hope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche’s thought. It
was not “systematic” in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to
describe as “unsystematic” a method of thinking whose formula was as
simple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the
alchemists hoped to use the philosopher’s stone for the transmutation
of metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number
of statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they
turned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became
corrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will
to Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave
Morality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that
is capable of moral interpretation are in some way changed. He was
not content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this
change a “transvaluation of values,” and wished thus to transvaluate
all values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new
representation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so
Sisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse
of his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a
broken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer
lightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His
madness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method
of thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him
to think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a
normal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which “races,”
as engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as
to allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for
themselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill
with hasty scene-painting the gaps in their construction. No man is
capable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and
homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed
in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its
snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not
sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged
his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the
ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the
months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the
heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to
explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness
as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he
lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to
refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.
Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid
illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations
of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of
La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a
scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible
that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist
and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great
tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears,
and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked
merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone.
The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations
on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked
away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his
remarks on self-development or war.
I have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now
hammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in
time with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements.
When he wrote: “One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were
by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever
existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in
this language an incalculable distance behind us,” he was not far
from the truth. _Thus spake Zarathustra_, that Ossianic poem of a
hero of thought, _Ecce Homo_, in the self-assertion of which is not
only pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert
itself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble
essays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph of
_The Birth of Tragedy_; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot
but admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an
aesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness;
in reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where
there is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us
are valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full
that we cannot commit “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; we cannot sit
still. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn
to more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun,
wind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room.
In his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the
thinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator.
In childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters.
When he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in
discovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was
usually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his
life, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No
man since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton
desiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind
their bows, skilful with the lute, learning to “repair the ruins of
their first parents by regaining to know God aright,” until “they
have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected
knowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion”: Ascham with his
longer list of exercises, “not only comely and decent, but also very
necessary for a courtly gentleman to use,” and his more detailed scheme
of learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them
hoped to educate more than men of a city or of a nation, and for the
service of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education
of mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for
lack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy
pupils. “Companions did the creating one seek, and children of _his_
hope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he
himself should first create them.”
In his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German
universities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his
attack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of
the abuse of history, in his farewell to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he
learnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought
to educate “higher men” to be themselves, to free them from impediments
to their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments
and attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them
should they show themselves. For his “higher men,” and for no others,
he found the ballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace
the misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their
sakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of
evil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life,
theirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them
he invented his watchword: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.”
He did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent
possible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the
meantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant,
daring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for
us to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans.
I shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up
in its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche’s teaching, the
ultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary:
“Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then
they disparaged all high hopes.
Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the
day had hardly an aim.
‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings
of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it
gnaweth.
Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now.
A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.
But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in
thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”
The man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice
of things to revere was not identical with his accuser’s. But in
these sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more
profound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions
to authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all,
to reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out,
though most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a
quest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed
reverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth,
of unsoiled ambition, of the flame alight before the altar of the
potential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose
continuance of life is the measure of each man’s nobility.
1912.
WALTER PATER
WALTER PATER
Walter Pater was brought up at Enfield, where he was near London, and
knew from his earliest years “those quaint suburban pastorals” that
gather “a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great
city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid
light on dome and bleached stone steeples.” Something of that weighty
atmosphere, and with it something of that rapid light, I find in his
work, whether he is writing of the Italians of the Renaissance, of
Montaigne, of the Greek philosophers, of the Dutch van Storck, or the
German Carl of Rosenmold.
The external facts of his life may be shortly dismissed. He “was fond,”
as a child, “of organising little processional pomps,” and a meeting
with Keble strengthened for a time his boyish resolve to enter the
Church. That part of his temperament which sought satisfaction in
such a course found it, perhaps, in the hieratic character of his
prose. He read Ruskin when he was nineteen, but his appreciations were
too independent of Ruskin’s sanction to allow us to recognise the
deep influence that is popularly attributed to the older man. Ruskin
believed that he had “discovered” Botticelli, but he first spoke of him
in the Oxford lectures of 1871, and Pater’s essay had been published in
the _Fortnightly Review_ the year before. Pater went from the King’s
School at Canterbury to Queen’s College, Oxford, took a Second Class in
the Final Classical Schools, and, in 1864, was elected to a fellowship
at Brasenose. He lived at Oxford thenceforward, with only occasional
periods of residence in London. In different long vacations he knew
Heidelberg, Dresden, and various parts of France, and, in 1869, four
years before the publication of _The Renaissance_, travelled in Italy.
He died at Oxford after a life of unhurried labour on July 30, 1894.
There are some words that one would never use in speaking of him. “Joy”
is one of them; “despair” is another. They would be represented by the
less exuberant “pleasure,” and the less violent “regret.” His was a
personality in half tones, lit by the pallid glow of a heavy sky, or by
the “peculiar daylight” he noticed in the church at Canterbury, that
daylight which “seemed to come from further than the light outside.”
