1906.] o?i Walter Pater. 209 



arriving at a beautiful effect by an amassing of minute touches, yet 

 there is no certain record that there was Dutch blood in his veins. 

 The Paters were a simple country stock, who are found living at 

 Weston Underwood, in Buckinghamshire, and enjoying the friend- 

 ship of the poet Cowper in the eighteenth century. Then came a 

 migration to America. The father of the great critic, a physician of 

 tender and unobtrusive benevolence, returned to England, and settled 

 at Shadwell, near Stepney, where he laboured diUgently at the reUef 

 of suffering among the poor. But he died young, and Walter Pater, 

 who was born in 1839, was brought up in the quietest of homes at 

 Enfield. 



Those to whom, what is perhaps almost the most exquisite of all 

 Pater's writings, a little study, called The Child in the House^ is 

 famihar, will be able to form a picture of the early days of the quiet 

 perceptive child. It was always about the home, the house, the 

 garden, that Pater's tenderest memories centred and lingered. He 

 carried with him all his Ufe a fragrant memory of the scents, the 

 furniture, the books, the rooms of the old house, the perfumed air 

 wafted slowly in through open windows on the still summer after- 

 noons, the pleasant, fireKt hearth of winter evenings. 



Side by side in childhood with this acute and delicate perception 

 of beauty, which we do well to remember was hardly consciously 

 exercised at the time, ran two other preoccupations, so characteristic 

 of Pater's attitude that I will mention them here. One was a strong 

 preoccupation with ritual. He liked to devise little ceremonies in 

 which the children, vested gravely, moved about with a djue 

 solemnity — the other was a deeper thing ; very early the boy became 

 aware of that strange dark fibre knit up with the bright texture of 

 the world, the thread of sorrow ; the stream of falHng tears made 

 itself audible to him. The sorrow of loss, of sweet things that have 

 an end, troubled his childish philosophy. The teiTor of death im- 

 printed itself with a shocking horror on the tender mind. 



"At any time or place," he writes of the child, " in a moment, the 

 faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed around 

 him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the 

 straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright carpet, 

 amid the gayesfe company or happiest communing with himself." 



It may be thought that there was a strain of morbidity here, but 

 there was nothing yet that was morbid about the child ; he was 

 merry, self-absorbed, occupied in little pursuits and aims, Uke all 

 clever children ; it was only that he had an extraordinary receptive- 

 ness of impressions ; he did not analyse them, or wish to know the 

 reason of things ; he had no premature ideals, none of that painful 

 consciousness of impressive virtue which is sometimes so discon- 

 certing a thing in childhood, which ought, above all things, to be 

 humble and unaffected. He merely perceived ; and all that he saw 

 or felt imprinted itself with a fine exactness upon his mind, and with 

 Vol. XVIII. (No. 100) p 



