To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening....
We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
Walter Pater (1839-1894) (The Renaissance).
In the Adelaide edition of this book this famous “pulsation” passage appeared as originally written; it is now given as Pater afterwards altered it.
Pater was a Hellenist and preached the new paganism of last century. The Greek ideal life was supposed to be one of purely aesthetic enjoyment, divorced from religious problems or from any sense of the higher in our nature. Pater, however, altered his views, Marius, the Epicurean, being intended as a recantation, and he became in effect an Anglo-Catholic. ([See p. 343 note.])
Pater was “Rose” in Mallock’s New Republic.
A CHILD
Is a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of the Apple.... He is nature’s fresh picture, newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper, unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater.... His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loth to use so deceitful an organ.... We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest: and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems and mocking of man’s business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has outlived. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.... Could he put off his body with his little Coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.
John Earle (Micro-Cosmographie, 1628).