and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only
did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life,
not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain
things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of
the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his
whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry
has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a
fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which
his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a
marvellous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire
had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English
poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the
greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they
influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He
discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his
vast materials, his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in
contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote
neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to
write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it
is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his
nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record
of sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a
moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To
'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader
(_Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère_) as a judge rather than
as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist,
with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered
the world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live
as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary,
secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, _le
mauvais moine_ of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the
brothel.
To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not
only the four volumes of his collected works, but every document in
Crépet's _Oeuvres Posthumes_, and, above all, the letters, and these
have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor
who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crépet. Baudelaire
put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given
moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every
observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read
the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he
showed his business side, or the letters to la Présidente, the
touchstone of his _spleen et idéal_, his chief experiment in the higher
sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it
is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear
of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The
tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry,
Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a little
clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains
baffling, and will probably never be discovered.
As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into
his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see.
Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out,
through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding
him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he
defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the _Petits Poèmes
en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur
constante (bonne humeur nécessaire, même pour traiter des sujets
tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules,
de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j'ai voulu faire!_ And,
writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more
explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: _Avez-vous observé qu'un
morceau de ciel aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux
rochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une idée plus profonde de l'infini
que le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne?_ It is to another
casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion
of his writing is some thrill of gratitude towards one who had at last
done 'a little justice,' not to himself, but to Manet): _Eh bien! on
m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si
patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La première fois que
j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec épouvante et ravissement, non
seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des phrases, pensées par moi,
et écrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant._ It is in such glimpses as
these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.
1906.
WALTER PATER
Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpreted
Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme
artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:
But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists
who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us
a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and
these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be
interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and
are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration
wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the
stress of a great name and authority.
It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, than
the very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properly
understood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is 'the
delicacies of fine literature' that chiefly appeal. There have been
greater prose-writers in our language, even in our time; but he was, as
Mallarmé called him, 'le prosateur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps.'
For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of
form, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt his
attraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great age
of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcely
fail to become, not only 'the object of a special diligence,' but also
of 'a consideration wholly affectionate,' not lessened by the slowly
increasing 'stress of authority' which is coming to be laid, almost by
the world in general, on his name.
In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and does all its hard work
as if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and to
overhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is like
music, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it
is precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and it
comes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is a
style in which, to use some of his own words, 'the writer succeeds in
saying what he _wills_.'
The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particular
qualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often,
been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely its
adaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary
closeness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, in
the man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you got
accustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, so
slow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet
scrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise,
pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousness
of utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and
out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask
moulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man,
literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far more than
that, the man himself, whom one felt through his few, friendly,
intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us,
in a slow and gradual revelation.
He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:
The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires
only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer
and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply
expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner.
And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty,
or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom,
and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor of
the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of all
this again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, the
criticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, a
confession, the _vraie vérité_ (as he was fond of saying) about the
world in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he was
sure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught the
tangible moments as they passed. It was a world into which we can only
look, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret
was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, an
unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful in
passing things.
In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soars
wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out the
liberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for the
absolute, his 'hunger for eternity,' and for his part he is content to
set all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis,
on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asks
for no 'larger flowers' than the best growth of the earth; but he would
choose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just
living, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract its
essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism,' even of the
mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is
beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he
added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly
and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for
Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not
merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first,
and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it is
passion,' he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealed
for the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; be
sure, he said, 'that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
multiplied consciousness.' What he cared most for at all times was that
which could give 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass'; he
differed only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was.
'The herb, the wine, the gem' of the preface to the _Renaissance_ tended
more and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, 'the
discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the
imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even,
at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through,
_aux abois_ with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers
that may really occupy it.'
When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not meet him for about
two years after he had been writing to me, and his first letter reached
me when I was just over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my
life, and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from about the age of
seventeen, had been to me in prose. Meredith made the third; but his
form of art was not, I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose,
requires no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's _Studies in the
History of the Renaissance_, in its first edition on ribbed paper (I
have the feel of it still in my fingers), that I realised that prose
also could be a fine art. That book opened a new world to me, or,
rather, gave me the key or secret of the world in which I was living. It
taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of what one calls
inspiration, and comes and goes, and cannot be caught or followed; that
life (which had seemed to me of so little moment) could be itself a work
of art; from that book I realised for the first time that there was
anything interesting or vital in the world besides poetry and music. I
caught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction of
curiosity into definite channels.
