Portraits and Speculations

by Arthur Ransome

On page 32 of the same book there is a characteristic construction partly due to a wish to preserve in his writing, tapestried as it might be, a flavour of conversational speech, and, for all that, dependent on the visibility of print, demanding a swift review of the beginning of the sentence as the reader arrives at its end:

“That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:—Parmenides and the Eleatic School were much preoccupied with the determination of the thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.”

Such sentences are blemishes, not because of inaccuracy, for their accuracy is their excuse, but because they trouble our reception of the whole, as a whole, by drawing too much attention to themselves.

With all his care for shapely building, for unity of impression, he could not avoid occasional over-insistence on details, rather pleasant than otherwise, unlike the troubling halts of his failures in sentence-making. Indeed, I am not sure that we can describe as a fault what was characteristic of a whole manner of vision, and due not to carelessness but to the peculiar gift of a rare intimacy of imagination. In his imaginary portraits (which include not only the book of that name, but “Emerald Uthwart,” “The Child in the House,” “Apollo in Picardy,” “Gaston de Latour,” “Marius the Epicurean,” and, less obviously, most of his critical work) we can observe his way of laying hold of small, separate facts, and expanding them, as Gaston expanded the poems of Ronsard, “to the full measure of their intention.” His was never a sweeping, large-rhythmed, narrative imagination; I fancy, even, that Pater felt a danger of losing himself when he had to say that something happened, and more than once, when his characters were compelled to significant, visible action, he did indeed lose himself ... for a sentence or two it is as if not Pater spoke but another. There was a danger of things happening in Gaston de Latour, the most lovable of his books. For seven chapters Pater put them off, and then, as they crowded up on the horizon, and became imminent, he laid the story aside before they could overwhelm him and carry him off his feet.[9]

Pater’s imagination loved not action but intellectual circumstance, and the significance not of deeds but of the promise of deeds yet unperformed. The story of Marius, the story of Gaston, as far as it had been carried, was the story of exceptional character in particular intellectual environment; and for us, perhaps, the interest lies as much in the one as in the other. When I think of the second of those two books, I think less of that scrupulous, finely strung youth than of Montaigne, whose portrait, in the old tower above his open house, seems to me at least equally important. Now to offer the reader a choice between the part and the whole is not the way of the perfect artist. Again, it is idle to say that the narrative of “Marius the Epicurean” is broken by the inclusion of that lovely rendering of the tale of Cupid and Psyche. It is idle to point to that tale as an interruption, when there is nothing for it to interrupt, nothing that is not already in repose. In Pater’s books it is the reader who moves from one contemplation to another, and, in “Marius,” quite naturally, from Pisa and the boy’s education there, and his friendship with Flavian, to the tale they read together on hot Italian afternoons.

In a way the inclusion of that tale is an illustration on a large scale of Pater’s invariable manner of using detail. It was the work of another man, and, before placing it in his book, Pater made it his own by translating it into a prose which, if purposely and also necessarily a little different from that of the rest of the book, was yet his. Just so smaller details, fragments of observation of external nature, for example, are not directly set upon the page, with no more than the imprint of the hands that plucked them to give them a spurious unity with the rest. They are all translated, idiomatically, until they are so wholly his that it seems he has looked within for them and not without. The light through the arched windows of the old church, the spires of London, the burial vault of the Dukes of Rosenmold: these things are so intimately imagined, so completely veiled in Pater’s mood that when we recognise them in life we accuse ourselves of plagiarism because we cannot see them other than as he saw them, and they come to us, almost, as remembered sentences.

“The Golden Book” takes its place in “Marius” as a single touch in the portrait of a time: a fragment, carefully chosen, of the local colour of ideas. Just so Pater uses details more minute. Irrelevant as they may seem, to a careless observer, irrelevant as perhaps they were before he had translated them, they help in the painting of the mood of a man, as that story in the painting of a mood of the ancient world, in each case a mood of Pater’s own, half borrowed from, half lent to, man or world. This mutual creation is like that which happens in the contemplation of a work of art. It is criticism, and, even when Pater is not criticising what are known as works of art, he is criticising not the world, or a period or a man, but works of art he has already made, privately, for himself. He used “the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a quiet clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect.” He believed that criticism was a form of creation: for him it was often a second stage of creation, for he had given artistic form to his material before, in contemplation of it, he began the criticism that he offers us in its place. I do not know that this is, accurately speaking, possible, but it is at least a fable that very fairly represents the process whereby, in Pater’s books, life comes to seem at once so ordered, so tapestried, so aloof and yet so intimately known.

I speak there of life in general, of the flux without, a turmoil until it has been arrested by one of those personal acts of artistic creation which it is the function of art to make more frequent, more habitual. The turbulent nature of the flux itself is disguised alike in his critical and his more obviously imaginative work. For his critical essays tend always to become imaginary portraits, no less than his studies in Greek mythology. They are not portraits of men as Pater believed them to be, but reproductions of their aspect in sudden side-lights that change them, specialise them, and for those readers who are vainly looking for a general view, simplify them a little too far. But what sometimes seems to be the reduction of a complex personality to a simple formula—Michelangelo, for example, to the repeated ex forti dulcedo—is not so intended. It is rather the reduction of a personality to the expression of a single mood. There is warp and woof in Pater’s essays, and the shuttle must thread parallel lines and not a maze as it weaves what is meant less as the portrait of a man than as the pattern of a mood. Pater never sacrificed his own personality to his nominal subject. He sacrificed his sitter, not himself. Nothing is more remarkable in Marius the Epicurean (where it would have been easier to disclaim the writer’s own time, to waive the centuries that separated him from his supposed material) than Pater’s resolute modernity. He will not allow us to forget the distinction in circumstances that makes so subtle the relation between subject and object. He will strip off nothing that has been brought him by the years between Marius and himself. Deliberately, he sees Marius with eyes enriched by those centuries, and, with the later knowledge that can compare Apuleius to Swift or to Théophile Gautier, takes pleasure in a reference to Wilhelm Meister and remarks that Marius thinks in the vein of St. Augustine. And so, caring more for the point of view from which he sees them than for the actual objects, that can be seen a thousand ways, he has no wish to “say the last word” on Lamb, on Pico, on Sir Thomas Browne. He does say it, however, on those men in those moods, or, more truly, on the moods in which he saw them. We often leave an essay of Pater’s with a new appreciation of someone else; but that is not because Pater has told us anything, but because, in reproducing the mood of his essay we have given ourselves a mood in which that other, Botticelli, Ronsard, Giorgione, can be more than usually significant.

Thus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is as a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented. His criticism is aesthetic and personal. Though compelled to offer a profusion of theories, he is impatient of them, submits himself to a work of art, and criticises that work not by showing what he feels, but by a reproduction of the mood which that work induces in him. His criticism, always indirect, is always creative, since the reproduction of a mood, unlike the recording of opinions, is itself a work of art. It has the validity of his own temperament and circumstances, lyrical as opposed to abstract truth. We can never say of him that he was wrong, unless in the theories that he could not avoid but considered unimportant. We can only say that he was different—from ourselves, from someone else. We read this critic as we read a poet, collaborating with him in the reproduction of a mood, in the searching knowledge of the fragment of life that was coloured for him by this or that book or picture. The book or picture becomes a secondary matter, and the first is the rapid light, the weighty atmosphere that he had made his own. After reading him I remember his words on Montaigne: “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.”

1912.