Micro-post #153: The Victorian critic Walter Pater

I have a fondness for finding out about people who were once celebrated but are now forgotten, usually due to falling out of fashion. Stumbling across the once-popular critic Walter Pater (basically the father of Aestheticism from a critical viewpoint) while thumbing through a copy of Gateway to the Great Books is a good example of this. I've only read a tiny portion of his work after doing this but he's got a style that's pretty smooth compared to the starchiness that usually puts me off of the Victorians, so I want to boost the signal a little bit for him here. The book where I found him has a good brief description of what you can find and I'll repost his famous "Conclusion" from The Renaissance (1873) as a sampler, followed by more resources:

An illustration of Pater while he was a young professor at Brasenose College

Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1894)

Walter Pater was born in England on August 4, 1839. His father, Richard, came from a Dutch family and was born in New York; he had moved to England several years before Walter’s birth. Walter was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury, and at Queen’s College, Oxford. He remained at Oxford as a private tutor until 1864, when he was elected a fellow of Brasenose College. In 1868 his essay Aesthetic Poetry appeared in the Fortnightly Review; it was followed by critical essays on Leonardo, Pico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and others. These were collected in a volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which appeared in 1873. The celebrated “Conclusion” to this work is reprinted below.

Pater now became the center of a small circle of critics and aestheticians; the Pre-Raphaelites were among his friends. He published a novel, Marius the Epicurean, in 1885. This was hailed by his followers as the gospel of a new movement; it advocated devotion to an aesthetic ideal of life, and its perfection of style and calm elevation of tone lent force to the claim. Pater continued to write, publishing a series of philosophical essays in fictional form in 1887 called Imaginary Portraits, and in 1893 the critical work Plato and Platonism. In his later life Pater returned to the religious fervor of his youth, and it is said that if he had lived he might have taken orders. He died, however, on July 30, 1894, at the age of fifty-four. Two volumes of his essays and a novel were published after his death, and the collected edition of his writings appeared in 1901.

The highest goal of human beings, according to Plato and Aristotle, is disinterested intellectual contemplation. For Epicurus and Lucretius, the ideal of life was mild pleasure exempt from pain and trouble. Neither ideal, as Pater saw, excluded a certain intensity of experience. Intellectual contemplation was for him no mere passive beholding of truth; it also involved the joy of discovery. There was an exquisite poise and ardor in the gentle, undemanding friendships of the Epicureans, and courage in their acceptance of nature, which was conceived to be indifferent to man and his fate.

Pater developed and exaggerated this element in Epicureanism in his Marius the Epicurean. In Plato’s doctrine, Pater emphasized the soul’s reckless ascent to the highest truth and beauty and to the most intense experience. What gives value to life, he insisted, are the ecstasies, the high moments of realization. Humdrum virtues and mediocre achievements are a weariness. “Hitch your wagon to a star,” as Emerson said. Think nothing of the sacrifice; be contented only with the finest—the finest phrase, the finest composition and color—the most consummate style in whatever you do.

The Renaissance was a subject to Pater’s taste. Never before in history, except for a short period in Athens, had so many geniuses accumulated in one small peninsula. In spite of the suffering due to disease, internal wars, and invasions, life reached a feverish pitch of creative achievement. Pater could point to Renaissance Italy as a living model of his ideal.

In the “Conclusion” of this book, he tells us that the way to success in life is to pass quickly from ecstasy to ecstasy. It is “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.” Like Rousseau, in his Émile, Pater thinks it is the forming of habits which robs us of spontaneity. If we are to maintain ecstasy, he says, we must avoid these stereotypes.

- from Gateway to the Great Books, Vol. 10

"Conclusion" from Pater's The Renaissance (1873)

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them—a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour from the wall,—the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest,—but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

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 well 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. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: 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 of art 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.

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