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That The Mere Matter Of A Poem, For Instance--its Subject, Its Given Incidents Or Situation; That The Mere Matter Of A Picture--the Actual Circumstances Of An Event, The Actual Topography Of A Landscape--should Be Nothing Without The Form, The Spirit Of The Handling, That This Form, This Mode Of Handling, Should Become An End In Itself, Should Penetrate Every Part Of The Matter;mthis Is What All Art Constantly Strives After, And Achieves In Different Degrees.

-Walter Pater

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That The Mere Matter

Walter Pater

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That The Mere Matter Of A Poem, For Instance--its Subject, Its Given Incidents Or Situation; That The Mere Matter Of A Picture--the Actual Circumstances Of An Event, The Actual Topography Of A Landscape--should Be Nothing Without The Form, The Spirit Of The Handling, That This Form, This Mode Of Handling, Should Become An End In Itself, Should Penetrate Every Part Of The Matter;mthis Is What All Art Constantly Strives After, And Achieves In Different Degrees.

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For Us Necessity Is Not As Of Old An Image Without Us, With Whom We Can Do Warfare; It Is A Magic Web Woven Through And Through Us, Like That Magnetic System Of Which Modern Science Speaks, Penetrating Us With A Network Subtler Than Our Subtlest Nerves, Yet Bearing In It The Central Forces Of The World.

Has Nature Connected Itself Together By No Bond, Allowed Itself To Be Thus Crippled, And Split Into The Divine And Human Elements? Well! There Are Certain Divine Powers Of A Middle Nature, Through Whom Our Aspirations Are Conveyed To The Gods, And Theirs To Us. A Celestial Ladder, A Ladder From Heaven To Earth.

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 To Be Seen In Them By The Finest Senses?

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Why Do You Always Write Poetry? Why Do You Not Write Prose? Prose Is So Much More Difficult.

To Burn Always With This Hard, Gemlike Flame, To Maintain This Ecstasy, Is Success In Life. ... 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.

What Is Important, Then, Is Not That The Critic Should Possess A Correct Abstract Definition Of Beauty For The Intellect, But A Certain Kind Of Temperament, The Power Of Being Deeply Moved By The Presence Of Beautiful Objects.

A Sudden Light Transfigures A Trivial Thing, A Weather-vane, A Windmill, A Winnowing Flail, The Dust In The Barn Door; A Moment - And The Thing Has Vanished, Because It Was Pure Effect; But It Leaves A Relish Behind It, A Longing That The Accident May Happen Again.

The Way To Perfection Is Through A Series Of Disgusts

A Very Intimate Sense Of The Expressiveness Of Outward Things, Which Ponders, Listens, Penetrates, Where The Earlier, Less Developed Consciousness Passed Lightly By, Is An Important Element In The General Temper Of Our Modern Poetry.

That Sense Of A Life In Natural Objects, Which In Most Poetry Is But A Rhetorical Artifice, Was, Then, In Wordsworth The Assertion Of What Was For Him Almost Literal Fact.

Great Passions May Give Us A Quickened Sense Of Life, Ecstasy And Sorrow Of Love, The Various Forms Of Enthusiastic Activity, Disinterested Or Otherwise, Which Comes Naturally To Many Of Us.

But When Reflexion Begins To Play Upon These Objects... Like Some Trick Of Magic Each Object Is Loosed Into A Group Of Impressions - Colour, Odour, Texture... And If We Continue To Dwell In Thought On This World... The Whole Scope Of Observation Is Dwarfed Into The Narrow Chamber Of The Individual Mind.

To Higher Or Lower Ends, They [the Majority Of Mankind] Move Too Often With Something Of A Sad Countenance, With Hurried And Ignoble Gait, Becoming, Unconsciously, Something Like Thorns, In Their Anxiety To Bear Grapes; It Being Possible For People, In The Pursuit Of Even Great Ends, To Become Themselves Thin And Impoverished In Spirit And Temper, Thus Diminishing The Sum Of Perfection In The World, At Its Very Sources.

In Truth, The Legitimate Contention Is, Not Of One Age Or School Of Literary Art Against Another, But Of All Successive Schools Alike, Against The Stupidity Which Is Dead To The Substance, And The Vulgarity Which Is Dead To Form.

To Burn Always With This Hard, Gem-like Flame, To Maintain This Ecstasy, Is Success In Life.

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All Art Does But Consist In The Removal Of Surplusage.

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Beauty, Like All Other Qualities Presented To Human Experience, Is Relative; And The Definition Of It Becomes Unmeaning And Useless In Proportion To Its Abstractness. To Define Beauty Not In The Most Abstract, But In The Most Concrete Terms Possible, Not To Find A Universal Formula For It, But The Formula Which Expresses Most Adequately This Or That Special Manifestation Of It, Is The Aim Of The True Student Of Aesthetics.

One Of The Most Beautiful Passages Of Rousseau Is That In The Sixth Book Of Confessions, Where He Describes The Awakening In Him Of The Literary Sense. Of Such Wisdom, The Poetic Passion, The Desire Of Beauty, The Love Of Art For Its Own Sake, Has Most.

To The Modern Spirit Nothing Is, Or Can Be Rightly Known, Except Relatively And Under Conditions.

Product Of A Myriad Various Minds And Contending Tongues, Compact Of Obscure And Minute Association, A Language Has Its Own Abundant And Often Recondite Laws, In The Habitual And Summary Recognition Of Which Scholarship Consists.

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All Art Constantly Aspires To The Condition Of Music....in Its Ideal, Consummate Moments, The End Is Not Distinct From The Means, The Form From The Matter, The Subject From The Expression; They Inhere In And Completely Saturate Each Other.

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.

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To Regard All Things And Principles Of Things As Inconstant Modes Or Fashions Has More And More Become The Tendency Of Modern Thought.

Through The Survival Of Their Children, Happy Parents Are Able To Think Calmly, And With A Very Practical Affection, Of A World In Which They Are To Have No Direct Share.

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All Art Constantly Aspires Towards The Condition Of Music.

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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.

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Such Discussions Help Us Very Little To Enjoy What Has Been Well Done In Art Or Poetry, To Discriminate Between What Is More And What Is Less Excellent In Them, Or To Use Words Like Beauty, Excellence, Art, Poetry, With A More Precise Meaning Than They Would Otherwise Have.

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