UC-NRLF B 4 IDA ILdI SELECTIONS V FROM WALTER PATER Edited with Introduction and Notes BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE, Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Rhetonc and Logic in Union College m. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Copyright, 1901, By HENRY HOLT & CO. PREFACE. //^cW On first thinking of this book my main princi- ples were merely to omit the passage on " La Giaconda " and to say nothing of Pater's style. But I soon found that however well those views would do in a negative way, there had to be something more positive to begin on. I tried, therefore, in this selection to put together essays that would be characteristic in ideas and style, and which would also illustrate the very broad range of Pater's inter- ests, as well as the different periods of his life. Keeping close to these ideas necessitated many omissions which I regret, — one should really read all Pater. The selection will, however, give an idea of his very diverse work; there are essays in general, criticism, poetry, philosophy, painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as several of those studies in criticism which he put in the form of fiction. They all come from what may be called the regular collections ; the essays from the " Guard- ian " are mostly ephemeral comment on books that were of interest often for the moment only, and except for those on Amiel and English literature have a negative rather than a positive interest. iii 267344 IV PREFACE The hitrodi^-' ^ .' Hows a course which is of the first necessity in a study of Pater, if necessary only at first ; it is simply an attempt to state what Pater's ideas and opinions were without criticism or com- ment. Pater himself advises a different course, but something of this sort is necessary as a begin- ning-. It may seem that there should be more at- tempt to correlate ideas and actions, to explain Pater's books by his life. But in this case the books are the main thing: one must know them thor- oughly and one will then have the best of the man and may go farther or not. The notes like the rest of the book omit a good deal which may be expected. They give very little information about people and facts. That sort of thing a student can generally get for himself. Pater will not be read by schoolboys. There are, how- ever, a good many things that one cannot readily get for oneself. Thus it is important that we should have constant comparison with work of Pater's not in this book. I have not been able to do quite as much in the way of reference to other work as 1 should like, but the typical comparisons are gener- ally noted. Allusions of one kind had to be explained — too fully for a good many readers, doubtless — i- namely those to pictures, statues, poems. Thus ii'x the essay on Wordsworth it was necessary to indi- cate the source of the many quotations and allu- sions, for it is only by reading them in Wordsworth PREFACE V that one can understand how closely that essay fol- lows its authorities. The same may be said of the essay on Plato, although in that case explanation to the same degree was impracticable. In speaking of these notes I must acknowledge with gratitude much friendly help from my col- leagues Mr. John L. March and Mr. John I. Ben- nett. The former is a deeper Wordsworthian than I, and the latter a better Grecian, and the reader benefits, as I have done, by their scholarship. E. E. H., Jr. CONTENTS. Introduction ix Chronology Ixxiii Bibliography Ixxv Selections. y^ Preface to " The Renaissance " i /^ Sandro Botticelli 8 Conclusion IQ Wordsworth 25 V^ ^The Child in the House 47 ^ Euphuism 69 V^ Divine Service 85^ Denys I'Auxerrois 9^ Style 123 — The Genius of Plato i54\ The Age of Athletic Prizemen ^'^^ \^ Notre Dame d'Amiens 204^ Notes 219 vii Si an Ml wa a J. :he ivas is ct. I a y INTRODUCTION xi scrupulous, which it certainly was, and that he was discomposed at the freedom of some of its details, which was not unnatural. What he dfd not like at all, however, was the newspaper talk that arose, in which he was presented to the world as a Hedonist. Now a Hedonist is commonly thought of as one who makes pleasure the chief end of life, and the common opinion held of those who make pleasure the chief end of life is that they are people like Mr. Rose or worse. So the title of " Hedonist " did something to prejudice Pater's opinions at this time, in the mind of the general reader, which was a bit unfortunate, for even in the fairest presentation, those views were not such as to commend them- selves wholly to the majority of earnest and right- minded people. Aside, however, from the unjust additions fast- ened to Pater's ideas, " The New Republic " really does give rather a fair notion of his then philosophy. To a certain degree, perhaps, Mr. Mallock's right hand had lost its cunning, for most of the remarks of Mr. Rose quite lack the temper of Pater's writ- ing and seem far more like the absurd tapestries of talk in the dialogues of Oscar Wilde than anything in " The Renaissance." Air. Rose is, after all said and done, a ridiculous weakling. He is quite lack- ing in any vital quality. He could never have said *' The service of philosophy, and of religion and culture as' well, to the human spirit is to startle it xii INTRODUCTION into a sharp and eager observation." Mr. Rose could never have burned with that hard gem-hke flame ; if he burned at all, it was with a very bland lambent, emollient, caressing flame, a sort of Char- lotte Russe ilame. Still, as far as the ideas, the thoughts, are concerned, we get a good deal of Pater's theory. Take these two passages : " We have learned that the aim of life is life ; and what does successful life consist in? Simply in the consciousness of exquisite living — in the making our own each highest thrill of joy that the moment ofifers us — be it some touch of color on the sea or / the mountains, the early dew in the crimson shadows of a rose, etc." " Not the fruit of experience, but experience it- self is the end. * * =^ While all melts under our feet we may well catch at any exquisite passion or any contribution to knowledge that seems, by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odors, etc." One is by Pater and one by Mr. Alallock but not a few might easily find it hard to tell which was the original and which the burlesque, unless by some external circumstance. When it comes to walking the river-side and longing for the infinity of emotions which would arise from seeing some unfortunate drown herself, or taking courage on a walk through the ugly streets of London from the shop-windows of the upholsterers and dealers in tNTRODUCti$i^ xiii works of art, — then, of course, we have frank cari- cature, but on the whole the so-called hedonism of " Studies in the History of the Renaissance " was a doctrine readily rfiisconceived or misapplied and very easily burlesqued or debased. If Pater had presented no other ideas, he would now be forgot- ten except as a master of English prose who had written something about " La Giaconda." This seems rather trivial : it is worth noting, how- ever, because some writers who have had their say on Pater have practically assumed that he did pre- sent no other ideas, have regarded him as an apostle of a sort of enlightened self-indulgence, as one who through too much study of the Renaissance and of Greece had become an aesthetic epicurean. We may pass by contemporary testimonies like Edward Cracroft Lefroy's views on '' Pater Paganism and Symonds Sensuousness," and come to critical opin- ion after Pater's death. A writer in the Quarterly Review also brackets John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater as *' Latter Day Pagans " and would have his readers believe that Pater's whole work consisted in propounding a way of life in the con- clusion of " The Renaissance " and retracting it in the second volume of " Mariits." The theories of the Conclusion (thinks this writer) were wrong, harmful, of ill-ef¥ect ; but Pater rejected them, and gave them up : the net result of his life work would be zero, were it not for