WALTER HORATIO PATER (1839-1894)

Pater began his life-long academic career at King's School, Canterbury, from which he proceeded to Queen's College, Oxford, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1862. As an undergraduate Pater knew few men, devoting himself closely to books, especially to Greek literature, in which Benjamin Jowett gave him much encouragement. After graduation he was elected to the Old Mortality, an essay society, through which he came into contact with the stimulating personalities of T. H. Green, A. C. Swinburne, and others. In 1864, he was elected fellow of Brasenose College, and except for visits to the Continent and a short residence in London, he remained in Oxford for the rest of his life. In 1865, a sojourn in Italy gave Pater those impressions of Renaissance art that appear conspicuously in his later writing. The quiet poise of his life as Oxford tutor and author was disturbed by nothing more eventful than an occasional vacation tour in France or Germany.

Pater's most significant mission was in interpreting to his age the spirit of the Renaissance in art and literature. His first essays, which had begun to appear in periodicals in 1867, were collected and published in a considerable volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in 1873. In 1885 appeared Pater's finest single work. Marius the Epicurean, a historical romance expounding the best phases of Epicureanism. His Imaginary Portraits (1887) contains fine studies in philosophic fiction, and his Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889) reveals bits of his most subtle literary criticism. Plato and Platonism (1893) is a notable result of his early classical studies. Pater's somewhat painful seeking for precision of expression resulted in a style more delicate and rhythmical than direct and simple. His philosophy of temperance, discipline, and asceticism in art has had a permanent and refining influence upon English criticism.

STYLE

Since all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with

which this or that artist works, as the
sculptor with solid form, or the prose-
writer with the ordinary language of
men, are always liable to be discredited
by the facts of artistic production; and
while prose is actually found to be a
colored thing with Bacon, picturesque
with Livy and Carlyle, musical with
Cicero and Newman, mystical and inti-
mate with Plato and Michelet and Sir
Thomas Browne, exalted or florid, it may
be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be
useless to protest that it can be nothing
at all, except something very tamely and .
narrowly confined to mainly practical
ends a kind of good round-hand';
as useless as the protest that poetry
might not touch prosaic subjects as with
Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as
with Browning, or treat contemporary
life nobly as with Tennyson. In subor-
dination to one essential beauty in all
good literary style, in all literature as a
fine art, as there are many beauties of
poetry, so the beauties of prose are many,
and it is the business of criticism to

To

estimate them as such; as it is good in
the criticism of verse to look for those
hard, logical and quasi-prosaic excel-
lences which that too has, or needs.
find in the poem, amid the flowers, the
allusions, the mixed perspectives, of
Lycidas for instance, the thought, the
logical structure: how wholesome!
how delightful! as to identify in prose
what we call the poetry, the imaginative 10
power, not treating it as out of place
and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by
way of an estimate of its rights, that is,
of its achieved powers, there.

in- 15

Dryden, with the characteristic stinct of his age, loved to emphasize the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect from one whose poetry was so 20 prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaic excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all unconsciously, by many a scanning 25 line. Setting up correctness, that humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery of the relative pro- 3 noun. It might have been foreseen that, in the rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry he re- 4° garded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; 45 but, as the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between the literature of power and the literature of knowl- 50 edge,' in the former of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.

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Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition of 55 poetry to prose, as savoring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of the last century,

and with it the prejudice that there can be but one only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and prose, so far as either is really imaginative — certain conditions of true art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them the secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar excellences of either.

The line between fact and something quite different from external fact is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading. a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or will an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat from the actual world. In science, on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule, we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of painstaking; this good quality being involved in all skilled work' whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in selecting assert something of his own humor, something that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon molds his unwieldy material to a preconceived

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view. Livy, Tacitus, Michelet, moving
full of poignant sensibility amid the
records of the past, each, after his own
sense, modifies who can tell where and
to what degree?- and becomes some-
thing else than a transcriber; each, as
he thus modifies, passing into the domain
of art proper. For just in proportion
as the writer's aim, consciously or un-
consciously, comes to be the transcribing, 10
not of the world, not of mere fact, but
of his sense of it, he becomes an artist,
his work fine art; and good art (as I
hope ultimately to show) in proportion
to the truth of his presentment of that
sense; as in those humbler or plainer
functions of literature also, truth
truth to bare fact, there is the essence
of such artistic quality as they may have.
Truth! there can be no merit, no craft 20
at all, without that. And further, all
beauty is in the long run only fineness
of truth, or what we call expression, the
finer accommodation of speech to that
vision within.

That imaginative prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world results from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic variety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue, the really master currents of the present time incalculable - a condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse form, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century has been lawless verse; and secondly, an allpervading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, in15 volving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience an instrument of many stops, meditative, 25 observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will be not exclusively pedestrian' it will exert, in due measure, all the varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which,

-The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the molding 30 as in Cicero, or Michelet, or Newman, at

their best, gives its musical value to every syllable.

of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, 35 will have in mind, first of all, the scholar

Such is the matter of imaginative or 45 artistic literature - this transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms. It will be good literary art not because it is 50 brilliant or sober, or rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its representation of that sense, that soulfact, is true, verse being only one department of such literature, and im-55 aginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the modern world.

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he proposes to do

and the scholarly conscience - the male conscience in this matter, as we must think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent limits real scholarship to men. In his selfcriticism, he supposes always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matter he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws, the limitations of vocabulary,