MR. PATER'S ESSAYS.*
APPROACHING Mr. Pater's new volume not without a certain misgiving as to our ability to do justice to a writer whose mannerism has sometimes moved us to impatience, we are free to confess that its perusal has given us a great deal more pleasure than we expected. There are certain passages—notably in the essay on ".Esthetic Poetry "—in which Mr. Pater, without intending it, almost persuades the plain person to be a Philistine. But this essay was written in 1868, and in his later work we observe far more of that self- restraint and "frugal closeness" of style which in his opening chapter he declares to be so essential to scholarly writing. Not only is his diction less exuberant, but his criticism is riper, sounder, and more manly. We are surprised—we had well- nigh said, delighted—to find Mr. Pater applauding the frank outspokenness of Doctor Johnson at the expense of the modern German commentators on Shakespeare. His essay on Rossetti, while eminently sympathetic, strikes us as singularly just. For example, after noting the strange and almost grotesque lengths to which Rossetti's delight in concrete definitions led him, and his excessive indulgence in personification, Mr. Pater con- tinues :—" Poetry as a mania—one of Plato's two higher forms of 'divine' mania—has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the defect of its quality,' into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness ; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the scholastic realism of the Middle Age." Another excellent point about these essays is the extreme aptness of the quotations. Mr. Pater quotes sparingly, but with true artistic choice. Thus, in the essay on "Shakespeare's English Kings," he illustrates very happily Shakespeare's conception of war, in which "the pity of it " always comes as an afterthought to the poet's admiration for the grandiose aspects of martial life. Mr. Pater has not only a sure instinct for things intrinsically beautiful in literature, but he is also very adroit in citing passages to illustrate his own meaning. To take one example, after dwelling with approval on Flaubert's extraordinary loyalty to his art, and the unwearied persistence with which he laboured to fit the right word to the meaning, Mr. Pater illuminates, as it were, his version of the old maxim, zcaurci Tea mak, with this happy image from one of Flaubert's own letters, which expresses so vividly and painfully the discouragement which all conscientious artists must occasionally feel : "I am like a man whose ear is true but who plays falsely on the violin : his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds • Appreciations: with, an Essay on Style. By Walter Pater, Fellow of Brame- nose College, London : Macmillan and Co. of which he has the inward sense." These words of Flaubert's remind us, however, that Mr. Pater is hardly to be con- gratulated on his employment of musical imagery. In the essay on "Shakespeare's English Kings," to which we have already alluded, occurs a similitude the appropriateness of which no musician would admit. The writer has been saying that Richard finally attains contentment in the merely passive recognition of superior strength, and continues : "As in some sweet anthem of Handel, the sufferer, who put finger to organ under the utmost pressure of mental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at last from the mere skill with which he sets his dis- tress to music." Such indulgence in the luxury of grief is, we think, entirely alien from the whole spirit of Handers robust genius. But Mr. Pater is evidently enamoured of the com- parison, for he recurs to it a couple of pages lower down, in a passage worded with curious laxity for so studied a writer : "Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handers, I said, of Richard's meek 'undoing' of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in fact, the play of Richard II. does, like a musical composition, possess a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple con- tinuity, an evenness of execution, which are rare in the great dramatist." Unlucky, again, is the musical allusion in the sentence where Mr. Pater speaks of prose literature as "the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music." If Mr. Pater had said Hucbald, we should not have quarrelled with him ; but to regard a colossus like Bach as representative of the infancy of music, is indeed a strange solecism.
The prefatory essay on "Style" amounts in its sum to a well-reasoned plea for eclecticism, and the note struck here is repeated in the postscript on "Classicism and Romanticism." There he declares that the scholar of the future will admit that the style of the nineteenth century was justified by necessity,—" a style very different, alike from the baldness of an impossible Queen Anne' revival, and an incorrect, in- condite exuberance, after the mode of Elizabeth." The literary artist, who must inevitably be a scholar, will find the laws of language not a restriction, but an opportunity. They will brace rather than hamper him. But he must beget a vocabulary of his own ; he mast expand and purify the elements of his language, and restore the finer edge of words still in use. Viewed in the light of a practical experiment on these lines, it cannot be said that these essays are wholly suc- cessful. The very title of the book—Appreciations—is a case in point, and, to us at least, the effort to acclimatise a Galli- cism smacks of affectation. Again, to any one who has ever glanced at a cookery-book, the word to " clarify " is saturated with culinary associations. Mr. Pater has en- deavoured to restore to it its finer edge by applying the term " clarifying " to somebody's soul; but we fear that his gallant effort will prove abortive. Soyer and Francatelli are not to be robbed of their own. What we care least about in the Patristic school is its foppery of phrase, "the fancy," as its chief puts it, "so many of us have for an exquisite and carious skill in the use of words," and which occasionally degenerates into a sort of fantastic rhapsodising,—as, for example, when Mr. Pater describes the Provencal poetry : "Here under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambu- listic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them." This is not the work of a man of letters, but a "stylist,"—to use a base coinage which has at least the merit of suggesting artificiality and affectation.