Yet his mind was not without intensity, though this was expressed
more by its freedom of invasion than by any obvious hardness of line
or brilliance of colour. When he said, “I should be afraid to read
Kipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat
down to write,” he was confessing an unnecessary carefulness. But his
very fear was not due to uncertainty of himself. It was that of the
jealous acolyte who will not expose the sacred glimmer of a votive
lamp to even momentary comparison with a flash of limelight, sure as
he may be of the lamp’s superior persistence, dignity, and, for him,
significance. Pater set a high value on his own personality, which in
a world of relative truth, was perhaps the only thing that he could
trust. He tended it, protected it from undue disturbance, even from
the contagion of others, fed it from time to time with victories ...
his essays are the carefully prepared conquests of other personalities
by his own ... and strengthened it always in the habit of a private
supremacy, a supremacy that neither sought nor needed external
acknowledgment.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his work, or,
more exactly, of the mental attitude reflected in his work, on the
literature of the end of the last century and of the beginning of our
own. He was a landmark in the history of consciously rhythmical prose,
the first English preacher (though very quietly) of the doctrine of
art for art’s sake, the exponent of an unusually precise technique,
the first example of a man whose life was consciously lived for art’s
sake; a man who, though he disguised the fact by many professions of
hedonism, found in art the finest means of living, and preferred,
with something of his childish love for processional pomps, to meet
life only when it came to him, decorous, arranged, unified to single
purposes, instead of with the medley of motives from which the artist
disentangles it.
His ideas have come to be more noticeable in other books than in his
own. He seemed to deprecate too exuberant agreement. He did not like to
stir his audience to an unbecoming enthusiasm. This is, perhaps, one
reason why he has seldom been considered as a thinker. But another
reason was more potent. “The sensible vehicle” of his expression almost
annulled his abstract thought. Pater is the best illustration of the
way in which ideas can be obliterated by the personality of which they
were a part. He has never been compared to Nietzsche. Yet no student of
Pater’s _ideas_ could avoid such a comparison, fantastic as it may seem
to those to whom it has not occurred to refuse, for critical purposes,
to adopt his attitude towards thought; to refuse, that is, “to assign
very little to the abstract thought and much to its sensible vehicle or
occasion.” Even this attitude, if we examine it closely, is not unlike
the Nietzschean demand for the personal touch in a theory before the
theory itself. Elsewhere the resemblance is clearer. In _Plato and
Platonism_ he says: “Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it
is not so much what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after
all really tells.” In smaller things he offers a parallel, strange from
one who lived as he lived, to Nietzsche’s outburst against sedentary
thinking: “It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that
promoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate
parturitions of the mind.” In more important things--things more
important to Nietzsche--Pater offers a similar aloof parallel, as if
from another planet. Before _The Birth of Tragedy_ was written, Pater
had distinguished Apollo and Dionysus, for his own purposes and in his
own way, as the particular deities of opposed artistic tendencies.
At one with Nietzsche in his conception of the relative nature of
truth, though he shrank from carrying it to battle _à l’outrance_,
he says almost what Nietzsche says of the evil influence of “the
ideal,” “the absolute,” on European thought, though, more eclectic,
incapable of partisanship, he does not let it disturb his admiration
of Plato. Mildly, as if it did not matter, he murmurs what Nietzsche
shouted: “The European mind will never be quite sane again....” And
he traces its insanity, as Nietzsche might have traced it, through
the Neo-Platonists, _The Imitation_, Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche,
Leibnitz, Berkeley. “By one and all it is assumed, in the words of
Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable, is the note of
the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily,
as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite unattainable)
condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the
suppression of all the rule and outline of one’s own actual experience
and thought.” And, in his criticism of the Sophists, he shows that he
is aware, smilingly perhaps, of the theory of two moralities, one of
the ruler and another of the ruled. He says of the Sophists: “And if
old-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better
than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that
was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for
the control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent
to it, in regard to one’s self? ‘It will break up--this or that ethical
deposit in your mind, ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear,
when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the
vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such
presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to
know their place.’” This may seem like ironic criticism of Nietzsche
before the fact, but it has not been noticed as such, even by
Nietzscheans, and that is a proof of the completeness with which Pater
made negligible what he said, beside the manner, the personal quality,
of himself saying it.
Yet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to
the personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow
rhythm of his mind to his careful observation of his own philosophic
attitude. It is easy to talk of a battle in his mind between metaphysic
and art; but no such battle was fought. Pater never lost his interest
in philosophies, and that interest never interfered with his interest
in art, but was rather its ally, an essential element in the mental
temper of all his work. He shared Nietzsche’s dislike of dialectic,
because in approaching the condition of mathematical speculation
philosophy denudes itself of personality. He disliked, for example,
Spinoza’s Euclidean demonstrations, “the dry bones of which rattle in
one’s ears,” but was enabled to use finely, in _Sebastian van Storck_,
that one of Spinoza’s sayings in which the man seems to be epitomised:
“Whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return.”
