It is with no small satisfaction, and with a sense of reassurance of
which one may, in moods of misgiving, have felt the need during
two decades of the Literature of Noise, that one sees a writer so
pre-eminently a master of the Literature of Meditation coming, for all
the captains and the shouting, so surely into his own. The acceptance
of Walter Pater is not merely widening all the time, but it is more
and more becoming an acceptance such as he himself would have most
valued, an acceptance in accordance with the full significance of his
work rather than a one-sided appreciation of some of its Corinthian
characteristics. The Doric qualities of his work are becoming recognized
also, and he is being read, as he has always been read by his true
disciples--so not inappropriately to name those who have come under his
graver spell--not merely as a _prosateur_ of purple patches, or a
sophist of honeyed counsels tragically easy to misapply, but as an
artist of the interpretative imagination of rare insight and magic, a
writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of
a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible
to parody him--after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in _The New
Republic_--as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible
any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained
libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly
wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to
be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and
intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much
matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of
a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve
something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result
in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence.
"Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had
entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the
murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the
sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant
affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him."
Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so
to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is
he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed,
manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters,
such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters
of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral
responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to _The
Renaissance_ from its second edition, from a fear that "it might
possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might
fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as
have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own
natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception
of metaphysical _formula_, all depends, as regards their actual and
ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human
nature into which they fall--the company they find already present
there, on their admission into the house of thought."
That Pater's philosophy could ever have been misunderstood is not to be
entertained with patience by any one who has read him with even ordinary
attention; that it may have been misapplied, in spite of all his care,
is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for
all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may
as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic
very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion
that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career
of the author of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Certainly that remarkable
man was an "epicurean"--but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would
have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic
in question that _The Renaissance_ is the book referred to in _The
Picture of Dorian Gray_ as having had a sinister influence over its hero
is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it
is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage
describing the demoralizing book in question:
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It
was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in
exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of
the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had
dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he
had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being,
indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who
spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except
his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods
through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their
mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called
virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call
sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled
style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms,
of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that
characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French
school of _Décandents._ There were in it metaphors as monstrous as
orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described
in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times
whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval
saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a
poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its
pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences,
the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex
refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of
the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a
malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and
the creeping shadows....
For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this
book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never
sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than
five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the
changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have
almost entirely lost control.
The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer--I have
good reason for thinking that it was _À Rebours_ by Huysmans--and how
any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's _The
Renaissance_ answers to this description passes all understanding. A
critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, or never have read _The Renaissance_. On
the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that
Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for
whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one
can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to
"that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that
which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something
wrong with the soil.
Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy
of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most
concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that
once-suppressed "Conclusion" to _The Renaissance_:
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A
counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated
dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen
in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from
point to point, and be present always at the focus where the
greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To
burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we
may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to
knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for
a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange
colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the
face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our
experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one
desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make
theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all
_condamnés_, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of
death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--_les hommes sont tous
condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis_: we have an interval,
and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in
listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the
children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in
expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible
into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened
sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of
enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come
naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does
yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of
such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of
art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication,
of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the
less true that another application of it led Marius to something like
Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and
serener path of spiritual vision.
Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus
offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be
brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble
employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us,
perhaps more than a few, who have no assurance of the leisure of an
eternity for idleness or experiment, this expansion and elevation of the
doctrine of the moment, carrying a merely sensual and trivial moral in
the Horatian maxim of _carpe diem_, is one thrillingly charged with
exhilaration and sounding a solemn and yet seductive challenge to us to
make the most indeed, but also to make the best, of our little day. To
make the most, and to make the best of life! Those who misinterpret or
misapply Pater forget his constant insistence on the second half of that
precept. We are to get "as many pulsations as possible into the given
time," but we are to be very careful that our use of those pulsations
shall be the finest. Whether or not it is "simply for those moments'
sake," our attempt must be to give "_the highest quality_," remember, to
those "moments as they pass." And who can fail to remark the fastidious
care with which Pater selects various typical interests which he deems
most worthy of dignifying the moment? The senses are, indeed, of natural
right, to have their part; but those interests on which the accent of
Pater's pleading most persuasively falls are not so much the "strange
dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," but rather "the face of
one's friend," ending his subtly musical sentence with a characteristic
shock of simplicity, almost incongruity--or "some mood of passion or
insight or intellectual excitement," or "any contribution to knowledge
that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment."
