1906.] on Walter Pater. 221 



with their work. Pater had a great admiration for the methods of 

 Flaubert, who said that in any question of phrasing, there were several 

 good ways of expressing a point, but only one perfect way, and that 

 it was the artist's business to find it. It was often a very trying 

 business in the case of Flaubert, who would pace about for hours or 

 lie on his couch, searching for a particular word, the racked and tor- 

 tured medium of his art. But though Pater used often to bewail, 

 half humorously, the trouble that his work cost him, there is no doubt 

 that it was to him a deep and abiding joy, a constant source of 

 refreshment and delight. 



His method of composition was peculiar ; he used to read and 

 meditate, noting on little slips of paper, many of which are preserved, 

 the points he wished to emphasise. Then he wrote, on alternate lines 

 of ruled paper, a skeleton of his essay or chapter. Then he pro- 

 ceded to ampHfy this, adding all kinds of curious and beautiful 

 touches, elaborate epithets, minute illustrations. Then the whole was 

 recopied, still on alternate lines, and the same process would be gone 

 through again, and even a third time, if he was not satisfied. 



The result of this is the peculiar effect, which is so noticeable in 

 all his work, of a richly embroidered texture. Sometimes, indeed, the 

 structure is apt to become invisible in the superabundance of ornament. 

 The long-drawn-out sentences, with their parentheses, their metaphors, 

 their qualifying clauses, their stately epithets, sometimes lack lucidity ; 

 but they have an extraordinary suggestiveness, a dim and haunted 

 grandeur, a delicacy of aroma, which is the work of a consummate 

 artist. He does not produce a brilHant easy effect ; he does not aim 

 at just flashing a clear impression upon the mind and passing on ; the 

 sentences rather wind and cUng Kke wefts of smoke on a still day, 

 with a subtle and aerial texture, full of hints and glimpses of 

 mysterious beauty. 



Let me read a sentence or two from the essay on Leonardo da 

 Vinci, which is perhaps the best example of his finest early work. He 

 is describing the sea-shore of the picture of St. Anne ; — " that delicate 

 place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher over 

 the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and 

 the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with 

 grass grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of 

 fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand 

 with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight 

 things reach him so ; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint 

 hght of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, 

 or through deep water." 



Or, again in the still more celebrated description of La Gioconda, 

 Leonardo's great picture : — 



" The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters is 

 expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to 

 desire. Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world have 



