In no other country has mediocrity such a chance as in England. The second-rate writer, the second-rate painter meets with an almost universal and immediate recognition. When good mediocrities die, if they do not go straight to heaven (from a country where the existence of Purgatory is denied by Act of Parliament), at least they run a very fair chance of burial in Westminster Abbey. ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonus,’ in the shape of royalties, is the real test by which we estimate the authors who have just passed away. A few of our great writers—Ruskin and Tennyson, for example—have enjoyed the applause accorded to senility by a people usually timid of brilliancy and strength, when it is contemporary. The ruins of mental faculties touch our imagination, owing, perhaps, to that tenderness for antiquity which has preserved for us the remains of Tintern Abbey. Seldom, however, does a great writer live to find himself, in the prime of his literary existence, a component part of English literature. Yet there are happy exceptions, and not the least of these was Walter Pater.

His inclusion in the English Men of Letters series, so soon after his death, somewhat dazzled the reviewers. Mr. Benson was complimented on a daring which, if grudgingly endorsed, is treated as just the sort of innovation you would expect from the brother of the author of Dodo. ‘To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only an age of small souls,’ says Swinburne, and the presence of Pater, which rose so strangely beside our waters, seemed to many of his contemporaries only the last sob of a literature which they sincerely believed came to an end with Lord Macaulay.

It was a fortunate chance by which Mr. A. C. Benson, one of our more discerning critics, himself master of no mean style, should have been chosen as commentator of Pater. Among the plutarchracy of the present day a not very pretty habit prevails of holding a sort of inquest on deceased writers—a reaction against misplaced eulogy—tearing them and their works to pieces, and leaving nothing for reviewers or posterity to dissipate. From the author of the Upton Letters we expect sympathy and critical acumen. It is needless to say we are never disappointed. His book is not merely about a literary man: it is a work of literature itself. So it is charming to disagree with Mr. Benson sometimes, and a triumph to find him tripping. You experience the pleasure of the University Extension lecturer pointing out the mistakes in Shakespeare’s geography, the joy of the schoolboy when the master has made a false quantity. In marking the modern discoveries which have shattered, not the value of Pater’s criticisms, but the authenticity of pictures round which he wove his aureoles of prose, Mr. Benson says: ‘In the essay on Botticelli he is on firmer ground.’ But among the first masterpieces winged by the sportsmen of the new criticism was the Hamilton Palace ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (now proved to be by Botticini), to which Pater makes one of his elusive and delightful allusions. While the ‘School of Giorgione,’ which Mr. Benson thinks a little passÉ in the light of modern research is now in the movement. The latest bulletins of Giorgione, Pater would have been delighted to hear, are highly satisfactory. Pictures once torn from the altars of authenticity are being reinstated under the acolytage of Mr. Herbert Cook. A curious and perhaps wilful error, too, has escaped Mr. Benson’s notice. Referring to the tomb of Cardinal Jacopo at San Miniato, Pater says, ‘insignis forma fui—his epitaph dares to say;’ the inscription reads fuit. But perhaps the t was added by the Italian Government out of Reference to the English residents in Florence, and the word read fui in 1871. Troja fuit might be written all over Florence.

Then some of the architecture at Vezelay ‘typical of Cluniac sculpture’ is pure Viollet-le-Duc, I am assured by a competent authority. A more serious error of Pater’s, for it is adjectival, not a fact, occurs in Apollo in Picardy—‘rebellious masses of black hair.’ This is the only instance in the parfait prosateur, as Bourget called him, of a clichÉ worthy of the ‘Spectator.’ Then it is possible to differ from Mr. Benson in his criticism of the Imaginary Portraits (the four fair ovals in one volume), surely Pater’s most exquisite achievement after the Renaissance. Gaston is the failure Pater thought it was, and Emerald Uthwart is frankly very silly, though Mr. Benson has a curious tenderness for it. One sentence he abandons as absolute folly. The grave psychological error in the story occurs where the surgeon expresses compunction at making the autopsy on Uthwart because of his perfect anatomy. Surely this would have been a source of technical pleasure and interest to a surgeon, much as a butterfly-collector is pleased when he has murdered an unusually fine species of lepidoptera. Speaking myself as a vivisector of some experience, I can confidently affirm that a well-bred golden collie is far more interesting to operate upon than a mongrel sheep-dog. Nor can I comprehend Mr. Benson’s blame of Denys l’Auxerrois as too extravagant and even unwholesome, when the last quality, so obvious in Uthwart, he seems to condone.