the evil efifect that his tem- porary errors caused the youth of his time. In like xiv INTRODUCTION manner, Mr. Jacobus writing in the Fortnightly of March, 1896, on ''The Blessedness of Egoism." Pater was one of the early writers for the Fort- nightly, and this article a year or so after his death may have been intended to do him honor. To ac- complish this good aim, however, the author chose the curious expedient of linking Pater with M. Maurice Barres and giving such an impression of him as would be drawn from the first two of his seven then-published volumes. The gestliet jc hedonisrn _of " The Renaissance " is a theory of a certain high-mindedness and nobility, presented in a surcharged and stimulating manner. Still even with all its beauty and electric fascination, it is not such as to have given Pater a place beside Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. It is only the pre- sentation of ideas by no means uncommon, re- deemed from commonplaceness by peculiar distinc- tion of manner and pecuHar delicacy of apprecia- tion. But it is not the theory of life and art which is the net result of Pater's work. This was the be- ginning, the point from which Pater, so long as he was before the public, moved. It is by the develop- ment of his ideas that Pater is of worth to the readers to-day knd it is an account of this develop- ment that I shall try to give. But first we must have the point from which, and I shall begin by a word or two on the early aestheticism of Pater in order to show the developments and modifications of later years. INTRODUCTION xv The word " aesthetic " is one wnich has had vari- ous changes of meaning. Imported from the Greek sometime ago by a German philosopher, to fill an especial need, it has since Baumgarten had a fairly ' definite meaning among English philosophers. But among the laity the word came in the last twenty or thirty years into great vogue and passed away again, leaving possibly only reminiscences of a very vague and general nature, made up mostly of ♦ dadoes and old china, sunflowers and velvet knick- erbockers, a sort of mock yearning and the con- ceited imbecillity of a Bunthorne or a Maudle. Such things were the characteristics of " the aesthete " in the public mind and were therefore connoted by the word "aesthetic." Now in the ^Esthetic Movement so-called Pater was a power : just what kind of power we shall best understand by looking at the history of the " movement," or rather at its origin. The yEsthetic Movement was a continuation of Pre-Raphaelitism. The Pre-Raphaelite Brother-/Y^ hood was formed in the year 1848. It consisted of seven young men devoted to art. Five of them were painters, Rosetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt being now the best known, and it was in painting chiefly that they expressed the principles of art which bound them together. They exhibited pic- tures which were marked by a new way of looking at things and so were violently attacked by the ♦ lov rs of art of their time. In 1850 they published a I per called " The Germ " defending their ideas. xvi INTRODUCTION ¥ In 1 85 1 John Ruskin, then a weighty art critic, startled into particular examination of their work by the asperity of the attacks upon them, decided that they were merely carrying out to the letter the advice which he had himself offered in " Modern Painters " and at once became a champion. Being thus well put before the public the, thing became a " movement." Nowadays when we think of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, we are not much struck by points in common. Sir John Everett Millais is now- adays most widely known by his picture of a little boy blowing bubbles with Pears' Soap or by his picture " Cherry Ripe," though it is also remem- bered that he painted " The Huguenot " and " The Princes in the Tower." Holman Hunt is best known by " Christ Among the Doctors " or by *' The Shadow of the Cross " or by " The Light of the World." And as to Rossetti, so far as he is re- membered by the generality as a painter, it is, in confusion with Burne Jones, as the creator of a type of wan, mystic beauty which is sometimes con- ventionally called morbid. It is this last conception which generally has the name Pre-Raphaelite at- tached to it in our minds. It is not the later Millais. or the later Rossetti either, that best represents the early aims oi ■he Pre-Raphaelites. It is true that the name vi re- Raphaelite became attached to Rossetti and ^fot- lowed all his variations of temper with a clost \e?s INTRODUCTION xvii that was very annoying to him. But the early Pre- RaphaeHtism was a way of looking at things as much as anything else, and it may be best studied in the paintings of Holman Hunt. He was an earnest, patient, logical, doddering Pre-Raphaelite to the very end, and as his pictures do not out- wardly resemble in the slightest degree anything ever painted before Raphael, we shall best see from him what were the ideas called Pre-Raphaelite. Holman Hunt always painted under oath. He swore to himself to paint the truth, the whol^ truth and nothing but the truth. In other words he put away the conventions of the schools and painted what he saw. The conventions of the schools went back to Raphael ; the primitives, the painters before Raphael, had little of them. Hence the name Pre- Raphaelite. Holman Hunt and Millais worked on this theory and were Pre-Raphaelite only because i(^ they discarded the conventions of the schools. Ros- setti was a Pre-Raphaelite for this reason ; but he might have been so-called for another, too, namely because he unconsciously imitated the painters who came before Raphael. Hence with him the term Pre-Raphaelite had not only the meaning which he and his companions attached to it, but also the meaning which the inartistic world at large could attach to it. And the term Pre-Raphaelite came to connote in the general mind, not the simple art- principles which the inventors of the term had in mind, but other ideas, ideas naturally enough con- 2 xviii INTRODUCTION nected with the name. It came to imply in the pub- He mind a certain mediaeval and renaissance char- acter of art. In this sense Pre-Raphaelitism ap- peared in literature. Rossetti's '' Blessed Damozel " (written in 1846) was evidently mediaeval. So was m.uch of William Morris's '* Defense of Guenevere " which appeared in 1858. So was much of Swin- burne's " Poems and Ballads " which appeared in 1866. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne were per- sonal friends, in the public mind they were readily classed together. The term Pre-Raphaelite was manifestly inappro- priate as applied to poetry. It is true th^t Rossetti was deeply read in older Italian poetry, but even that was no especial , reason for calling hi§ poems Pre-Raphaelite. As to Morris the inspiration of his first volume was rather old French than anything else, and as to Swinburne, if we search for his in- spiration we are soon led to call him eclectic. Still there certainly is a common quality to the poems of these three men. There is something far deeper than some obvious superficialities. Let us say that Rossetti was Italian, Morris Old French, Swin- burne Greek or anything else you like ; there is be- yond all that a common quality and a vital one. L^or this quality, which is the chief thing Jhe three have in conimoji, the name " Pre-Raphaelite " is \ fflfot a good name. In j 868 Pate r defined the quality /and p-av e it the name '' .Esth etic.'' He was a great admirer cf the work of Burne Jones and on intimate INTRODUCTION xix terms with Swinburne. In his own way he was interested in the things that interested those men. The early Itahan painters he stud ied with interest and therefore admire d Pre-Rapha elite painting. The literature of the later Middle Ages he also studied and was therefore in touch with William^^ Morris. But he was not a painter nor a poet: hence he had nothing especial to do with ^.he early Pre-Raphaelite principles which concerned paint- ing pictures, nor much more with the ideas of the " aesthetic " poets, as he called them. He was a stu- dent, having views on art, it is true, whether paint- ing or poetry, but not from the artist's stand-point. He was a student of aesthetic and something of a philosopher as well and therefore was led to con- sider the rel ation o f art t o life in gene ral. His par- ticular interests, being for the time at least in the Renaissance, gave an especial turn to his theories. But alth oiigh he was called a Pre- JBLRph?