
In the beguiling impressionism of his so very Paterian prose, what  
Pater gives us in “Tibalt” are historical facts, landscape descriptions, 
and a theo-philosophical background that cast light on his continuing 
preoccupation in the 1890s with the medieval foreshadowing of the 
Reformation and the Renaissance. From “Two Early French Stories” in 
his 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance to his unfinished Gas-
ton de Latour, the emergence of the “modern” perspective engrossed 
him. The proto-Reformation Albigensians were so named from Albiga, 
the capital city of the Albigenses in the Gallo-Roman period; later, 
at the time of this story, the city was called Albi and had become a 
fiefdom of the counts of Toulouse. However, the name “Albigensian” 
is a quirk of history because Toulouse, not Albi, was the movement’s 
center. Contemptuous of a corrupt and ignorant clergy and with  
nationalistic aspirations strengthened by their ancient regional lan-
guage, the Albigensians grew rapidly under the protection of the nobil-
ity. They believed there were two gods, an evil Satan, who is lord of the 
eternal world of material things, including mankind’s sinful body, and 
Christ whose spiritual kingdom includes the souls of believers inspired 
day by day by the Holy Spirit. They rejected entirely the institutional 
organization and authority of the Roman Church. On election to the 
papacy, Innocent III unsuccessfully attempted a peaceful conversion of 
the “heretics.” Then in 1204 he launched an implacable crusade against 



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much of the south of France and starved, mutilated, hanged, disem-
boweled, and burned the “heretics” (at the stake or without stakes). 
If not in the mountains, most certainly in the cities this crusade deci-
mated a brilliant Provençal culture of wealth, leisure, and imagination. 
In Marius the Epicurean (1885) Pater acknowledged “the fatality which 
seems to haunt any signal beauty, whether moral or physical, ... the 
suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the vulgar” (1885, 1: 100). 
The monastic mind feared the ancient life of the senses and had set 
itself against those ambiguities of what would become a transforma-
tive modernity. Jakob Burckhardt, like Winckelmann, considered the 
Renaissance a return from an intense medieval otherworldliness to the 
earlier classical life of the senses. Thus when Dominico “stumbled on 
the buried Venus” in Pater’s “Gaudioso, the Second” (Monsman 2008, 
91), he enacted this discovery of antiquity’s latent potency, thereby 
allegorizing the advent of modern civilization. But for Pater this new 
paradigm of modernity was not truly antithetical to the cloister but 
blossomed into an artistic perfection in which “Catholicism and the 
Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem re-
conciled” (Pater 1895, 103).

After the death of Pater in 1894, both C.L. Shadwell and Edmund 
Gosse prepared a number of his important remaining manuscripts 
for posthumous publication; but when Macmillan suggested publish-
ing still other manuscripts, Clara Pater, her brother’s administrator,  
declined because she felt the remainder not sufficiently finished and did 
not wish “that any work of his should appear in a form less complete 
than he would himself have approved” (1896, vii). But we now have a 
much greater tolerance for the unfinished; indeed, “the fragment” is a 
major aesthetic category. Further, Pater always revised even after publi-
cation, edition after edition, never really finishing absolutely any text. 
And finally, in the light of his growing reputation as “the strongest as 
well as the subtlest literary-critical intelligence” of the high-Victorian 
period in England (Rossetti 2003, xxii), Pater’s later thoughts on the 
enchantment of beauty and love cannot be dismissed as unworthy of 
notice or study. As a fragment, “Tibalt” is only nineteen manuscript 
pages long, perhaps slightly more than 2,500 words. And as with nearly 
all Pater’s fiction, it is more essay than action. Although the manuscript 



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of “Tibalt” can be deciphered by those familiar with Pater’s penman-
ship, my sense is that this draft, with its numerous abbreviations and 
hasty illegibilities, is in an earlier, more cursory state than even that of 
“Gaudioso.” Pater said he never published anything until he had “writ-
ten it out seven times” (more likely he reviewed and revised it from end 
to end seven times); this fragment of “Tibalt” surely had been awaiting 
more revisions-cum-writings-out, not to mention its completion. As 
to uncareted interlineations, ordinarily I would not interpolate them 
into the reading text unless they were above either an authorial cancel-
lation or lacuna on the primary line; however, at this stage of the draft 
sensible editing suggests Pater’s last (even though still tentative) alter-
native should be privileged: “last is best.” Bracketing in the text below 
indicates simple gaps in the primary line of composition that Pater had 
left both unfilled and without any tentative choices above the line but 
for which the editor has suggested words to fill these voids, often from 
Pater’s published work elsewhere. Indeed, the Sir Thomas Browne quo-
tation is precisely the one Pater intended to use.1

