by Walter Pater
It might have been imagined that so deliberate and precise a craftsman, with so definite a theory of his art, would perhaps have held on his way producing his careful masterpieces, content to put it on record that he had thought thus, and expressed it just so, content that the beautiful thing should be formed and fashioned, and made available for the use or delight of any that followed the same or a like path among the things of the soul. One could have supposed Pater indifferent to criticism and censure, deeming it enough not to be unfaithful to the heavenly vision. For to him, doubtless, the first and chiefest pleasure lay in the thrilling thought, that thought which sets the writer’s spirit all aglow, leaping into the mind, as it does, with an almost physical shock, and opening up a sudden vista of possibilities; as when a man, walking in a wood, comes suddenly across a ride, and sees the green space run to left and right, with its carpet of flowers, its leafy walls. And next to that first and sacred joy came the delight of the slow and careful conception, tracing the development, restricting the ramification, foreseeing the proportion. Then followed the later joy, the gradual embroidery of the austere outline, the laying of thread by thread, of colour by colour; and then the final pleasure of strict revision, of enriching the close texture, of strengthening the languid cadence, of refining the refined epithet, the eagerness to reach that impossible perfection that seemed to recede even as he drew near.
Yet even to a craftsman thus wholeheartedly intent upon his work, there is a satisfaction in publication which is like the framing of a picture. The book with its white margins, its delicate sprinkling of ornament, its headings and mottoes, all this is the symbol of completion, of an end attained. There is a further delight still in the possibility of becoming thus the companion of the imagined reader; to be held in unknown hands and scanned by gentle eyes; to appeal to kindred natures, kindly and generous persons; the thought of this to one like Pater, who had found so many in the world whom he could love, and to whom human relations had always so deep and sacred a significance, was full of a potent attraction. But one is perhaps surprised to learn that he was also deeply sensitive to adverse criticism; that he felt about the harsh and summary treatment of his books, especially when they were misrepresented or misunderstood, something of what the old Psalmist felt, when he prayed that his darling might be delivered from the power of the dog. There were times when he suffered acutely from the attacks of critics, as when the exquisite and elaborate Essay on “Style” was treated as incomprehensible and affected; when he declared with desolate conviction that his pleasure in writing was gone, and that he could never resume his work. Only those nearest to him knew of these dark moods of discouragement, because he was not one who took the world into his confidence; indeed, to those who were without, his gentle and equable manner seemed to bear witness to a tranquillity of mind, which indeed he sedulously practised, although he never attained the deep serenity of which he was in search.
It is a curious fact that Pater showed no precocious signs, in boyhood and youth, of a desire to write. Those in whose blood stirs the creative impulse, the literary energy, feel the thrill as a rule very early, and cover paper diligently from their first years. But Pater’s family cannot remember that he ever showed any particular tendency to write. He never wrote poetry in childhood, except a few humorous verses; long lost and forgotten; later on he made some verse-translations from Goethe, Alfred de Musset, and the Greek Anthology; and this abstention from the composition of verse is a remarkable fact in the case of one whose prose is so essentially poetical. It is common to differentiate the prose of poets, as in the case of Dryden, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and others, from the prose of those who have never attempted to write in verse; it is thought that it has a greater precision, a sonorous richness, a more vivid colouring. If Pater had ever practised the art of poetry, it would be easy to point to his prose as a supreme instance of these qualities, because, quite apart from its luxurious prodigality, both of epithet and image, it has a strong, rhythmical, almost metrical movement in places. But, as a matter of fact, his chief characteristics, as a prose-writer, came to him late. As a rule, the makers of gorgeous and exquisite prose have begun by erring on the side of diffuseness and ornament, and have chastened their style into due proportion and lucidity. But Pater’s earliest writings, which seem to have been essays for Societies, have none of the later charm; they tend to be austere, hard, and even dry. Neither did he arrive at his plentiful and magnificent vocabulary, as some writers have done, by the production of large masses of writing that never see the light, in which their hand has learned firmness of outline, and their teeming brain the power of summoning the supremely appropriate word from a suspended cloud of more or less suitable language. His method was far otherwise. At one time he applied himself daily for some months to translating a page of Sainte-Beuve or Flaubert, and this seems to have been his only exercise. His prose steadily grew in volume and depth; and the one serious fault of his writing, the tendency that his sentences have to become long and involved, did not diminish. What he did gain as years went on was a refined and surprising power over words, a power of condensing an elaborate effect into a single haunting sentence which suggests rather than reveals. His work was always the result of much patient and unseen labour; but though he revised carefully