CRUSHED VIOLETS

“Good God! I forgot the violets!” exclaimed Walter Savage Landor, after he had thrown his cook out of the window. This happened at Fiesole, near Florence, and within one year of a century ago. The great prose master had a rather excitable temperament, as Charles Dickens has testified. (The novelist put him in Bleak House as Boythorn—“with the genius and much else left out,” as Havelock Ellis says.) Landor dearly loved his flowers, and in his dismay he gave birth to a classic phrase. Nowadays we would gladly put a chef on the throne, so debased has become the world’s cuisine. But Landor was an aristocrat masquerading as a fierce democrat and his gesture was a typical one, and in the gentlemanly interest; we might say a gentleman’s prerogative, one that has gone quite out of fashion.

I am minded of his despairing cry when I think of Walter Pater. A member of the delicious Hermione’s family, indelibly recorded by Don Marquis, asked me once upon a time if the prose of Pater didn’t remind me of crushed violets. I related then and there the adventure of Landor’s cook and the flowerbed. Her answer threw much light on her mentality: “I wonder what the cook said?” she asked. But Pater prose and crushed violets! For the life of me I can’t bridge this gulf of the dissimilar. Some of Whistler is an indigestion of strawberries and cream; but Pater and violets! Walter Pater wasn’t as “precious,” as insipid, as his imitators.

On a certain occasion Matthew Arnold advised Frederic Harrison to “flee Carlylese as the very devil,” and doubtless would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. It is true Pater is dangerous for students. This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Sir Walter Raleigh’s monograph—the best we know of; Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on the technical elements of style is too technical, valuable as it is—has been worn threadbare from Aristotle to Renton and his Logic of Style. Pater produced slowly—he wrote five books in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two every year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The chief accusation brought against the Pater method of working and his consequent style is its lack of spontaneity; it is not a natural style. But a “natural style,” so called, is not encountered in its full flowering more than a half dozen times during the course of a century; perhaps that figure is an exaggeration. The French write all but flawless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France we must go to Ruskin, Newman, and Pater. When we say, “Let us write simple, straightforward English,” we are setting a standard that has been reached only by Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and how few others? There are as many victims of the “natural English” formula as there are of the “artificial” formula of Pater and Stevenson. The first-named write careless, flabby, colorless, undistinguished, lean commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliché is lord of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of affected “fine writing,” are more easily detected and denounced by purists, pedants, and other sultry professorial persons. A master, Renan, disliked the teaching of “style” per se—as if the secret could be imparted—yet he toiled over his manuscripts. We recall the Flaubert case. With Pater one should not rush to the conclusion, because he produced slowly, that he was of an artificiality all compact. For him prose was a fine art. He could no more have used a phrase coined by another than he could have worn the other man’s hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his themes the grave and lovely phrases we so envy and admire. Prose—“cette ancienne et très jalouse chose,” as it was described by Stéphane Mallarmé—for Pater was at once a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid “poetic-prose,” the stillness of his style—atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet undertones—is always in the true rhythm of prose. Speed is absent. The tempo is usually lenten. Brilliancy is not pursued; there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp. The sentences uncoil their many-colored lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that occasionally confuse; for compensation we are given harmonies newly orchestrated, as salient, as mordant, and as subtly rare as chords in the music of Brahms or Debussy. Sane prose it always is; but seldom simple. It is extremely personal, and while it may not make music for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it garbs. Read Ruskin aloud and then apply the same vocal test to Pater, and the magnificent harmonies of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will make your ear captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in eloquence slightly muffled, the last manner of Pater hinted at newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, quoting his own words concerning another theme: “It is beauty wrought from within, ... the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”

The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Sir Thomas Browne’s richer and full of flashing conceits; there are deeper organ tones in De Quincey, and Ruskin excels in effects, rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is more sinuous, subtle, more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it is, sometimes, and its rich polyphony palls if one is not in the mood, and in greater measure than the prose of classic masters, for the world is older and Pater was often weary of life. But suggestions of morbidity may be found in every writer from Plato to Dante, from Dante to Shakespeare and Goethe. It is but the faint spice of mortality which lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures. Beautiful art is always challenged as corrupting. There may be a grain of truth in the accusation. Man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art was invented by him to console, to disquiet, to arouse. Art may be a dangerous adventure and also an anodyne, like religion. And unhappily we are losing our taste for adventuring amidst dangerous ideas. Once deprived of moral self-determination, of the right of private judgment, man soon relapses into a vegetable existence. Whenever a new poet or philosopher appears he is straightway accused of tampering with the moral currency. This is only mediocrity’s mode of adjusting too marked mental disproportions. Difference engenders hatred. In this period, when art and literature are violently despised and persecuted, do not let us be frightened by the word “wicked.” For my part, as an old practitioner in literary and artistic poisons, I have never encountered a book or a picture or a sonata that was so immoral as to kill at twenty paces. So let us cheer up, read Pater, Baudelaire, and the Bible—from which they derive—and blench not before the dissonantal batteries of the Neo-Scythian composers.

There is another Pater, one far removed from the weaver of colored silken phrases. If he recalls the richness of Keats in the texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Spencer. There are essays of his as cold, as logically adamant, and as tortuous as sentences in the Synthetic Philosophy. Luckily his tendency to abstract reasoning was subdued by the humanism of his temper. There are not many “purple panels” in his prose; “purple” in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no “fringes of the north star” style. He never wrote in sheer display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern writing he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, not to mention those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, Botticelli, Joachim du Bellay. Even the newly gathered minor essays, slight as they are in theme and treatment, reveal the master.

Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work, often the artist for art’s sake, he may never trouble the main currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers, a critic for critics. Little books may have their destiny. Pater was a thinker whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer of a polyphonic prose-music which echoes a harmonious adagio heard within the spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the multicolored windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favorite contention of his that all the arts aspire toward the condition of music. This idea is the keynote of Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius the Epicurean, carried, his life long, “in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul.” And yet——!