Tibalt the Albigense

The close of the twelfth century witnessed in the flowery yet sombre 
regions of the South of France the first movement of the Reformation 
in its utmost harshness of mood and, side by side with that, the first 
growth of the Renaissance already sensuous and gay. Oddly enough, 
they appear amid all their contrasts as not unfriendly powers. The 
fierce “crusade,” which in the course of years swept both alike away, 
made common cause against them as Albigensian; and the closer stu-
dent of the period cannot help asking himself whether there may not 
have been some deeper basis of union than a common danger between 
those two, at first sight so incongruous, companions—in some tenet 
of that “Manichean”2 doctrine, perhaps, with which the very soil of 
Languedoc was held to be tainted.

What is a natural query with the modern student seems to have been 
felt by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Middle Age as a deep suspi-
cion, as if they divined already in those uncertain movements the bold-
er scope, the more powerful drift, of each at a later time, the connexion 
of both with that all-solving critical philosophy which is of the texture 



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of the modern mind.3 What united two natural enemies, it was dimly 
felt, in common and concerted promotion of Antichrist must be some 
conviction of a perverted intellect common to both, animating by the 
fancied light of better doctrine the constant tendency of human nature 
to revolt against authority. The alliance of the pious “little people,” 
in the suburbs of the great towns or in the distant mountain villages, 
with the gay court of the Count of Toulouse was no merely temporary  
union, at an exceptional and trying moment, in opposition to the  
ancient hierarchy, nor the Count’s patronage of the avowed heretics 
merely the easy generosity or indifference of a liberal sovereign.4 There 
must be some seed of poisonous thought afloat in the general atmos-
phere, lighting, to take root, here in sour protest against holy church, 
there in a luxurious furtherance of the pleasant things of life.

The student of thought at the end of the twelfth century has to con-
tent himself with a result as uncertain as the suspicion which would 
seem to have envenomed the religious bigotry of the court of Inno-
cent III.5 No proof of the intellectual pravity supposed is forthcoming  
behind either the scanty notices of those early sectaries which present 
them merely as theological purists or behind the Provençal literature, 
in effect the sole extant monument of that early Renaissance in its frank 
and easily intelligible service to poetic culture. Yet the query remains, 
remains in the suggestion of a mental possibility, a possible phase6 of 
thought evolved just then in this or that curiously pondering mind, 
which may have determined one or many lives in that perplexed age 
with the tragedy, the terrible series of events, in which it terminated.

It is doubtless a part of the world’s real wisdom to make small  
account of metaphysical doctrines in the analysis of the forces which 
determine its movements. There are epochs, notwithstanding, as well 
as individual characters which from age to age reproduce the mood of 
particular epochs, not to be understood without large allowance for 
the influence of abstract theory. If metaphysical doctrines afford but a 
thin and sketchy version of our rich and complex actual experience, yet 
on the other hand they express this or that strong natural tendency of 
the mind which reflects on that experience, compelling all in this direc-
tion to the exclusion of that. Like morbid physical tendencies (if you 
will), such doctrines, the doctrine of [Xenophanes’ impersonal god-



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force] or [the negation of finite entities in Baruch Spinoza’s theology] 
or [Giordano Bruno’s materialistic pantheism], reappear at intervals, 
and are constitutional in certain minds. Imperfections, obliquities, 
[the motes and beams] of vision (it may be), since they are constitu-
tional and we cannot put them from us, they come to rank with those 
affected by them as no less than laws of light.7 In this way such sterili-
ties of doctrine as [a wholly rational deity] or [a wholly naturalistic 
one]—sterilities to the healthy—help largely to shape the history, as 
well of [communities] as of individuals, by bringing special tendencies 
of character into exclusive action, by making conscious and effective a 
mere tendency of mind in antagonism to its other tendencies. As the 
pronounced metaphysical formula reflects a general direction of the 
mind; so, given those mental directions, the formula, even if it comes 
from without, stamps them as current coin, or (to use another image) 
handicaps them in the competition for survival.