There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with
great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements,
and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not
both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our
mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled
sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem
with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life
apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is
infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for
their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found
aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which
that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such
it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the
aspiration of this tenderly religious passage:
Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow,
even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect,
our souls and whatever our souls touch upon--these wonderful bodies,
these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass
together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes,
and the intercourse of society.
Here in this passage from _Marius_ we find, to use Pater's own words
once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming,
so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories."
That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things
as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical
application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on
this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had
fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a
theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair
life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness
as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson,
Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each
other in that each of them wrought a certain optimism, or, at all
events, a courageous and even blithe working theory of life and conduct,
out of the unrelenting facts of existence unflinchingly faced, rather
than ecclesiastically smoothed over--the facts of death and pain and
struggle, and even the cruel mystery that surrounds with darkness and
terror our mortal lot. Each one of them deliberately faced the worst,
and with each, after his own nature, the worst returned to laughter. The
force of all these men was in their artistic or poetic embodiment of
philosophical conceptions, but, had they not been artists and poets,
their philosophical conceptions would have made but little way. And it
is time to recall, what critics preoccupied with his "message" leave
unduly in the background, that Pater was an artist of remarkable power
and fascination, a maker of beautiful things, which, whatever their
philosophical content, have for our spirits the refreshment and
edification which all beauty mysteriously brings us, merely because it
is beauty. _Marius the Epicurean_ is a great and wonderful book, not
merely on account of its teaching, but because it is simply one of the
most _beautiful_ books, perhaps the most beautiful book, written in
English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in
the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once
austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact
and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble,
sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the
qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures,
yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every
delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly
surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and
instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as
I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to
one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere
ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding
the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated
expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a
vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can,
to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he
himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of
prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various
places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on
"Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called
"Euphuism" in _Marius_. In this last he thus goes to the root of the
matter:
That preoccupation of the _dilettante_ with what might seem mere
details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing
to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong
personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things
as really being, with important results, thus, rather than
thus--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called
upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the
model within.
This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a
beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the
prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not
irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary
Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity.
There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by
quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative
qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to
remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less
frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a
wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines,"
for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills";
"far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers
home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and
tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than
these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are;
what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is
particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural
effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two,
an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched,
and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral
country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite
fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"--"Two centuries of the
play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along
its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture:
The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the
shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still
a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds
were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple.
And again this picture of a wayside inn:
The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary
Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced
cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked _lucernae_ burning cleanly
with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of
scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place
put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and
with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a
reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.
Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the
famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy
with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift
for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and
particularly running water, "green fields--or children's faces." His
lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely
of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the
religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme.
For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through
them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the
sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his
preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the
intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of
atmosphere which pervades his _Marius_, an atmosphere which might be
termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say,
body-beauty as beautiful prose.
Considering _Marius_ as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the
same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal
of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing
to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and
character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often
assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other
way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us,
there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to
the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to
employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that
the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and
the story be told. And Pater's _Marius_ entirely satisfies this demand
for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is
a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones
of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live
for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at
first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and,
as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of
Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a
masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life,
done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like
over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail,
of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ applies with far greater fitness to Pater's
masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as
The golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty,
it is _Marius the Epicurean_.
It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because
Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of
course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to
be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably
that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain
subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its
perfection in _Imaginary Portraits_, to which the later "Apollo in
Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary
to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the
strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's
claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and
fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no
less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living,
breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative
interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It
gives their value to the studies of _The Renaissance_, but perhaps its
finest flower is to be found in the later _Greek Studies_. To Flavian,
Pater had said in _Marius_, "old mythology seemed as full of untried,
unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what
marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later
developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his
studies of the myths of Dionysus--"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and
leaping in a thousand vines"--and Demeter and Persephone--"the peculiar
creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their
work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its
sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"--no reader of Pater needs to
be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his
studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the
ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself
to be of the company of the great humanists.
Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism,
its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal
austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the
haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and
simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something
childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so
strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as
the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the
House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious
odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of
one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far
from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water.
It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and
aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers
and artists of our time.