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 visualizes 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exclusive, too withdrawn.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yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of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 elaborate _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--laborious, 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 color, 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 their 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!
And, finally, that Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines "we say to
our friend" about Her who is "older than the rocks on which she
sits."
What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his
perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip,
in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our
youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry
with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life
on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no
rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil
its taste. For it is all you have, and it cannot last long!"
He is a great writer, because from him we may learn the difficult
and subtle art of drinking the cup of life _so as to taste every drop._
One could expatiate long upon his attitude to Christianity--his final
desire to be "ordained Priest"--his alternating pieties and
incredulities. His deliberate clinging to what "experience" brought
him, as the final test of "truth," made it quite easy for him to dip his
arms deep into the Holy Well. He might not find the Graal; he might
see nothing there but his own shadow! What matter? The Well itself
was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worth
long summer days spent dreaming over it--dreaming over it in the
cloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness of
the brutal World, that knows neither Apollo or Christ!