The common ground, if such there was, between the children of the 
Renaissance and the children of Reform at the close of the twelfth 
century in Languedoc, would be found in the inherent, the character-
istic shiftiness of one of those [ambiguously] abstract metaphysical for-
mulæ—a metaphysical notion preoccupying men’s minds at that place 
and time, but taking quite different issues on the plane of practice by 
its passage through two opposed types of character and conditions of 
life. It would be an instance of the versatility, the consequent useless-
ness after all some might urge, of metaphysical doctrine. —Abstract 
principles! Applied to the complex world of the various forces of men’s 
characters, they do but lend themselves, like the old leaden rule, to the 
twists and angles pre-existent there, or like the larvæ of the naturalist 
take deceptive colour from the matter they feed on or pass across.

Whence had come that fantastic opinion of the eternity of matter—
the eternity of matter and its implacable hostility to spirit, which at 
the close of the twelfth century8 lit up the fanaticism of multitudes in 
the South of France—has puzzled historians. Was it perhaps—Man-
icheism? as alleged by some, startled or bent on startling others by a 
strange name. Had it come like infectious disease in the baggage of 
returning crusaders from some old cobwebbed brain long since turned 
to dust in the distant East? Was it a rag of old pagan philosophy still 



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lingering like the monuments, the law, the very speech of old Rome 
on the soil of Languedoc, or a loan perhaps from Saracen unbelievers 
in Spain grown all too neighbourly, or had it actually been secreted 
afresh in the perverse mind of that late day? At any rate it was an  
established force there: it was in the air, seed from the hand of the bad 
sower thought some, of course.9 The matter and spirit of which meta-
physicians talk are, as we know, but creations of the metaphysicians 
themselves, rude abstract terms for the denomination of two series of 
phenomena only roughly distinguishable from each other in our actual 
experience, where the material and the spiritual, soul and body, are 
ever inextricably playing upon and fusing into each other, with a close-
ness which is nothing less than the unity of oneself. The eternity of 
matter! —Could anything seem more barren than a belief about that? 
But see it at its work on the cranky brains, the fierce hearts of a hand-
ful of wild people, vassals of that gay Count Raymond of Toulouse, 
half barons half shepherds within the high narrow walls of Castel la 
Crête, a fortified feudal village built of black lava clinging to one of 
the highest ledges in the Crest of the volcanic mountains of Lodève.10 
At these levels a country of the chestnut and the vine becomes a coun-
try of much rain and darkness. To these harsh people without leisure, 
without knowledge, without art, the old Manichean [heresy], if such 
it was, came plausibly enough—identifying the rough and graceless 
world around their own rough and graceless bodies marred by labour 
or battle, unutterably heavy when the labour and the fight were over 
or else breaking into wild sin—with matter as the creation of Satan 
or as Satan himself, the indestructible element of darkness and evil in 
things in eternal hostility to the spirit. The metaphysical “strife” gave 
trenchancy to, while it explained the opposition of, good and evil in 
themselves and in the world about them. Could they limit its reign by 
fasting from their rude or scanty store, by [penance and prayer], even 
by the proscription of marriage, by becoming rougher and ruder still in 
habit and person. Or did it matter at all what became of the irredeem-
able body, what it did with itself, they might ask themselves in hours of 
[fasting], the puritan becoming [purer still]. Allying itself to their rude 
taste for a purer or at least more colourless form of Christianity than 
was known to the catholic church, it gave theoretic interest to their 



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revolt against a hierarchy so closely identified with material splendour 
and had kept the Crest for [a hundred] years without a sacred taper, 
without the waters of Baptism. 

To minds thus strangely scrupulous it was a relief to think that the 
flesh of Christ himself had been but an unreal phantom. No priest 
lifted the Body of the Lord or blessed a marriage. If one came that 
way by chance, tongues perhaps false averred that he went back with a 
mutilated person. The chanted psalms soothed, no longer, irritated or 
weary souls, for the Old Testament was a wicked book. There were no 
holy oils for the dying in the bare unlighted chamber which had taken 
the place of the castle chapel fallen to ruin. Only down there below, 
sunk among the black cliffs, was the particular burial place of “the Per-
fect,”11 where the bodies of their dead might go without a blessing to 
mingle with matter even grosser still. With a touch of grotesque pride, 
revealing their kinship to those far-off Scotch descendants,12 far off 
both in time and place, these odd vassals of the [Count of Toulouse] 
might think of themselves as the pure, the perfect, the people of the 
spirit amid a world immersed in matter. Yes! the body, the natural 
world, the whole material order, was plainly a vile prison-house of the 
soul. That “matter was eternal”—its obscure rival godhead, its eternal 
war with spirit throughout the ages, did but make its power in the 
world mightier and one’s own battle against it more desperate. With 
these [folk] the metaphysical dogma had given coherence and [fixed  
direction] and a kind of fanatical lucidity of mind to the crude in-
stincts of a premature puritanism.

