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Page 25 text:
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tlb e Ibollness of Beauty il INSIGHT, insight through culture, into all that the present I moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its pres- ence. From the maxim of Life as the end of Life, followed, as a practical consequence, the desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising one ' s self in them, till one’s nature became one complete medium of reception, towards the vision — the ‘beatific vision,’ if we really cared to make it such — of our actual experience in the world .” — Walter Pater. These are words to brood over. They express the philosophy of one whose life was an art — the art of insight. ILe thought this life worth the devoted study of the artist. He made human exper- ience the matter of his art; and in his writings he has given, for those who will follow him, what he deems true education — “the conveyance of an art” — this art of insight into the wealth of meaning of the life that now is. Literature has been perme- ated with the doctrine of art for art’s sake ; but only when that ideal finds its processes in the stuff that life is made of, does it become deeply spiritual and vital. The art that finds its light and shade amid the comedy and tragedy of human concerns, and seeks to mingle their colors significantly, makes for beauty that is perennial. Walter Pater’s ideal was the finest possible degree of perfec- tion ; and for him perfection meant completeness, the complete
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Page 26 text:
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16 SENSE AND NONSENSE. development of our finest human capacities. The senses were to be “ a wonderful machinery of observation,” through which to col- lect material for “ a life of various yet select sensation.” A beam of yellow light was a never failing source of complete delight to him. The fog was redeemed for him “ because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimes upon the chimneys.” “ The coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church,” “the angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow,” “ the sweet carvings of the lips of those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or sang,” — to these things ' he tells us, lie owed “ certain inward lights under which things most naturally presented them- selves to him.” And to us he communicates his art, so that we realize, with a new intelligence, how all these things “ become parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound” — the chain that is far stronger than precept or creed or statute, either to make or to mar the beauty of our lives. And yet, “ not pleasure, but a general completeness of life,” was his philosophy. Just as man has risen above the brutes by development of his higher capacities, so must he go on to perfec- tion by the completeness of that growth. And so Pater, leaving to others the metaphysical questionings as to what is beyond, digni- fied and spiritualized the maxim, “ Be perfect as to what is here and now” — rather the opposite of the theological lucubrations of Christianity, which too often, doting on a gaudy hereafter, count, and thereby make, the life that now is a deplorable calamity. Much nearer was Pater to the unperverted truth — “ not that thou shouldst take them out of the world.” But this keen sensibility to physical beauty, this capacity for perfect pleasure in “ the golden thread inwoven,” was only one fea- ture, or rather one degree, of his fine receptivity — that art which
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