by Walter Pater
Plato and Platonism, certain chapters of which appeared in 1892, was eventually published in 1893, and thus was the main and serious occupation of Pater’s last years. He placed the book at the head of his own writings. A friend once asked him whether he thought that The Renaissance or Marius was his best book. “Oh, no,” he said, “neither. If there is anything of mine that has a chance of surviving, I should say it was my Plato.”
I do not propose here to discuss the accuracy and the justice of his picture of the Platonic philosophy, or how far it harmonises with received conceptions. There are points, for instance, in his presentment of the Platonic doctrine, with which it is easy to disagree; I merely intend to indicate the conception which Pater formed and expressed, the angle at which the idea impinged upon his own mind.
He intended it primarily to be a useful book, an educational work. He says in his preface that his aim was to interest young students of philosophy; and he says at the outset of the book, “The business of the young scholar... in reading Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato’s opinions, to modify, or make apology for, what may seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental process there, as he might witness a game of skill.” His own object, therefore, in the book is not primarily philosophical; it is rather critical and historical — to put Plato in his proper place and to see the relation which he bore to his age.
Indeed it would be misleading to speak of Pater as a philosopher in the technical sense of the word, namely, as one who publishes systematic or consecutive thoughts upon the ultimate nature of things. Pater was merely philosophically cultured, and the most we can say of his philosophy is that his mental attitude is to a considerable extent determined by his interest in the study of philosophical opinions. He was, then, a philosopher in the sense that Ruskin, for instance, was not a philosopher; but Pater would not be accepted among critical writers as a philosopher in the technical sense.
It was ingeniously said of Pater, that he was a philosopher who had gone to Italy by mistake instead of to Germany. There is a real truth in this epigram. He had a deep-seated sense of the mysterious inner relation of things, an intense desire to discern and disentangle the bare essential motives of life; but instead of attacking this in the region of pure and abstract thought, he touched it through the sense of beauty. It was beauty that seemed to him the most characteristic, the most significant thing in the world, that beauty touched with strangeness of which he so seriously spoke; and his preoccupation was to penetrate the strangeness, to trace the mystery back to primal emotion, while he watched, with the intensest eagerness and the most sacred thrill, the rich accumulation of beauty, apprehended and expressed by so many personalities, such varied natures, which the human race acquired and made its own, leaving its fine creations to exist as monuments of its currents and movements, like the weed-fringed posts that mark the sea-channel over the estuary’s sands; while they gathered year by year the added beauty of age and association, yet never losing the pathos, the heart-hunger, the unfulfilled desire, that hangs like a sweet and penetrating aroma round the beautiful things that men have made and loved, and have been forced to leave behind them. The passionate desire to create and express, followed by the consecration of sorrow and darkness, these two strains mingled for Pater into a strain of high solemnity and pathetic sweetness.
But he can hardly be said to have had any philosophical system, just as he himself believed Plato to have had none. Plato’s writings represented to Pater an atmosphere, not a defined creed. Pater was rather a psychologist, and it was through the effect of metaphysical ideas upon personality that he approached philosophy. He was not an abstract thinker; he says, indeed, plainly, “Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such.... We cannot love or live upon genua and species, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses.” But his psychology gave him the power of making metaphysics real to people who are not naturally metaphysical, by touching them with a personal appeal, and showing their ethical significance; he translates the pure thought of abstract thinkers into artistic and ethical values. It is interesting, for instance, to contrast his development with the development of such a man as Henry Sidgwick. Both were saved by the uneventful course of academic life from the pressure of hard facts and of social problems. Both began with a metaphysical and a literary bias; but Henry Sidgwick was fitted for abstract speculation, and the literary and artistic, interests of his life tended to diminish; whereas in Pater’s case the literary and artistic interests developed, and subordinated his metaphysical interests to his artistic prepossessions.
In Plato and Platonism, then, Pater is absorbed in the task of bringing out the personality of Plato. This he does with singular skill. He shows that Plato was not an originator of philosophical thought; that it is the form and not the matter that is new; and that his charm lies in his romantic realism, his love of modest and ingenuous youth, his dramatic sense of character; so that, as Pater says, he had a resemblance to Thackeray, and was fully equipped to be a writer of noble fiction. He shows that Plato was in no sense a doctrinaire, but held that ideas and notions are not the consequence of reason but the cause of it. That they are there to be discovered, not non-existent and capable of being originated; be shows how Plato, in the Republic, was presenting philosophy as an essentially practical thing, a thing to mould life and conduct, an escape from the evils of the world — a religion, in fact, and not a philosophical system. Philosophy is, according to Plato, to teach us how to cultivate the qualities by which we can obtain a mastery over ourselves, how to arrive at a kind of musical proportion, the subordination of the parts to the whole. “It is life itself,” he says, “action and character, he proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts.”