On dark [lowering] days, amid those [cliffs and ravines], it might 
easily seem that the souls so imprisoned were apostate spirits, damned 
already or with but a single chance more. That was what was offered 
by way of p[oetry]13 to a softly dreaming lad, at home among those 
gloomy chieftains. Unbaptised Thibalt!14—here was the sort of bold-
ly pondering soul to which the suspected theoretic link, between the 
barons of Castel la Crête, men gloomy and turbulent as the tempests 
they looked out upon, and their gay insouciant sovereign at Toulouse, 
might become apparent by the sifting out of the remoter possibilities 
in an ambiguous doctrine. What if the doctrine of the eternity of mat-
ter, the reign, the Satanic godhead of that should disclose itself as the  



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motive of some quite other mode of taking the world to this speculative 
lad, gifted so unmistakably with the intellectual ingenuousness which 
detects instinctively sincerity of conviction anywhere and will always 
stay to listen, always with fine equity allow its due weight to doctrine 
in the conduct of life? The doctrine of two principles—duteously he 
disciplines his thoughts upon the track of that, stimulating the early 
strength of a fine intelligence to discover the reason of this supreme 
trust, which though but a challenge to endless thinking within him-
self, was like a drawn sword all around in the protecting people about 
him. “There is an edge [in all firm belief, and with an easy metaphor 
we may say, the sword of faith”], says quaint [Sir Thomas Browne, “but 
in these obscurities I rather use it in the adjunct the apostle gives it, a 
buckler; under which I conceive a wary combatant may lie invulner-
able”] (1643, 1: 10).15

Albi, the sacred city, the new Rome of this fantastic doctrine might 
be just discerned sometimes in rare luminous weather from this or 
that outstanding hill-side, far off on the long bad winding roads which 
had not yet carried Tibalt beyond the limits of his birthplace. For him 
eternal matter identified itself with that girdle of cracked and calcined 
hill-tops, the barren precipices, the starveling bitter-scented herbage 
of those hollows where the volcanic fires had gone out, after some old 
Satanic conflict, leaving ugly dust and ruin behind. In those lowlands 
whence the black sheep mounted in immense flocks, bleating over the 
solitude as the heat of summer increased, there he divined already a 
richer land of corn and the vine, with the white bread which was rich 
cake at home and the wine, tasted here only by the sick or the very old, 
spreading West and South and East to the pope, to paynim Spain, to 
the sea and the ships. But here at the Crest winter came early, when 
behind the thick clouds battling together for months above the wind-
ing ravines Satan himself might be thought to sit enthroned. And with 
the first rains began that other battle of the rivers, parting to this land 
or that down their black gashes. O! to be rid of that noise of howling 
sheep-dogs, of blind cruel water! Then on a sudden, a frost, like swords 
in the air, had hushed it as he wandered like some highly intelligent 
wild animal, healthy still, furtive, bright-eyed beneath his sheep-skin, 
across the snow before a bleak sun under which a world of grey balloons 



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or domes with wild basaltic columns, range upon range, was presented 
for a while: a passionate if sombre scenery for passionate people.

