WALTER PATER.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 900, 20 August 1910, Page 9

WALTER PATER.

-.. It is morn than ■ fifteen years since Walter Pater died, and his- more famous books have' been before the world for a quarter of a century. If it is still too ■ soon to determine his exact, place in English letters, thero can-bo no doubt that that place is a permanent and a high one. Ho is already a classic, ranking not among the greater.kings of literature, but.among the sovereigns of .small and exclusive territories, like Do Quincey and Peacock and Landor.'. The popular school with which he seemed to have affinities "has long since disappeared. . The aestheticism which flourished•-,. in." tho early "eighties" is as demodo as the DeUa-Cru'scans. The word, has -, gone 'lifter other,gods, and"in judging.Walter Pater'we. are not hampered by tho illegitimate developments .with, which a school; is always apt to credit a master. Wo can.take'him.wholly oh bis merits, as 'a. sincere.'scholar, and thinker,' who had much to say to. his generation,' and,who strove to. say it,■ not in tho easy phrases of ijopular rhetoric, but in a stylo'of al 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 tho "New ; Republic" . is ■ a good caricature of certain Paterians, but ho has no sort of iresemWance to < their master. Pater was.never foolish, never flippant, never petty. In all his work there, y is the evidence' ,pf' a. strong'. aitd penetrating intellect.'.So. far, from deifying sensa'tions, it was the 'intellectual element in 'them,' the,- disciple of their evaluation, which interested him. Ho combined, indeed, two qualities which are generally Sissociated—an intense love of tho concrete, and a passion for some principle which would link natural beauty to tlie life of'the human',son!.-'-.

.... The starting-point of his .intellectual development.. was probably . a '.. revolt from, easy metaphysics.. He got his Fellowship at Oxford or; his work in philosophy-, and -he was well read,, in' the classics . of. speculation; but . ho never seems to have had any of tho passion for .unification •which, .we.-asso-ciate' with the' philosopher.. Among /the many: imaginary portraits which _he. has. drawn, only one —that of Sebastian raiC'Storck —is a metaphysician, and :|ic; is, the most tragically fated of .Pater's" types, land, obviously the: least 'sympathetic,'to its'; author. In tho "seventiqs"- the revolt, .against- tho narrow ratiocination of Mill and Manse] was :driving. the bettor minds to Hegel and German metaphysics. ' Pater was sensitive to this influence,'as he was to all others, 'but so'hiefliirig lVhim reacted , against, it. Like Nietzsche , in a later day ho protested against a unifi,cation .which made life a featureless plain. ' Ho became the'apostle of_ tho 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 tho old Cyreiiaicism; 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 phciiomj'.e'n'a of our everyday life: He wished to rationalise it, Imt without depleting it, an aim.which ho shared with Hegei, and, indeed, with .. all metaphysicians worthy of .the name. But for Pater the interest was always less' rectitude of 'thought than rectitude of' conduct; ,Ho was -a' humanist, and therefore a moralist!: Nowadays we are inclined — not without' justice perhaps—to put tho moralist 1 outside phdosophy : proper. His : ppint. of is embarrassing iu 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 i in I tho .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 lino .of a statue, .every delicacy ,of, a 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, ho created "diaphanous" type—for, like Plato, he always thought in types—thu soul which i - alonf from'thu bustle of action, which does notj create or construct, but which reflects and transmits tho. subloties of beauty .which Would otherwise be' lost to men. ■: , , : : .

,-Tho true litualist is wholly passive, and the earlier Pater was an austere ritualist. Ke was like some conimuiiity of mystics, waiting with husked breath on tho blowing of the .. Spirit. Marius, thu greatest of his creations, is a harp played on by tho wind. IW 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 tbo ; Church; but, remember, ho docs 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 iio resistance. Bui 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 delicately poised soul, lie. groped after active principles, of selection. |There is'.always a. discipline in ritualisirf, 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 nieu- The soul is master of itself, and will shapt the world to its will. Sensations, . tho sensuous world, aro 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 sec ■ a real change of attitude. The chapter on "Lacedaemon" would not have been written by tho writer of the postscript to "The Renaissance." The discipline of tho ritualist was changing to- tho discipline of the thinker. He had not lost his grip upon the infinite and various beauty of the. world; but be is ready to subdue it consciously-to bpirit, to select and recreate and remodel. Tho soul is no. longer a minor, but i> tire.

Some such spiritual development we may with justice, using tlio books as ■iiir. evidence, attribute to Walter Pater. Ho has left 'no autobiography and no .materials for a biography, so wo are driven to read tlie Jiistory ot liis soul in his writings. And wlieii all is said, , what a pcriormunco those ton volumes constitute 1 Where else in -English letters are wo' to find so much subtlety .of thought and feeling embodied in so adequate a medium ? li may be that later generations will care little for our old controversies of •the spirit. ' Some new master may supersede all our conundrums' with s»me pioi'ounder organon. 3Jut by the happy law of things stylo cannot be superseded; and Pater will be read for tlio unique blandishments of his stylo.' In Mi is matter be has been vastly overpraised, aiid vastly underrated, and in both cases on the wrong grounds. His is not a model of English prfise. 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 sontences. It is not, therefore, a true, working weapon, like • Milton's tremendous periods,' ot Burke's golden , (low of eloquence, or Ruskin's transmuted pnetry. 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 \vrote a great page. The vital force ran low in his stylo. 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 pleave. Nevertheless, languid,' overstrained, ■and overstudiod as he often is, thero aro many moments when lie attains the purest melody. Prom the too-famous postscript to "The Renaissance" and the description of Monna Lisa, through a dozen passages in "Marius" and tie ■•"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 lan■guage the: exquisite and intangible effect of music. ' He is a petite cbapelle in style, like Lamb'and Borrow and Stevenson, but: it is a chapelle whoso, walls are well founded, and whoso worshippers .will not decrease.—"Spectator." -.■'■.■■..