1906.] Mr. Artlmr G. Benson on Walter Pater. 207 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, January 2 (J, I'JOG. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S., Treasurer and 

 Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Arthur C. Benson, Esq., M.A. 



Walter Pater. 



In this mysterious Avorld in which we Uve, this short space of sun and 

 shade, of tears and laughter, there is nothing that is more mysterious 

 than our relation to, and our knowledge of, other personalities, those 

 men and women who are bound on the same strange pilgrimage as 

 ourselves. How little we know of those who are nearest to us ! How 

 little we know^ of ourselves ! How often are we confronted with the 

 fact that we ourselves, no less than those w^hom we believe we under- 

 stand, are swayed and guided by forces which are quite different from, 

 and infinitely more strong than, the motives by which we believe 

 ourselves and others to be influenced ! How common an experience 

 it is, when we look back upon a crisis in which we beheved at the 

 moment that we were acting spontaneously and decisively, to discern, 

 as time goes on, that our action was the inevitable outcome of our 

 circumstances, and that we had in reahty little choice in the matter ! 

 Herein lies the extraordinary interest of biography, that in the records 

 of a man's life we can trace to what extent he moulded his own career, 

 and how far it wa^ moulded by temperament and circumstances. 



The man whose life and work I propose to depict tonight has 

 the special interest of exhibiting a very marked and sahent type of 

 character. Walter Pater is a supreme instance of a man of creative 

 and artistic temperament. The great mass of mankind is mainly 

 swayed by what may be called material motives. The necessity for 

 earning the means of subsistence, for supporting a wife and family, 

 in a commonwealth where, though there is a considerable accumula- 

 tion of wealth, it seems as if there were not enough work to go round, 

 must for most people be paramount. But if we take our analysis a 

 little further, we shall find that there are two marked types of tem- 

 perament that are swayed, if not mainly, at least to a considerable 

 degree, by forces which we may call spiritual — the religious and the 

 artistic temperament. The basis of the rehgious temperament is that 

 it conceives itself to stand in a certain personal relation to God. This 

 beUef has innumerable forms. But the essence of it is that the 

 religious person believes that there is a certain significance in his life 



