curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature'." This passage from the essay on Style belongs to the later period of Pater's authorship; but the ideas were his from the start, and it is evident that the man who was thus impressed by the complexity of the issues, and humbled by the wide range of curiosity, was not likely to rush prematurely into print, or to be very copious and facile as an author. His earliest contribution to literature was the essay on Coleridge, first printed in 1866; and from that date onwards he slowly produced the papers gathered together in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Imaginary Portraits (1887), Appreciations (1889), Greek Studies (1895) and Miscellaneous Studies (1895). Plato and Platonism (1893) was the outcome of lectures which he delivered with almost as much suffering as Carlyle, though lecturing was part of the business of Pater's life. His most ambitious, and on the whole his greatest, work, Marius the Epicurean (1885), was the fruit of six years of the most concentrated labour he ever gave. Gaston de Latour (1896), which might have rivalled Marius, remained unfinished at his death.

With the exception of Marius, the lectures on Plato and the unfinished Gaston de Latour, the whole of Pater's work belongs to the class of miscellaneous writings, and formally it is critical rather than creative; but, though the subjects are various, the impression conveyed is remarkably uniform. All that Pater wrote is as deeply marked with the personality of the writer as is the work of Ruskin himself. In both cases we may doubt whether the interpretation of the critic would have been accepted by the artist; but also in both cases the work has a value independent of the question of the soundness of the interpretation. We may reasonably think Pater's description of La Gioconda over-wrought, we may suspect that it puts too much into the picture, we may even doubt whether it be not, as an interpretation of Leonardo, wholly misleading; but, even so, it remains a very beautiful piece of writing and in itself a valuable work of art. Pope's Homer

1 Appreciations, 7.

may not be Homer, but if it is "a very pretty poem," it has a solid value of its own.

Pater illustrates the complexity of the age, which so deeply impressed him, by the multitude of strands which are twined together in his own work. The Middle Ages and the Italian Renascence, painting and poetry, classicism and romanticism, all contribute to it. No one carries the suggestion of more numerous and more various writers. The influence of Plato is pervasive, and that of Goethe only less so. Traces of Ruskin and the PreRaphaelites are less numerous than might be expected; for, though Pater had many sympathies in common with them, his methods were different. Breaths or whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne and Lamb and Hawthorne and Arnold, widely different as they are from one another and from Pater, are also borne by his sentences. And yet through all this he remains highly original and individual. Few writers are more completely non-dramatic than Pater. Whatever the character he depicts, it is always really Pater who appears upon the canvas. This is true of all the Imaginary Portraits, of The Child in the House, of Emerald Uthwart and of Marius the Epicurean. The mirror which Pater holds up to nature is one which can reflect only himself. There is nothing in the least degree objective in his work; it is hardly too much to say that the whole of it, whether intentionally or not, is autobiographic. The very artists and poets whom he passes in review have to take his colour, and it may be questioned whether he ever succeeded in putting himself in the place of the man he criticised. Hence he is best when he deals with men who have a large share of his own introspective, brooding nature, and he is unsatisfactory in dealing with a genius of the free and objective type, like Shakespeare. It can hardly be doubted that the elaborate passage in which he describes the effect of Oxford upon Uthwart is a transcript from his own experience. Uthwart, we are told, cares for the beauties of Oxford, in themselves, and except through association, less when he is among them than in retrospect. But then, "It was almost retrospect even now, with an anticipation of regret, in rare moments of solitude perhaps, when the oars splashed far up the narrow streamlets through the fields on May

evenings among the fritillaries-does the reader know them ? that strange remnant just here of a richer extinct flora-dry flowers, though with a drop of dubious honey in each. Snakes' heads, the rude call them, for their shape, scale-marked too, and in colour like rusted blood, as if they grew from some forgotten battle-field, the bodies, the rotten armour-yet delicate, beautiful, waving proudly1."

It would be hard to find a passage more characteristic of Pater's peculiar imagination than this, or more illustrative both of his merits and his defects. There is a kind of uncanniness in it, as there is sometimes in Hawthorne, and in spite of its beauty the reader is tempted to ask whether it is altogether wholesome. This, certainly, would hardly do for "human nature's daily food." It is the product of a highly artificial, perhaps a decadent, life, it is the air of the hot-house, to be breathed now and then for the sake of the strange and beautiful flowers that grow there, but whence the escape into the free air of heaven is a joy and a relief. In the case of Pater then, the "personal equation" is a thing for which liberal allowance must be made, and his judgments both of painters and of writers commend themselves rather to a coterie than to the world at large. They are, in short, "appreciations rather than judgments. There is however another aspect to Pater's critical work. He can hardly be called technically a philosopher; his Plato and Platonism is essentially an attempt to get at the thought through sympathy with the thinker; and so far as he deals with abstract principles, he prefers principles of the emotional nature to principles of the understanding. But few have written more wisely upon style, and the sentence in which he concentrates the essence of his doctrine is unimpeachable :— "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: there, is the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, 'entire, smooth, and round,' that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration." Few, again, have more wisely discriminated between the romantic and the classical elements in 1 Miscellaneous Studies, 231. 2 Appreciations, 32.

literature. He finds the essential elements of the romantic spirit to be "curiosity and the love of beauty," that of the classical spirit, "a comely order." He quotes with qualified approval Stendhal's saying that "all good art was romantic in its day"; and his own love for and affinity to the romantic spirit is obvious. But the true function of Pater is to make the romantic once more classical, to superimpose the "comely order" upon beauty, and in doing so inevitably to reduce the strangeness. This he does almost in spite of himself, and yet with the approval of his own judgment. The influence of Goethe upon him is due to his sense that Goethe too, in a far larger way, did the same. In the essay on Winckelmann he points out that Goethe illustrates the union of the romantic spirit with Hellenism, and the preponderance of the Hellenic element. Of this union, says Pater, the art of the nineteenth century is the child. His point of view therefore is similar to that of Matthew Arnold; but that breath from the outer world which Arnold brings is never felt in Pater. He is cloistered, -a recluse looking out from the windows of a College upon a world in which he has no part or lot. The whole moral atmosphere of the two men is also different. Pater, from first to last, is epicurean, while through the playful banter of Arnold there is always audible the undertone of Stoicism.

CHAPTER III

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

THE miscellaneous prose of this period presents almost as difficult a problem of selection as the fiction, and is even more baffling in respect of arrangement. There is however no difficulty about the first figure. For age, for copiousness and for distinction, Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) clearly deserves the precedence; and though a poet so considerable may seem out of place among miscellaneous writers, yet his greatest work is in prose, and it can only be classified in this way.

Landor was throughout his long life a strange union of contra

A republican and yet a born aristocrat, a polished gentleman who dropped his h's, a life-long rebel who was by nature a despot, a man of the most exquisite tenderness yet of ungovernable violence, a classical scholar and a model of classical style yet of ultra-romantic freakishness, there is scarcely anything that may be said of him which has not to be qualified by something that seems almost to annul it. The key-note of Landor's life is struck in his rustication from Oxford for an act of violence in 1794. In 1808 he went to Spain to support the cause of Spanish independence; but neither independence nor anything else can be supported without some control of temper, which Landor could not or would not exercise. Returning to England, he bought the estate of Llanthony Abbey in Monmouthshire. He had great and generous plans for its improvement; but in the end he quarrelled with all around him, lost his own capital, and effected nothing. In 1811 he married in haste, and found leisure to repent in the fifty-three years of life which remained to