And amid this world of rigid people and things, in which childhood 
and age and natural weakness generally seemed doubly susceptible of 
pain, an immense tenderness grew up in him. What a refuge for a 
sensitive youth, stimulated to rude manliness by those men of iron, 
bruised sometimes by contact with them, and, turning away, for child-
ish solace was the soft if ignorant womanhood in this nest among the 
rocks, the rock-like towns! Side by side with those dark, terrible, ter-
ribly sincere men whose view of [carnal relations] was summed up in 
the rule “that married persons must not come together but with the 
hope of having children,” the women and children, [simple-heart]ed, 
[unsulli]ed, [unaffect]ed, became more than usually tame, sweet, soft, 
almost animal in their winsomeness. —Yes! they were like so many 
delightful, contemptible pet animals. A catholic, the boy would have 
become a priest: as it was, with the visages of these women and chil-
dren, so often suffering, deep at his heart, he already had determined 
to be a healer of the body and went his way betimes, a self-taught 
botanist, searching for such [leaf or berry] as might lurk in those arid 
regions, finding them at last rich therein for the diligent seeker. Surely 
one old churchyard, long disused by “the Perfect,” must have its secret 
treasures. Its carved memorial stones and shattered crosses above the 
old catholic bones seemed like works of nature in their immemorial 
age. Pitiful, indulgent—he felt towards them who lay thus as one feels 
towards very old people, older and weaker than ever they seemed, by 
those long years under the moss-covered loam just above the precipice 
whence the unseen water roared so harshly. Reverently he plucked up 
from among them his white or purple treasures. And one spot there 
was—he detected it by its ring of molten snow—where those old vol-
canic fires lay not yet quite extinct amid the cinders. Here like the 
relics of a warmer, more florid and genial world, certain odd, exotic, 
miraculously fresh flowers were begotten as by natural magic, erect in 
the dark clefts, their roots deep down in the medicinable salts. Only 
on less lightsome days this presented itself as but another humour of 
cruelty in things—tender things cast out upon the scathing cold in the 
bad reign of “matter”—the cruelty it would be his vocation to counter-



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act. And it was after all a fruit of duteousness, of real humanity in those 
grim people that they did not discourage, that they found a way to the 
realisation of the lad’s purpose to become a physician....

In 1887, Pater published four fictional studies under the title, Imagi-
nary Portraits; then only two years later he had considered the idea of 
bringing out a second volume of uncollected stories, including several 
at that time either unwritten or only just begun, one of which Pater 
said would have been “set in the time of the Albigensian persecutions” 
(1970, xxx and n.1).16 We do not know if even as late as 1892, at the 
time its inclusion was seemingly dropped from this projected collec-
tion, whether Pater had even begun “Tibalt.” This second collection 
afterwards was indefinitely postponed or cancelled, and Pater died 
with several published but uncollected portraits and four fragmentary 
portraits, “Gaudioso” and “Tibalt” being the most coherent among 
the latter. What we do know with a fair degree of certainly is that Pater 
began work on his ultimately abandoned Gaston de Latour toward the 
end of 1886 and that a year later he simultaneously was researching 
“Tibalt,” having borrowed in 1887 both Claude Fauriel’s edition of a 
versified account of the crusade against the “Albigeois” by a Provençal 
poet from the 1200s and also Paul Meyer’s translations (1875–1879) 
of the same topic (Inman 1990, 471). In Pater’s first published essay, 
“Coleridge’s Writings” (1866), he asserted, “It is at the court of Fred-
erick II [in Sicily] that the Renaissance first becomes discernible as an 
actual power in European society” (Inman 1990, 25). Later in 1874 
he read Claude Fauriel’s Dante (1854); and “according to Fauriel, the 
troubadours at the court of Frederic II had fled there for refuge from 
the crusade against the Albigenses, which destroyed an elegant civili-
zation and dispersed its poets” (Inman 1990, 25). Was this, as B.A. 
Inman has suggested, a possible thread of plot for Pater’s portrait of 
Tibalt? “If he had finished this story, perhaps he would have had the 
gentle Tibalt flee with the troubadours from the violence of his home-
land to the court of Frederick in Sicily” (1990, 25).

 Or more likely he dies a martyr. The meaning of Tibalt’s name, 
“brave or bold people,” may have been intended to be no less a char-
acternym than that of Gaudioso’s name, signifying “joy.” In this era of 
St. Francis of Assisi, healer and herbalist, it may be that Tibalt, who 



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will become a physician, was intended by means of the practice of his 
profession to bridge the gap between, as he writes in the manuscript, 
“the people of the spirit amid a world immersed in matter” and the 
“the gay court of the Count of Toulouse”—whose lives of wealth and 
pleasure are reminiscent of the youth of St. Francis. Pater wrote of the 
temple of Aesculapius in Marius the Epicurean:

The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or 
abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of 
sacramental character; so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, 
of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious 
bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, 
but a quiet handmaid of the soul. (1885, 1: 30) 

Within the precincts of this temple, the young Marius is shown a vi-
sion of Rome as a holy city—to which he goes and at which, ultimate-
ly, he dies “with plenary grace.” Here in “Tibalt” the city glimpsed in 
the distance is “Albi, the sacred city, the new Rome,” a hieratic vision 
of the human community in contrast to its impending catastrophe—
no mere theological horror of pleasure then, of fountains running with 
wine, but of streets running with blood. The temple of Aesculapius 
offered a healing connection for the darker side of physical reality with 
the vitality of the spirit. It may be no coincidence that in Pater’s essay 
on “Style,” one of his most important aesthetic manifestos, he cited 
Flaubert’s conjunction of the physician with the painter and the writer: 
“‘Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of 
ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were some-
thing else than healing, of the painter than painting–as if the end of art 
were not, before all else, the beautiful’” (1889, 26).