Again, Marius the Epicurean is a failure by Pater’s own high standard: you would have imagined it seemed so to Mr. Benson.

Dulness is by no means its least fault. In scheme it is not unlike John Inglesant; but how lifeless are the characters compared with those of Shorthouse. Both books deal with philosophic ideas and sensations; the incidents are merely illustrative and there is hardly a pretence of sequence. In the historical panorama which moves behind Inglesant, there are at least ‘tactile’ values, and seventeenth-century England is conjured up in a wonderful way; how accurately I do not know. In Marius the background is merely a backcloth for mental poses plastiques. You wonder, not how still the performers are, but why they move at all. Marcus Aurelius, the delightful Lucian, even Flavian, and the rest, are busts from the Capitoline and Naples museums. Their bodies are make-believe, or straw from the loft at ‘White Nights.’ Cornelius, Mr. Benson sorrowfully admits, is a Christian prig, but Marius is only a pagan chip from the same block. John Inglesant is a prig too, but there is blood in his veins, and you get, at all events, a Vandyck, not a plaster cast. The magnificent passages of prose which vest this image make it resemble the ex voto Madonnas of continental churches—a shrine in literature but not a lighthouse.

I sometimes wonder what Pater would have become had he been a Cambridge man, and if the more strenuous University might have forced him into greater sympathy with modernity; or if he had been born in America, as he nearly was, and Harvard acted as the benign stepmother of his days. Such speculations are not beyond all conjecture, as Sir Thomas Browne said. I think he would have been exactly the same.

On the occasion of Pater’s lecture on Prosper MerimÉe, his friends gathered round the platform to congratulate him; he expressed a hope that the audience was able to hear what he said. ‘We overheard you,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘Ah, you have a phrase for everything,’ replied the lecturer, the only contemporary who ever influenced himself, Wilde declared. How admirable both of the criticisms! Pater is an aside in literature, and that is why he was sometimes overlooked, and may be so again in ages to come. Though he is the greatest master of style the century produced, he can never be regarded as part of the structure of English prose. He is, rather, one of the ornaments, which often last, long after a structure has perished. His place will be shifted, as fashions change. Like some exquisite piece of eighteenth-century furniture perchance he may be forgotten in the attics of literature awhile, only to be rediscovered. And as Fuseli said of Blake, ‘he is damned good to steal from.’ If he uses words as though they were pigments, and sentences like vestments at the Mass, it is not merely the ritualistic cadence of his harmonies which makes his works imperishable, but the ideas which they symbolise and evoke. Pater thinks beautifully always, about things which some people do not think altogether beautiful, perhaps; and sometimes he thinks aloud. We overhear him, and feel almost the shame of the eavesdropper.

Mr. Benson has approached Walter Pater, the man, with almost sacerdotal deference. He suggests ingeniously where you can find the self-revelation in Gaston and The Child in the House. This is far more illuminating than the recollections of personal friends whose reminiscences are modelled on those of Captain Sumph. Mr. Humphry Ward remembers Pater only once being angry—it was in the Common Room—it was with X, an elderly man! The subject of the difference was ‘modern lectures.’ ‘Relations between them were afterwards strained.’ Mr. Arthur Symons remembers that he intended to bring out a new volume of Imaginary Portraits. Fancy that! Really, when friends begin to tell stories of that kind, I begin to suspect they are trying to conceal something. Perhaps we have no right to know everything or anything about the amazing personalities of literature; but Henleys and Purcells lurk and leak out even at Oxford; and that is not the way to silence them. Just when the aureole is ready to be fitted on, some horrid graduate (LitterÆ inhumaniores) inks the statue. Anticipating something of the kind, Mr. Benson is careful to insist on the divergence between Rossetti and Pater, and on page eighty-six says something which is ludicrously untrue. If self-revelation can be traced in Gaston, it can be found elsewhere. There are sentences in Hippolytus Veiled, the Age of the Athletic Prizemen, and Apollo in Picardy, which not only explode Mr. Benson’s suggestions, but illustrate the objections he urges against Denys l’Auxerrois. They are passages where Pater thinks aloud. If Rossetti wore his heart on the sleeve, Pater’s was just above the cuff, like a bangle; though it slips down occasionally in spite of the alb which drapes the hieratic writer not always discreetly.

(1906.)