The " appreciation " of Wordsworth is, we think, excellent, and full of acute remarks. "There was in Wordsworth's character," writes Mr. Pater, "a certain contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united with a sensi- bility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence." "To read one of his longer pastoral poems for the first time, is like a day spent in a new country : the memory is crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents." Later on, Mr. Pater insists with much force that man's close connection with natural objects, so far from degrading him in Wordsworth's eyes by emphasising the physical connection of our nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, rather tended to the dignity of human nature, because they tended to tranquillise it. "By raising nature to the level of human thought, he gives it power and expression : he subdues man to the level of human nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity." It was because he saw man as a part of Nature that Wordsworth was able to appre- ciate passion in the lowly. "He chooses to depict people from humble life, because, being nearer to Nature than others, they are on the whole more impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression of passion, than other men : it is for this direct expression of passion that he values their humble words." "What he values most [in scenes of pastoral life] is the almost elementary expression of elementary feelings." Finally, Mr. Pater regards Wordsworth's poetry as a con- tinual protest against the predominance of machinery in our existence—i.e., the conception of means and ends—the end-in- itself with the poet being "impassioned contemplation." In the study of Coleridge, Mr. Pater's faculty of quotation is again most happily exhibited. There is an interesting passage in which Wordsworth and Coleridge are contrasted, from which we may be allowed to take the following paragraph :—" Words- worth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, a little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary) good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent in- telligence in Nature within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those delicate and subdued shades of expres- sion which alone perfect art allows, In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the transcendental schools of Germany." Mr. Pater is at his best in what he says of Coleridge's superlative skill in handling the supernatural, compared with which "the too palpable intruders from a spiritual world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of crudity or coarseness." The estimate of Charles Lamb which follows is, but for one or two slightly " precious " paragraphs, an excellent piece of sympa- thetic criticism. In the character as well as in the writings of Lamb, one may see, according to Mr. Pater, a visible inter- pretation and instance of the distinction between wit and humour. Mr. Pater dwells on Lamb's lifelong sacrifice, the ever- present undercurrent of tragedy beneath his cheerful exterior, his modesty, and his disinterested devotion to literature pure and simple, pointing out with great truth that his detachment from the theories of the time, combined with his immediate contact with what was real, have given to his work an ex- ceptional enduringness. Mr. Pater's habitual pensiveness as a critic, and the autumnal tone of his work, make this tribute to Charles Lamb all the more remarkable. In the books and domestic correspondence of Sir Thomas Browne, Mr. Pater has found another thoroughly congenial subject on which he discourses in a long and thoughtful paper. But, on the whole, the best and most penetrating criticism in the volume is con- tained in the short posteript on Classicism and Romanticism. Mr. Pater is scrupulously fair to the advocates of either school, and while he hold's Stendhars views to be more suggestive, admits the greater reasonableness of Sainte-Benve. Again, though holding France to be—whether in the old Provencal poetry or the prose of this century—the best and truest representative of the Romantic temper, he regrets its antinomian bizarrerie, the malign element which mars its beauty. Finally, after declaring his conviction that both elements are united in perfect art, he defines it to be the proper aim and problem of modern literary art "to induce order upon the contorted, proportionless accumulation of our knowledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes and disillusions, and in effecting this, to do consciously what has been done hitherto too unconsciously, to write our English language as the Latins wrote theirs, as the French write, as scholars should write." "Consciously,"—there is where the danger resides, for consciousness so often degenerates into self-consciousness. We have read these essays with a great deal of pleasure, which would have been further enhanced could we but rid ourselves of the occasional impression,—we admit that it is only occasional,—that the author was thinking less of what he wanted to say than of the effect that his periods would produce on his audience.
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