Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write of his _Eureka_: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy, expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite pain:

“Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the
law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in
entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that
the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for
ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into
existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of
the Heart Divine?” (Poe’s _Eureka_.)

Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein lay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said:

“If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy,
as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept
remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that
the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations
in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In
infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must
once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been
realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between
every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every
other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone,
and since every one of these combinations would determine the
whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely
identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown
to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself
an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all
eternity.”

Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem:

“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne
Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai
Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,
Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta
Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:
Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:
Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”

Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6] admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have wandered everywhere far astray from sense.”

The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before every deed that thou doest--Is this such a deed as I am prepared to perform an infinite number of times?--is the best ballast.” It does not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as “the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “the means of enduring it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.

Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” In Nietzsche’s world we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first being his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment of artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the time serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the conception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth century thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had supposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the regiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the will to power, in which that other will may or may not be included. Men are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power, unless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area over which to exercise it.

But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity. Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again, Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding, not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.” He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to the slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with Seannchan, the poet:

“The stars had come so near me that I caught
Their singing. It was praise of that great race
That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,
With a high head, and open hand, and how,
Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”

Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the other.

Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_ reminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the sooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the large tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.” A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this: “Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life. Nietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner, wrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I had cherished of him.”

Nietzsche’s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book that he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati, the acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful “yea-saying” to all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though they might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the tragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a proud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest. He wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and this desire brought his writings on art nearer to “the business and bosoms of men” than the discreet distance from these things usually preserved by aesthetic theory. His _Birth of Tragedy_ was not merely an historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life words that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art. These words were “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” The latter word has been persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw “in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.” What does he mean by this antithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations:

1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two
art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in
the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between
the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of
music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies
were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance,
and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful
births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which
is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till
at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they
appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually
generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic
tragedy.”

2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts
from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of
every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities
of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the
living and conspicuous representatives of _two_ worlds of art which
differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo
stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the _principium
individuationis_ through which alone the redemption in appearance
is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus
the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the
Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”

He conceives these as “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness,” and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian artist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to Blake’s poem of “The Mental Traveller,” in which there is just such an alternation of conquest and captivity:

“And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands and feet,
She cuts his heart out at his side,
To make it feel both cold and heat.

Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old.

Till he becomes a bleeding youth,
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles,
And binds her down for his delight.”

It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live--because Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age” he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo, shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of Apollo.

There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and are continually being re-made _by_ man. “There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ did _not_ originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves; that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a survival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations” of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question. The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest and tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for example, of the “widespread heaven of clear _wicked_ spirituality,” a spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be that which is danced _over_, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?” It is not Nietzsche’s fault that his books have stimulated “moles and clumsy dwarfs” to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves. He did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times that he wrote “for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and merrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.” And his writings are intended to teach such “laughing lions” to “become what they are,” unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them from below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with moralities, but asks each of his “higher men” to be true to his own. If he goes “beyond good and evil,” he is to carry with him his private scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in accordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to a higher, a more laughing perfection.

After the brief statement of these ideas, we can examine with better hope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche’s thought. It was not “systematic” in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to describe as “unsystematic” a method of thinking whose formula was as simple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the alchemists hoped to use the philosopher’s stone for the transmutation of metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number of statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they turned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became corrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will to Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave Morality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that is capable of moral interpretation are in some way changed. He was not content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this change a “transvaluation of values,” and wished thus to transvaluate all values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new representation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so Sisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse of his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a broken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer lightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His madness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method of thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him to think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a normal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which “races,” as engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as to allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for themselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill with hasty scene-painting the gaps in their construction. No man is capable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.

Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears, and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone. The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his remarks on self-development or war.

I have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now hammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in time with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements. When he wrote: “One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in this language an incalculable distance behind us,” he was not far from the truth. _Thus spake Zarathustra_, that Ossianic poem of a hero of thought, _Ecce Homo_, in the self-assertion of which is not only pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert itself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble essays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph of _The Birth of Tragedy_; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot but admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an aesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness; in reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where there is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us are valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full that we cannot commit “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; we cannot sit still. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn to more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun, wind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room.

In his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the thinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator. In childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters. When he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in discovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was usually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his life, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No man since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton desiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind their bows, skilful with the lute, learning to “repair the ruins of their first parents by regaining to know God aright,” until “they have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected knowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion”: Ascham with his longer list of exercises, “not only comely and decent, but also very necessary for a courtly gentleman to use,” and his more detailed scheme of learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them hoped to educate more than men of a city or of a nation, and for the service of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education of mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for lack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy pupils. “Companions did the creating one seek, and children of _his_ hope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he himself should first create them.”

In his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German universities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his attack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of the abuse of history, in his farewell to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he learnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought to educate “higher men” to be themselves, to free them from impediments to their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments and attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them should they show themselves. For his “higher men,” and for no others, he found the ballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace the misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their sakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of evil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life, theirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them he invented his watchword: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.” He did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent possible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the meantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant, daring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for us to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans.

I shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up in its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche’s teaching, the ultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary:

“Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then
they disparaged all high hopes.

Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the
day had hardly an aim.

‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings
of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it
gnaweth.

Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now.
A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.

But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in
thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”

The man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice of things to revere was not identical with his accuser’s. But in these sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more profound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions to authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all, to reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out, though most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a quest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed reverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth, of unsoiled ambition, of the flame alight before the altar of the potential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose continuance of life is the measure of each man’s nobility.

1912.

WALTER PATER

WALTER PATER

Walter Pater was brought up at Enfield, where he was near London, and knew from his earliest years “those quaint suburban pastorals” that gather “a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.” Something of that weighty atmosphere, and with it something of that rapid light, I find in his work, whether he is writing of the Italians of the Renaissance, of Montaigne, of the Greek philosophers, of the Dutch van Storck, or the German Carl of Rosenmold.

The external facts of his life may be shortly dismissed. He “was fond,” as a child, “of organising little processional pomps,” and a meeting with Keble strengthened for a time his boyish resolve to enter the Church. That part of his temperament which sought satisfaction in such a course found it, perhaps, in the hieratic character of his prose. He read Ruskin when he was nineteen, but his appreciations were too independent of Ruskin’s sanction to allow us to recognise the deep influence that is popularly attributed to the older man. Ruskin believed that he had “discovered” Botticelli, but he first spoke of him in the Oxford lectures of 1871, and Pater’s essay had been published in the _Fortnightly Review_ the year before. Pater went from the King’s School at Canterbury to Queen’s College, Oxford, took a Second Class in the Final Classical Schools, and, in 1864, was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He lived at Oxford thenceforward, with only occasional periods of residence in London. In different long vacations he knew Heidelberg, Dresden, and various parts of France, and, in 1869, four years before the publication of _The Renaissance_, travelled in Italy. He died at Oxford after a life of unhurried labour on July 30, 1894.

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....”

“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.

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.