The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater in the world, an
occasional letter from him, an occasional meeting, and, gradually, the
definite encouragement of my work in which, for some years, he was
unfailingly generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, than
I can well indicate, or even realise, now. It was through him that my
first volume of verse was published; and it was through his influence
and counsels that I trained myself to be infinitely careful in all
matters of literature. Influence and counsel were always in the
direction of sanity, restraint, precision.
I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, in his delaying
way, with 'wells' and 'no doubts' in it, to describe, and to describe
supremely, a person whom I had seemed to him to be disparaging. 'He
does,' he said meditatively, 'remind me of, well, of a steam-engine
stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic!' Pater liked people to be
enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guarded
by the wary humour that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue
earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist
is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked
him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of
extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he
suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less
dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words
which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He
never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what
seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily 'sordid' in their lives. It pained
him, as it pains some people, perhaps only because they are more acutely
sensitive than others, to walk through mean streets, where people are
poor, miserable, and hopeless.
And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that what Pater most
liked in poetry was the very opposite of such work as that of Verlaine,
which he might have been supposed likely to like. I do not think it was
actually one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after his manner in
English, that some reviewer once quoted, saying: 'That, to our mind,
would be Mr. Pater's ideal of poetry.' Pater said to me, with a sad
wonder, 'I simply don't know what he meant.' What he liked in poetry was
something even more definite than can be got in prose; and he valued
poets like Dante and like Rossetti for their 'delight in concrete
definition,' not even quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as
_Kubla Khan_, which he omitted in a brief selection from the poetry of
Coleridge. In the most interesting letter which I ever had from him, the
only letter which went to six pages, he says:
12 EARL'S TERRACE,
KENSINGTON, W.,
_Jan. 8, 1888._
MY DEAR MR. SYMONS,--I feel much flattered at your choosing me as
an arbiter in the matter of your literary work, and thank you for
the pleasure I have had in reading carefully the two poems you have
sent me. I don't use the word 'arbiter' loosely for 'critic'; but
suppose a real controversy, on the question whether you shall spend
your best energies in writing verse, between your poetic
aspirations on the one side, and prudence (calculating results) on
the other. Well! judging by these two pieces, I should say that you
have a poetic talent remarkable, especially at the present day, for
precise and intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with.
Rossetti, I believe, said that the value of every artistic product
was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intellectual force
that went to the initial conception of it: and it is just this
intellectual conception which seems to me to be so conspicuously
wanting in what, in some ways, is the most characteristic verse of
our time, especially that of our secondary poets. In your own
pieces, particularly in your MS. 'A Revenge,' I find Rossetti's
requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things from one
who has the talent of conceiving his motive with so much firmness
and tangibility--with that close logic, if I may say so, which is
an element in any genuinely imaginative process. It is clear to me
that you aim at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind,
great interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal
excellence, greatly preferring 'A Revenge' to 'Bell in Camp.'
Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the lover's gift, is not
a little bourgeois, I think this piece worthy of any poet. It has
that aim of concentration and organic unity which I value greatly
both in prose and verse. 'Bell in Camp' pleases me less, for the
same reason which makes me put Rossetti's 'Jenny,' and some of
Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank which many
assign them. In no one of the poems I am thinking of, is the
inherent sordidness of everything in the persons supposed, except
the one poetic trait then under treatment, quite forgotten.
Otherwise, I feel the pathos, the humour, of the piece (in the
full sense of the word humour) and the skill with which you have
worked out your motive therein. I think the present age an
unfavourable one to poets, at least in England. The young poet
comes into a generation which has produced a large amount of
first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of good secondary poetry.
You know I give a high place to the literature of prose as a fine
art, and therefore hope you won't think me brutal in saying that
the admirable qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative
prose; as I think is the case also with much of Browning's finest
verse. I should say, make prose your principal _métier_, as a man
of letters, and publish your verse as a more intimate gift for
those who already value you for your pedestrian work in literature.