and jealously enough in many cases, his richness was not derived in reality so much from these stippled effects, as from the fulness of mind out of which he wrote. Any one who has ever gone over the same ground as Pater, and studied the same authorities, will be amazed to find how conscientiously and diligently the material has all been employed; not by elaborately amplifying detail, but by condensing an abundance of scattered points into a single illuminating hint, a poignant image, an apt illustration. He was entirely remote from those easy superficial writers who generalise from insufficient premises, and bridge the gaps in their knowledge by graceful fabrics of words. All Pater’s work was strongly focussed; he drew the wandering and scattered rays, as through a crystal lens, into a burning and convergent point of light. Not to travel far for instances, the essay on Leonardo is a perfect example of this. The writing is so delicate, so apparently fanciful, that it is only through a careful study of the available tradition that one comes to realise how minute is the knowledge that furnishes out these gemmed and luminous sentences. It is true that his knowledge is not pedantically applied, that he concerns himself little with minute and technical questions of art-criticism; but I conceive that Pater’s attempt was always to discern the inner beauty, the essence of the thing; to disentangle the personality, the humanity of the artist, rather than to classify or analyse the work. And so it comes about that his art-criticism is essentially a creative thing, that adds little to the historical aspect of the development of art, and falls indeed at times into positive error; the training, the severe observation, the cultivated instinct, is there, but it is relegated, so to speak, to an ante-room, while the spirit is led to apprehend something of the mysterious issues of art, initiated into the secret appreciation of beauty, and drawn to worship in the darkened innermost shrine. There is always something holy, even priestly, about Pater’s attitude to art. It insists upon the initial critical training, the necessity of ordered knowledge; but it leaves this far behind; it passes beyond the nice apprehension of eye, the cultivated sense of line and colour, the exact discrimination of style and medium, into a remote and poetical region. Such secrets cannot be explained or even analysed; they cannot be communicated to those that are without; they must be emotionally and mystically apprehended, by the soul rather than by the mind.
It was this secret vision, this inner enlightening, on which Pater had set his heart, and which he sought for urgently and diligently. He loved the symbol, not for itself alone, but for the majesty which it contained, the hidden light which it guarded. It is in this region alone that he seems to wear an absorbed and pontifical air, not with the false sacerdotal desire to enhance personal impressiveness and private dignity, through the ministry of divine power
s and holy secrets, but with the unconscious emotion of one whose eyes behold great wonders enacting themselves upon the bodiless air, which the dull and the contemptuous may not discern.
It remains to attempt to indicate Pater’s position in later English literature, and his philosophy, or rather his point of view, by summarising what has already, it is to be hoped, been made clear by analysis.
In literature he practically struck out a new line. The tendency of the best prose-writers of the century had been, as a rule, to employ prose in a prosaic manner. Landor had aimed at a Greek austerity of style. Macaulay had brought to perfection a bright hard-balanced method of statement, like the blowing of sharp trumpets. This was indeed the prose that had recommended itself to the taste of the early Victorians; it was full of a certain sound and splendour; it rolled along in a kind of impassioned magnificence; but the object of it was to emphasise superficial points in an oratorical manner, to produce a glittering panorama rich in detail; it made no appeal to the heart or the spirit, awaking at best a kind of patriotic optimism, a serene self-glorification.
Carlyle had written from the precisely opposite point of view; he was overburdened with passionate metaphysics which he involved in a texture of rugged Euphuism, intensely mannerised. But he had no catholicity of grasp, and his picturesqueness had little subtlety or delicacy, because his intense admiration for certain qualities and types blinded him to finer shades of character. There was no restraint about his style, and thus his enthusiasm turned to rant, his statement of preferences degenerated into a species of frantic bombast.
With these Pater had nothing in common; the writers with whom he is more nearly connected are Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Newman, and Ruskin. He was akin to Charles Lamb in the delicacy of touch, the subtle flavour of language; and still more in virtue of his tender observation, his love of interior domestic life. He has a certain nearness to De Quincey in the impassioned autobiographical tendency, the fondness for retrospect, which Pater considered the characteristic of the poetical temperament. He is akin to Newman in respect of the restraint, the economy of effect, the perfect suavity of his work; but none of these probably exerted any very direct influence upon him. Ruskin perhaps alone of the later prose-writers had a permanent effect on the style of Pater. He learnt from Ruskin to realise intensely the suggestiveness of art, to pursue the subjective effect upon the mind of the recipient; but though the rich and glowing style of Ruskin enlarged the vocabulary of Pater, yet we can trace the time when he parted company with him, and turned aside in the direction of repression rather than volubility, of severity rather than prodigality.
