this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to
form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world.( 236 )
Yet in order to arrive at the purely ecstatic flame, Thomas complained
inWalter Pater, Pater has had to consciously refine away the superfluous
in the most intellectual, conscious manner possible, discriminating his
way through the collected Wordsworth:
He spoke of the ‘splendour of our experience’ and its ‘awful brevity’, and the lack
of time for theories about the objects of it. And yet one had to be sure that the
passion... really was passion, and really did yield the full number of pulsations,
which meant a considerable wisdom and a ‘looking before and after’. ( 75 )
A neat example of the self-contradiction this involves is Pater’s summary
of his views on ‘Style’: ‘say what you have to say, what you have a will to
say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible, with no
surplusage’.^30 This is a sentence whose second and fourth clauses are pure
surplusage, because the consciously displayed act of testing and refining
his words to find the simplest and most direct manner has utterly
overridden any simplicity at all. In short, Pater manifests the old problem
of the naı ̈ve that turns out to depend on the sentimental. All his simple
and direct experiences are intellectualised, shaped and formed as exquis-
itely pure experiences. And for all Pater’s insistence on the unique, and by
extension against the mass-produced in life or literature, Thomas tartly
notes that this ‘conscious conquest of sensation’ ( 94 ) makes Pater an
efficiency expert, ‘the aesthetic spectator with a stop-watch’, professionally
eliminating the ‘wasteful’, and making sure ecstasy ‘pays for itself by “this
fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness” ’. ( 95 )
Hence despite placing ecstasy at the core of his aesthetics, Pater’s
perfect self-control has eliminated its possibility. The aesthetic critic’s
‘connoisseurship’ means events ‘appear only at his desire, rarely taking
us by surprise as they do in Nature and in poetry’ ( 96 ). When Thomas
turns to the relation of ecstasy and poetry in the ‘Ecstasy’ essay, then, it is
Pater that he homes in on.
His writing is one of the attempts, one of the failures to make literature all of one
even – and mechanical – intensity. It is no more a proof of the possibility of
‘burning always with a hard flame’ than is ragtime music... or the lives which
are all sunflowers, peacock feathers and cre`me de menthe and aesthetic poetry
and pseudo-Bergsonism. The mystic knows that ecstasy and notable days are not
marked out in advance on the calendar: above all he knows that the other days
are far less humbled in comparison with the great and notable days than exalted
by their influence: he does not question the possibility of long poems, or of poets
Edward Thomas in ecstasy 75