Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  Having thus drawn out, as far as possible, what Pater’s ethical creed was not, let us try to indicate the nature and movement of his religious life. He began, it is plain, by feeling the strong aesthetic attraction of the accessories of religion; probably he did not disentangle the elements of religious faith from the effect which great churches, solemn ceremonial, ecclesiastical music, and hieratic pomp had upon his mind. As Jowett is once, in early days, reported to have said to him somewhat irritably, at the close of a discussion, “Mr. Pater, you seem to think that religion is all idolatry!” But as soon as Pater plunged into the study of metaphysics, he found that philosophy began to act as a solvent upon his creed; he still had a bias towards the expression of religious truth; and his half-formed idea of becoming a Unitarian minister, which, as I have said, was suggested in all probability by the career of Coleridge, was the outcome of this mood.

  After this impulse, if it was ever so much as an impulse, died away, he seems to have been content for some years to suspend his judgment. He even, both in public and in private, used expressions which indicated an attitude of definite hostility to the Christian position. He was immersed in artistic conceptions, and in practical work; but as he grew older the old associations began to reassert themselves; he found, like so many people of speculative temperament, who set out on a philosophical quest with an impatience of received traditions and conventional opinion, that there was far more truth in the accumulated treasures of human thought, simple and in many ways contradictory as they appeared, than he had originally believed. As he wrote once, in one of his reviews for the Guardian, “the religious, the Catholic, ideal,... the only mode of poetry realisable by the poor.”

  He discovered afresh the tranquillising influence of a direct faith on quiet people — of the type that he described in another review; speaking of sacristans as “simple people coming and going there, devout, or at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical life.” And thus the old quiet consecration of life by faith, not very confident perhaps, hardly more than a sacred hope of beautiful and tender possibilities, reasserted itself.

  As Lady Dilke wrote of a talk with him in the later years: —

  “Pater came and sate with me till dinner-time. We had been talking before that on the exclusive cultivation of the memory in modern teaching as tending to destroy the power of thought, by sacrificing the attitude of meditation to that of perpetual apprehension. When the others left we went on talking of the same matter, but on different lines. Thence we came to how it might be possible, under present conditions of belief, to bring people up not as beasts but as men by the endeavour to train feeling and impart sentiments as well as information. He looks for an accession of strength to the Roman Church, and thinks that if it would abandon its folly in political and social intrigue, and take up the attitude of a purely spiritual power, it would be, if not the best thing that could happen, at any rate better than the selfish vulgarity of the finite aims and ends which stand in the place of an ideal in most lives now. He has changed a great deal, as I should think for the better, and is a stronger man.”

  Pater spoke, indeed, as I conceive, very plainly in one place — the review of Robert Elsmere — of what was the inner attitude of his mind: —

  “Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognise our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is false — minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false, unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the world. The recognition of it straightway opens wide the door to hope and love; and such persons are, as we fancy they always will be, the nucleus of a Church. Their particular phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertainty, has been the secret of millions of good Christians, multitudes of worthy priests. They knit themselves to believers, in various degrees, of all ages.”

  And thus he came both to feel and to express a deep and sincere sympathy with the Christian point of view; Marius reveals most subtly the closeness of this approximation; but it may be seen, in scattered hints and touches, through all his later writings. Speaking, for instance, of the death of Socrates he wrote that the “details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have sometimes been compared.” A friend of Pater’s tells me that the present Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Gore, went to the Brasenose Church Society to read a paper on the Blessed Trinity, and was rather taken aback to find Pater in the chair. “However, he proved to be an admirable chairman, directing the discussion after the paper, and checking anything approaching irreverence.”

  He wrote Mrs. Humphry Ward a very interesting letter on December 23, 1885, on receiving from her as a Christmas gift her newly published translation of Amiel’s Journal. After congratulating her on the admirable literary grace of the translation, he continued: —

  “I find a store of general interest in Amiel, (take at random, e g., the shrewd criticism of Quinet,) which must attract all those who care for literature; while for the moralist and the student of religion he presents the additional attraction of yet another thoroughly original and individual witness to experiences on the subject they care most for. For myself, I gather from your well-meditated introduction, that I shall think, on finishing the book, that there was still something Amiel might have added to those elements of natural religion, (so to call it, for want of a better expression,) which he was able to accept, at times with full belief, and always with the sort of hope which is a great factor in life. To my mind, the beliefs, and the function in the world, of the historic church, form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities, which the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself; and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis. The supposed facts on which Christianity rests, utterly incapable as they have become of any ordinary test, seem to me matters of very much the same sort of assent we give to any assumption, in the strict and ultimate sense, moral. The question whether those facts were real will, I think, always continue to be what I should call one of the natural questions of the human mind.”

  In connection with this frame of mind we may quote an interesting passage which occurs in the Greek Studies (“The Bacchanals of Euripides”). He is speaking of Euripides, at the end of a long life of varied emotion and experience; he says: —

  “Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old) accustomed ideas, comformable to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man’s allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or ironical, but that he tends, in the sum of probabilities, to dwell on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side of things; and what is accustomed — what holds of familiar usage — comes to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects; and the well-known delineation of the vague country, in Homer or Hesiod, one’s best attainable mental outfit, for the journey thither.”

  This is no doubt a true picture of the writer’s own inner mood, a forecast of the later years in which the excitement of the quest for new ideas, new experiences, dies do
wn; and a man begins to rediscover for himself the humanity, the reality, of the old and constant stock of mortal tradition; the thoughts that have tortured, comforted, attracted, satisfied, the great company of mankind.

  When he lived in London he was fond of attending St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Albans, Holborn, and other high Anglican Churches; and he was sometimes seen at the Carmelites’ Church in Kensington; but there is no sort of evidence that he had any thought of Anglican orders, or that he was tending towards Roman Catholicism. He found in religion a deep and tranquillising force, and recognised the religious instinct, the intuitions of faith, as a Divine influence even more direct and unquestionable than the artistic or the intellectual influence. And thus we may think of him as one who, though his intellectual subtlety prevented his aiming at any very precise definition of his creed, was yet deeply penetrated by the perfect beauty and holiness of the Christian ideal, and reposed in trembling faith on ‘the bosom of his Father and his God.’

  Much that is beside the mark has been written and said about Pater’s precise habits of composition. The truth is that they were in no way unusual. The common tradition is that he wrote words and sentences upon cards, and then when he had accumulated a sufficient store, he dealt them out as though he were playing a game of patience, and made them into a species of mosaic. The real truth is much simpler. When he was studying a subject he took abundance of notes, but instead of making them in a note-book, he preferred slips of paper, for the greater convenience of sorting them, and arranged them in order so that they might illustrate the divisions of his subject.

  Mr. Gosse, to whom was entrusted the task of deciphering the fragmentary manuscript of the “Pascal,” gives one or two interesting instances of these notes, most of which are of the nature of passing thoughts, captured for future reference. One runs: —

  “Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., belfries, solemn night come in about the birds attracted by the Towers.”

  And again: —

  “? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, only after the Fall?”

  When he had arranged his notes he began to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the effect; the same device that Tennyson so often used.

  The work of writing grew easier to him as time went on. “Ah! it is much easier now,” he said to Mr. Gosse, near the end of his life. “If I live long enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing.”

  He was a regular rather than a hard worker. It was his habit for many years to devote two or three hours of the morning to writing, and he often wrote again for another hour in the afternoon. But he never worked late at night; writing was to him an absorbing and at the same time a fatiguing process, to be pursued temperately and quietly. Some writers work for a time as though possessed, fall into a profound exhaustion when a book is finished, and then lie fallow for a time. Such was never Pater’s way. His writing was his central concern; he loved it with an ever-growing love; it formed the staple employment of his days; but his friends say that there never was a man who seemed to be always so free from preoccupation, so ready to put his work aside, and enter into conversation of the most trivial kind; there were no furtive glances at the clock, none of the air of jealous if patient resignation, no hunted sense of the desire to escape from interruption.

  Again, too much emphasis has been laid upon the conscious fatigue and exhaustion arising from his work. He was not, like Flaubert, the racked and tortured medium of his thought. He was a man of low physical vitality, and he would sometimes half-humorously lament the labour that his work cost him. But the toil and the delight were inextricably intermingled; such writing as Pater’s with its subtle distinctions, its fine metaphors, its delicate effects, its haunted richness, its remote images, its liquid cadences, could never have been produced except by one who tasted to the full the artistic pleasure of elaborate workmanship. And it is beyond all doubt that his work became to him in increasing measure the mainspring of his life, a spring of the purest joy.

  One source of his concentrated strength was that he never wasted time in experimental researches; he knew his own mind; he knew exactly what interested him and the limitations of his taste; thus he confined his ideals to a restricted circle, and though perhaps losing somewhat in catholicity of thought, he gained astonishing depth and insight in certain specified directions. But he made no parade of omniscience. He used to say smilingly that it was such a relief to work hard at a subject and then forget all about it.

  One of Pater’s happiest accomplishments was his power of bringing up in a few words a figure or a scene, beautiful in itself and charged moreover with a further and remote significance, revealing as by a sudden glimpse or hint some solemn thought enshrined within the outer form. Thus he said once that churches where the Sacrament was reserved gave one the sense of a house where a dead friend lies; and again in a subtle allegory he touched the difference between Roman Catholicism with all its rich fabric of association and tradition, and Puritanism with its naked insistence on bare rectitude and rigid conduct. Roman Catholicism, he said, was like a table draped in fair linen, covered with lights and flowers and vessels of crystal and silver; while Puritanism was like the same table, after it had been cleared, serviceable enough, but without charm or grace. The essential form present in both; but the one furnished with rich and dainty accessories, the other unadorned and plain.

  It may be said generally that richness under a severe restraint is the principal characteristic of Pater’s style; but there are two or three special small characteristics, almost amounting to mannerisms, which may be noted in his writing. One is the natural result of his habit of composition; it is of overloading his sentences, of introducing long parentheses, of heaping fine detail together, which sometimes gives an impression of overluxuriousness. Here is a typical sentence, out of one of the Guardian Essays, the review of Wordsworth: —

  “An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.”

  This sentence has every charm except the charm of perfect lucidity. But any one who enjoys the characteristic quality of Pater, will be able to give its due value to the slight blurring of outline on which the charm to a certain extent depends.

  Again, he was fond of beginning a sentence with the emphatic phrase, and thus inverting the clause. Where another writer would say, “That tale of hours, the long chanted English service, develops patience,” Pater wrote: “It develops patience — that tale of hours, the long chanted English service.” And again: “Horace! — he was, had been always, the idol of their school.” And again: “Submissiveness! — It had the force of genius with Emerald Uthwart.” Such sentences, occurring as a rule at the opening of a paragraph, are of constant occurrence. He had a fondness for points of exclamation: “How wretched! how fine! how inconceivably great and difficult! — not for him!” and his frequent introduction of the word “say!” with its stop breaking the continuity of the clause where an ordinary writer would use “for instance,” is a favourite usage.

  It is clear that he did not aim primarily at simplicity or lucidity. His style was deliberately adopted and practised, and he was careful to allow no influence whatever to interfere with it. He told Mr. Gosse that he had read scarcely a chapter of Stevenson, and not a line of Mr. Kipling.

  “I feel, from what I hear about them,” he said, “that they are strong; they might lead me out of my path. I want to go on writing in my own way, good or bad. I should be afraid to read Kipling, lest he should come be
tween me and my page next time I sat down to write.”

  His view was that slipshod impressionism, rough, sketchy emphasis, was the literary fault of the time which needed to be sternly resisted. Writing of a serious kind, he felt, ought to be a strenuous, almost a learned process. He wrote in one of the reviews he contributed to the Guardian: —

  “Well, the good quality of an age, the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and confusion, may well be eclecticism.... A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned language.”

  This thought had its effect upon his writing, even when he was dealing with the apprehension of the ordinary objects of sense and perception.

  Great as was Pater’s appreciation of nature, and fine as was his perception of the quality and beauty of landscape, it is almost always through a medium of art that he beheld it. Nature is to him always a setting, a background, subordinated to the human interest. The thought that men had laboured, painfully or joyfully, over a building, or a picture, or a book, invested the result with a certain sacredness in his eyes. The nearer that outward things approached to humanity, the more they appealed to Pater. The home, the house, the room, its furniture and decoration, the garden, the pleasaunce, all these were nearer to his heart than nature in her wilder and sterner aspects, because the thought and hand of humanity had passed over them, writing its care and its dreams legibly on cornice and lintel, on panel and beam, on chest and press, on alley and bower, on border and fountain. When, as in “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” or in “Sebastian van Storck,” he describes the sunny vine-clad country, or the lonely clump on the long hill that seems to summon the vagrant foot thither, or the frozen lake with the fur-clad skaters moving to and fro, it is always with a sense of how Such scenes might have been painted. It was always nature seen through the eye of the artist rather than in the mind of the poet. There is little sense of expanse or largeness about these natural touches; they are rather caught at salient points, in glimpses and vignettes, grouped and isolated. It may be observed how rarely he alludes to natural sounds; these visions seem to be seen in a reflective silence, recorded and represented by the mind that has stored itself full of minute pictorial impressions. Pater went to nature, not in the spirit of Wordsworth, to exult in the freedom, the width, the tenderness, the energy, the vastness of it all; but rather as a great quarry of impressions, through which he walked with a perceptive gaze, selecting and detaching striking and charming effects, which could afterwards be renewed and meditated over in the home-keeping mind. None of his direct nature-touches, beautiful as they are, are penetrated with quite the same zest and emotion as his descriptions of nature when represented by some master-hand. It was the penetration of nature by human personality that gave it its value for Pater, its significance; and thus it comes about that his descriptions of scenes always seem, so to speak, to have a frame about them. He did not, like a poet, desire to escape from man to nature; but rather to suffuse nature at every point with humanity, to judge of it, to feel its beauty, not as the direct expression of the mind of God, but as it affected and appealed to man.