1906.] 071 Walter Pater. 217 



close friend when he was nearing the end of his great labour ; and it 

 may be said, too, that in the course of writing Marins he passed from 

 youth into settled manhood. He withdrew for those years into a 

 secret chamber of thought ; no sound, no hint came from within to 

 indicate what the worker was doing in his lonely hours ; the metal 

 rang faintly within ; the smoke of the furnace ascended ; but no one 

 was admitted to a sight of the toil. He entered his house of labour 

 a brilhant, wayward, almost reckless youth ; he emerged from it a 

 grave, kindly, soUd-hearted man. He entered it a fitful, ornate 

 writer ; he left it a profound master of his art. He entered it a 

 man of fluctuating impulses of soul, drawn this way and that by 

 metaphysical and artistic speculation, not knowing what to think, 

 and disguising his vacillation under a glancing irony ; he emerged a 

 man of one vision, with a tender, hopeful, religious attitude of spirit, 

 if not fully a Christian, at least more Christian than anything else. 

 All reUgious beliefs are bound to be a balancing of probabiHties, 

 issuing, perhaps, in practical certainties ; but there are many dark 

 and insoluble mysteries which the brightest creed can hardly illu- 

 mine, but in this book Pater seems to have laid his hand upon a 

 clue, which, if it did not reveal the heavenly vision, at least seemed 

 indeed to lead the pilgrim thither. 



In the year of the publication of Marius, Pater took a house 

 in London, in Earl's Terrace, Kensington. But he did not give up 

 his Oxford work, residing there in the terms. His college work was 

 now less absorbing, because he had resigned his tutorship, though he 

 still continued to lecture. In London he went out a good deal into 

 society in a quiet way ; the pubUcation of Marius had given him 

 a real position in the literary world, and he found himself welcomed 

 and honoured. His chief work at this time was the interesting series 

 of studies which he called Imaginary Portraits. His method was to 

 select some typical and characteristic figure in the past, to study its 

 background very carefully, and then to produce a highly finished 

 picture ; it was the kind of work which was most congenial to him ; 

 it gave him an outlet for his pure imaginative and creative force, 

 and it also gave full scope to his extraordinary power of producing an 

 historical or artistic effect by selecting dehcate and characteristic 

 touches of scenery or environment. 



He was at work, too, on a great unfinished book Gaston de Latour, 

 of which a few chapters have been published. There are other 

 chapters in existence, but in a fragmentary state. Gaston is a young 

 French noble, who lives at the time of the great struggle between the 

 Huguenots and the Catholics, and falls under the various influences 

 of the time ; he visits the poet Ronsard in his monastery, and the 

 philosopher Montaigne in his chateau. He falls under the spell of 

 Bruno's pantheism. One fault in the book is that Gaston has too 

 little individuality ; he is a mere mirror which reflects a succession of 

 bright and attractive forms ; he is too much like Marius in tempera- 



