by Thomas Hardy
It is this that separates Mr. Hardy’s work from so much modern fiction that is clever and “philosophical” but does not satisfy one’s imagination. All things with Mr. Hardy — even the facts of geology and chemistry — are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance that gives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianity itself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should have appeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with his brilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity “taken for granted,” and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics.
But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by the poetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any great religion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the Gothic Tower of St. Peter’s Church in Casterbridge is always with him. He may burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of those queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same reason, in spite of his intellectual realisation of the mechanical processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is always being driven to personify these ultimate powers; to personify them, or it, as something that takes infernal satisfaction in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging them to madness.
Mr. Hardy’s ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and unconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among the graves of those Wessex churchyards, or watching the twisted threads of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand village roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to “strike back” at this damned System of Things that alone is responsible. And how can one “strike back” unless one converts unconscious machinery into a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparably greater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in these Wessex novels there is none of that intolerable “ethical discussion” which obscures “the old essential candours” of the human situation.
The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presence of the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all social readjustments and all ethical reforms.
While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long after a quite new set of “interesting modern ideas” have replaced the present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is “the dust out of which we are made;” the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us on and “take us off” until the planet’s last hour.
Mr. Hardy’s style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestiveness which approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribable touch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in it peculiar to himself — threatening and silencing; a thunderous suppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes, again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and not unfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir Thomas Browne, that majestic and perverted Latinist.
The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning of the Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that is like the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may be noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angel stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness.
One thinks of the words of William Blake: “He who does not love Form more than Colour is a coward.” For it is, above all, Form that appeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drives pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the architectural sub-structure. Whoever tries to visualise any scene out of the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons concerned “silhouetted” against a formidable skyline. One sees them, these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy’s manner such a refuge from the levities and gravities of the “reforming writers” is a quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of “proportion” like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath, and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes of men have felt it since the beginning.
The modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow grave over social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social and artistic problems and “takes nothing seriously” — not even “God” — except the love and the hate of men and women, and the natural elements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, this uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hard to read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except in railway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossess the passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have not understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than be deprived of his right to suffer the bitterness of love.
It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimistic about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects that to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinks over Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked, “talking to herself,” across the blasted heath; such things as the mood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mere accidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter.
Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us, for whom the world does not seem likely to “improve” so fast, it is an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare, and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work of such hands, put our generation altogether to shame.
WALTER PATER
What are the qualities that make this shy and furtive Recluse, this Wanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in the first place, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitless Reverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power. It visualises and it creates. With clairvoyant ubiquity it floats and flows into the most recondite recesses, the most reluctant sanctuaries, of other men’s souls. With clear-cut, architectural volition it builds up its own Byzantium, out of the quarried debris of all the centuries.
One loves to think of Pater leaving that Olney country, where he “hated” to hear anything more about “the Poet Cowper,” and nursing his weird boy-fancies in the security of the Canterbury cloisters. The most passionate and dedicated spirit he — to sulk, and dream, and hide, and love, and “watch the others playing,” in that quiet retreat — since the great soul of Christopher Marlowe flamed up there into consciousness!
And then Oxford. And it is meet and right, at such a point as this, to lay our offering, modest, secret, shy — a shadow, a nothing — at the feet of this gracious Alma Mater; “who needs not June for Beauty’s heightening!” One revolts against her sometimes. The charm is too exclusive, too withdrawn. And something — what shall I say? — of ironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and her eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare, exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know, you for whom the syllables “Oxford” are an Incantation, that to the yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elabourate soul of Walter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, a little vulgar and silly?
Indeed, he fled from her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters, for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was “Conventual” in his taste — and sometimes with the “original” of Marius the Epicurean. But what matter where he fled — he who always followed the “shady side” of the road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his “Boxes of Alabaster,” into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that even Oxford cannot reach, but he has carried us thither with him.
>
And there, from the opal-clouded windows of that high place, he shows us still the secret kingdoms of art and philosophy and life, and the remotest glories of them. We see them all — from those windows — a little lovelier, a little rarer, a little more “selective,” than, perchance, they really are. But what matter? What does one expect when one looks through opal-clouded windows? And, after all, those are the kinds of windows from which it is best to look at the dazzling limbs of the immortal gods!
Not but what, sometimes, he permits us to throw those “magic casements” wide open. And then, in how lucid an air, in how clean and fresh a morning of reality, those pure forms and godlike figures stand out, their naked feet in the cold, clear dew!
For one must note two things about Walter Pater. He is able to throw the glimmering mantle of his own elabourate sophistry of the senses over comparatively fleeting, unarresting objects. And he is able to compel us to follow, line by line, curve by curve, contour by contour, the very palpable body and presence of the Beauty that passeth not away.
In plainer words, he is a great and exact scholar — labourious, patient, indefatigable, reserved; and, at the same time, a Protean Wizard, breathing forbidden life into the Tyrian-stained writhings of many an enchanted Lamia! At a thousand points he is the only modern literary figure who draws us towards him with the old Leonardian, Goethean spell. For, like Goethe and Da Vinci, he is never far from those eternal “Partings of the Ways.” which alone make life interesting.
