Walter Pater

Walter Pater was born in 1839 in the East End of London where his father was a doctor. At the age of 14 he was sent to private school in Canterbury where he was influenced by the soaring beauty of the cathedral and the stylish art criticism of John Ruskin. Aged 19 he went up to Oxford where he took a degree in Literae Humaniores in 1862. Within a few years he began writing essays about poets and artists, including ground-breaking essays about Leonardo da Vinci (1869), Sandro Botticelli (1870) and Michelangelo (1871). He gathered these in his 1873 volume, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance had a big impact on the literary world because of 1) the length and thoroughness of the essays and 2) the exquisitely sensitive prose they were written in, prose which delicately describes the psychological impact of interacting with great works of art.

It is also a goldmine of literary quotes, for example the Leonardo essay contains the famous line that the Mona Lisa is ‘older than the rocks among which she sits’. The essay on ‘The School of Giorgione’, originally published in 1877 and added to the third edition of The Renaissance (in 1888), features Pater’s much-quoted saying that: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’

The Conclusion

Studies in the History of the Renaissance ended with a so-called Conclusion. As Pater’s biographer Michael Levey points out in his edition of Pater’s novel, ‘Marius the Epicurean’, the Conclusion is not really a conclusion at all, certainly not to a book of essays about the Renaissance. It is a free-standing essay in its own right.

The Conclusion is a miniature work of philosophy which takes as its starting point the swirl of impressions which make up the conscious mind: a drift of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, reduced to impressions ‘unstable, flickering, inconstant’, ‘ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality’ and ‘with the passage and dissolution of impressions…a continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.

Having described the weaving and unweaving of sensory information for a couple of paragraphs, Peter goes on to propose an ideal for living. Given the never-ending flux of sense data and the perceptions which they prompt in us and the impossibility of bursting through this flux to find any permanent structures or resting places, then it makes sense to live this life of sensations to the max: to seek to live where ‘the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy’.

He uses half a dozen phrases to describe the same basic idea – the quest to live and experience the most vivid sensations possible, but the one that is most quoted is To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

We should seek to have a ‘quickened, multiplied consciousness’ and the best way to achieve this is through a life of artistic appreciation, ‘the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake‘.

Quite obviously this is a deeply amoral and asocial idea. For most of recorded history, art and literature have been created with deeply moral messages in mind, reinforcing the values and norms of the society which produced it. The literature of ancient Greece and ancient Rome was fiercely judged by critics in terms of its social and moral impact and so was every literature up to and including the Victorians.

Pater’s very short essay is proposing a radical alternative, that art has no moral or social message whatsoever, and that the best way to live is simply to enjoy art for its own sake, enjoy beauty for beauty’s sake alone.

Here’s the full text of the Conclusion. I have added to it my own numbered headings and the bold (neither are in Pater’s original text) mainly to help me remember the structure and key points of the argument.

The Conclusion by Walter Pater (1868)

1. The external life

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 lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues 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 flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

2. The internal world

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 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 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 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.

3. Philosophy as observation

‘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 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?

4. Therefore, we must burn with ecstatic perceptions

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 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 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 very 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 of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

5. The aim of life is not to ‘learn’ or ‘mature’ or find The Truth, but to cram as many sensations as possible into our short span, purely for their own sake

One of the most beautiful passages 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 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 biased 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 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 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.

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Upon the essay’s publication, four things happened:

1) Pater was a tutor at Oxford and this slender essay was adopted as a manifesto and a creed by some of his students and their friends and quickly ramified out into the doctrine and critical theory known as Art for Art’s Sake which was then also christened ‘Aestheticism’.

2) This produced a backlash in Oxford’s authorities and Pater was deprived of a promised position as proctor of Balliol (although more recent scholarship suggests this was as a result of a scandal caused when a student handed over to the authorities homosexual love letters between Pater and a student).

3) Pater himself was dismayed by the impact his essay had on the rising generation (and on his career) and adopted radio silence. For the next 12 years he published nothing except a few discreet essays. And in the second edition of Studies in the History of the Renaissance he quietly omitted the Conclusion altogether, hoping nobody would notice.

4) But, also, Pater grew up. He came to think of the fervid promotion of a life of sensations as immature. He calmed down. He came to see life more as a question of carefully perceiving and distinguishing between perceptions rather then feverishly cramming in as many sensations as you can manage. When you think about it this is rather a schoolboy-let-loose-in-a-sweetshop philosophy of life. This maturity and sobriety may have mirrored a movement in his personal beliefs from an apparent amoral epicureanism back towards the Christian faith of his pious boyhood.

Whatever precisely it was that prompted the long silence, Pater finally broke it when, in 1885 he published a long novel, ‘Marius the Epicurean’. In the same year he published a new, third edition of The Renaissance, as he now called his collection of essays, and this time he allowed the Conclusion to be reincluded, but with a note:

This brief ‘Conclusion’ was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with the thoughts suggested by it.

Does ‘Marius the Epicurean’ deal more fully with the issues raised in the Conclusion? Sounds like an A-level English question. Read my review of ‘Marius the Epicurean’ (which I’m publishing on Wednesday) to find out.

Related links

• The Renaissance: Studies in Art And Poetry
• Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater (1885)
• Nineteenth century Britain reviews