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



come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out 

 from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange 

 thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a 

 moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women 

 of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty into 

 which the soul with all its maladies has passed ! . . . She is older 

 than the rocks among which she sits ; hke the vampire she has been 

 dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been 

 a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ; and 

 trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants ; and, as Leda, 

 was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of 

 Mary ; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and 

 flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the 

 changing hneaments, and tinged the eyehds and the hands." 



Such writing has an undeniable magic about it ; it is like a 

 musical fantasia, embodying hints and echoes, touching into life a 

 store of reveries and dreams, opening up strange avenues of dreamful 

 thought. 



It may be said that Pater goes too far in his interpretation of 

 these pictures, and that the great artists who made them would have 

 disclaimed the significance Avith which Pater has charged them ; but 

 after all, the pictures are there, and the magical power of art is its 

 quickening spirit ; its faculty of touching trains of thought that run 

 far beyond the visible horizon. 



Of course, it is possible to dislike such writing for its over- 

 powering sensuousness ; it is possible to say that it is touched with 

 decadence, in its dwelling on the beauty of evil, made fair by remote- 

 ness ; but this is to take an ethical view, to foresee contingencies, to 

 apprehend the ultimate consequences of the appeal. As in all lofty 

 art, the beauty is inexphcable, the charm cannot be analysed ; its 

 sincerity, its zest is apparent, and it remains as a typical instance of 

 the prose that is essentially poetical, in its liquid cadences, its echoing 

 rhythms. 



And here, I believe, lies the value of the work that Pater was 

 able to do for English. He struck out an absolutely new line in 

 EngUsh prose. He was the most original, the least imitative of 

 stylists ; he refused to read the works of contagious writers, such as 

 Stevenson and Mr. Kipling, because he knew what he meant to say, 

 and how he meant to say it, and he was afraid that their influence 

 might come in between him and his conception. 



The essence of his attempt was to produce prose that had never 

 before been contemplated in English, full of colour and melody, serious, 

 exquisite, ornate. He devoted equal pains, both to construction and 

 ornamentation. Whether he is simple and stately, whether he is 

 involved and intricate, he has contrast always in view. His object 

 was that every sentence should be weighted, charged with music, 

 haunted with echoes ; that it should charm and suggest, rather than 