Thus Plato, according to Pater, is an advocate of the immutable, of law and principle. “Change is the irresistible law of our being.... Change, he protests, through the power of a true philosophy, shall not be the law of our being.” He shows that Plato was by constitution an emphatically sensuous nature, deeply sensible to impressions of beauty, and to emotional relations with others; but that he regarded the appeal of the senses as a species of moral education; that the philosophical learner passed from the particular to the general, from the love of precise and personal beauty, to the love of the central and inner beauty.
And thus Plato is not so much a teacher as a noble and inspiriting comrade; those who love Plato do not sit at his feet and absorb his wisdom, but take service with him in his adventurous band, journeying from the familiar scene and the beloved home to the remote and distant mountains that close the horizon, but from which there may be a prospect of hidden lands.
The whole book cannot be held to be exactly characteristic of Pater’s deliberate style. It is composed not so much to embody his own dreams as to make a personality, an age, a spirit, clear to younger minds; but there is a sense of a delighted zest, a blithe freedom about it, as though it were the work of a mind which had escaped from tyrannical impulses and uneasy questionings into a gentle tranquillity of thought. One feels that not only is the subject dear to him, but that those whom he would address are also dear; there is thus an affectionate solicitude, a buoyant easiness, about the book, as of a master speaking simply and unconstrainedly among a band of eager and friendly pupils. The book is full of echoes out of a well-filled mind, of Augustine and Dante, of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Not only Plato himself, but the other incidental figures are brilliantly touched. Socrates, himself “rude and rough as some failure of his own old sculptor’s workshop,” yet “everywhere, with what is like a physical passion for what is,
what is true — as one engaged in a sort of religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and meant us to know”; or Pythagoras, that distant legendary figure, with his strange glimpses of pre-existence, emerging as a brilliant, perhaps showy, personality, a mysterious or mystical thaumaturge, — these are sharply and definitely conceived.
Again, there is a beautiful chapter on Lacedaemon, and the decorous, ordered, submissive system of the Dorians, which presented so strong a contrast to the diffuse, unregulated, brilliant spirit of Ionian communities. The Spartan theory of education, with its resemblance to our own English system, developing the individual only in order to subordinate him to the common welfare, repressing all eclectic, all independent qualities, had a potent attraction for Pater’s mind, the attraction that all systems have that promise tranquillity and settled instincts as a reward for obedience, for a mind that desires guidance, and to whom personal freedom has brought more anxiety than serenity. The high value of this chapter is that it contrives to invest a system which, barely and unsympathetically described, appears to be ineffably dreary and unpicturesque, with the charm of cheerfulness and quietness so characteristic of communities of a monastic order, a cheerfulness which comes from the removal of personal responsibility, and the substitution of unquestioning obedience — that highest of all luxuries for indecisive and sensitive characters.
The book, then, is a beautiful thing, with a sense of recovered youth blending with an older wisdom about it; a book admirably fitted to attract and instruct an ingenuous mind; but lucid, interesting, and gracious as it is, Pater does not here emerge as the parfait prosateur, as Bourget called him; it was no doubt the delight of feeling that in this book he had conferred a real educational benefit upon those youthful spirits to whom his heart went out, that made him rate the book so highly. He did not feel so sure whither the artistic reveries, the metaphysical speculations, of his other works might conduct them; but, for all that, criticism is right in setting a higher value upon his more intimate self-revelations, upon the books in which he uttered oracles, rather than on the book where he furthered knowledge.
In the last year of Pater’s life he published one of the Greek Studies—” The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” which we have already considered, and two little sketches of travel— “Some Great Churches in France,” which appeared in the Nineteenth Century in March and June of that year. “Notre-Dame d’Amiens” is a fine study of a great church, dwelling on the lightness, the brightness, the “immense cheerfulness,” of the building.
The only very noteworthy passage is one in which he contrasts Greek and Gothic architecture. He says that in Gothic art “for the mere melody of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the same moment; and were gainers”... “the vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence, of the Catholic religion.”
Again in “Vézelay” (1894) we have a study in contrast, of a “majestic, immoveable” church, which, with “its masses of almost unbroken masonry, its inertia,” seems to have a certain kinship with imperial Rome. Its almost savage character, he says, is hardly relieved by a great band of energetic, realistic, coarsely executed sculpture, in which demons make merry over the punishment of wickedness: “Bold, crude, original, the work indicates delight in the power of reproducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense of beauty.”
