212 Mr. Arthur G. Benson [Jan. 26, 



is said always to have stood open. Men are constantly passing the 

 door, if that is the right word to use of an undergraduate going up- 

 stairs. Otherwise there is no noise, and in this small quiet room 

 were written and re-written some of the most elaborate and deUcately 

 wrought pages of English prose that have ever been put on paper. 

 Out of the room opens a door into a tiny vestibule full of cupboards, 

 which admits you by a low Gothic arch into a narrow little bedroom 

 of odd shape, such as are often found in the older colleges. Here for 

 over thirty years Pater slept during term-time. In latter years he 

 was an indifferent sleeper, and to beguile the slow hours worked 

 leisurely through the Dictionary of National Biography volume by 

 volume. He had constant opportunities of changing his rooms, 

 but partly from economy, partly because he hked the outlook, he 

 would not change. The sitting-room was simply furnished, but a few 

 beautiful things, and care as to colour and arrangement, and great 

 neatness, gave a mingled effect of grace and simplicity, which was 

 always characteristic of his surroundings. 



The interesting thing is that this was the environment of the man 

 whose teaching is by many supposed to be the apotheosis of intellectual 

 luxury, the life of Epicurean sensation, the resolve to taste and to 

 enjoy the quality and fineness of beauty, to crowd life with delicate 

 pulsations ; and all this was indeed a part of Pater's creed ; but there 

 was to be no surrender of life to lower deUghts, no pursuit of grosser 

 pleasure ; it was to be rather a life of spare austerity, a constant dis- 

 regarding of lower impulses and bodily satisfaction, a pursuit of 

 higher thought and purer beauty, the life of a Saint in art. And 

 again this was not to be a purely seK-regarding thing, a mere 

 surrender to agreeable and delicate sensation. If these things were 

 perceived and apprehended, by resolute practice, by unflagging 

 patience, they must be shared with and interpreted to others. It 

 was to this end that Pater's laborious life was dedicated ; not only to 

 see in Ufe and art what was beautiful and refining, but to toil inces- 

 santly, day by day, to bring the same joys home to others, whose per- 

 ceptions were less acute, whose aspirations were more fitful. 



Pater's view of his Oxford life was that it was primarily to be a 

 life of solitary study and quiet creative work. At the same time he 

 discharged such educational duties as fell to him with severe and 

 conscientious labour. He spent an amount of toil upon his college 

 lectures, which few people can have ever given to such work ; instead 

 of being brisk and business-like expositions of classical texts, hasty 

 improvisations, extempore comment, they were elaborately wi'itten, 

 carefully balanced discourses. The men who attended his lectures 

 purely from the examination point of view were apt to consider them 

 vague and unpractical ; but those whose aim was mental stimulus, 

 the enlarging of the intellectual horizon, found in them an extra- 

 ordinary sympathy and vitality. Pater seemed to approach Greek 

 thought and Greek life from the inside rather than from the outside. 



