Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  Flaubert, as seen in these letters, was undoubtedly a somewhat austere lover. His true mistress was his art. Counsels of art there are — for the most part, the best thing he has to offer. Only rarely does he show how he could play the lover: —

  “Your love penetrates me at last, like warm rain, and I feel myself searched through with it, to the bottom of my heart Have you not everything that could make me love you? body, wit, tenderness? You are simple of soul and strong of head; not poetic, yet a poet in extreme degree. There is nothing but good in you: and you are wholly, as your bosom is, white, and soft to touch. I try sometimes to fancy how your face will look when you are old, and it seems to me I shall love you still as much as now, perhaps more.”

  In contrast with the majority of writers, apt to make a false pretence of facility, it is of his labour that Flaubert boasts. That was because, after all, labour did but set free the innate lights of a true diamond; it realised, was a ministry to, the great imaginative gift of which he was irresistibly conscious. It was worth his while!

  “As for me, the more I feel the difficulties of good writing, the more my boldness grows. It is this preserves me from the pedantry into which I should otherwise fall. I have plans for books, the composition of which would occupy the rest of my life: and if there happen to me, sometimes, cruel moments, which wellnigh make me weep with anger (so great do I feel my weakness to be), there are others also when I can scarce contain myself for joy: something from the depths within me, for which voluptuous is no word, overflows for me in sudden leaps. I feel transported, almost inebriate, with my own thoughts, as if there came to me, at some window within, a puff of warm perfumes. I shall never go very far, and know how much I lack; but the task I undertake will surely be executed by another. I shall have put on the true road some one better endowed, better born, for the purpose, than myself. The determination to give to prose the rhythm of verse, leaving it still veritable prose; to write the story of common life as history or the epic gets written (that if to say, without detriment to the natural truth of the subject), is perhaps impossible. I ask myself the question sometimes. Yet it is perhaps a considerable, an original thing, to have tried. I shall have had my permanent value for my obstinacy. And who knows? One day I may find a good motif an air entirely within the compass of my voice: and at any rate I shall have passed my life not ignobly, often with delight. Yet still it is saddening to think how many great men arrive easily at the desired effect, by means beyond the limits of conscious art. What could be worse built than many things in Rabelais, Cervantes, Molière, Hugo? But, then, what sudden thrusts of power! What power in a single word!”

  Impersonality in art, the literary ideal of Gustave Flaubert, is perhaps no more possible than realism. The artist will be felt; his subjectivity must and will colour the incidents, as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things. By force of an immense and continuous effort, however, the whole scope of which these letters enable us to measure, Flaubert did keep ‘Madame Bovary’ at a great distance from himself; the author might be thought to have been completely hidden out of sight in his work. Yet even here he transpires, clearly enough, from time to time; and the morbid sense of life, everywhere impressed in the very atmosphere of that sombre history, came certainly of the writer himself. The cruelty of the ways of things — that is a conviction of which the development is partly traceable in these letters.

  “Provided the brain remains! That is the chief thing. But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive. There have been at most two or three years in which I was really entire — from seventeen to nineteen. I was splendid just then, though I scarce like to say so now; enough to attract the eyes of a whole assembly of spectators, as happened to me at Rouen, on the first presentation of ‘Ruy Bias.’ Ever since then I have deteriorated at a furious pace. There are mornings when I feel afraid to look at myself, so worn and used-up am I grown.”

  ‘ Madame Bovary,’ of course, was a tribute to science; and Flaubert had no dread, great hopes rather, of the service of science in imaginative literature, though the combat between scientific truth — mental physiology and the like — and that perfectly finished academic style he preferred, might prove a hard one. We might be all of us, since Sophocles — well, “tattooed savages!” but still, there was “something else in art besides rectitude of line and the well-polished surface.” The difficulty lay in the limitations of language, which it would be the literary artist’s true contention to enlarge. “We have too many things, too few words. ’Tis from that comes the torture of the fine literary conscience.” But it was one’s duty, none the less, to accept all, “imprint all, and, above all, fix one’s point d’appui in the present.” Literature, he held, would take more and more the modes of action which now seem to belong exclusively to science. It would be, above all, exposante — by way of exposition; by which, he was careful to point out, he by no means intended didactic. One must make pictures, by way of showing nature as she really is; only, the pictures must be complete ones. We must paint both sides, the upper and under. Style — what it might be, if writers faithfully cherished it — that was the subject of his perpetual consideration. Here is a sketch of the prose style of the future: —

  “Style, as I conceive it, style as it will be realised some day — in ten years, or ten generations! It would be rhythmical as verse itself, precise as the language of science; and with undulations — a swelling of the violin I plumage of fire! A style which would enter into the idea like the point of a lancet; when thought would travel over the smooth surfaces like a canoe with fair winds behind it. Prose is but of yesterday, it must be confessed. Verse is par excellence the form of the ancient literatures. All possible prosodic combinations have been already made; those of prose are still to make.”