“Philosophic truth,” for him, “consists in the philosophic temper.”
He finds that “perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of
seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but
from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade
of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which
may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract
questions.... Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them.”
That was said in the first of his printed papers. In the last book
of his that was published in his lifetime, he says of the essay: “It
provided him (Montaigne) with precisely the literary form necessary
to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable
not as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a
particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully
those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself
with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to
the very last asking: _Que scais-je?_ Who knows?--in the very spirit of
that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined
sense of one’s ignorance.” The essay, we must not forget, was the form
chosen by himself.
Nowhere does he better illustrate his conception of philosophic truth,
of the philosophic temper, than in that harmony of essays, written for
delivery as lectures, and printed as _Plato and Platonism_. Philosophy
clothes herself with humanity, or rather retains the clothes of which
dialectic would deprive her, and we watch her as a human being, are
nervous for her in the difficult places, as she threads her way through
the lives of men and the history of a nation. Pater is engaged in
portraiture, not in exposition, so humane has his subject become. The
three philosophers whose images are impressed upon the theories of
“the flux,” of “the one,” and of “number,” Heraclitus, Parmenides,
Pythagoras, are no longer outline drawings, like illustrations in a
classical dictionary, but coloured and modelled with something of
Blake’s enthusiastic vision, softened and quieted, till the enthusiasm
is like summer lightning behind the hills, clear and bright but without
menace for his general intention. Their portraits, inset in the “Plato”
like the vignettes that encircle the central picture in those old
engraved frontispieces, are curiously suggestive of paragraphs of
Nietzsche’s _Early Greek Philosophy_. They are ruled by just such a
conception of truth, but are without the spirit of proselytism, so
inconsistent with it, and yet so characteristic of the man who preached
rather than denounced his version of the Eternal Recurrence. It is
hard to know which is most admirable--the delicate disentangling of
Socrates from Plato, the clearly visualised picture of the Sophists
(there never was a book on philosophy so full of concrete vision),
the synthesis of Plato’s personality, lover, seer, observer, “who has
lingered too long in the brazier’s workshops” to be able to speak of
“dumb matter,” or the beautiful appreciation of the method of the
dialogues and of the often travestied aims of Socratean talk, which
represent both the “demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or
knowledge worthy of the name,” and Plato’s method of learning and
teaching, the essential quality of these conversations with himself
being their endlessness. Then there is the dream, to the making of
which has gone so much knowledge content to be hidden by the perfection
of its service, of the city of Lacedaemon in Sparta, so necessary a
prelude to the account of Plato’s dreamed republic. Finally, perhaps
because dearest to himself, there is the chapter on Plato’s aesthetics,
which, to Pater, were not what some have made them, but of immediate
import to men living their lives, and suggested a purpose, a hope “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.” It is, in a sense, a white heat of decorum
for which he asks, a scrupulousness, a patience which is “quite as
much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers.” He is really asking
for self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by
art, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the
private acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less
often, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of
scrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book
better fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that
it is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter
Pater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon
his personality.
More than any other writer of his time he was justified in speaking
of “the irrepressible conscience of art.” For many he is, I suppose,
chiefly interesting as the man who brought into English literary
workshops the craftsman’s creed of Flaubert. This importation of his
was not a mere translation and expansion of the few sentences from
Flaubert that appear in his essay on “Style.” Those sentences and his
comments upon them, do but form, in the structure of that essay, a
pendant to, an illustration of, Pater’s original remarks, which are
themselves a complete, if resolutely non-technical, exposition of
his own clearly comprehended methods. It is possible that Pater saw,
a little more circumspicuously than he, what it was that Flaubert
believed. At any rate that belief is here unified with the suggestions
of earlier writers, and given corollaries whose implication in it
Flaubert never troubled to see. The theory is, briefly stated, as
follows: Literature will fulfil the condition of all good art “by
finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the
term to its import.” Its first, indeed, accurately speaking, its only
object is truth, the exact fitting of words to meaning, which involves
the watchfulness over the whole that will guard details from being made
inexact by the reflected light of other details; and this involves
also a loving scholarship in the precise meanings and implications of
the words used.
He accepts De Quincey’s distinction between “the literature of power
and the literature of knowledge,” with the comment, “in the former
of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of
fact, whether past or present.” In the fine art of literature, the
identity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words
and the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its
particular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. Throughout
his works is scattered evidence of the importance that Pater attributed
to this particularity of thought, dependent on the thinker and his
circumstances, the personality of thought which is really the guarantee
of its uniqueness, and in a sense, not only of its truth but of its
artistic rightness. In _The Child in the House_, for example:
“In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much
in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal
elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it;
and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to
the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.”
And, in the essay on “Style” we are considering:
“... just in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or
unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not
of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his
work _fine_ art....”