Then some of the architecture at Vezelay ‘typical of Cluniac sculpture’ is pure Viollet-le-Duc, I am assured by a competent authority. A more serious error of Pater’s, for it is adjectival, not a fact, occurs in Apollo in Picardy—‘rebellious masses of black hair.’ This is the only instance in the parfait prosateur, as Bourget called him, of a cliché worthy of the ‘Spectator.’ Then it is possible to differ from Mr. Benson in his criticism of the Imaginary Portraits (the four fair ovals
in one volume), surely Pater’s most exquisite achievement after the Renaissance. Gaston is the failure Pater thought it was, and Emerald Uthwart is frankly very silly, though Mr. Benson has a curious tenderness for it. One sentence he abandons as absolute folly. The grave psychological error in the story occurs where the surgeon expresses compunction at making the autopsy on Uthwart because of his perfect anatomy. Surely this would have been a source of technical pleasure and interest to a surgeon, much as a butterfly-collector is pleased when he has murdered an unusually fine species of lepidoptera. Speaking myself as a vivisector of some experience, I can confidently affirm that a well-bred golden collie is far more interesting to operate upon than a mongrel sheep-dog. Nor can I comprehend Mr. Benson’s blame of Denys l’Auxerrois as too extravagant and even unwholesome, when the last quality, so obvious in Uthwart, he seems to condone.
Again, Marius the Epicurean is a failure by Pater’s own high standard: you would have imagined it seemed so to Mr. Benson.
Dulness is by no means its least fault. In scheme it is not unlike John Inglesant; but how lifeless are the characters compared with those of Shorthouse. Both books deal with philosophic ideas and sensations; the incidents are merely illustrative and there is hardly a pretence of sequence. In the historical panorama which moves behind Inglesant, there are at least ‘tactile’ values, and seventeenth-century England is conjured up in a wonderful way; how accurately I do not know. In Marius the background is merely a backcloth for mental poses plastiques. You wonder, not how still the performers are, but why they move at all. Marcus Aurelius, the delightful Lucian, even Flavian, and the rest, are busts from the Capitoline and Naples museums. Their bodies are make-believe, or straw from the loft at ‘White Nights.’ Cornelius, Mr. Benson sorrowfully admits, is a Christian prig, but Marius is only a pagan chip from the same block. John Inglesant is a prig too, but there is blood in his veins, and you get, at all events, a Vandyck, not a plaster cast. The magnificent passages of prose which vest this image make it resemble
the ex voto Madonnas of continental churches—a shrine in literature but not a lighthouse.
I sometimes wonder what Pater would have become had he been a Cambridge man, and if the more strenuous University might have forced him into greater sympathy with modernity; or if he had been born in America, as he nearly was, and Harvard acted as the benign stepmother of his days. Such speculations are not beyond all conjecture, as Sir Thomas Browne said. I think he would have been exactly the same.
On the occasion of Pater’s lecture on Prosper Merimée, his friends gathered round the platform to congratulate him; he expressed a hope that the audience was able to hear what he said. ‘We overheard you,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘Ah, you have a phrase for everything,’ replied the lecturer, the only contemporary who ever influenced himself, Wilde declared. How admirable both of the criticisms! Pater is an aside in literature, and that is why he was sometimes overlooked, and may be so again in ages to come. Though he is the greatest master of style the century produced, he
can never be regarded as part of the structure of English prose. He is, rather, one of the ornaments, which often last, long after a structure has perished. His place will be shifted, as fashions change. Like some exquisite piece of eighteenth-century furniture perchance he may be forgotten in the attics of literature awhile, only to be rediscovered. And as Fuseli said of Blake, ‘he is damned good to steal from.’ If he uses words as though they were pigments, and sentences like vestments at the Mass, it is not merely the ritualistic cadence of his harmonies which makes his works imperishable, but the ideas which they symbolise and evoke. Pater thinks beautifully always, about things which some people do not think altogether beautiful, perhaps; and sometimes he thinks aloud. We overhear him, and feel almost the shame of the eavesdropper.
Mr. Benson has approached Walter Pater, the man, with almost sacerdotal deference. He suggests ingeniously where you can find the self-revelation in Gaston and The Child in the House. This is far more illuminating than the recollections of personal friends
whose reminiscences are modelled on those of Captain Sumph. Mr. Humphry Ward remembers Pater only once being angry—it was in the Common Room—it was with X, an elderly man! The subject of the difference was ‘modern lectures.’ ‘Relations between them were afterwards strained.’ Mr. Arthur Symons remembers that he intended to bring out a new volume of Imaginary Portraits. Fancy that! Really, when friends begin to tell stories of that kind, I begin to suspect they are trying to conceal something. Perhaps we have no right to know everything or anything about the amazing personalities of literature; but Henleys and Purcells lurk and leak out even at Oxford; and that is not the way to silence them. Just when the aureole is ready to be fitted on, some horrid graduate (Litteræ inhumaniores) inks the statue. Anticipating something of the kind, Mr. Benson is careful to insist on the divergence between Rossetti and Pater, and on page eighty-six says something which is ludicrously untrue. If self-revelation can be traced in Gaston, it can be found elsewhere. There are sentences in Hippolytus Veiled, the Age of the Athletic