But the end was at hand, although there was no hint or foreshadowing of it. Never had Pater been more tranquil, serene, contented, than in these last months. Increasing years, without diminishing strength, concentration, or intellectual force, had brought him nothing but what was good; the respect, the regard, the devotion, of friends; the consciousness that he had now a perfect control of his art and its resources. He had many designs and schemes for books that should be written, and there seemed no reason why he should not have many years before him of simple life and congenial activity; and so we come to his last utterance.
The essay on “Pascal” has a deep significance among the writings of Pater; it contains, thinly veiled under the guise of criticism, some of his deepest thoughts on the great mystery of life — freewill and necessity — and his views of orthodox theology. It is true that he is nominally justifying Pascal and confuting the Jesuits; but there is a passionate earnestness about his line of argument which shows only too clearly that he was doing what it suited his natural reticence to do — fighting like Teucer under the shield of Ajax, and taking a part, an eager part, in the controversy between Liberalism and Authority.
Moreover, it is his last work; the work on which he was engaged in the last hours of his life; the essay, indeed, never received the last touches of that careful hand, and though substantially complete, it breaks off in the middle of a sentence. This fact — that it was his last deliberate utterance — gives it a special significance; even before he had said his last word on the mystery of life, he knew all that there is to know.
To take the theological side of the essay first, speaking of Pascal’s half-contemptuous attempts to arrive at the true definition of theological phrases, Pater thus comments upon the situation: —
“Pascal’s charges are those which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.”
“The sin of the Jesuits,” he says, “is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they interfere in great matters — faults promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be saved in some easy way, quite other than Pascal’s high, fine, chivalrous way of gaining salvation.”
In these words breathes the accent of the liberal spirit, the spirit which dares to look close into great questions; declines to admit more than it can prove, or at least infer; refuses, at whatever loss of serenity, to formulate its hopes and desires as certainties.
The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is that grace is always vouchsafed in sufficient measure to overcome temptation, if only the spirit chooses to make use of it by the exercise of its free choice.
“This doctrine,” says Pater, “is certainly, to use the familiar expression, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as assuming them to be, what they really are, at the worst, God’s silly sheep.”
Pater goes on to say, with an outspokenness which is hardly characteristic of him, that the very opposite doctrine, the Calvinistic doctrine of election both to reprobation and to salvation, would seem to be strikingly confirmed by our own experience. Pascal himself, a visibly elect soul, acting as it were by a certain irresistible impulse of holiness, is an instance in point.
He makes, of course, no attempt at the solution of the insoluble difficulty. But nowhere else in the whole of his writings does he touch on the great dilemma, namely, that our consciousness tells us we are free, our reason that we are bound. He only surveys it from the spectatorial point of view.
“Who,” he says, “on a survey of life from outside would willingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, for which the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our respective points of view?”
But Pater leaves us in little doubt as to the side on which his own heart was engaged. It is clear that he felt that we are not, when our humanity is sifted to the very bottom, independent beings; we are deeply involved and hampered; something outside of us and a
nterior to us determines our bent, our very path.
This last deep utterance of Pater’s has a strange significance when taken side by side with the fact so often stated that he was thinking of the possibility of receiving Anglican ordination. There could not possibly be a greater mistake than this supposition. Perhaps, indeed, there was a region of his mind in which the idea appealed to him, but deeper down, in a secret chamber of thought, which in his writings at all events he did not often visit, lay that consciousness of the hard, dark, bare truth which, if a man once truly apprehends, prevents him from figuring as a partisan, except through a certain sophistry, on the side of authoritative religion.
This is the truth, disguise it as we will, that religion in its purest form is not a solution of the world’s mystery, but a working theory of morals. For all religions, even Christianity itself, tend to depend upon certain assumptions, such as the continuance, in some form or other, of our personal identity after death, of which no scientific evidence is forthcoming. We may assume it, yielding to a passionate intuition, but nothing can prevent it from being an assumption, an intuition, which may perhaps transcend reason, but cannot wholly satisfy it. And thus, however impassioned, however transcendent that intuition may be, there must always remain a certain element of doubt, in all sincere minds, as to the absolute certainty of the assumption. Thus there must lie, in all reasoning men’s hearts, a streak of agnosticism. The triumph of faith can never, until faith melts into certainty, be of the same quality as the triumph of reason; and it is upon the proportion of doubt to faith in any man’s mind that his religious attitude depends. There is little question as to which way Pater’s sympathies and hopes inclined; but this essay clearly reveals that the doubt was there.
He touches with deep sympathy the strange and sad withdrawal of Pascal from the world; his attempt, under the pressure of a painful and unmanning disease, to find solace in asceticism, renunciation, and the practice of austere pieties; it seems strange to Pater to find that Pascal never fell under the aesthetic charm of the rites of the Catholic Church, but found “a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness, in them.”
