“Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact—form, or colour, or incident—is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.”
Let me attach to these another quotation from the same essay, to illustrate his use of the word “soul,” the keyword of his belief:
“Mind and soul;—hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of preponderating soul embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a fact, in certain writers—the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.”
When we talk of words it is, if possible, better to talk in terms of speech than thus indirectly in terms liable to debate, of the nature of man, which, in this case at least, have led a careful writer into inaccuracy. Blake was neither embarrassed nor at a loss. He thought all the rest of the world was. A sort of diffidence would not allow Pater to admit that he was thinking neither of soul nor of mind but of a quality in Blake’s language, a quality markedly less evident in the work of his contemporaries. Whenever Pater uses the word soul in this sense he is thinking of the magical power in contradistinction from the practical power of words. Blake’s words say more by what they carry with them in suggestive atmosphere, than by what they say. His speech is highly potential; and when Pater talks of soul in literature he is talking of the potential element in the language of literature, the element so noticeable in the language of his own works. His insistence on truth, not only in the merely kinetic speech, the thing said, but also in the potential speech that gives the thing said its atmospherical particularity, distinguished his own work, and deeply influenced the writers who followed him—Wilde, Dowson, perhaps Mr. Yeats, at least in his prose, certainly Mr. Arthur Symons. It was an indigenous spring of the tendency that, in France, has been called Symbolist, with which the last of the younger writers I have mentioned definitely allied himself. Pater’s expressed admirations for modern French books are only such as suggest his ignorance of the best writers in a later generation than that of Flaubert, who was, of course, not twenty years his senior. He does not seem to have read those younger men whose ideas so closely resembled his own, so closely that Frenchmen often claim Pater’s most obvious disciple[7] for a pupil of the school of Mallarmé.
With his care in the use of words, he had also a care for structure, and for similar reasons. He says, as in a cruder way Poe had said long before, but not with such close significance:
“The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that.”
Those words embody in technical wisdom the profoundest understanding of the aims of art and of the nature of artistic creation.
His practice was not quite on the level of his theory. His details sometimes fail to preserve a unity of tone and rhythm with the whole of which they are a part. Sometimes too, the effort to preserve that unity compels the whole to a chafing monotone. An over-zealous pursuit of accuracy sometimes allowed those careful sentences to encumber themselves with adjectival burs, and a too visual method of composition sometimes cost them their harmony with the music it was their business to maintain, and even brought that music to an abrupt stop. “Pater,” Mr. Benson says, who knew him, “when he had arranged his notes, began to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the effect....” Such a method, however careful the writer might be to make continual appeal to his ear, could not but allow the eye to assume too great a share in that collaboration in which ear should be the sole dictator and eye the ear’s obedient servant. It would make it difficult to reject pleasant, exact phrases put in on those alternate lines, even if they made the sentences top-heavy with their own distinguished, highly specialised meaning. They would make this top-heaviness hard to perceive, and, if perceived, erroneously attributable to the visible crowding and elaboration of the written page. The setting up in print, while useful as a guide to the general outline, would only confirm these sentences in their condition. Nobody who has tried to read Pater aloud can be without instances when the reading became difficult, breathless, impossible, even while the words demanded admiration for their subtle accuracy and perfect choice. Let me give no more than two examples of the awkward constructions Pater allowed himself. I shall take them from the least decorative of his works, from a book actually written for oral delivery. On page 35 of Plato and Platonism[8] there is this sentence:
“From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulæ, Pure Being, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; ‘The Absolute’; ‘The One’; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men.”
Now there are 37 words in 8 clauses, needing 5 commas and 3 semi-colons to make up the subject of that sentence. The underlining of the words Pure Being seems to me a manifest concession to the eye.