| Selections from
The Renaissance:
Studies in Art and Poetry
By Walter Pater
Preface (1st edition)
"Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove "
Many attempts have been made by writers on
art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in
the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value
of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and
penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little
to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate
between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use
words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning
than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities
presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it
becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To
define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms
possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula, but the
formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation
of it, is the aim of the true student of æsthetics.
"To see the object as in itself it
really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true
criticism whatever, and in æsthetic criticism the first step towards
seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it
really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with
which æsthetic criticism deals --music, poetry, artistic and
accomplished forms of human life-- are indeed receptacles of so many
powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many
virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging
personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What
effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so,
what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its
presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions
are the original facts with which the æsthetic critic has to do;
and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must
realise such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who
experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the
discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with
the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact
relation to truth or experience --metaphysical questions, as unprofitable
as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as
being, unanswerable or not, of no interest to him.
The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which
he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind.
Conclusion
Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chorei kai ouden
menei.
Pater's translation: "[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains." Plato, Cratylus 402A
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 those 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 waste and repairing of the brain under 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 in many currents; 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 flame-like 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, the gradual fading of colour from the wall --movements of
the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in
apparent rest-- but the race of the midstream, 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 play upon
these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive
force seems suspended like some 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
into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already
reduced to a group 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 further
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 to, 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 to a life of constant 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 to 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 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, gem-like
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 two persons, things, situations,
seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp 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
sense, 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
very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing 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 of what is only conventional, has no
real claim upon us.
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in
him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always
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 condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence
of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve --les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have
an interval, and then our place knows no more. Some spend this
interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest, at least
among "the children of the 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 a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the
various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise,
which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion
--that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied
consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of
beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to
you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to
your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
--1868
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