ter's essays became to me
'the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.' They are
still this to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about
them. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration
there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.
It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a
really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an
unbiassed opinion is always valueless.

But I must not allow this brief notice of Mr. Pater's new volume to
degenerate into an autobiography. I remember being told in America that
whenever Margaret Fuller wrote an essay upon Emerson the printers had
always to send out to borrow some additional capital 'I's,' and I feel it
right to accept this transatlantic warning.

_Appreciations_, in the fine Latin sense of the word, is the title given
by Mr. Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite
essays, of delicately wrought works of art--some of them being almost
Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others mediaeval
in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them
absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to
whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the
age in which he lives. To realize the nineteenth century one must
realize every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to
its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about
others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathize, no dead
mode of life that one cannot make alive. The legacies of heredity may
make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but
intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he
who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
impulse obscure.

Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the least successful, of the
essays contained in the present volume is that on _Style_. It is the
most interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high
authority that comes from the noble realization of things nobly
conceived. It is the least successful, because the subject is too
abstract. A true artist like Mr. Pater is most felicitous when he deals
with the concrete, whose very limitations give him finer freedom