Notes

1. Permission to publish this material from among the papers of Walter Pater comes 
from the residual legatees of his literary and scholarly estate, Ms. Catherine Jones 
and her sisters, whom I warmly thank. I would also like to thank for editorial 
support over the years: the late Professor Ian Fletcher, Reading University; Emer-
itus Professor Lawrence Evans, Northwestern University; Emeritus Professor  
Billie Andrew Inman, University of Arizona; and the late Dr. Rodney G. Dennis, 



Gerald Monsman 37

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

Houghton Library, Harvard University.

2. An ancient Persian doctrine of religious dualism teaching that matter, personified 
by the devil, is evil and that spirit, embodied in God, is good; through asceticism, 
one’s spirit may escape from matter.

3. The famous Conclusion to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance describes 
“modern” consciousness as a product of scientific theory (1873, 207–213).  
Pater’s use of the word “solving” in its root sense of “loosening, dissolving” (from 
sed-, se-, apart + luere, to release) is owing to a literary aestheticism that he shared 
with French advocates of art-for-art’s sake and that paralleled the earlier Latin 
writers of the Anonine Age. In Marius the Epicurean (1885) Pater gives extended 
attention to Cornelius Fronto’s style because Fronto aimed to revitalize Latin 
by capturing the rich and varied vocabulary of the old Republican days before 
literary classicists such as Caesar and Cicero stimulated an artificial Latin discon-
nected from daily life. Purists such as Caesar shunned unusual words as if they 
were “rocks” (Gellius 1946, I: 10); but Fronto, like the fictitious poet Flavian in 
Marius, urged his pupils to seek out “the unexpected and unlooked-for word” 
(1962–1963, I: 6).

4. Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse (1156–1222). A contemporary Cistercian 
monk described him in Historia Albigensium as “A limb of the devil, a son of 
perdition, the first born of Satan, an enemy of the Cross and persecutor of the 
Church, defender of heretics...”—and the appellatives continue (Warner 1922, I: 
50). One suspects this reflects Raymond’s success as a warrior for the Albigensian 
cause.

5. Innocent III (1161–1216, Pope 1198–1216). He asserted papal rights, spiritual 
and secular, and opposed heresy, notably for twenty blood-stained years against 
the Albigensians. In 1215 he convoked the fourth Lateran Council, the major 
doctrinal assemblage of the Middle Ages.

6. Each of Pater’s pages consists of twelve primary lines with room for interlinea-
tions; the word “phase” on the primary line is cancelled and “condition” is insert-
ed on the half-line above it; “phase” is then rewritten on the quarter-line between 
the cancellation and “condition” on the half-line. Since Pater’s last choice is the 
editor’s best choice, here and elsewhere, the top-most alternative is rejected in 
favor of the word on the quarter-line.

7. The “laws of light” is a covert nod toward Professor John Tyndall (1820–1893) 
and his lectures on light as a mode of motion, like heat, and his explanations of 



38 Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890

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diffusion (“Tyndall effect”) for why the sky is blue. The foregoing brackets are 
filled with: first, a reference from Pater’s Plato and Platonism (1893, 25–29) to the 
ideas of the Eleatic School; second, to Baruch Spinoza’s “nihilism,” presented in 
Pater’s “Sebastian van Storck” (1887, 89–133); third, to the “lower pantheism” of 
Giordano Bruno in Pater’s Gaston de Latour ([1896] 1995, 68–83). Alternatively 
one might have cited John Calvin, who propounded the savage doctrine of God’s 
“unconditional election”; Pater in Marius the Epicurean (1885, 2: 115) alludes to 
Calvin’s statement that “there are babies but a span long in hell.” The final bracket 
employs the familiar (for Pater’s generation) biblical imagery of Matthew 7:3, 
Luke 6:42.