^ elite he was by no means pjedgedjto_t_he principles of Rossetti, and alth ough we think of him as a leader in the Esthetic Movement, he was not necessarily the champion of the views of Swinburne. Like almost everyone ~e1s e~"1ir~ En gland he was interested in medievalism or more exactly, in his case, in the Renaissance, and as wliat he wrote about this time dealt with Renaissance subjects, he was naturally grouped in the public mind with the poets and painters who, found inspiration there. In 1868 he had written an article upon the poems of William iJ^ XX INTRODUCTION Morris, but the article would seem to have lain long unpublished. In the years following, however, he published in the Fortnightly Review results of his own interest in the Renaissance, namely the articles on Leonardo (1869), Botticelli (1870), and Michael Angelo (1871). In 1^23^ he published these essays" with several others under the title " Studies in the History of the Renaissance." Besides the critical essays was an introduction explaining tKe aims of his criticism^ and a conclusion in which he stated tersely the thepr^iofaxtjand life that, seemed best to him. It is this Conclusion which has caused all the trouble. There is not I suppose another such piece of writing in J^nglish Literature. It is but half a dozen pages long and yet it states a philosophy of life so completely, _so brilliantly and to one having the sHghtest sympathy, so convincingly, that it seems as though nothing more need be said, or rather as though nothing more could be said. Exactly what effect this Conclusion has had upon the life and thought of England is more than I can say. The Quarterly seems to think that by it not a few have been led astray. Pater thought that it was misunderstood, which seems almost impossi- ble. At any rate when a second edition of " The Renaissance " was printed four years later, the Conclusion was omitted. What, then, was this famous or infamous philoso- phy? It can hardly be made clearer than Pater INTRODUCTION xxi made it, still it may be useful to call attention to what in the light of after-writings seems to be its most important points. ^ In the first place it ofifers a theory of life which ^ has no reference to any existence except that of this earth. " A counted number of pulses only is given to us " : to any course of action having refer- ence to a future life or to anything not immediately perceivable in this world, the Conclusion makes no allusion. That was the first thing that gave ofifence. The Co nclu si on as a philosophy of life was dis- tinctly Pagan : a Christian might find its resultant ideas not incompatible with very dififerent bases, but Pater himself had nothing to say about Christianity ; he took his text from a Greek philos- opher, a predecessor of Darwin. But in the second place the Conclusion^as not ^ merely Pagan, it was Epicurean. Now Hedonistic, Cyrenaic, Antinomian, are words not exactly un- derstood by the world at large, but everybody knows that the Epicureans were people who lived for themselves alone. They were therefore not merely non-Christian but distinctly anti-Christian. Epicureanism means in most minds sensuousness, voluptuousness, licentiousness, and these are bad^ things ; nobody can publicly defend them or submit to any contact with them. iln fact, taken literally, the Conclusion does actually offer principles from which may be logi- cally deduced a career of artistic libertinism, and it xxii INTRODUCTION offers very little direct advice to counteract the im- pulse to such deduction. From anything really hideous, Pater's own exquisite taste and his own sane love of the healthful would infallibly have saved him ; but there may well enough have been disciples who, embarking upon a life which was to be a quest for every most refined, most delicate sensation, landed finally in a position which made them a source of offence to decent people. All this may be, and yet it is qtiite true that the Conclusion may also serve as an incentive to a Cigher life for those who honestly and single-mind- dly love the things of good report. We may be- lieve most firmly in a future life and still be as- sured of our duty to get all we can out of this one. We may believe most firmly in the duty of living for others and yet we never can escape the duty of living for ourselves. The Conclusion need not be taken to refer only to a life of self-indulgence : it really leaves open the kind of sensation which shall make up our lives. Pater's preference was clear enough ; the wisest, he says, spend the interval in art and song. But others, he remarks, spend it in " religious enthusiasm or the enthusiasm of j humanity." \ The enduring element of the Conclusion lay really in its^impulse towards a real life instead of a con- ventional, formal, orthodox sort of existence. Pater was called a Pagan but a Christian can lead such a life as'welTas anyone else, and indeed better, for he INTRODUCTION xxiii is the only one who really knows how the thing is to be done. To be a Christian does not mean to be a rigid formalist of any given pattern : it was just that sort of thing that Christ did away with. He came to supply the world an active, vitalizing spirit whereby each one, instead of merely following out the law, might enjoy eternal life. It is true that Pater^s idea of life was by no mean^s Chrjstian : still consider some of his most brilliant sentences : they have in themselves no more than *' I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.'' v^^ The Christian, then, may convert to his own ends the inspiring counsel of the Conclusion (as Pater, afterwards, perhaps, perceived) and his life may thereby become the more eagerly and keenly vigor- ous in the way that he has chosen. On the other hand, the Epicurean of popular fancy, might easily work out of the Conclusion an incentive to a life less satisfying. And of this Pater, I suppose, became aware; it was this possible misunderstanding, I suppose, which led him to omit the Conclusion in the edition of 1877. As he wrote some years after- ward — on another matter but perhaps with the Conclusion in mind — " How would Paolo and Francesca have read the lesson ? " The Christian and the Epicurean might each have found the Conclusion to their purpose. Heater was neither ; at this time and throughout his life he might have been called a Neo-Platonist. The word .xiv INTRODUCTION is a vague one, but by it I would convey the idea that Pater was deeply interested in the philosophy of the spirit and in those of ancient and recent times who have affirmed something of it. One of his first pieces of writing was on the philosophy of Cole- ridge, in this volume was the essay on Pico della Mirandola, some years later he wrote on Giordano Bruno, and the last work published in his lifetime was the volume on Plato. Pater was one who be- / lieved in the Spirit and this Conclusion if we wish to get at its author's intent must be read from the standpoint of such a one. " While all metts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite pas- sion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by \ a lifted horizon, to set the spirit free for a moment, or I any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange / fiowers, and curious odors, or work of the artist's I hands, or the face of one's friend." Those words italicized, although one might pass them over on a first reading, turn out on a knowledge of what came after, to have been the most important words in the book. Before we proceed to study Pater's advance from the equivocal premises of the Conclusion, there is a word or two more to be said on the Pre-Raphael- ite or Esthetic Movement, by which latter name it came gradually to be called. I fear that most of us recollect it by its sun-flowers and peacock- feathers rather than by its real excellences ; we re- member it better in the person of Bunthorne or INTRODUCTION xxv Maudle than in anybody of real power. It is true Pater never presents himself to us as a Bunthorne or a Maudle, as lesser men did not disdain to do, but we certainly can, and that without much diffi- culty, trace a family likeness, or rather one can see in what he has to say some of the ideas so cleverly travestied by Du Maurier and Gilbert. Among the sketches in " Punch " in the seventies, one remem- bers many a hit at the aesthetes and among them, perhaps, that of a very haggard, unkempt creature in " Passionate Brompton," looking with clasped hands at a very round-faced and comfortable Jones, who is about to take her down to dinner, with the question, '' Are you Intense? " As one turns over the sketches many a forgotten catch-word of the worn-out fad arises to recollection, " quite too utterly utter," and so on, but none is more charac- teristic of the real strength of the movement and the silly weakness of its affectations, than this one word " intense." And this qualfty of intensity, the qualit}' so prized by the false aesthetes and the true alike, this quality is a dominant element in the mood which came to its best expression in the Con- clusion to " The Renaissance." Intensity is not a \/ distinguishing quality of art. There is no reason why a person who is intense should also have artis- tic tastes. It is true that the power of intense feel- ing is very apt to be accompanied by a delight in beautiful things but it is not always. Love is an in- tense passion, patriotism, zeal in reHgion or science, xxvi INTRODUCTION ill fact every passion is intense or it is not a passion. Intensity is a necessary quality in the artistic nature, but not a distinguishing one. It was a mark of Pater's breadth of view, of his cathoHcism of appre- ciation, that the idea which impressed him most lastingly in the aesthetic movement was this idea of intensity. It is true that he was not uncontaminated by false intensity. Some sentences in his writings, are very good specimens of what may be called aesthetic prose, namely prose that has all the weakness of the aesthetic movement, prose like Swinburne's. For example : " The EngHsh poet too has learned the secret. He has diffused through King Arthurs Tomb the maddening- white glare of the sun, and tyranny of the moon, not tender and far off, but close dow^n — the sorcerer's moon, large and feverish. The color- ing is intricate and delirious as of ' scarlet lilies.' The influence of summer is like a poison in one's blood, with a sudden bewildering sickening of life and all things. In Galahad: a Mystery, the frost of Christmas night in the chapel stones acts as a strong narcotic : a sudden shrill ringing pierces through the numbness : a voice proclaims that the Grail has gone forth through the great forest." Such passages have the aesthetic trademark upon them. There is all the self-consciousness, all the straining for effect, all the affectation which still clings to the name '* aesthetic," all the whipped-up INTiiOD^JTlON , ^ x/ intensity which deceives weak natures and some- times strong ones. Such prose as that, were there much of it in Pater's work, would show that he had been influenced by the weaker elements in a move- ment with which he has been to some extent identi- fied. But there are not many such sentences in Pater's work, — those particular ones occur in the essay on WiUiam Morris's "Defence of Guenevere " in a passage where the temptation to suit style to subject led the author to express himself in a way which was hardly natural to him. This sort of " sestheticism '' is no considerable element in Pater's work, and yet the very fact that what we have is so perfect of its kind, goes to show by how little Pater escaped becoming what others did become. As it was we have Pater in the year 1874, the year of " The New Republic," a man who beli eved in i ntensity of life, in a life which gain ed beauty and val ue from a strong appreciatio n o f tlie lovely things of nature and art, and whose interests had for some- time be£n with the poets and painters of the_ Renais- sance, a time in which flourished many whose lives are not very good examples for people five centuries later who admire their works. As such Pater was doubtless a dangerous guide for the young and generous, a man to be avoided. It is somewhat curious that his next publication should have been an essay on Wordsworth. Somewhat curious, be- cause a delight in Wordsworth seems incongruous with the idea some people have formed of the author y.viii INTRODUCTION of " The Renaissance." This dilletante hedonist, this leader-astray of the generous-hearted, this fore- runner of how much foohshness and evil, this suave apostle of exq uisite immorality, what is he doing now? He is reading Wordsworth. It is true that one may read Wordsworth and yet be a person of very dangerous tendencies, as Mat- thew Arnold, for example, was once thought to be. And yet it is a hard point to get over ; it is certainly not a moral act to like Wordsworth and yet he is not the poet whom one would suppose attractive to epicureans, sensualists, libertines. This essay on Wordsworth, if we read it now, not as criticism but as autobiography, is a remark- ably illuminating piece of work. What is there in Wordsworth to attract the Pre-Raphaelite? The preciseness and vividness with which he sees nature / and the sincerity and scrupulousness with which he I has rendered her sights and sounds. Why is Words- I worth of interest to the aesthete ? Because he " has \done so much for those who value highly the con- centrated treatment of passion, who appraise men and women by their sensibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle of it." What is there for the spiritual hedonist? The idea that " contemplation — impassioned contemplation — that is, with Wordsworth, the end in itself, the per- fect end." That the end of life is being as distinct from doing, a certain disposition of mind rather than any prescribed set of actions. The essay is a more INTRODUCTION xxix accurate expression of Pater's own ideas than of Wordsworth's. If one study this essay instead of the Conclusion to '' The Renaissance," one will find the same philosophy, although put in a less brilliant and therefore less immoral form. But for a time Pater gave up the idea of offering the world a philosophy of life and betook himself to studies other than those with which his name was associated. When a new edition of " The Renais- sance " was called for, he withdrew the Conclusion which he thought had been misunderstood. It was almost as though he were for a time disgusted with the matter; at any rate he turned his attention to other studies and, except for a few stray essays, never published anything else directly upon the Renaissance. During the next few years he seems to have studied Greek art chiefly ;_ I suspect he found it cool and refreshing. The revival of a knowledge of Greek literature had been one of the elements of the Renaissance, and Pater had added to the strictly Renaissance studies in his book, his essay on Winkelmann, which included some consideration of Greek sculpture. It does not appear that between 1874 and 1880, Pater looked at Greek art from the standpoint of that essay. The " Greek Studies," collected after his death, but written, for the most part, at this time, approach the subject in rather a different way. They are not in the tone of his first book. XXX INTRODUCTION Beside the Conclusion, " The Renaissance " had an introduction, in which were laid down cer- tain principles of crticism agreeable to that phil- osophy of life which regarded art as the most efficient means of vitalizing the passage of exist- ence. The office of the critic was to discriminate between the sensations aroused by one and another work of art. Each beautiful thing had its own specific virtue : the duty of the critic was rightly to appreciate it. Hence the word " appreciation," instead of " criticism," which has had a certain currency. These Greek studies, however, are not apprecia- tions in such a sense of the word. Pa ter underto ok to sjate, not how^Greek art appeared to him, but how it had appeared to the Greeks. These studies were, in intention at least, scientific. The inquiry was not, What besf "pleasure may we get from Greek art? but, What sort of thing was Greek art to the Greeks themselves ? Therefore, Pater began with some studies of Greek religion, whence he passed to Greek tragedy and Greek sculpture. The result of these studies, as one considers the book collected after Pater's death, is a curious one. It neglects, on the whole, the question. What may art be to us ? — it discusses rather what art was once to those with whom it arose. These essays are full of human interest. They prese nt G reek mytholog;v_to^sjn^ \vaj^ tojwhich unaccustomed. The average schoolboy conception INTRODUCTION xxxi of Greek mythology (and how many of us never outgrow it!) is of a great collection of stories of gods and heroes who, though constantly getting mixed up, have each quite a distinct character to be understood alike by everybody. Such a con- ception does not seek to explain how any one could ever have had belief in the existence of these creatures; it merely presents them. These studies of Pater proceed from a very differ- ent point of view. His very first sentence gives a different idea. " Writers on mythology speak habitually of the religion of the Greeks. In thus speaking, they are really using a misleading expres- sion, and should speak rather of religions; each race and class of the Greeks — the Dorians, the people of the coast, the fishers — having had a religion of its own conceived of the objects that came nearest to it and were most in its thoughts, and the resulting usages and ideas never having come to have a precisely harmonized system after the analogy of some rehgions." He re w e have an effort to see how a people embodied their spiritual ideas in forrns — Greel^ mythology being at the bottom of Greek art — how^they gave forms to their concep- tions and how these forms had part and influence in their lives. HowTar these essays seemed at the time to have any connection with Pater's then just published book, I cannot say.: they had really, however, a sort of connection or more exactly showed a sort xxxii INTRODUCTION of development. In " The Rensaissance " we had work done with the prevaiHng idea in mind that art was a sort of leaven to give life and lightness to existence. What have we to do with art? was the question. This and that, said Pater, where- upon arose vigorous criticism. Pater's mind may then very well have returned upon itself. Instead of asking: What have we to do with art? or rather, What is art to us? he thought, What has art really been to some real people? To the Greeks, for ex- ample. How did they create and mould their art? and again. How did their art mould and modify them? Some such questions may have been more or less consciously at the bottom of these studies : questions like these may, also, have been at the bottom of another piece of work of about this time, namely " The Child in the House." This " Imagi- nary Portrait," as it was called, is a study of the early development of the life of one who in later years had been profoundly influenced by philosophv and art. It is true that the idea is not carried very far — we have only the beginning, only a study of how .shildhood is influenced by surroundings — but had it been carried farther, as it must have been carried in Pater's mind, it could not but have be- come a study of the way a maturer life was influ- enced by art. " The Child in the House " has been called auto- biographic, and doubtless there is something of autobiography in it, although no more, ,1 fancy, INTR0DUC7I0N xxxiii « than there is apt to be in any work not rigidly ob- jective. Florian Deleal would have been in later < life a man much like Pater, a student of the arts, an amateur of life, one who had been much occu- pied in philosophies and speculations, but a lover of the beautiful as well, so that he was led to assign more importance to the sensible form than to the abstract thought beneath. It may be that like Florian, Pater had then " a certain design in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the story of his spirit." Under the attacks upon his theories of art and life, Pater may have turned back to think a little as to the influence of art on his own life, and so, allowing his thoughts some Hberty in avoiding facts, there grew up in his mind this shadowy companion, a sort of doppelganger, as it were, one who lived a life much like Pater's own, differing, perhaps, in this or that unimportant par- ticular, but of the same stuff throughout, of the same character. By whatever turn of thought and interest it was reached, the product of the years foUowing was published in 1885 in the form of " Marius the Epi- curean." I suggest the connecting links of Greek religion and Imaginary Portrait : we have in " Marius " the study of a young Roman feeling his way in early life through the religions, the philoso- phies, the arts of the time of Marcus Aurelius. " Marius the Epicurean " has been called an auto- biography and it probably has, even more than xxxiv INTRODUCTION '' The Child in the House," a strong autobiographic color. Without identifying Pater with his hero, we may certainly see in the book phases of thought and passion which must have come from experience. We may run through the book and almost every- where point out curious analogies with something else written by Pater, either before or after. If only the first two chapters had been written, we should have had a figure closely resembling " The Child in the House." The fatherless boy growing up in the old house surrounded by beautiful trees and flowers, and by the polished observances of a cultivated life, the soul sensible to beauty and re- ligion, supersensitive, for a boy's, and turned much upon its own thoughts and feelings, — these are the same in each : if we conceive of Florian Deleal carried through two volumes and Marius stopped after two chapters, we can see how we might still have had much the same development of ideas, though in a more modern- dress, a too modern dress. Pater may have thought. In other respects, too, we may have coincidences. The description of the old " reUgion of Numa " is closely allied in spirit with studies of the religions of the fisher-folk, the country people, the coast- dwellers of Greece. Flavian's ideals in letters ap- pear in other forms in the later Essay on Style. The self-sacrifice of Marius may be compared with the story of Sebastian van Storck, which appeared only a year or two afterwards. And not onjy are INTRODUCTION xxxv these main motives to be recognized, but through- out" the book the reader of Pater is constantly noting~l;he^appearance of some thought or mood which also has its place elsewhere. AH Ibis shows, not how poor wa_s^ Pater's imagination, but .how genuinely he put- himself into his work. He was not one to dash on and on, scattering brilliant flashes from his horsehoofs to glitter and go out. His thoughts matured slowly; he was constantly embodying them in new forms, and always watch- ing intently the modifications and developments. There is one very curious example. He seems to have been early impressed by the conception of Heine's " Gods in Exile," quoting from it in his essay on Pico della Mirandola," published in 187 1, and by it illustrating the Renaissance conceptions of antiquity. In 1886 he developed the idea and gave it form in the tale of Denys I'Auxerrois. In 1893 he turned to it again and made the story of *' Apollo in Picardy " One might almost say that he never gave up an idea. Not that he was in any way obstinate in his opinions : quite the reverse ; life, he thought, was far too short to rest on '* any facile orthodoxy of Comte or Hegel." But he rarely gave up' utterly an idea which had once attracted him; he tried it and tested it and turned it; he forced it to give him everything he could wring from it. But