And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a certain occasion advised Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. Pater is a dangerous guide for students. This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Mr. Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare during the days when Pater was slowly producing one book every few years—he wrote five in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two a year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The principal accusation brought against the Pater method of work and the Pater style is that it is lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase, "it is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, appears not more than a half dozen times in its full flowering during the course of a century. The French write all but faultless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go to Ruskin, Pater, and Newman. When we say: "Let us write simple, straightforward English," we are setting a standard that has been reached of late years only by Thackeray, Newman, and few besides. There are as many victims of the "natural English" formula as there are of the artificial formula of a Pater or a Stevenson. The former write careless, flabby, colourless, undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliché is king of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine writing," are more easily detected.
Now, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural" style. Even Newman confesses to laborious days, though he wrote with the idea uppermost, and with no thought of the style. Renan, perfect master, disliked the idea of teaching "style"—as if it could be taught!—yet he worked over his manuscripts. We all know the Flaubert case. With Pater one must not rush to the conclusion that because he produced slowly and with infinite pains, he was all artificiality. Prose for him was a fine art. He would no more have used a phrase coined by another man than he would have worn his hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his ideas the grave and lovely phrases we envy and admire. Prose—"cette ancienne et très jalouse chose," as it was called by Stéphane Mallarmé—was for Pater at once a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid "poetic-prose," the great stillness of his style—atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet undertones—is always in the rhythm of prose. Speed is absent; the tempo is usually lenten; brilliance is not pursued; but there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp and power. The sentences uncoil their many-coloured lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that occasionally confuses; for compensation we are given newly orchestrated harmonies, as mordant, as salient, and as strange as some chords in the music of Chopin, Debussy and Richard Strauss. Sane it always is—simple seldom. And, as Symons observes: "Under the soft and musical phrases an inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well. Link is added silently but faultlessly to link; the argument marches, carrying you with it, while you fancy you are only listening to the music with which it keeps step." It is very personal, and while it does not make melody for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it clothes. Read aloud Ruskin and then apply the same vocal test—Flaubert's procedure—to Pater, and the magnificence of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will make it captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, more subtle, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in eloquence slightly muffled, his last manner hinted that he had sought for newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, employing his own words concerning another theme: "It is a beauty wrought from within,... the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions."
The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Browne's richer, there are deeper organ tones in De Quincey's, Ruskin's excels in effects, rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is subtler, more sinuous, more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it sometimes is, and its rich polyphony palls if you are not in the mood; and in greater measure than the prose of the other masters, for the world is older and Pater was weary of life. But a suggestion of morbidity may be found in the writings of every great writer from Plato to Dante, from Shakespeare to Goethe; it is the faint spice of mortality that lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures. Beautiful art has been challenged as corrupting. There may be a grain of truth in the charge. But man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art was invented to console, disquiet, and arouse him. Whenever a poet appears he is straightway accused of tampering with the moral code; it is mediocrity's mode of adjusting violent mental disproportions. But persecution never harmed a genuine talent, and the accusations against the art of Pater only provoked from him such beautiful books as Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean, and Plato and Platonism. Therefore let us be grateful to the memory of his enemies.
There is another Pater, a Pater far removed from the one who wove such silken and coloured phrases. If he sometimes recalls Keats in the rich texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Herbert Spencer. There are early essays of his that are as cold, as logically adamant, and as tortuous as sentences from the Synthetic Philosophy. Pater was a metaphysician before he became an artist. Luckily for us, his tendency to bald theorising was subdued by the broad humanism of his temperament. There are not many "purple patches" in his prose, "purple" in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no "fringes of the north star" style, to use South's mocking expression. He never wrote in sheer display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern drama he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, setting aside those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, and Botticelli. As Mr. Benson puts it, Pater was not a modern scientific or archæological critic, but the fact that Morelli has proved the Concert of Giorgione not to be by that master, or that Vinci is not all Pater says he is, does not vitiate the essential values of his criticism.
Like Maurice Barrès, Pater was an egoist of the higher type; he seldom left the twilight of his tour d'ivoire; yet his work is human and concrete to the core. Nothing interested him so much as the human quality in art. This he ever sought to disengage. Pater was a deeply religious nature au fond, perhaps addicted a trifle to moral preciosity, and, as 'Mr. Greenslet says, a lyrical pantheist. His essay on Pascal, without plumbing the ethical depths as does Leslie Stephen's study of the same thinker, gives us a fair measure of his own religious feelings. A pagan with Anatole France in his worship of Greek art and literature, his profounder Northern temperament, a Spartan temperament, strove for spiritual things, for the vision of things behind the veil. The Paters had been Roman Catholic for many generations; his father was not, and he was raised in the Church of England. But the ritual of the older Church was for him a source of delight and consolation. Mr. Benson deserves unstinted praise for his denunciation of the pseudo-Paterians, the self-styled disciples, who, totally misinterpreting Pater's pure philosophy of life, translated the more ephemeral phases of his cyrenaicism into the grosser terms of a gaudy æsthetic. These defections pained the thinker, whose study of Plato had extorted praise from Jowett. He even withdrew the much-admired conclusion of The Renaissance because of the wilful misconstructions put upon it. He never achieved the ataraxia of his beloved master. And Oxford was grudging of her favour to him long after the world had acclaimed his genius. Sensitive he was, though Mr. Gosse denies the stories of his suffering from harsh criticism; but there were some forms of criticism that he could not overlook. Books like his Plato and Marius the Epicurean were adequate answers to detractors. Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work; too much the artist for art's sake, he may never trouble the greater currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers, the critic whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer of a polyphonic prose-music that recalls the performance of harmonious adagio within the sonorous spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favourite contention of his that all the arts constantly aspire toward the condition of music. This idea is the keynote of his poetic scheme, the keynote of Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius, carried his life long "in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul."
[IX]
IBSEN
I
Henrik Ibsen was the best-hated artist of the nineteenth century. The reason is simple: He was, himself, the arch-hater of his age. Yet, granting this, the Norwegian dramatist aroused in his contemporaries a wrath that would have been remarkable even if emanating from the fiery pit of politics; in the comparatively serene field of æsthetics such overwhelming attacks from the critics of nearly every European nation testified to the singular power displayed by this poet. Richard Wagner was not so abused; the theatre of his early operations was confined to Germany, the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris a unique exception. Wagner, too, did everything that was possible to provoke antagonism. He scored his critics in speech and pamphlet. He gave back as hard names as he received. Ibsen never answered, either in print or by the mouth of friends, the outrageous allegations brought against him. Indeed, his disciples often darkened the issue by their unsolicited, uncritical championship.