I should think you ought to find no difficulty in finding a
publisher for poems such as those you have sent to me.
I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are such poor
means of communication. Don't come to London without making an
appointment to come and see me here.--Very sincerely yours,
WALTER PATER.
'Browning, one of my best-loved writers,' is a phrase I find in his
first letter to me, in December 1886, thanking me for a little book on
Browning which I had just published. There is, I think, no mention of
any other writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Rossetti
which I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty letters which I
have from him. Everything that is said about books is a direct matter of
business: work which he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was
doing, about which he advises and encourages me.
In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled by their
persistence when they pressed upon him. To wrap up a book to send by
post was an almost intolerable effort, and he had another reason for
hesitating. 'I take your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me,' he
writes in June 1889, 'hoping to be able to restore it to you there lest
it should get bruised by transit through the post.' He wrote letters
with distaste, never really well, and almost always with excuses or
regrets in them: 'Am so over-burdened (my time, I mean) just now with
pupils, lectures, and the making thereof'; or, with hopes for a meeting:
'Letters are such poor means of communication: when are we to meet?' or,
as a sort of hasty makeshift: 'I send this prompt answer, for I know by
experience that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy.' A review
took him sometimes a year to get through; and remained in the end, like
his letters, a little cramped, never finished to the point of ease, like
his published writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of the
three lectures which I have heard in my life were given by Pater, one on
Mérimée, at the London Institution, in November 1890, and the other on
Raphael, at Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a severer
humiliation. The act of reading his written lecture was an agony which
communicated itself to the main part of the audience. Before going into
the hall at Whitechapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a
little, between the discomfort of the underground railway and the
distress of the lecture-hall.
In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, Pater was rarely
quite at his ease, but he liked being among people, and he made the
greater satisfaction overcome the lesser reluctance. He was particularly
fond of cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been dining with
him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly natural way in which he
took up the great black Persian, kissed it, and set it down carefully
again on his way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bourget had
sent him the first volume of his _Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_,
and that the cat had got hold of the book and torn up the part
containing the essay on Baudelaire, 'and as Baudelaire was such a lover
of cats I thought she might have spared him!'
We were talking once about fairs, and I had been saying how fond I was
of them. He said: 'I am fond of them, too. I always go to fairs. I am
getting to find they are very similar.' Then he began to tell me about
the fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an unpublished
fragment in one of his stories, the minute, coloured impression of the
booths, the little white horses of the 'roundabouts,' and the little
wild beast shows, in which what had most struck him was the interest of
the French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have seen in his own
woods. 'An English clown would not have looked at a wolf if he could
have seen a tiger.'
I once asked Pater if his family was really connected with that of the
painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 'I think so, I believe so, I
always say so.' The relationship has never been verified, but one would
like to believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the English
writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of family interest that he
came to work upon Goncourt's essay and the contemporary _Life of
Watteau_ by the Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of _L'Art
du XVIII^e Siècle_, out of which he has made certainly the most living
of his _Imaginary Portraits_, that _Prince of Court Painters_ which is
supposed to be the journal of a sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we
see in one of Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889[4]
Pater was working towards a second volume of _Imaginary Portraits_, of
which _Hippolytus Veiled_ was to have been one. He had another subject
in Moroni's _Portrait of a Tailor_ in the National Gallery, whom he was
going to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study of
life in the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be a
modern study: could this have been _Emerald Uthwart_? No doubt _Apollo
in Picardy_, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. _The
Child in the House_, which was printed as an _Imaginary Portrait_, in
_Macmillans Magazine_ in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapter
of a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life,' something,
he said, as _Aurora Leigh_ does. There is much personal detail in it,
the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the old
house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent much
of his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and their
caravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady in
her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors who
had come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train,
and of 'the red flag, which meant _blood_.' It was because he always
dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginary
portrait in the book of _Imaginary Portraits_; but he did not go on with
it because, having begun the long labour of _Marius_, it was out of his
mind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing it,
he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, and
that it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, later
manner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which no
continuation could ever add a more essential completeness.