of all the comparison and coincidence which we may think of in reading " Marius," the most xxxvi INTRODUCTION interesting is that which we may make with the conclusion to " The Renaissance." It is indeed almost a matter of course that there is in " jNlarius the''Epicurean " another presentation of that theory of life which had been put forth twelve years be- fore, harshly criticised and silently withdrawn. In fact we have almost exactly the same idea — some variations will be of interest later — wdth a single difference, a difference of great importance. In " The Renaissance " the view was placed at the end ; it seemed to be for the time, at least, the last word. In " Marius " it comes early in the book ; it is almost a starting point. And it is the develop- ment of thought from this point that gives " Marius " its peculiar interest in tiie study of Pater's philosophy. When the book was first pub- lished it was at once recognized that Pater had presented a development of that " hedonism " which the newspapers and Air. Edward Cracroft Lefroy had reprehended, but no one perceived the exact scope of the development, and even now, in the light of much now published, written by Pater before '* Marius " and afterward, one cannot rest assured that Pater's later philosophy is before us in any such sharp clearness as characterized his earlier views. For this there are several reasons, of which the chief is that Pater himself conceived his later ideas with no such definite sharpness as had distinguished his earlier thought. He makes plain enough what is needed for his story, the INTRODUCTION xxxvii development of the thought of Marius, but it is only by rather tentative conjectures that we can reconstruct for ourselves anything that shall be in harmony with what we may otherwise know. Any attempt should be offered with diffidence : it is sometimes pretty hard even to find out what one thinks oneself (if anything), and Pater's mind was a very subtle one. In the first glow of realization of manhood, sent to philosoph}^ for comfort which the religion of Numa failed to give, Marius became an Epicurean of the school of Aristippus of Cyrene. And, not to risk misconception by vagueness of allusion, it will be well to note the main elements of his then theory quite definitely. -The idea from which he started, the idea at that moment most definitely impressed upon his mind by the death of his first passionate friend, was that of mortality. Flavian was gone forever : of that there was no manner of doubt; and, like Flavian, Marius too would go at his appointed time — would go, or, more graphically, would go out. It was, then, not with any hope of immortality that Marius turned to the philosophers, but rather with a sojt,of_c.uriosity, a feeling of half-interest arising in the very numbness or deadness of pain. And yet his mind was such that he could not long re- main intellectually adrift, and whatever had been his motive in reading Heraclitus, it is not strange that the pregnant enigmas of the Ionian had a xxxviii INTRODUCTION moving effect on his mind. He read and thought, or rather began to think, began to construct for himself a sort of intellectual standing-ground. It is pointed out that in common with the greater number, he misconceived his author, or at least it he did at times arrive at true conception, he more often halted at the first step, the easiest to appre- hend and remember, the step, in fact, indicated by the quotation -dvra pel which serves as motto for the conclusion. It was at this point, at the concep- tion of the changing and transitory nature of all things, that Marius fell in with the doctrine of Aristippus, a '' master of decorous livmg," who gave him the idea of accepting even the hard terms of Heraclitus, and yet aiming to *' well adorn and beautify these fleeting lives into an exquisite gra- ciousness and urbanity." Experience was the thing: truth was perhaps illusory and impossible to come at, but direct impression must be real, and to be constantly able to apprehend experience, was something which might well offer a path through life. The aim was, not pleasure as so many thought, but a " general completeness of life," a Hfe of various and select sensations. " H he could but count upon the present, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one any- where beyond ftself, if men's highest curiosity was indeed so persistently bafifled — then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vivid sensations, and INTRODUCTION xxxix such intelligent apprehensions as, in strength and , directness and their immediately realized values at I the bar of actual experience, are most like sensa- - tJOJA&J' Still even such experience, to be perfect, must not be isolated and discrete, hence the artistic enjoyment took more or less the form of culture or education, such a form of culture as, Marius conceived, might even be as though a kind of religion. But there was yet one thing more and that some- thing very important. What kind of experience was it to be? What kind of culture? We may, nowadays, even ask what kind of religion? Might it not often be an experience which would run counter to ordinary conditions of morality? To an eager, wide-ranging mind, such everyday conditions might seem to be made by habit, conven- tion : the necessary course of life might easily seem directly across them. Or might not lower natures, following vigorously the line of experience most easily conceived by them, might they not readily fall into the bog of a life given up to animal pleasures ? In these last queries we see the chief difference between the Conclusion and the eighth and ninth chapters of " Marius." The philosophy of the young Roman was the same as that philosophy which had been criticised in London : and in these last words Pater had his answer to such criticism. That it was possible that such a view of life might xl INTRODUCTION not always lead one in the path of traditional moral- ity he allowed readily enough : it was a good doc- trine for the strong, but there were some who might find in it an opportunity for inherent evil tendency. As to '' hedonism," however, he took pains to show that the philosophy of Marius was by no means chargeable with it, provided, that is, that by " hedonism " one meant a life which makes pleas- ure, in its lower conception, the great object of life. And at any rate it was not pleasure, even of a noble kind, but rather fullness of life that Marius sought. He was a youth of pure, healthy temper, given up to vigorous, even severe, studies, — one can see that he would easily keep a true line be- tween youthful antinomianism, joyful contravention of traditional morality on the one hand and any shameful lowering of the spirit by seeking mere pleasure of a baser form. Still, in spite of Pater's caveats, it is clear that the philosophy of Marius, like that of the Conclusion, might perhaps be taken as guide by such as could not strictly follow it, or, to vary the figure, by such as desired not so much a lamp to their feet as a cloak for favorite deeds of darkness. So much might still be urged agaii^t the early philosophy of Marius, against the new form into which Pater had put the ideas of the Conclusion. <;^But there is still one more point to notice in our criticism, a point which will supply us with an idea of how to go forward in an inquiry as to Ibe development of Pater's thinking. INTRODUCTION xli ' Both the Conclusion and Marius base their theory of Hfe upon the perpetual flux of life, the series " of impressions unstable, flickering, incon- sistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them." Both also hold in mind the inevitable end. In the Conclusion the idea is constant : " a counted number of pulses only," '' this too short day of frost and sun," " we have an inter- val and then our place knows us no more," — the sense of the inevitable end gives a character that at times is as oppressive as the motionless air on a summer's day. In '' Marius," however, there is very little suggestion of this unescapable doom, and that the more curiously that the development of the idea