where lives no poems tho’ without great scent or audible music [sic]. Rather is
the mystic to be found among those who would wring the neck of rhetorical
attempts at imitating the poetry in life as in literature.
If this passage conflates the interior de ́cor of the 1890 s with the Bergson
cult of the 1910 s, it is because Thomas wants to make that link between a
Pateresque aestheticism and the Imagists, whose Bergson-inspired fidelity
to the unanalysable absolute will always turn out to have been very
thoroughly and self-consciously analysed indeed. It was the Imagists
who, like Pater, demanded ‘maximum efficiency of expression’ from a
poetic that nevertheless ‘washes its hands of theories’, a self-betraying
denial nicely confirmed by the connotations of Pilate’s guilt.^31 ‘Modern
poets have seen ecstasy, and they have seen the lack of it’, remarks the
‘Ecstasy’ essay, and the result has been the doctrines of Pater and Poe that
long poems ‘do not exist’, in the sense that they are a contradiction in
terms. But for Thomas, the concentration they believed essential to poetry
is inimical to ecstasy; crucially, the implication of his rejection of an ‘even
intensity’ is that an ecstatic poetics must include moments not ‘of the first
intensity’, the Wordsworthian repetitions and redundancies that Pater
sought to eliminate from his prose as from his life. For ecstasy means
standing outside oneself – a certain exteriority to oneself—and hence will
not align neatly with the perfectinteriorityof form which the Imagists
followed Pater in desiring. The refinement that utterly eliminates the
superfluous and the common (two of Thomas’s favourite words) in the
interests of perfect integrity with the uniqueness of ‘life itself ’ leaves no
opportunity for that life to go outside itself. For Thomas, Pater’s aesthetic
philosophy stemmed from his intense desire for self-detachment:
The isolation of the individual among the terrible inharmonious multitudes
impressed him and made it seem certain to him that art should become ‘an end
in itself, unrelated, un-associated’. He himself is one who continuously writes of
all things as a ‘spectacle’... Nothing whatever is alien to such a one, for
everything is indifferent.(Walter Pater, 185 )
There is no otherness in Pater, and as Thomas’s sly adaptation of
Terence’s tag indicates, no common humanity either. Pater’s aesthetic
autonomy, with its correlative organic unity of form and content, is here
explicitly translated into social isolation, the elimination of any voice but
Pater’s own. For although his self-conscious style tries to eliminate
everything but the desired meaning, actually ‘no man can decree the value
of one word, unless it is his own invention; the value which it will have in
his hands has been decreed by his own past, by the past of his race’ ( 215 ).
76 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism