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ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
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ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
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have preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-
text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek,
it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a
Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater
and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
CONTENTS
1. English Literature: 1-16
2. Amiel's "Journal Intime": 17-37
3. Browning: 39-51
4. "Robert Elsmere": 53-70
5. Their Majesties' Servants: 71-88
6. Wordsworth: 89-104
7. Mr. Gosse's Poems: 105-118
8. Ferdinand Fabre: 119-134
9. The "Contes" of M. Augustin Filon: 135-149
ESSAYS FROM 'THE GUARDIAN'
WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume
originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this
volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included
any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first
substantive page.
I. ENGLISH LITERATURE
FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
[3] THE making of an anthology of English prose is what must have
occurred to many of its students, by way of pleasure to themselves,
or of profit to other persons. Such an anthology, the compass and
variety of our prose literature being considered, might well follow
exclusively some special line of interest in it; exhibiting, for
instance, what is so obviously striking, its imaginative power, or
its (legitimately) poetic beauty, or again, its philosophical
capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's well-considered Specimens of English
Prose Style, from Malory to Macaulay (Kegan Paul), a volume, as we
think, which bears fresh witness to the truth of the old remark that
it takes a scholar indeed to make a [4] good literary selection, has
its motive sufficiently indicated in the very original "introductory
essay," which might well stand, along with the best of these extracts
from a hundred or more deceased masters of English, as itself a
document or standard, in the matter of prose style. The essential
difference between poetry and prose--"that other beauty of prose"--in
the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of
the sort of prose he prefers:--that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden. It
is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great importance both for the
writer and the critic; in England especially, where, although (as Mr.
Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction of an imperfectly
informed French critic of our literature) the radical distinction
between poetry and prose has ever been recognized by its students,
yet the imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the richest of our
purely intellectual gifts, has been apt to invade the province of
that tact and good judgment, alike as to matter and manner, in which
we are not richer than other people. Great poetry and great prose,
it might be found, have most of their qualities in common. But [5]
their indispensable qualities are different, or even opposed; and it
is just the indispensable qualities of prose and poetry respectively,
which it is so necessary for those who have to do with either to bear
ever in mind. Order, precision, directness, are the radical merits
of prose thought; and it is more than merely legitimate that they
should form the criterion of prose style, because within the scope of
those qualities, according to Mr. Saintsbury, there is more than just
the quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare sermo pedestris.
Acting on language, those qualities generate a specific and unique
beauty--"that other beauty of prose"--fitly illustrated by these
specimens, which the reader needs hardly be told, after what has been
now said, are far from being a collection of "purple patches."
Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader
will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made
to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose
rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those
rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied
examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done
in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly
prosaic merit--their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a
structure primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose
structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been
always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers
here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty
and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and
incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate
prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of
Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining
the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the
prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France":
and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and
prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such
writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which
the story of our prose literature divides itself. And Mr. Saintsbury
has his well-timed, practical suggestions, upon a survey of them.
[7] If the invasion of the legitimate sphere of prose in England by
the spirit of poetry, weaker or stronger, has been something far
deeper than is indicated by that tendency to write unconscious blank
verse, which has made it feasible to transcribe about one-half of
Dickens's otherwise so admirable Barnaby Rudge in blank-verse lines,
a tendency (outdoing our old friend M. Jourdain) commoner than Mr.
Saintsbury admits, such lines being frequent in his favourite Dryden;
yet, on the other hand, it might be maintained, and would be
maintained by its French critics, that our English poetry has been
too apt to dispense with those prose qualities, which, though not the
indispensable qualities of poetry, go, nevertheless, to the making of
all first-rate poetry--the qualities, namely, of orderly structure,
and such qualities generally as depend upon second thoughts. A
collection of specimens of English poetry, for the purpose of
exhibiting the achievement of prose excellences by it (in their
legitimate measure) is a desideratum we commend to Mr. Saintsbury.
It is the assertion, the development, the product of those very
different indispensable qualities of poetry, in the presence [8] of
which the English is equal or superior to all other modern
literature--the native, sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and
irregular, imaginative power in English poetry from Chaucer to
Shakespeare, with which Professor Minto deals, in his Characteristics
of English Poets (Blackwood), lately reprinted. That his book should
have found many readers we can well understand, in the light of the
excellent qualities which, in high degree, have gone to the making of
it: a tasteful learning, never deserted by that hold upon
contemporary literature which is so animating an influence in the
study of what belongs to the past. Beginning with an elaborate
notice of Chaucer, full of the minute scholarship of our day, he
never forgets that his subject is, after all, poetry. The followers
of Chaucer, and the precursors of Shakespeare, are alike real persons
to him--old Langland reminding him of Carlyle's "Gospel of Labour."
The product of a large store of reading has been here secreted anew
for the reader who desires to see, in bird's-eye view, the light and
shade of a long and varied period of poetic literature, by way of
preparation for Shakespeare, [9] (with a full essay upon whom the
volume closes,) explaining Shakespeare, so far as he can be explained
by literary antecedents.
That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but
certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the
typical, prose of Dryden. In Dryden, and his followers through the
eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and
irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but
cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only
because an age had come--the age of a negative, or agnostic
philosophy--in which men's minds must needs be limited to the
superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a
positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way
of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's
moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and
manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and
harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's
Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful
"Life." The well-known qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original
work are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and discrimination we
may look for in a collection like this, in which the random
lightnings of the first of the essayists are grouped under certain
heads--"Character Sketches," "Tales and Incidents," "Manners and
Fashions," and the like--so as to diminish, for the general reader,
the scattered effect of short essays on a hundred various subjects,
and give a connected, book-like character to the specimens.
Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's
literature had his subjectivities--into books. What a survival of
one long-past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to
London"! What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct
claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that
truthfulness, when he writes, for instance:
"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the
charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a
link."
[11] It was one of his peculiarities, he tells us, to live by the eye
far more than by any other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an
Englishman), and this is what he sees at the early daily service then
common in some City churches. Among those who were come only to see
or be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
had gone to sleep with expectation of it."
The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic
manners of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way beneath,
such a picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really
deal with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still
merely aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or
little, finds what it has in common, and directly shows itself up.
The natural strength of such literature will, of course, be in the
line of its tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness. To
the unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style! Steele is,
perhaps, the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he
belongs; he abounds in felicities of impulse. Yet who can help
feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is
the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not
imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in
Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men
of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make
them, in any sense, forget themselves.
No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change
which was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our
own; that sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of
intellectual interest, which has many times torn and distorted
literary style, even with those best able to comprehend its laws. In
Mrs. Leicester's School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse
(Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and annotated certain remains
of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to lie unknown to the present
generation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible reprints. The
story of the Odyssey, abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for
children--of all ages--will speak for itself. But the garland of
graceful stories which gives name to the volume, told by a party of
girls on the evening of their assembling at school, are in the
highest degree characteristic of the brother and sister who were ever
so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and
people. The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated
their natural community of interest had, one might think, something
to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous
writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the
way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very different from
that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But one cannot
forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
Ainger here reprints. Would that he could have reprinted it as
originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor! Lamb,
like Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a
precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age.
But it might have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and
feeling, on the strength of which they too are borne upward, would
sometimes overflow barriers. And so it happens that these simple
stories are touched, much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with
tragic power. Dealing with the beginnings of imagination in the
minds of children, they record, with the reality which a very
delicate touch preserves from anything lugubrious, not those merely
preventible miseries of childhood over which some writers have been
apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood with the great and
inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth,
with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic
greatness, to the discipline of the heart. Let the reader begin with
the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what Mr. Ainger
especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his sister
Mary.
The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely
to adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and
limited, [15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne. Yet Mr.
Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style,
English literature has much to do. Well, the good quality of an age,
the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it
is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.
Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned
language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone
a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of
language towards their own. If there be a weakness in Mr.
Saintsbury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a
little too independently of matter. And there are still some who
think that, after all, the style is the man; justified, in very great
varieties, by the simple consideration of what he himself has to say,
quite independently of any real or supposed connection with this or
that literary age or school. Let us close with the words of a most
[16] versatile master of English--happily not yet included in Mr.
Saintsbury's book--a writer who has dealt with all the perturbing
influences of our century in a manner as classical, as idiomatic, as
easy and elegant, as Steele's:
"I wish you to observe," says Cardinal Newman, "that the mere dealer
in words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is
embellishing, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order;
whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich
visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks
or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and
appropriate to the speaker."
17th February 1886
II. AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"
Amiel's Journal. The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel.
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Two vols. Macmillans.
[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much
curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book
has already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's
translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious
lovers of good literature. Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English
version reads like an excellent original English work, and gives
fresh proof that the work of translation, if it is to be done with
effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward,
original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-
denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public. In
this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for
the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able
and interesting essay of seventy pages on Amiel's life and
intellectual position. And certainly there is much in the book, thus
effectively presented to the English reader, to attract those who
interest themselves in the study of the finer types of human nature,
of literary expression, of metaphysical and practical philosophy; to
attract, above all, those interested in such philosophy, at points
where it touches upon questions of religion, and especially at the
present day.
Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both
his parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little
bare and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in
him early. His student days coming to an end, the years which
followed, from 1842 to 1848--Wanderjahre, in which he visited
Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany--seem to
have been the happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at
Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of
outward events. He published some volumes of verse; to the last
apparently still only feeling after his true literary metier. Those
last seven years were a long struggle against the disease which ended
his life, consumption, at the age of fifty-three. The first entry in
his Journal is in 1848. From that date to his death, a period of
over twenty-five years, this Journal was the real object of all the
energies of his richly-endowed nature: and from its voluminous sheets
his literary executors have selected the deeply interesting volumes
now presented in English.
With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy life--
melancholy with something not altogether explained by the somewhat
pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive
tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very
early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile
himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from
sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a
thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern
spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied
intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many
very various types of contemporary ability. The use of his book to
cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by
which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality
of their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write
a page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and
attainment which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have
sufficed for an effective volume. Continually, in the Journal, we
pause over things that would rank for beauties among widely differing
models of the best French prose. He has said some things in Pascal's
vein not unworthy of Pascal. He had a right to compose "Thoughts":
they have the force in them which makes up for their unavoidable want
of continuity.
But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the
surface of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary
manner, we discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity
or complexity of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an
adequate literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable,
interest for the modern reader. Senancour and Maurice de Guerin in
one, seem to have been supplemented here by a larger experience, a
far greater education, than either of them had attained to. So
multiplex is the result that minds of quite opposite type might well
discover in these pages their own special thought or humour, happily
expressed at last (they might think) in precisely that just shade of
language themselves had searched for in vain. And with a writer so
vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to
present themselves as so many contending persons. The perplexed
experience gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the
animation, of a long dialogue; only, the disputants never part
company, and there is no real conclusion. "This nature," he
observes, of one of the many phases of character he has discovered in
himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. It
is one of my departments. It is not the whole of my territory, the
whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten men in me,
according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion; and, in my
restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."
Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently
opposed personalities, which the attentive reader may define for
himself; compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct
also by each other. There is the man, in him and in these pages, who
would be "the man of disillusion," only that he has never really been
"the man of desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double
weariness about him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene,
even to Werther, and, on our first introduction to him, we might
think that we had to do only with one more of the vague
"renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction,
and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were
picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all,
essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of
first-rate importance in literature. Taken for what it is worth, the
expression of this mood--the culture of ennui for its own sake--is
certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the
completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood
into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction
to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is also certainly in
evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far stronger person,
in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for
the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all that is
puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
certainly find a Church.
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