rcade, donnait une idee plus profonde de l'infini
que le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne?_ It is to another
casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion
of his writing is some thrill of gratitude towards one who had at last
done 'a little justice,' not to himself, but to Manet): _Eh bien! on
m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si
patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La premiere fois que
j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec epouvante et ravissement, non
seulement des sujets reves par moi, mais des phrases, pensees par moi,
et ecrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant._ It is in such glimpses as
these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.

1906.

WALTER PATER

Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpreted
Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme
artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:

But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists
who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us
a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and
these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be
interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and
are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration
wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the
stress of a great name and authority.

It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, than
the very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properly
understood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is 'the
delicacies of fine literature' that chiefly appeal. There have been
greater prose-writers in our language, even in our time; but he was, as
Mallarme called him, 'le prosateur ouvrage par excellence de ce temps.'
For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of
form, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt his
attraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great age
of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcely
fail to become, not only 'the object of a special diligence,' but also
of 'a consideration wholly affectionate,' not lessened by the slowly
increasing 'stress of authority' which is coming to be laid, almost by
the world in general, on his name.

In the work of Pater, thought moves to mus