214 Mr. Arthur C. Benson [Jan. 26, 



Calais." He became intolerant and indiscreet ; his talk, for instance, 

 in early days, showed a direct hostility to Christian principles ; he 

 defended artistic independence in matters of morality so frankly, that 

 many good people became suspicious of his own code of ethics. 



He plunged moreover into authorship. He abandoned the 

 metaphysical studies in which he had taken his chief delight ; he 

 made the discovery that art was the influence to which his spirit 

 responded, and of which he had all his life, dumbly and unconsciously, 

 been in search. His conversion, if I may use the word, dates from 

 his study of Otto Jahn's Life of Winckelmann. Winckelmann was 

 a young German, who after a toilsome, starved, and stunted boyhood, 

 suddenly discovered, with a shock of natural joy, the stimulus, the 

 appeal, the constraining charm of G-reek art, and flung himself with 

 fierce ardour into the study of ancient sculpture. In this, and in a 

 series of romantic friendships, he spent his short meteoric life. The 

 example of Winckelmann appealed to Pater as nothing in his life had 

 ever appealed to him before ; and the little study of Winckelmann, 

 which he completed in these early days, is not only a very beautiful 

 thing in itself, but casts a bright light upon the opening soul of the 

 writer. 



Pater's method was at first to produce, with infinite retouchings 

 and endless delays, a little study of some artistic or literary figure ; and 

 he chose for his period the Renaissance, when the wave of Greek 

 literature rolling westward, set free, it is said, by the taking of 

 Constantinople by the Turks, caused a strange mental stir in Europe, 

 at a time of eager speculation and wild unrest. Leonardo da Yinci, 

 Michelangelo, Botticelli, and other august figures, were taken by 

 Pater as types of this alert and blithe spirit of intellectual and artistic 

 enjoyment. In 1873, when he was 34, he collected these scattered 

 essays into a volume. Studies of the History of the Renaissance. Up 

 till this time he had been considered a young don, of ingenious 

 wit and dilettante tastes ; but the book produced a deep impression. 

 It was realised that here was a new voice, speaking of subjects 

 which were generally neglected, with a force and a conviction which 

 could not be gainsaid. It was a new philosophy of life ; and 

 the effect was heightened by the elaborate and impressive style in 

 which the book was written. It might be called languid, enervating, 

 oppressive, over-scented, but for all that it was clear that the book 

 had an extraordinary beauty of its own, that it was written in a 

 species of highly-wrought poetical prose that had never been exactly 

 attempted in English before. Luxuriant and gorgeous as it was, it 

 was at the same time refined and restrained ; it aimed at a severe 

 economy of effect, and the long intricate sentences were haunted with 

 rich echoes and cadences ; it evoked a whole host of images of a 

 shadowy and remote beauty ; it seemed full of subtle fragrance and 

 delicate colour ; whatever might be said of its possible effect, there 



