Part 12 (1/2)
its lost Atlantis. Well! It is for us to search it out; to take colour from its dim-lit under-world; to feed upon its wavering Sea-Lotus--and then, returning to the surface, to swim away, in search of other diving-grounds!
No Philosopher except Pater has dared to carry Esoteric Eclecticism quite as far as this. And, be it understood, he is no frivolous Dilettante. This draining the secret wine of the great embalmed Sarcophagi of Thought is his Life-Lure, his secret madness, his grand obsession. Walter Pater approaches a System of Metaphysical Thought as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleeping Nymph. On light-stepping, crafty feet he approaches--and the hand with which he twitches the sleeve of the sleeper is as soft as the flutter of a moth's wing. ”I do not like,” he said once, ”to be called a Hedonist. It gives such a queer impression to people who don't know Greek.”
Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the wayfaring of my patient academic duties, I speak about Pater, and ask me point-blank to tell them what his ”view-point”--so they are pleased to express it--”really and truly” was. Sweet reader, do you know the pain of these ”really and truly” questions? I try to answer in some blundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing in this world was certain or fixed; how everything ”flowed away”; how all that we touch or taste or see, vanished, changed its nature, became something else, even as we vanish, as the years go on, and change our nature and become something else. I try to explain how, for him, we are ourselves but the meeting-places of strange forces, journeying at large and by chance through a s.h.i.+fting world; how we, too, these very meeting-places of such forces, waver and flicker and s.h.i.+ft and are transformed, like dreams within dreams!
I try to explain how, this being so, and nothing being ”written in the sky” it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer, short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower, less easy, for ”the other person.”
And if my Innocents ask--as they do sometimes--Innocents are like that!--”Why must we consider the other person?” I answer--for no _reason,_ and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative; but simply because we have grown to be the sort of animal, the sort of queer fish, who _cannot_ do the things ”that he would”! It is not, I try to indicate, a case of conscience; it is a matter of taste; and there are certain things, when it comes to that point, which an animal possessed of such taste _cannot do,_ even though he desire to do them. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatures who happen to have been caught in the same ”gin” as ourself.
With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as with regard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute standard--even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream.
There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold ”Mathematic” of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well inspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us.
Beauty is not Mathematical; it is--if one may say so--physiological and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and pure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth and change than we sometimes would care to allow.
Walter Pater's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than when he deals with the _materials_ which artists use. And most of all, with _words,_ that material which is so stained and corrupted and outraged--and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses and what--so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!--they apprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold and silver; these--and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiable fingers--he handles with the reverence of a priest touching consecrated elements.
Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streams and tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all, for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than the others, and one is more apt to find one's self alone there.
Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Denys L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled G.o.d--has he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched white Flesh?--leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his pa.s.sion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their own too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic valley of dreams. Watteau's ”happy valley” is, indeed, sadder than our most crowded hours--how should it not be, when it is no ”valley” at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles?--but, though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!
And along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its fountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilight the s.h.i.+mmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and the despair in his smile! For him, too--for Gilles the Mummer--as for Antoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is not inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon it must be only a garden, ”only a garden of Lenotre, correct, ridiculous and charming.” For the lips of the Despair of Pierrot cannot always touch the lips of the Mockery of Columbine; in the end, the Ultimate Futility must turn them both to stone!
And, finally, that Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines ”we say to our friend” about Her who is ”older than the rocks on which she sits.”
What really makes Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip, in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our youth! ”Carry, O Youths and Maidens,” he seems to say. ”Carry with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no rain-drops or bryony-dew, or floating gossamer-seed, fall into it and spoil its taste. For it is all you have, and it cannot last long!”
He is a great writer, because from him we may learn the difficult and subtle art of drinking the cup of life _so as to taste every drop._
One could expatiate long upon his att.i.tude to Christianity--his final desire to be ”ordained Priest”--his alternating pieties and incredulities. His deliberate clinging to what ”experience” brought him, as the final test of ”truth,” made it quite easy for him to dip his arms deep into the Holy Well. He might not find the Graal; he might see nothing there but his own shadow! What matter? The Well itself was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worth long summer days spent dreaming over it--dreaming over it in the cloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness of the brutal World, that knows neither Apollo or Christ!
DOSTOIEVSKY
The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark pa.s.sage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat.
Everything that has been _forbidden,_ by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.
All that one has _felt,_ but has not dared to think; all that one has _thought,_ but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.
There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, _will_ not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not _want_ said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace?
What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarra.s.s? What matter? We _require_ embarra.s.sment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed c.h.i.n.ks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even _down there,_ where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodp.e.c.k.e.r's beak! They seem labouring beneath some pathetic vow, exacted by the Demons of our Fate, under terrible threats, only to reveal what will serve _their_ purpose! This applies as much to the Realists, with their traditional animal chemistry, as to the Idealists, with their traditional ethical dynamics. It applies, above all, to the interpreters of s.e.x, who, in their conventional grossness, as well as in their conventional discretion, bury such Ostrich heads in the sand!
The lucky-unlucky individual whose path this formidable writer crosses, quickly begins, as he reads page by page, to cry out in startled wonder, in terrified protest. This rending Night Hawk reveals just what one hugged most closely of all--just what one did _not_ confess! Such a person, reading this desperate ”clairvoyant,”
finds himself laughing and chuckling, under his breath, and _against his w.i.l.l.y_ over the little things there betrayed. It is not any more a case of enjoying with distant aesthetic amus.e.m.e.nt the general human spectacle. He himself is the one scratched and p.r.i.c.ked. He himself is the one so abominably tickled. That is why women--who have so mad a craving for the personal in everything--are especially caught by Dostoievsky. He knows them so fatally well. Those startling, contradictory feelings that make their capricious bosoms rise and fall, those feelings that they find so difficult themselves to understand, he drags them all into the light. The kind of delicate cruelty, that in others becomes something worse, refines itself in his magnetic genius into a cruelty of insight that knows no scruple. Nor is the reluctance of these gentle beings, so thrillingly betrayed, to yield their pa.s.sionate secrets, unaccompanied by pleasure. They suffer to feel themselves so exposed, but it is an exquisite suffering.
It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction with which we human beings feel ourselves _at the bottom,_ where we cannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequent than when we read Dostoievsky. And that is largely because he alone understands _the depravity_ _of the spirit,_ as well as of the flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will does not always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite as often its own laceration and destruction.
Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard to that twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms of unsatisfied desire, and where unspoken l.u.s.ts stretch forth pitiable hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional machinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express.
He expresses these, not in tedious a.n.a.lysis, but in the living cries, and gasps, and gestures, and fumblings and silences of his characters themselves. Who, like Dostoievsky, has shown the tragic a.s.sociation of pa.s.sionate love with pa.s.sionate hate, which is so frequent a human experience?
This monstrous _hate-love,_ caressing the bruises itself has made, and shooting forth a forked viper-tongue of cruelty from between the lips that kiss--has anyone but he held it fast, through all its Protean changes? I suppose, when one really thinks of it, at the bottom of every one of us lurk two _primary emotions_--vanity and fear. It is in their knowledge of the aberrations of these, of the mad contortions that these lead to, that the other writers seem so especially simple-minded. Over and over again, in reading Dostoievsky, one is positively seized by the throat with astonishment at the man's insight into the labyrinthian retreats of our secret pride--and of our secret fear. His characters, at certain moments, seem actually to spit gall and wormwood, as they tug at the quivering roots of one another's self-esteem. But this fermenting venom, this seething sc.u.m, is only the expression of what goes on below the surface every day, in every country.
Dostoievsky's Russians are cruelly voluble, but their volubility taps the evil humour of the universal human disease. Their thoughts are _our_ thoughts, their obsessions, _our_ obsessions. Let no one think, in his vain security, that he has a right to say: ”I have no part in this morbidity. I am different from these poor madmen.”
The curious nervous relief we experience as we read these books is alone a sufficient vindication. They relieve us, as well as trouble us, because in these pages we all confess what we have never confessed to anyone. Our self-love is outraged, but outraged with that strange accompaniment of thrilling pleasure that means an expiation paid, a burden lightened. Use the word ”degenerate” if you will. But in this sense we are all ”degenerates” for thus and not otherwise is woven the stuff whereof men are made.