rhaps the most beautiful book, written in
English. It is beautiful in many ways. It is beautiful, first of all, in
the uniquely personal quality of its prose, prose which is at once
austere and sensuous, simple at once and elaborate, scientifically exact
and yet mystically suggestive, cool and hushed as sanctuary marble,
sweet-smelling as sanctuary incense; prose that has at once the
qualities of painting and of music, rich in firmly visualized pictures,
yet moving to subtle, half-submerged rhythms, and expressive with every
delicate accent and cadence; prose highly wrought, and yet singularly
surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and
instinctive beneath all its sedulous art. It is no longer necessary, as
I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose. Whether it appeal to
one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere
ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding
the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated
expression. It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a
vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can,
to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he
himself sees it. Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of
prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various
places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on
"Style," and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called
"Euphuism" in _Marius_. In this last he thus goes to the root of the
matter:

That preoccupation of the _dilettante_ with what might seem mere
details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing
to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong
personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things
as really being, with important results, thus, rather than
thus--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called
upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the
model within.

This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a
beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the
prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not
irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary
Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity.

There is neither space here, nor need, to il