It may be said, then, that Pater really struck out a new line in English prose, working on the principles enunciated by Flaubert in a widely different region. The essence of his attempt was to produce prose that had never before been contemplated in English, full of colour and melody, serious, exquisite, ornate. He devoted equal pains both to construction and ornamentation. Whether he is simple and stately, whether he is involved and intricate, he has the contrast always in view. His object was that every sentence should be weighted, charged with music, haunted with echoes; that it should charm and suggest, rather than convince or state. The danger of the perfection to which he attained is the danger of over-influence, seductive sweetness; the value is to suggest the unexplored possibilities of English as a vehicle for a kind of prose that is wholly and essentially poetical. The triumph of his art is to be metrical without metre, rhythmical without monotony. There will, of course, always be those whom this honeyed, laboured cadence will affect painfully with a sense of something stifling and overperfumed; and, indeed, the merits of a work of art can never be established by explanation or defended by argument; but to such as can apprehend, feel, enjoy, there is the pleasure of perfected art, of language that obeys and enriches the thought, of calculated effect, of realisation, with a supreme felicity of the intention of the writer.
One does not praise his works as the perfection of style; there is a limpidity and lucidity of prose style — prose as used by Newman, by Matthew Arnold, by Buskin, in chastened moods, — to which no style that depends upon elaborateness and artifice can attain; but it may fairly be claimed for Pater that he realised his own conception of perfection. The style is heavy with ornament, supple with artifice. It is not so much a picture as an illumination. For sunlight there is stiff burnished gold; it is full of gorgeous conceits, jewelled phrases; it has no ease or simplicity; it is all calculated, wrought up, stippled; but it must be considered from that point of view; it must be appraised rather than criticised, accepted rather than judged.
To feel the charm it is necessary to be, to some extent, in sympathy with the philosophy of Pater. We see in him a naturally sceptical spirit, desiring to plunge beneath established systems and complacent explanations; and this, in common with an intense sensibility to every hint and intimation of beauty, apprehended in a serious and sober spirit; not the spirit that desires to possess itself of the external elements, but to penetrate the essential charm. Yet it is not the patient and untroubled beauty of nature, of simple effects of sun and shade, of great mountains, of wide plains, but of a remote and symbolical beauty, seen by glimpses and in corners, of which he was in search — beauty with which is mixed a certain strangeness and mystery, that suggests an inner and a deeper principle behind, intermingled with a sadness, a melancholy, that is itself akin to beauty.
There is always an interfusion of casuistical and metaphysical thought with Pater’s apprehension of beauty; he seems to be ever desirous to draw near to the frankness, the unashamed happiness, of the Greek spirit, but to be for ever held back by a certain fence of scepticism, a malady of thought.
Yet the beauty of which he takes account is essentially of a religious kind; it draws the mind to the further issue, the inner spirit. All the charm of ritual and ceremonial in worship has for Pater an indefinable and constant attraction. He is for ever recurring to it, because it seems to him to interpret and express an emotion, a need of the human spirit, whose concern is to comprehend if it can what is the shadowy figure, the mysterious will, that moves behind the world of sight and sense.
We can trace the progress of thought in the case of Pater as clearly as it is possible to trace the thought of any recent writer; though reticent and even suavely ironical in talk, he was in his writings at once selfcentred and intime. His own emotions, his own preoccupations, were absorbingly important to him; yet while he shrank from giving them facile utterance, he was irresistibly impelled to take the world into his confidence. He had none of the frank egotism of Wordsworth, none of the complacent belief in the interest of his revelations of himself; and yet there is no writer that speaks more persistently and selfconsciously of his own point of view. He made little attempt to pass outside of it, and hardly disguised what he would fain have concealed. The instinct, indeed, for expression triumphs at every point over the instinot for reticence.
We see the silent, self-contained boyhood, the intellectual awakening, the absorption in metaphysics, and their abandonment, the eager pursuit of recondite beauty, that from the days of his maturity never left him; we see in the candour, the urbanity, the delicate and gentle outlook, the intellectual strenuousness, of his heroes a reflection of his own personal ideal. We see how he was led to trust personal intuitions rather than intellectual processes; to listen rather for the simpler, sweeter message which comes from life, from experience, from sympathy, than to obey the logical conclusions of reason, which indeed arrives so soon at the consciousness of its own limitations; we see that he determined that the function of reason was rather to keep judgment suspended; that it should be applied as a solvent alike to philosophical and religious systems; but that the spirit should not thus be bound; that reason should indeed erect the framework of the house, its walls and doorways — and that then its work was done; while the spirit should dwell within, drawing its strength from the tender observation of humanity, from humble service, from quiet companionship, w
hile it should all the time keep its eyes open to any faintest message flashed from afar, whether it came through glance or word, through book or picture, through charm of form or colour, from tower or tree, from the clear freshness of the solitary dawn, or from the orange sunset dying softly over wide, glimmering fields.