came to Marius immediately after the death of Flavian. One would be inclined to say that at just such a time, if ever, would be felt the heavy pressure of the certain stop to which all must come. For to Marius at that time death was a finality. '* The end of Flavian came Hke a final revelation of nothing less than the soul's extinction. Fla- vian had gone out as utterly as the fire among those still beloved ashes." Now, then, if ever, would the sense of death be bitter and imperious, and the Epicurean theory would be perhaps the only escape from the pressing recurrence of a thought too painful to be avoided. Such may have been Pater's idea, but if it were it was not a dom- inating element, for after the first few lines we get hardly a reminder of the thought. The whole xlii INTRODUCTION speculation is built up with a different view, — it is not a shelter in the face of necessary and impending death, it is rather a preparation for availing oneself to the utmost of all the possibilities of life. It came at the beginning and not at the end ^it was not the final Epicureanism of Marius, it was the first philosophy of a young man, a philosophy from which he moved, or, more exactly, a philosophy which he enlarged and developed for himself under the pressure of maturer years and the illumination of new experience^ Just here it may become an open question as to how far '' Marius " Js_atrtobiogi:aphi9/^ Undoubt- edly Marius developed the new Cyrenaicism so that it had little left of its original character ; it may be questionable as to whether Pater himself so developed the ideas of the Conclusion. And yet when we consider that the Conclusion was written at the age of thirty, it seems foolish to think for an instant that Pater, at the age of fifty-odd, should not have modified or developed his ideas, that he should not have withdrawn from them or advanced beyond them. Still we may for the present content ourselves with tracing the development of Marius. The young Roman at this time was planning for himself a life precisely like Pater's life, namely, that of a critic of art, and further, a critic whose canons were precisely those presented by Pater in the Introduction to *' The Renaissance," just as his philosophy was very like its Conclusion. *' To INTRODUCTION xliii understand the various forms of ancient art and thought, the various forms of actual human feeUng (the only new thing in the world almost too opulent in what was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scrupu- lous entirety, the claims of these concrete and actual objects on his sympathy, his intelligence, his senses — to ' pluck out the heart of their mystery,' and in turn become the interpreter of them to others : this had now defined itself for Marius as a very nar- rowly practical design : it determined his choice of a vocation to live by." Such was the idea with which Marius sought the city of Rome to take a place in the imperial household. In thus leaving the seclusion of his own thoughts for the more open world of conflicting opinions, Marius exposed himself to two influences, — one that of the Stoicism then dominant at the court of Marcus Aurelius, the other that of Christianity, which was widely permeating society. Stoicism Marius regarded openly as a rival theory, and even in the person of the philosophic Emperor and the persuasive rhetorician Fronto, he felt it to be a little mediocre, almost vulgar. Its abnegations fitted too easily into incapacity. Christianity, on the other hand, came to him without his knowledge in the person of his friend Cornelius, one to whom he was drawn by an attraction stronger even than had drawn him to Flavian, one well-fitted by his chaste and strong youth to exercise a dominating if unconscious influence. xjiv INTRODUCTION So the Epicureanism of Marius, which, as we have seen, gave large opportunity for difference of direction, allowed him to draw to a life of which itself would have been incapable. The chief sug- gestions of the journey, of his early life at Rome, came from the example of Cornelius, the teaching of the young Knight giving a color, or even a direction, to the speculation and the self-conscious conduct of life of his friend. What then was the influence of Christianity upon the philosophy of Marius, and what the influ- ence of Stoicism? As Marius began his journey to Rome at the summons of the Emperor, his first days were filled by a free delight of appreciation and reflection which one can readily imagine. It is noteworthy however, that after these days came a sort of reac- tion, in which '' all journeying from the known to the unknown came suddenly to figure as a mere foolish truancy," in which he felt a vague sort of homesickness, the need of some companion or of some society which was his and to which he be- longed. It was from this depression, from this dis- trust and loneliness, that he was rescued by the comfort of the little inn and the voice of Cornelius. It is in its ample answer to these two simple human needs that Christianity has so often come to those who were intellectually well enough satisfied with one or another philosophy. The mind may be sufificientlv convinced, but the heart often feels INTRODUCTION xlv vaguely that the one thing needful is not. To many lonely souls Christ and the Christian Church have given a peace and joy not to be reached by . the subtlest and most accurate definition and dis- , crimination. It was this, and no philosophical | solution of questions, no satisfying development of ; ideas, that Christianity offered Marius. Certainly \ a very simple matter. Simple as the solution was, it was brought about in the case of the young Roman by no simple means. The influence of Cornelius, foreshadowed at the moment of his coming into his friend's life, never affected any conscious adaptation in the theory which became so effectually modified. Emotional in its nature, it had to be translated into other terms, and hence it was that the conscious appreciation of what it was that he needed came to Marius, not from Christianity but from Stoicism. The discourse of Pronto left him dreaming " of that august community, to be an outlaw from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss so much greater than to be excluded unto the ends of the earth from the sovereign Roman commonwealth." And it was from Marcus Aure- lius that he gained the idea of that " self not him self, beside him in his coming and going," " that living and companionable spirit at work in all things." It was certainly in no simple way, it was by very subtle, even by subconscious, processes that these ideas gained their place in his careful xlvi INTRODUCTION philosophy, such a place that everything else had to be remodeled to harmonize with them. It was /by his building upon the " golden mediocrity," the ' " facile optimism " of Stoicism, as well as by the I companionship of Cornelius, and the church in the \ house of Caecilia that he finally reached the appre- ciation of a true theory of life. Nor w^as the full I realization of that theory ever reached by conscious thought : Marius was made aware of it finally only when the force of circumstances gave him the op- portunity for an act of self-sacrifice of which he gladly availed himself. ' To follow out carefully the development of the •" New Cyrenaicism " of Marius would be needless here. It was left behind : two points of destruc- tive criticism soon appeared; first, that his theory had been in part the result of the natural antinomi- anism of youth ; and second, that it had attempted to grasp too much without recognition of the need in a well-ordered life of a certain sacrifice. These two ideas are of more interest just here than the practical outcome of the life of Marius. 