8. Pater, rapidly interlining, simply neglected to write “century” here, as in another 
place he writes “him” for “them”; his MS housekeeping is not as meticulous as 
usual. But, as the editor of Pierre L’Estoile’s journal remarked with fine Gallic 
dismissal, “One is not obligated to respect certain vagaries of the pen.”

9. Matthew 13:3-39; Galatians 6:7-8. The good sower is Christ or the Christ-like; 
the bad sower is the Devil.

10. Lodève, as Pater knew it, was a bustling market town in the southern Massif 
Central. In the countryside, among weird rock formations, hillsides of chest-
nut and pine trees, mountain streams, and vineyards, are quaint medieval stone-
built villages hidden or clinging to the steep hills, dominated here and there by a  
ruined chateau. Castel la Crête seems to be an invention of Pater, suggestive of 
the Mediterranean as a cultural crossroads in the medieval period.

11. Pater here did not use quotation marks and capitalization for this phrase; later 
he does. Albigensians belonged to one of two groups: either “the Perfect,” the 
men and women of the ordained priesthood, who had received the gift of the 
Holy Spirit, or the unbaptized laity, called “believers.” In the next sentence the 
nouns in the phrase, “the pure, the perfect,” I consider less an effort to single out 
a specific group than to denote a general class of religious behaviors and ideas. 
Nevertheless, “the pure” is an alternate characterization of the Albigensians who 
were also called Cathars, a name that likely derives from the Greek Katharoi, “the 
pure.”

12. The old Scotch Covenanters (Presbyterians) in the seventeenth century revolted 
against the established Church that they felt to be irreligious and oppressive; in 
two covenants they laid the groundwork for independence of religious thought 
and conduct, thereby introducing as well ideals of civil liberty.



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13. Pater’s abbreviation for this word is simply “p.”; either “poetry” or “philosophy.”

14. Pater here is using a spelling of the name that has a host of variants in France—
Thibaud, Thibaut, Tibert, Tybert, Tybalt, Tybalt, all derivations from Thibault 
that originally came from a Germanic surname Theudbald. The thirteenth-cen-
tury Saint Thibault of Marly (1235–1247) was a knight who became a Cistercian 
abbot.

15. Browne’s reference is to Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, Ephesians 6:14-17. Religio 
Medici translates as “The Religion of a Physician”; Pater’s choice of this quotation 
is undoubtedly relevant to Tibalt’s chosen profession.

16. In 1891 Pater had read proofs of Douglas Ainslie’s blank verse play, Escarlamonde, 
published in Escarlamonde and Other Poems (1893). Lawrence Evans reports: 
“The story is set in Languedoc at the time of the Albigensian persecutions, and 
the eponymous heroine is sister to Count Raymond of Toulouse, about whom, 
according to Ainslie (in Benson, [Walter Pater, 1906] p. 123; cf. Symons, [A Study 
of Walter Pater, 1932] p. 105), Pater was planning an Imaginary Portrait” (Pater 
1970, 121 and n.1; xxx).

References

Browne, Thomas.

1643 Religio Medici.  London: Andrew Crook.

Fronto, Marcus Cornelius.

1962–63 Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto. Loeb Classical Library. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press.

Gellius, Aulus.

1946.  Attic Nights. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Inman, Billie Andrew.

1990 Walter Pater and His Reading 1847–1877. New York: Garland.

Monsman, Gerald.

2008 Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890. Expositions 2(1): 83–101. 

Panofsky, Erwin.

1939 Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New 
York: Oxford University Press.



40 Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890

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Pater, Walter.

1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan.
1885 Marius the Epicurean. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.
1887 Imaginary Portraits. London: Macmillan.
1889 Appreciations with an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan.
1893 Plato and Platonism. London: Macmillan.
1895 Miscellaneous Studies. Ed. C.L. Shadwell. London: Macmillan.
1896 Gaston de Latour. Ed. C.L. Shadwell. London: Macmillan.
1970 Letters of Walter Pater. Ed. Lawrence Evans. Oxford: Clarendon.
1995 Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text. Ed. Gerald Monsman. Greensboro, 

NC: ELT Press.

Plato 

1871a Phaedrus. Vol. 1 of The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by B. Jowett. Oxford: 
Clarendon.

1871b Symposium. Vol. 1 of The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by B. Jowett.  
Oxford: Clarendon.

Rossetti, D. G.  

2003 Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jerome McGann. New Haven, CT: Yale 
University Press.

Warner, H.J.

1922 The Albigensian Heresy. New York: Macmillan.