  The effort, certainly, cost him much; how much we may partly see in these letters, the more as ‘Madame Bovary,’ on which he was then mainly at work, made a large demand also on his impersonality: —

  “The cause of my going so slowly is just this, that nothing in that book [‘Madame Bovary’] is drawn from myself. Never has my own personality been so useless to me. It may be, perhaps, that hereafter I shall do stronger things. I hope so, but I can hardly imagine I shall do anything more skilful. Here everything is of the head. If it has been false in aim, I shall always feel that it has been a good mental exercise. But after all, what is the non-natural to others is the natural to me — the extraordinary, the fantastic, the wild chase, mythologic, or metaphysic.

  ‘Saint Antoine’ did not require of me one quarter of the tension of mind ‘Madame Bovary’ has caused me.

  ‘Saint Antoine’ was a discharge: I had nothing but pleasure in writing it; and the eighteen months devoted to the composition of its five hundred pages were the most thoroughly voluptuous of my life, hitherto. Judge, then, of my condition in writing ‘Madame Bovary.’ I must needs put myself every minute into a skin not mine, and antipathetic to me. For six months now I have been making love Platonically; and at the present moment my exaltation of mind is that of a good Catholic: I am longing to go to confession.”

  A constant reader of Montaigne, Flaubert pushed to the utmost the habit of doubt, as leading to artistic detachment from all practical ends: —

  “Posterity will not be slow in cruel desertion of those who have determined to be useful, and have sung ‘for a cause.’ It cares very little for Chateaubriand, and his resuscitation of mediæval religion; for Béranger, with his libertine philosophy; will soon care little for Lamartine and his religious humanitarianism. Truth is never in the present; and if one attaches oneself to the present, there comes an end of one. At the present moment, I believe that even a thinker ( and the artist, surely, is three times a thinker) should have no convictions.”

  Flaubert himself, whatever we m
ay think of that, had certainly attained a remarkable degree of detachment from the ordinary interests of mankind.

  Over and above its weightier contributions to the knowledge of Flaubert, to the knowledge and practice of literature at its best, this volume, like its predecessor, abounds in striking occasional thoughts: —

  “There is no imagination in France. If you want to make real poetry pass, you must be clever enough to disguise it.”

  “In youth one associates the future realisation of one’s dreams with the existence of the actual people around us. In proportion as those existences disappear, our dreams also depart.”

  “Nothing is more useless than those heroic friendships which require exceptional circumstances to prove them. The great difficulty is to find some one who does not rack your nerves in every one of the various ordinary occurrences of life.”

  “The dimensions of a soul may be measured by its power of suffering, as we calculate the depth of rivers by their current.”

  “Formerly, people believed that the sugar-cane alone yielded sugar; nowadays it is extracted from almost anything. It is the same with poetry. Let us draw it, no matter whence, for it lies everywhere, and in all things. Let us habituate ourselves to regard the world as a work of art, the processes of which are to be reproduced in our works.”

  “To have talent, one must be convinced one has it; and to keep the conscience pure, we must put it above the consciences of all other people.”

  “We retain always a certain grudge against any one who instructs us.”

  “What is best in art will always escape people of mediocrity, that is to say, more than three quarters of the human race.”

  “Let our enemies speak evil of us! it is their proper function. It is worse when friends speak well of us foolishly.”

  “Materialists and spiritualists, in about equal degree, prevent the knowledge of matter and spirit alike, because they sever one from the other. The one party make man an angel, the other a swine.”

  “In proportion as it advances, art will be more and more scientific, even as science will become artistic. The two will rejoin each other at the summit, after separating at the base.”

  “Let us be ourselves, and nothing else! ‘What is your duty? What each day requires.’ That is Goethe’s notion. Let us do our duty; which is, to try to write well. What a society of saints we should be, if only each one of us did his duty!”

  A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, DECEMBER, 1889

  ONE of the privileges of the larger survey of historical phenomena enjoyed by our own generation, looking back now over many unexpected revivals in doctrine and practice, is the assurance that there are no lost causes. Through the complexity of things, as of men’s thoughts about them, the last word, on this side or that, never gets spoken. For example: the force, the secret, if not of the future, at the present, may seem to be with ‘the idea, the faith, the dogma,’ (if indeed there really was anything of the kind) ‘underlying’ that blind conflict labelled historically as The French Revolution. Yet Catholicism, which, if any vast practical movement ever had one, has an idea underlying it (Catholicism, which the Revolution certainly did its best to destroy but only succeeded in putting on its mettle), possessing its share of permanent truth to human experience, still finds therefore from time to time its adherents, alike among the simple who ‘must needs live’ and the wise who must needs reflect, as it has found just now an able and animated vindicator in the author of A Century of Revolution.

