forces unite in their purest energy? To
burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we
may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to
knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for
a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange
colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the
face of one's friend. With this sense of the splendor of our
experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one
desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make
theories about the things we see and touch.... Well! we are all
_condamnes_, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of
death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--_les hommes sont tous
condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis_: we have an interval,
and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in
listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the
children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in
expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible
into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened
sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of
enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come
naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion--that it does
yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of
such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of
art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication,
of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the
less true that another application of it led Marius to something like
Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and
serener path of spiritual vision.

Nothing short of wilful misconstruction can make of the counsel thus
offered, with so priestly a concern that the writer's exact meaning be
brought home to his reader, other than an inspiration toward a noble
employment of that mysterious opportunity we call life. For those of us,
perhaps more than a few, who have n