• • WALTER PATER.*
• SoMe and PKrple: with other Poems. By 'William Watson. London: • The Works of Walter Pater. 10 vols. New Edition. London Macmillan IT is more than fifteen years since Walter Pater died, and his more famous books have been before the world for a quarter of acentirY. If 'it' is still too soon to determine his exact place in English• letters, there can be no-doubt that that place is a permanent and a high one. He is already a classic, ranking not among the' greater kings of literature, but among the sovereigns of small and exclusive territories, like De Quincey
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and Peacock and Landor. The popular school with which he seemed to have affinities has long since disappeared. The aestheticism which flourished in the early " eighties " is as demo& as the Della-Cruscans. The world has gone after other gods, and in judging Walter Pater we are not hampered by the illegitimate developments with which a school is always apt to credit a master. We can take him wholly on his merits as a sincere scholar and thinker, who had much to say to his genera- tion, and who strove to say it, not in the easy phrases of popular rhetoric, but in a style of a rigorous and classic perfection. It is one of the ironies of literary history that work so laborious, so laden with thought, so morally serious and sincere, should have been adopted as the gospel of a school of facile impressionists. Mr. Rose in The New Republic is a good caricature of certain Paterians, but he has no sort of resemblance to their master. Pater was never foolish, never flippant, never petty. In all his work there is the evidence of a strong and penetrating intellect. So far from deifying sensations, it was the intellectual element in them, the discipline of their evaluation, which interested him. He combined, indeed, two qualities which are generally dis- sociated,—an intense love of the concrete, and a passion for some principle which would link natural beauty to the life of the human soul.
The starting-point of his intellectual development was probably a revolt from easy metaphysics. He got his Fellow- ship at Oxford on his work in philosophy, and he was well read in the classics of speculation ; but he never seems to have had any of the passion for unification which we associate with the philosopher. Among the many imaginary portraits which he has drawn, only one—that of Sebastian van Storck—is a metaphysician, and he is the most tragically fated of Pater's types, and obviously the least sympathetic to its author. In the " seventies " the revolt against the narrow ratiocination of Mill and Mansel was driving the better minds to Hegel and German metaphysics. Pater was sensitive to this influence, as he was to all others, but something in him reacted against it. Like Nietzsche in a later day, he protested against a unification which made life a featureless plain. He became the apostle of the concrete, the individual. He insisted upon a value in the sensation which the thinkers who merely regarded it as the raw material of a concept would not grant it. It is necessary to be very clear as to this attitude. He did not revive any crude version of the old Cyrenaicism ; he laid down no metaphysical theory ; he merely insisted upon a greater reverence, a fuller analysis, a more dignified destiny, for the content of sensation, the phenomena of our everyday life. He wished to rationalise it, but without depleting it, an aim which he shared with Hegel, and, indeed, with all metaphysicians worthy of the name. But for Pater the interest was always less rectitude of thought than rectitude of conduct. He was a humanist, and therefore a moralist. Nowadays we are inclined—not without justice perhaps—to put the moralist outside philosophy proper. His point of view is embarrassing in the quest for truth. Most modern heresies take their origin in his plea that man wants a rule of conduct rather than the reason of things. So, leaving the narrow and thorny path of metaphysics, Pater sought for a principle which would, as they say in the schools, " maximise " life. With his intense love of beauty in art and Nature, his temperament responding like a sensitised plate to the nuances of atmosphere and memory, he strove to give men a key to the rich datum of life. But he never lost sight of his own metaphysics. The beauty of Nature and art was impregnated with spirit. Every detail of a picture, every line of a statue, every delicacy of a spring morning was alive with a vast and spiritual significance. The truly spiritual were they whose souls were like a transparency, in which the wonders of the sensuous world could be reflected through a fine medium. Hence he created the " diaphanous " type—for, like Plato, he always thought in types—the soul which is aloof from the bustle of action, which does not create or construct, but which reflects and transmits the subtleties of beauty which would otherwise be lost to men.
The true ritualist is wholly passive, and the earlier Pater was an austere ritualist. He was like some community of mystics, waiting with hushed breath on the blowing of the Spirit. Marius, the greatest of his creations, is a harp played on by every wind. Few more searching and beautiful histories of the progress of a soul have been written than the study of this Falkland of the Roman Empire. He dies on the eve of finding salvation in the Church ; but, remember, he does not find it. He is too diaphanous; creeds and emotions are too adequately appreciated by him to remain ; they flit through his soul and find no resistance. But as the years went on Pater's mind turned to something harder and less passive. Instead of the unconscious discrimination between good and evil of a deli- cately poised soul, he groped after active principles of selection. There is always a discipline in ritualism, but it is a prison discipline ; one endures because one has no other choice. But the ascesis which Plato taught, and Pater began to emphasise, is the discipline of free men. The soul is master of itself, and will shape the world to ita will. Sensa- tions, the sensuous world, are still vital things, but the mind is not subject to them ; it uses and adapts them. In his last work, Plato and Platonism, it is permissible, we think, to see a real change of attitude. The chapter on "Lacedaemon " would not have been written by the writer of the postscript to The Renaissance. The discipline of the ritualist was changing to the discipline of the thinker. He has not lost his grip upon the infinite and various beauty of the world; but be is ready to subdue it consciously to spirit, to select and recreate and remodel. The soul is no longer a mirror, but a fire.
Some such spiritual development we may with justice, using the books as our evidence, attribute to Walter Pater. He has left no autobiography and no materials for a biography, so we are driven to read the history of his soul in his writings. And when all is said, what a performance these ten volumes constitute ! Where else in English letters are we to find so much subtlety of thought and feeling embodied in so adequate a medium ? It may be that later generations will care little for our old controversies of the spirit. Some new master may supersede all our conundrums with some profounder organon. But by the happy law of things style cannot be superseded, and Pater will be read for the unique blandishments of his style. In this matter he has been vastly overpraised, and vastly underrated, and in both cases on the wrong grounds. His is not a model of English prose. It is far too cumbrous, too recondite, too unworkable. The exact meaning is hammered out laboriously ; it does not spring up fresh and unexpected like a spring flower. There is always the air of heavy thought and effort about the sentences. It is not, therefore, a true working weapon, like Milton's tremendous periods, or Burke's golden flow of eloquence, or Ruskin's transmuted poetry. Still less is it a model, like Huxley's or Newman's prose, which the humble man may strive after because it is English in its simplest and most central form. Pater wrote great sentences, sometimes great paragraphs, but he rarely wrote a great page. The vital force ran low in his style. For one thing, in the successful search for the right word he forgot sometimes to look for the right cadence, and there are many passages where there is not a word wrong, but yet the sentence does not please. Nevertheless, languid, over- strained, and overstudied as he often is, there are many moments when he attains the purest melody. From the too famous post- script to The Renaissance and the description of Monna Lisa, through a dozen passages in Marius and the Imaginary Portraits, to the grave dignity of some of the Greek Studies and of Plato and Platonism, he has left us a treasury of prose which will endure. No man perhaps can come so near giving our rugged prose language the exquisite and intangible effect of music. He is a petite chapelle in style, like Lamb, and Borrow, and Stevenson, but it is a chapelle whose walls are well founded and whose worshippers will not decrease.
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