'Bo far as '' Marius " throws any light on Pater's" attitude" toward his much-criticised theory of the place of art in life, we may say this much: he recognized that it had its faults, that it was not broad enough, and that it had been carried somewhat on its nar- row way by the force of youthful joy in individual- ity. But when we ask ourselves further, and look to see what was substituted therefor, we find little. INTRODUCTION xlvii The development of the thought and life of Marius toward Christianity gives us a hint, perhaps, on Pater's • own ideas, but not much as to his own thinking on those matters which are to our present purpose. Whatever may have been Pater's ideas on these matters, one thing is certain enough : namely, that he did not see fit to express them in any definite form. Turned into the direction, it may well be, by his striking success in " Marius the Epicurean," his imagination worked in the vein suggested by " The Child in the House." "An Imaginary Por- trait " that had been called ; his next volume was a collection of four such portraits. In fact, for the four years following '' Marius " he seems to have written little beside these sketches of ideal figures. *' A Prince of Court Painters," that is to say, Wat- teau, " Sebastian van Storck," " Denys TAuxer- rois," the one put into our selection, '' Duke Carl von Rosenmold," " Gaston de Latour," originally planned as a companion to '' Marius," but never finished, '' Emerald Uthwart," and '' Hippolytus ^ Veiled," a realization of the tragedy of Euripides, and " Apollo in Picardy," — in all these, whatever ideas on the relation of art to life were presented must be sought for in the personalities. And in these *' Imaginary Portra its " — written, not with a critical or didactic purpose, but for, the pleasure of putting some imagined life into per- manent form — we can distinguish easily what may xlviii INTRODUCTION be regarded as Pater's typical figure, perhaps the figure which was a concrete exhibition of the ideas which he held in theory : — a youth set apart in a measure from his fellows by greater sensitiveness to surroundings and greater disposition to reflec- tion, a little worldlet thrown ofif, as it were, in the revolution of the great world, continuing to revolve in the same general system, but having an individ- uality of its own, or more accurately a center of gravity of its own. Florian Deleal, Marius, Sebas- tian, Carl von Rosenmold, Gaston, Hippolytus, Emerald — the generalization includes them all ex- cept Anthony Watteau, the only historical figure among them, and the medieval avatars of Dionysus and Apollo, which were the outcome of quite a different idea. A life continually absorbing from without the material for continual evolution from within, that is the ideal presented in various forms. And it will be remarked that no one of all these gracious figures can be regarded as the embodi- ment of the principles of the Conclusion, Watteau comes the nearest. Of him it was at first written : *' The rudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces of life into a physical want, like hunger or thirst which might come to greed; and methinks he perhaps overvalues those things." Later the diarist goes on: "Those worldly graces he seemed as a young lad almost to hunger and thirst for, as if truly the mere adorn- ments of life were necessaries : he takes them as if INTRODUCTION xlix he had been used to them. And there is something noble — shall I say ? — in his half-disdainful way of serving himself with what he still, as I think, secretly values over much." But Watteau makes an advance : he never pretended that the delicate beauty that was necessary to him was really suffi- cient for him ; " that delicate life of Paris " painted so excellently, with so much spirit, partly because after all, he looked down upon it or despised it or knew it was but a means too often taken for an end. He was indeed " always a seeker after something in the world, that there is in no satisfying measure or not at all ; " so says the diarist, but it is likely enough that what he was seeking for might really have been found by seeking in another way. With the others each enjoyment was by no means the highest satisfaction of a passing moment, which must be enjoyed or forever lost, but rather some- thing of which the chief value was in its outcome. So it was also in the house of M. de Crozat that Watteau found so charming. The antiquities, " beautiful curiosities of all sorts ... are ar- ranged all around one," — how? " so that the influ- ence, the genius of those things may imperceptibly play upon, and enter into one, and form what one does." ^ In a few words, then, art is not an enjoy- ment merely, it is an educator. Life and character are to be moulded by it. The end of life is not experience only : it is education. 4 . ' I INTRODUCTION It is the view of certain philosophers on Beauty that a thing may be beautiful if we find in it imme- diate enjoyment, while those things which are not immediate in their happy result are rather to be called good. According to such a view aesthetics would be a matter of present values and ethics a matter of future values, [li this distinction be cor- rectly made between the two words we should say that while the Conclusion to " The Renaissance " was aesthetic in tone, Pater's later idea was largely, indeed, chiefly ethicajC^ For the Conclusion had distinctly the appreciation of immediate experience for its own sake without view to future possibilities. In the Imaginary Portraits, however, the beauty of surrounding circumstances is almost always re- garded as being an educative force. Actually the distinction should not be pressed so far. Undoubtedly even in his earlier days Pater thought of art as a formative agent and in his later thought it is tke pure enjoyment of art w-liich works unconsciously in its ethical function. But he certainly changed the point he chose to empha- size and that was the important matter. It is not much of an achievement, perhaps, to conceive or present the idea that beauty, and so art, is an educator. Ruskin had something of the same idea. Ruskin, however, had it with a great dii¥er- erence, for he held art to be not merely educative but didactic. He held that in literature, painting, INTRODUCTION li sculpture, we should actually find something, often precepts even, that should be of value in deter- mining conduct. Some such idea, too, though not precisely the same, had Arnold. ^The . origina lity of Pater'^Jdea did not lie in the fact that he gave ethics a place in aesthetics ; it lay in the way in \ which he conceived that aesthetic enjoyment might j itself be a moral agent. ^The two points of importance here would seem to be the end to which art educates and the means by which it proceeds. On the first of these mat- ters Pater says little, for a reason that will appear : The second is of more importance because Pater's solution is very characteristic; it involves his ideas on style. To many readers the matter of style is the great thing about Pater. With Pater him.self it was probably not so, — that is, he is almost always occu- pied with other matters when he writes about any- body else. Had he regarded style as a matter of the importance given to it by his admirers, it seems probable that he would have said more about it in speaking of other men. Still he must have paid a great deal of attention to his own mode of expres- sion, and certainly his style has been greatly ad- mired. But hence arises the curious fact that some who read with great pleasure Pater's first work, find in his last much that they can only with diffi- culty even understand. It is curious that a man lii INTRODUCTION who wote so clearly and brilliantly in '' The Renais- sance shoulde ver hav e written sentences as in- volved as man^of those in " Plato and Platonism." The fact, however, puts us on the right path. Are we to regard style as a way of writing, per- haps a very excellent way of writing, which will be discovered early in life, it may be, and then ad- hered to always as the best? We may, certainly, and many men have done so. But the idea involves a curious corollary, namely, that the first idea was the best. Such seems to have been the case of Macaulay, who, in the essay on Milton, exhibited a remarkable style, which he modified, but never changed. Pater, however, was a man very differ- ent from Macaulay. He changed his opinions on some things, as we have seen : what was the chanc