And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a certain occasion advised Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. Pater is a dangerous guide for students. This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Mr. Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare during the days when Pater was slowly producing one book every few years--he wrote five in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two a year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The principal accusation brought against the Pater method of work and the Pater style is that it is lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase, "it is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, appears not more than a half dozen times in its full flowering during the course of a century. The French write all but faultless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go to Ruskin, Pater, and Newman. When we say: "Let us write simple, straightforward English," we are setting a standard that has been reached of late years only by Thackeray, Newman, and few besides. There are as many victims of the "natural English" formula as there are of the artificial formula of a Pater or a Stevenson. The former write careless, flabby, colourless, undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the _cliché_ is king of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine writing," are more easily detected.
Now, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural" style. Even Newman confesses to laborious days, though he wrote with the idea uppermost, and with no thought of the style. Renan, perfect master, disliked the idea of teaching "style"--as if it could be taught!--yet he worked over his manuscripts. We all know the Flaubert case. With Pater one must not rush to the conclusion that because he produced slowly and with infinite pains, he was all artificiality. Prose for him was a fine art. He would no more have used a phrase coined by another man than he would have worn his hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his ideas the grave and lovely phrases we envy and admire. Prose--"cette ancienne et très jalouse chose," as it was called by Stéphane Mallarmé--was for Pater at once a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid "poetic-prose," the great stillness of his style--atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet undertones--is always in the rhythm of prose. Speed is absent; the _tempo_ is usually lenten; brilliance is not pursued; but there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp and power. The sentences uncoil their many-coloured lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that occasionally confuses; for compensation we are given newly orchestrated harmonies, as mordant, as salient, and as strange as some chords in the music of Chopin, Debussy and Richard Strauss. Sane it always is--simple seldom. And, as Symons observes: "Under the soft and musical phrases an inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well. Link is added silently but faultlessly to link; the argument marches, carrying you with it, while you fancy you are only listening to the music with which it keeps step." It is very personal, and while it does not make melody for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it clothes. Read aloud Ruskin and then apply the same vocal test--Flaubert's procedure--to Pater, and the magnificence of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will make it captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, more subtle, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in eloquence slightly muffled, his last manner hinted that he had sought for newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, employing his own words concerning another theme: "It is a beauty wrought from within,... the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions."