22 August 1900

 

Now, where was I?  Ah, yes.  But if at Oxford I learned from Ruskin the integrity of individual perception, it was from Walter Pater that I learned the poetry of feeling.  I attended his lectures on Plato and Platonism and the beauty of his low, chaste 'intonation trainante' remains with me still.  I did not meet him until my final year; he had admired some slight article which I had written about the Grosvenor Gallery, and he invited me to tea.  What a strange contrast the man presented: in feature a Boer farmer, in manner a vestal virgin.  His was an essentially feminine temperament which was trapped inside quite the wrong body.  His rooms would have been suitable for St Cyril or St Bernard - there was a sixteenth-century Pietà on one wall, otherwise completely bare, and Baskerville editions of the classics on his shelves - and indeed there is more true piety in Pater's accounts of the Greek myths than in the whole of Newman.

      At that first meeting, I felt that my physical presence caused him a certain unease - I am aware of that with others, also, who draw back when they see me.  I once remarked to Reggie Turner that I had the figure of Nero; Reggie, who has a tongue of fire, replied, 'But made out of suet, Oscar.'  Well, Pater retired to a safe distance in the event of my toppling over.  We saw much of each other after that, but there was always a curious nervousness about our meetings.  I remember once, in a moment of threnody when we were discussing the Symposium, inadvertently placing my hand upon his arm and he started as though I had seared him with a brand.  It was a moment of supreme discomfort for both of us.

      He would finger a tortoiseshell paperknife as he spoke, continually rubbing it on the table in front of him.  He was capable of the most extraordinary enthusiasms, and then his Sibylline whisper would change to a louder note.  Ruskin, I think, despised him but that did not prevent him from speaking of Ruskin with great reverence.  Poor Pater, I felt - and still feel - for him an infinite pity mixed with an infinite gratitude.  'I want,' he told me once, 'to lift the veil of the blindfold - to see life in its exact relations.'  I do not believe he ever did.  He was too retiring and innocent a man to understand that life cannot be seen.  It can only be suffered.

      But I owe Pater everything: just as I learnt in his prose the secrets of his bashful art, so it was through his eyes that I first saw myself as an artist.  In his delicate praise of my work, he gave me the gift of self-awareness and it was he who suggested the direction I was later to follow: he urged me to forsake the revelations of poetry for the intimations of prose.  Poetry, he said, was the higher art; but prose was the more difficult.

      And indeed my own poetry was perhaps too facile.  I worked swiftly, under the direct impress of those modes which most fascinated me.  I saw everything as words, for in words could I hide from myself.  Without them I stumbled blindly.  I addressed myself to the gods because I did not wish to see that which was closer to hand.  It seems to me now that many of my poems were written to young men but, since I called them by Greek or Roman names, neither I nor they knew anything whatever about it.  I carried the shield of the true poet everywhere with me, not understanding then that a shield can crush one also.

      In my last year I won the Newdigate Prize for an elegy on Ravenna.  I was taken in procession like a fatted calf to the Sheldonian, where I recited the more violet passages of that terribly flawed poem.  It was a wonderful moment, and I borrowed for the occasion some of the techniques which I had seen employed with great effect at the Brompton Oratory.  It was my first taste of success as an artist, but one that led me fatally to believe that success would always surround me.

      When the poem was published in volume form, I suffered agonies of conscience.  There is something both magnificent and terrible about one's first book - it goes out into the world unwillingly because it takes so much of its creator with it also, and the creator always wishes to call it home.  I wrote the poem in a deliberately conventional manner and yet, by wearing the mask of my own age, I realise that I could express quite directly my own feelings.  Although in their natural state they were quite deficient in form, I was able in my verse to marshall them in perfect order.  I found myself by borrowing another's voice.  And I was applauded for it: here we have the wonderful beginnings of an artist, do we not, touched only lightly by the shadow of later tragedy?