Walter Pater Quotes

“Unless a man write with his whole nature concentrated upon his subject he is unlikely to take hold of another man. For that man will read, not as a scholar, a philologist, a word-fancier, but as a man with all his race, age, class, and personal experience brought to bear on the matter.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“The most and the greatest of man's powers are as yet little known to him, and are scarcely more under his control than the weather: he cannot keep a shop with- out trusting somewhat to his unknown powers, nor can he write books except such as are no books. It appears to have been Pater's chief fault, or the cause of his faults, that he trusted those powers too little.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“The more we know of any man the more singular he will appear, and nothing so well represents his singularity as style. Literature is further divided in outward seeming from speech by what helps to make it in fact more than ever an equivalent of speech. It has to make words of such a spirit, and arrange them in such a manner, that they will do all that a speaker can do by innumerable gestures and their innumerable shades, by tone and pitch of voice, by speed, by pauses, by all that he is and all that he will become. ' Is it wonderful,' asks Newman, after quoting Shakespeare's lines on the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling ' and * the poet's pen ' giving ' to airy nothing a local habitation and a name ':

'Is it wonderful that that pen of his should sometimes be at fault for a while — that it should pause, write, erase, re -write, amend, complete, before he satisfies himself that his language has done justice to the conceptions which his mind's eye contemplated?

‘In this point of view, doubtless, many or most writers are elaborate ; and those certainly not the least whose style is furthest removed from ornament, being simple and natural, or vehement, or severely business-like and practical. . . .”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“The reason why Professor Earle was pleased with this Prose Diction, and why Mr. W. B. Yeats believes that 'in this century he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves nothing,' is that men understand now the im- possibility of speaking aloud all that is within them, and if they do not speak it, they cannot write as they speak. The most they can do is to write as they would speak in a less solitary world. A man cannot say all that is in his heart to a woman or another man. The waters are too deep between us. We have not the confidence in what is within us, nor in our voices. Any man talking to the deaf or in dark- ness will leave unsaid things which he could say were he not compelled to shout, or were it light; or perhaps he will venture once — even twice— and a silence or a foolish noise prohibits him. But the silence of solitude is kindly; it allows a man to speak as if there were another in the world like himself; and in very truth, out of the multitudes, in the course of years, one or two may come, or many, who can enter that solitude and converse with him, inspired by him to confidence and articulation. Wisely did Quintilian argue against dictation, that ‘privacy is rendered impossible by it; and that a spot free from witnesses and the deepest possible silence are the most desirable for persons engaged writing, no one can doubt. You are not therefore necessarily to listen to those who think that groves and woods are the most proper places for study. ... To me, assuredly, such retirement seems rather conducive to pleasure than an incentive to literary exertion. Demosthenes acted more wisely, who secluded himself in a place where no voice could be heard, and no prospect contemplated, that his eyes might not oblige his mind to attend to anything else besides his business. As to those who study by lamplight, therefore, let the silence of the night, the closed chamber, and a single light, keep them, as it were, wholly in seclusion. . . .”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“We do not see the grey working day, the cap and gown, the note-books, the feet burning from the pavements of picture galleries, but things ' that set the spirit free for a moment,' ' stirring of the senses/ ' strange dyes,' ' strange colours and curious odours,' ' work of the artist's hands,' ' passionate attitudes.' It is not the style of ecstasy such as can be seen in Jefferies' Story of My Heart, or Sterne's Journal to Eliza, or Keats' last letter to Fanny Brawne. Hardly does it appear to be the style of remembered ecstasy as in Traherne's Centuries of Meditation or Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. It is free from traces of experience. All is subtilised, intellectualised, ' casting off all debris.' It is a polished cabinet of collections from history, nature, and art ; objects detached from their settings but almost never without being integrated afresh by Pater's careful arrangement, whether they are pictures, books, landscapes or personalities. It fulfils Pater's own condition of art by putting its own ' happy world ' in place of ' the meaner world of our common days.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“Above all, it is choice. Pater is at all points an eclectic. Several times he insists upon the necessity of separating what is touched with ' intense and individual power' in a man's work from what has ' almost no character at all.' In art, in life, the best of whatever kind will delight him. He loves the spectacle of 'brilliant sins and exquisite amusements.' The strong, the magnificent, the saintly, the beautiful, the cruel, the versatile, the intense, the gay, the brilliant, the weary, the sad-coloured, everything but the dull, delights him. From religion, philosophy, poetry, art, Nature, human life, he summons what is rich and strange. He delivers it in choicest language because it has to be worthy of his own choicest moments of enjoyment. For here also he is an eclectic, ignoring the ordinary, the dull, the trite.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“His very words are to be seen, not read aloud ; for if read aloud they betray their artificiality by a lack of natural expressive rhythm.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater

“He avoided obscurity more and more, by dealing chiefly with the concrete and with the ideas and images of other men. The stiffness, the lack of an emotional rhythm in separate phrases, and of progress in the whole, the repellent preoccupation with an impersonal and abstract kind of perfection, did not disappear. The rarity of blank verse in his prose is the chief mark of its unnaturalness. When his prose sounds well it is with a pure sonority of words that is seldom related to the sense. He expresses himself not by sounds, but by images, ideas, and colours.”
― Edward Thomas, Walter Pater