Portraits and Speculations

by Arthur Ransome

There are some words that one would never use in speaking of him. “Joy” is one of them; “despair” is another. They would be represented by the less exuberant “pleasure,” and the less violent “regret.” His was a personality in half tones, lit by the pallid glow of a heavy sky, or by the “peculiar daylight” he noticed in the church at Canterbury, that daylight which “seemed to come from further than the light outside.” Yet his mind was not without intensity, though this was expressed more by its freedom of invasion than by any obvious hardness of line or brilliance of colour. When he said, “I should be afraid to read Kipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat down to write,” he was confessing an unnecessary carefulness. But his very fear was not due to uncertainty of himself. It was that of the jealous acolyte who will not expose the sacred glimmer of a votive lamp to even momentary comparison with a flash of limelight, sure as he may be of the lamp’s superior persistence, dignity, and, for him, significance. Pater set a high value on his own personality, which in a world of relative truth, was perhaps the only thing that he could trust. He tended it, protected it from undue disturbance, even from the contagion of others, fed it from time to time with victories ... his essays are the carefully prepared conquests of other personalities by his own ... and strengthened it always in the habit of a private supremacy, a supremacy that neither sought nor needed external acknowledgment.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his work, or, more exactly, of the mental attitude reflected in his work, on the literature of the end of the last century and of the beginning of our own. He was a landmark in the history of consciously rhythmical prose, the first English preacher (though very quietly) of the doctrine of art for art’s sake, the exponent of an unusually precise technique, the first example of a man whose life was consciously lived for art’s sake; a man who, though he disguised the fact by many professions of hedonism, found in art the finest means of living, and preferred, with something of his childish love for processional pomps, to meet life only when it came to him, decorous, arranged, unified to single purposes, instead of with the medley of motives from which the artist disentangles it.

His ideas have come to be more noticeable in other books than in his own. He seemed to deprecate too exuberant agreement. He did not like to stir his audience to an unbecoming enthusiasm. This is, perhaps, one reason why he has seldom been considered as a thinker. But another reason was more potent. “The sensible vehicle” of his expression almost annulled his abstract thought. Pater is the best illustration of the way in which ideas can be obliterated by the personality of which they were a part. He has never been compared to Nietzsche. Yet no student of Pater’s ideas could avoid such a comparison, fantastic as it may seem to those to whom it has not occurred to refuse, for critical purposes, to adopt his attitude towards thought; to refuse, that is, “to assign very little to the abstract thought and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.” Even this attitude, if we examine it closely, is not unlike the Nietzschean demand for the personal touch in a theory before the theory itself. Elsewhere the resemblance is clearer. In Plato and Platonism he says: “Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells.” In smaller things he offers a parallel, strange from one who lived as he lived, to Nietzsche’s outburst against sedentary thinking: “It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that promoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate parturitions of the mind.” In more important things—things more important to Nietzsche—Pater offers a similar aloof parallel, as if from another planet. Before The Birth of Tragedy was written, Pater had distinguished Apollo and Dionysus, for his own purposes and in his own way, as the particular deities of opposed artistic tendencies. At one with Nietzsche in his conception of the relative nature of truth, though he shrank from carrying it to battle à l’outrance, he says almost what Nietzsche says of the evil influence of “the ideal,” “the absolute,” on European thought, though, more eclectic, incapable of partisanship, he does not let it disturb his admiration of Plato. Mildly, as if it did not matter, he murmurs what Nietzsche shouted: “The European mind will never be quite sane again....” And he traces its insanity, as Nietzsche might have traced it, through the Neo-Platonists, The Imitation, Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Berkeley. “By one and all it is assumed, in the words of Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable, is the note of the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily, as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite unattainable) condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the suppression of all the rule and outline of one’s own actual experience and thought.” And, in his criticism of the Sophists, he shows that he is aware, smilingly perhaps, of the theory of two moralities, one of the ruler and another of the ruled. He says of the Sophists: “And if old-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it—that was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the control of others—not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to it, in regard to one’s self? ‘It will break up—this or that ethical deposit in your mind, ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear, when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to know their place.’” This may seem like ironic criticism of Nietzsche before the fact, but it has not been noticed as such, even by Nietzscheans, and that is a proof of the completeness with which Pater made negligible what he said, beside the manner, the personal quality, of himself saying it.

Yet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to the personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow rhythm of his mind to his careful observation of his own philosophic attitude. It is easy to talk of a battle in his mind between metaphysic and art; but no such battle was fought. Pater never lost his interest in philosophies, and that interest never interfered with his interest in art, but was rather its ally, an essential element in the mental temper of all his work. He shared Nietzsche’s dislike of dialectic, because in approaching the condition of mathematical speculation philosophy denudes itself of personality. He disliked, for example, Spinoza’s Euclidean demonstrations, “the dry bones of which rattle in one’s ears,” but was enabled to use finely, in Sebastian van Storck, that one of Spinoza’s sayings in which the man seems to be epitomised: “Whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return.” “Philosophic truth,” for him, “consists in the philosophic temper.” He finds that “perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions.... Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them.” That was said in the first of his printed papers. In the last book of his that was published in his lifetime, he says of the essay: “It provided him (Montaigne) with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? Who knows?—in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.” The essay, we must not forget, was the form chosen by himself.

Nowhere does he better illustrate his conception of philosophic truth, of the philosophic temper, than in that harmony of essays, written for delivery as lectures, and printed as Plato and Platonism. Philosophy clothes herself with humanity, or rather retains the clothes of which dialectic would deprive her, and we watch her as a human being, are nervous for her in the difficult places, as she threads her way through the lives of men and the history of a nation. Pater is engaged in portraiture, not in exposition, so humane has his subject become. The three philosophers whose images are impressed upon the theories of “the flux,” of “the one,” and of “number,” Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, are no longer outline drawings, like illustrations in a classical dictionary, but coloured and modelled with something of Blake’s enthusiastic vision, softened and quieted, till the enthusiasm is like summer lightning behind the hills, clear and bright but without menace for his general intention. Their portraits, inset in the “Plato” like the vignettes that encircle the central picture in those old engraved frontispieces, are curiously suggestive of paragraphs of Nietzsche’s Early Greek Philosophy. They are ruled by just such a conception of truth, but are without the spirit of proselytism, so inconsistent with it, and yet so characteristic of the man who preached rather than denounced his version of the Eternal Recurrence. It is hard to know which is most admirable—the delicate disentangling of Socrates from Plato, the clearly visualised picture of the Sophists (there never was a book on philosophy so full of concrete vision), the synthesis of Plato’s personality, lover, seer, observer, “who has lingered too long in the brazier’s workshops” to be able to speak of “dumb matter,” or the beautiful appreciation of the method of the dialogues and of the often travestied aims of Socratean talk, which represent both the “demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name,” and Plato’s method of learning and teaching, the essential quality of these conversations with himself being their endlessness. Then there is the dream, to the making of which has gone so much knowledge content to be hidden by the perfection of its service, of the city of Lacedaemon in Sparta, so necessary a prelude to the account of Plato’s dreamed republic. Finally, perhaps because dearest to himself, there is the chapter on Plato’s aesthetics, which, to Pater, were not what some have made them, but of immediate import to men living their lives, and suggested a purpose, a hope “to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts.” It is, in a sense, a white heat of decorum for which he asks, a scrupulousness, a patience which is “quite as much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers.” He is really asking for self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by art, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the private acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less often, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of scrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book better fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that it is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter Pater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon his personality.

More than any other writer of his time he was justified in speaking of “the irrepressible conscience of art.” For many he is, I suppose, chiefly interesting as the man who brought into English literary workshops the craftsman’s creed of Flaubert. This importation of his was not a mere translation and expansion of the few sentences from Flaubert that appear in his essay on “Style.” Those sentences and his comments upon them, do but form, in the structure of that essay, a pendant to, an illustration of, Pater’s original remarks, which are themselves a complete, if resolutely non-technical, exposition of his own clearly comprehended methods. It is possible that Pater saw, a little more circumspicuously than he, what it was that Flaubert believed. At any rate that belief is here unified with the suggestions of earlier writers, and given corollaries whose implication in it Flaubert never troubled to see. The theory is, briefly stated, as follows: Literature will fulfil the condition of all good art “by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import.” Its first, indeed, accurately speaking, its only object is truth, the exact fitting of words to meaning, which involves the watchfulness over the whole that will guard details from being made inexact by the reflected light of other details; and this involves also a loving scholarship in the precise meanings and implications of the words used.

He accepts De Quincey’s distinction between “the literature of power and the literature of knowledge,” with the comment, “in the former of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.” In the fine art of literature, the identity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words and the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its particular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. Throughout his works is scattered evidence of the importance that Pater attributed to this particularity of thought, dependent on the thinker and his circumstances, the personality of thought which is really the guarantee of its uniqueness, and in a sense, not only of its truth but of its artistic rightness. In The Child in the House, for example:

“In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.”

And, in the essay on “Style” we are considering:

“... just in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art....”