  As such a vindicator Mr. Lilly proposes to test the Revolution by its fruits from 1789 to 1889 — by its supposed operation in the world, its effort ‘to mix with life,’ in the three spheres of politics, science, and art. Judged by his chapter on ‘The Revolution and Liberty,’ he would appear peculiarly well fitted for that useful function of excepting against, and qualifying, any too confident faith in the final acceptability of this or the other theoretic programme. He is no idolàtor, for instance — no idyllist, shall we say? — of the French peasant, as the Revolution has left him. It is sad to think that, after paying such a price for emancipation, so many millions of the French people still not only eat the bread of sorrow, but with so sordid a heart. As a critic of the worship of the Revolution, affected or sincere, and the somewhat second-rate performers therein, as also of those later phases of Liberalism which figure as derivative from it, he proves himself an effective controversialist, capable of a good deal of fine raillery, sometimes of racy mockery for his opponents, equipped with various reading and a style singularly well adapted to the purpose of popular exposition.

  But Mr. Lilly is not only a critic of the Revolution, of the tree and its supposed fruits. His exceptions come by way of the assertion of a counter-principle, an abstract ideal of his own; and effectiveness in asserting an abstract ideal can, for the most part, be attained only at the cost of those very qualifications in which at times Mr. Lilly shows himself so expert, and in which what we may call the ‘aesthetic’ spirit, driving always at the concrete, at the precise differentiation of the concrete, event or person, finds its opportunity. It is the spirit which in dealing with the Revolution, for instance, or with the Catholicism Mr. Lilly here so ably upholds against it, does justice to the irregularities, the inconsistencies, the ‘faults’ as the geologist calls them, which traverse and set at nought our abstract or ideal assumptions of the nature of this or that ‘tendency’ in human affairs. One thing, certainly, the Revolution left to the century which followed it — a large stock, not merely of questionable abstract propositions, but also of abstract terms of very doubtful serviceableness in the study of history. Abstract terms like Liberty, Democracy, Atheism — abstract propositions about them in whatever interest, make one think sometimes of those worn old screws which turn either way with equal facility, and compact nothing. What we mean might be illustrated by Mr. Lilly’s chapter on ‘The Revolution and Art;’ telling as it really is as an attack on the ‘naturalism’ which he holds to be the fruit of the Revolution, especially in literature. But was ‘naturalism,’ even as he understands it, finding it at its height in M. Zola’s Nana, really born in 1789? did it not exist, like the revolutionary temper itself, from of old? Is not a certain kind of naturalism an element in all living art?

  And then Nana is very far from being characteristic of the whole scope of M. Zola’s work. Was not the Revolution, after all, a kind of vicious running to seed of that principle of Individualism so nobly vindicated by Mr. Lilly himself as a discovery of Christianity or Catholicism?

  For in developing the spirit, the, of Catholicism, compatible or incompatible as it may be with Revolution, he writes admirably, with a fulness of historic and personal insight into what Christianity, in that most venerable of its forms, has been to each and all of us, with touches also of a really masculine eloquence, and a dignity worthy of so great a subject, of his own chivalry for it. A Catholic, writing for the general public, with a sense perhaps that reason is not too obviously on his side, may sometimes be tempted to be more ingenious than he needs. There is nothing of that kind in Mr. Lilly. Not so much ingenious as ingenuous in the best sense, he takes our old-fashioned Catechism as a ‘summary of the fundamental religious and ethical conceptions of Christendom,’ and (must it be said? ) with true ‘liberalism’ after all, is ready to accept what is popularly known as Darwinism; feels as strongly as Newman himself the unreasonableness of forcing people’s opinions; makes in passing an effective attack on vivisection; and is catholic in his aesthetic tastes, at least till 1789 is concerned. If he deals a little too much with abstractions, yet he has real insight into, a real power over them, available both for thought and utterance, which we would willingly illustrate by quotation.

  ‘The past is really indestructible. You do not destroy it by destroying its symbols.’

  ‘An artist is one who reproduces the world in his own image and likeness.’

  ‘The advance of the general mind is so slow as to be imperceptible unles
s viewed at a distance.’

  Mr. Lilly’s judgments are not seldom as compact, as aphoristic, as these; and, if only by way of a variation of routine, in this age of foregone conclusions, it is a pleasure to see gifts and accomplishments such as his in service, not as a mere matter of course, on the side of Revolution.

  A NOVEL BY MR. OSCAR WILDE

  THE BOOKMAN, NOVEMBER, 1891

  THERE is always something of an excellent talker about the writing of Mr. Oscar Wilde; and in his hands, as happens so rarely with those who practise it, the form of dialogue is justified by its being really alive. His genial, laughter-’ loving sense of life and its enjoyable intercourse, goes far to obviate any crudity there may be in the paradox, with which, as with the bright and shining truth which often underlies it, Mr. Wilde, startling his “countrymen,” carries on, more perhaps than any other writer, the brilliant critical work of Matthew Arnold. The Decay of Lyings for instance, is all but unique in its half-humorous, yet wholly convinced, presentment of certain valuable truths of criticism. Conversational ease, the fluidity of life, felicitous expression, are qualities which have a natural alliance to the successful writing of fiction; and side by side with Mr. Wilde’s Intentions (so he entitles his critical efforts) comes a novel, certainly original, and affording the reader a fair opportunity of comparing his practice as a creative artist with many a precept he has enounced as critic concerning it.