ost of
all, with _words,_ that material which is so stained and corrupted
and outraged--and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly
he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for
the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses
and what--so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!--they
apprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold and
silver; these--and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiable
fingers--he handles with the reverence of a priest touching
consecrated elements.

Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streams
and tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all,
for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than the
others, and one is more apt to find one's self alone there.

Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most
characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Denys
L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god--has
he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched
white Flesh?--leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau,
the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded and
withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of
those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their
own too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic
valley of dreams. Watteau's "happy valley" is, indeed, sadder than
our most crowded hours--how should it not be, when it is no
"valley" at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles?--but,
though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!

And along the borders of it and under its clipped trees, by its
fountains and ghostly lawns, still, still can one catch in the twilight
the shimmer of the dancing feet of the Phantom-Pierrot, and the
despair in his smile! For him, too--for Gilles the Mummer--as for
Antoine Watteau and Walter Pater, the wistfulness of such places is
not inconsistent with their levity. Soon the music must stop. Soon it
must be only a garden, "only a garden of Lenotre, correct, ridiculous
and charming." For the lips of the Despair of Pierrot cannot always
touch the lips of the Mockery of Columbine; in the end, the Ultimate
Futility must turn them both to stone!

And, finally, that Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines "we say to
our friend" about Her who is "older than the rocks on which she
s