He is, for instance, more profoundly drenched, dyed, and endued in “Christian Mythology” than any mortal writer, short of the Saints themselves. He is more native to the pure Hellenic air than any since Walter Savage Landor. And he is more subtle, in his understanding of “German Philosophy” as opposed to “Celtic Romance,” than all — outside the most inner circles — since Hegel — or Heine! The greedy, capricious “Uranian Babyishness” of his pupil Oscar, with its peevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things, is mere child’s play, compared with the deep, dark Vampirism with which this furtive Hermit drains the scarlet blood of the Vestals of every Sanctuary.
How little the conventional critics have understood this master of their own craft! What hopeless people have “rushed in” to interpret this super-subtle Interpreter! Mr. Gosse has, however, done one thing for us. Somewhere, somehow, he once drew a picture of Walter Pater “gambolling,” in the moonlight, on the velvet lawn of his own secluded Oxford garden, like a satin-pawed Wombat! I always think of that picture. It is a pleasanter one than that of Mark Pattison, running round his Gooseberry bushes, after great screaming girls. But they are both touching sketches, and, no doubt, very indicative of Life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian.
Why have the professional philosophers — ever since that Master of Baliol who used to spend his time boring holes in the Ship that carried him — ”fought shy” of Pater’s Philosophy? For a sufficient reason! Because, like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristippus the Cyrenean, he has undermined Metaphysic, by means of Metaphysic.
For Walter Pater — is that clearly understood? — was an adept, long before Nietzsche’s campaign began, at showing the human desire, the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite, hidden behind the mask of “Pure Reason.”
He treats every great System of Metaphysic as a great work of Art — with a very human, often a too human, artizan behind it — a work of Art which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look at the world through, and then to pass on!
Every Philosophy has its “secret,” according to Pater, its “formula,” its lost Atlantis. Well! It is for us to search it out; to take colour from its dim-lit under-world; to feed upon its wavering Sea-Lotus — and then, returning to the surface, to swim away, in search of other diving-grounds!
No Philosopher except Pater has dared to carry Esoteric Eclecticism quite as far as this. And, be it understood, he is no frivolous Dilettante. This draining the secret wine of the great embalmed Sarcophagi of Thought is his Life-Lure, his secret madness, his grand obsession. Walter Pater approaches a System of Metaphysical Thought as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleeping Nymph. On light-stepping, crafty feet he approaches — and the hand with which he twitches the sleeve of the sleeper is as soft as the flutter of a moth’s wing. “I do not like,” he said once, “to be called a Hedonist. It gives such a queer impression to people who don’t know Greek.”
Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the wayfaring of my patient academic duties, I speak about Pater, and ask me point-blank to tell them what his “view-point” — so they are pleased to express it — ”really and truly” was. Sweet reader, do you know the pain of these “really and truly” questions? I try to answer in some blundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing in this world was certain or fixed; how everything “flowed away”; how all that we touch or taste or see, vanished, changed its nature, became something else, even as we vanish, as the years go on, and change our nature and become something else. I try to explain how, for him, we are ourselves but the meeting-places of strange forces, journeying at large and by chance through a shifting world; how we, too, these very meeting-places of such forces, waver and flicker and shift and are transformed, like dreams within dreams!
I try to explain how, this being so, and nothing being “written in the sky” it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer, short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower, less easy, for “the other person.”
And if my Innocents ask — as they do sometimes — Innocents are like that! — ”Why must we consider the other person?” I answer — for no reason, and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative; but simply because we have grown to be the sort of animal, the sort of queer fish, who cannot do the things “that he would”! It is not, I try to indicate, a case of conscience; it is a matter of taste; and there are certain things, when it comes to that point, which an animal possessed of such taste cannot do, even though he desire to do them. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatures who happen to have been caught in the same “gin” as ourself.
With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as with regard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute standard — even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream. There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold “Mathematic” of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well inspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us.
Beauty is not Mathematical; it is — if one may say so — physiological and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and pure colour, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth and change than we sometimes would care to allow.
Walter Pater’s magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than when he deals with the materials which artists use. And most of all, with words, that material which is so stained and corrupted and outraged — and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses and what — so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes! — they apprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold and silver; these — and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiable fingers — he handles with the reverence of a priest touching consecrated elements.
Not only the great main rivers of art’s tradition, but the little streams and tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all, for the pathways to thei
r exquisite margins are less trodden than the others, and one is more apt to find one’s self alone there.
Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Denys L’Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god — has he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched white Flesh? — leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their own too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic valley of dreams. Watteau’s “happy valley” is, indeed, sadder than our most crowded hours — how should it not be, when it is no “valley” at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles? — but, though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!
And along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its fountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilight the shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and the despair in his smile! For him, too — for Gilles the Mummer — as for Antoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is not inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon it must be only a garden, “only a garden of Lenotre, correct, ridiculous and charming.” For the lips of the Despair of Pierrot cannot always touch the lips of the Mockery of Columbine; in the end, the Ultimate Futility must turn them both to stone!
