l economy, which was no business of his at all.

On the other side of his literary soul, his mere unwrapping of the
wealth and wonder of European art, he set going another influence,
earlier and vaguer than his influence on Socialism. He represented what
was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a
much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The
word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and
all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward.
They used the mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion.
Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not
Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that
Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic
and indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence of
Ruskin's great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in the
name of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name is
Walter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to which
Ruskin's vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Pater
eventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleased
Ruskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his work
that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly and
splendidly Pagan. In Pater we have Ruskin without the prejudices, that
is, without the funny parts. I may be wrong, but I cannot recall at this
moment a single passage in which Pater's style takes a holiday or in
which his wisdom plays the fool. Newman and Ruskin were as careful and
graceful stylists as he. Newman and Ruskin were as serious, elaborate,
and even academic thinkers as he. But Ruskin let himself go about
railways. Newman let himself go about Kingsley. Pater cannot let himself
go for the excellent reason that he wants to stay: to stay at the point
where all the keenest emotions meet, as he explains in the splendid
peroration of _The Renaissance_. The only objection to being where all
the keenest emotions meet is that you feel none of them.

In this sense Pater may well stand for a substantial summary of the
aesthetes, apart from the purely poetical merits of men like Rossetti and
Swinburne. Like Swinburne and others he first attempted to use mediaeval
tradition without trusting it. These people wanted to