ic, and does all its hard work
as if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and to
overhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is like
music, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it
is precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and it
comes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is a
style in which, to use some of his own words, 'the writer succeeds in
saying what he _wills_.'

The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particular
qualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often,
been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely its
adaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary
closeness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, in
the man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you got
accustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, so
slow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet
scrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise,
pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousness
of utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and
out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask
moulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man,
literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far more than
that, the man himself, whom one felt through his few, friendly,
intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us,
in a slow and gradual revelation.

He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:

The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires
only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer
and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply
expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner.

And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty,
or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom,
and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor of
the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of all
this again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, the
criticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, a
confession, the _vraie verite_ (as he was fond of saying) about the
wo