to be busy on a study on Pascal," In his earlier years the labor of liftwhich he has left nearly completed, ing the sentences was so terrific that when, in consequence of writing too any one with less fortitude would have close to an open window, pleurisy set entirely abandoned the effort. I recolin and greatly reduced his strength. lect the writing of the opening chapters Again he seemed convalescent, and had of "Marius," and the stress that atleft his room, without ill effect, on July tended it- -the intolerable languor and 29, when, repeating the experiment fatigue, the fevers and the cold fits, next day, the action of the heart failed, the grey hours of lassitude and insomand he died, on the staircase of his nia, the toil as at a deep petroleum house, in the arms of his sister, at ten well when the oil refuses to flow. o'clock on the morning of Monday, With practice, this terrific effort grew July 30, 1894. Had he lived five days less. A year ago I was reminding him longer, he would have completed his of those old times of storm and stress, fifty-fifth year. He was buried, in the and he replied, "Ah! it is much easier presence of many of his oldest friends, now. If I live long enough, no doubt in the beautiful cemetery of St. Giles I shall learn quite to like writing." at Oxford. The public saw the result of the labor in the smooth solidity of the result, and could suppose, from the very elaboration, that great pains had been taken. How much pains, very few indeed can have guessed. III. It may be of interest to record the manner in which this most self-con ceeded. First of all, another pretty fable must be knocked on the head. It has been said, and repeated, that Pater composed his best sentences without any relation to a context, and wrote them down on little squares of paper, ready to stick them in at appropriate and effective places. This is nonsense; it is quite true that he used such squares of paper, but it was for a very different purpose. He read with a box of these squares beside him, jotting down on each, very roughly, anything in his author which struck his fancy, either giving an entire quotation, or indicating a reference, or noting a disposition. He did not begin, I think, any serious critical work without surrounding himself by dozens of these little loose notes. When they were not direct references or citations, they were of the nature of a memoria technica. Here is an example : WHEN Pater was first seized with an ambition to write, the individuals of his own age with whom he came into competition were mainly poets. Those were the early days of Gabriel and Christian Rossetti, of Morris, of Swin-scious and artistic of prose-writers proburne; and most of the still younger men made their first steps in the field of verse, however far they might afterwards diverge from it. Pater, in this nest of singing-birds, resolved to be in prose no less painstaking, no less elaborate, no less bound by rule and art than the poets were. He is to be distinguished from those who had so much to say that their speech was forced out of them in a torrent, nor less from those whose instinct led them to bubble forth in periods of a natural artless grace. If we take these symbols of a mountain-stream or of a fountain for other prose-writers who have won the ear of the public with little effort, then for Pater the appropriate image seems the artesian well, to reach the contents of which, strata of impermeable clay must be laboriously bored. It was not that there was any lack of material there, nor any doubt about the form it must take when it emerged, but that it was so miraculously deep down and hard to reach. I have known writers of every degree, but never one to whom the act of composition was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater. Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., belfries, solemn night come in about the birds attracted by the Towers. Here is another: ? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, only after the Fall? These papers would be placed about too heavy a burden of allusion and him, like the pieces of a puzzle, and illustration. His style, however, was when the right moment came the his peculiarity. It had beautiful qualproper square would serve as a moni-ities, if we have to confess that it had. tor or as a guide. the faults of those qualities. It was highly individual; it cannot be said that he owed it to any other writer, or that at any period of his thirty years of literary labor he faltered or swerved from his own path. He was to a high degree self-centred. Pater did not study his contemporaries; last summer he told me that he had read scarcely a chapter of Mr. Stevenson and not a line of Mr. Kipling. "I feel, from what I hear about them," he said, "that they are strong; they might lead me out of my path. I want to go on writing in my own way, good or bad. I should be afraid to read Kipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat down to write." It was the excess of a very native and genuine modesty. He, too, was strong, had he but known it, strong enough to have resisted the magnets of contemporary style. Perhaps his own writing might have grown a little simpler and a little more supple if he had had the fortitude to come down and fight among his fellows. Having prepared his box of little squares, he would begin the labor of actual composition and so conscious was he of the modifications and additions which would supervene that he always wrote on ruled paper, leaving each alternate line blank. Mr. Austin Dobson reminds me that Goldsmith did the same. On this broad canvas of alternate lines, then, Pater would slowly begin to draw his composition, the cartoon of what would in time be a finished essay. In the first draft the phrase would be a bald one; in the blank alternate line he would at leisure insert fresh descriptive or parenthetical clauses, other adjectives, more exquisitely related adverbs, until the space was filled. It might then be supposed that the manuscript was complete. Far from it! Cancelling sheet by sheet, Pater then began to copy out the whole as before, on alternate lines of copybook pages; this revise was treated in the same way-corrected, enlarged, interleaved, as it were, with minuter shades of feeling and more elaborate apparatus of parenthesis. IV. No wonder that certain disadvan- WALTER PATER was one of those tages were attendant upon the exces- discreet spirits who, like Gray, never sive finish of such a style. It is not speak out." He was cautious, repossible to work in this way, with a served, and shy in his relations even cold hammer, and yet to avoid a certain with his friends; he seemed to possess deadness and slipperiness of surface. no medium through which to approach Pater's periods, in attaining their long- them very closely. An extremely drawn harmony and fulness, were apt affectionate disposition took the place to lose vigor. Their polish did not of expansiveness, and the young peoquite make up for their languor, for the ple who in later years gathered around faintness and softness which attended him mistook the one for the other. their slow manipulation. Verse will Each found in Pater what he brought; bear an almost endless labor of the each saw in that patient, courteous, file; prose, as the freer and more spon-indulgent mirror a pleasant reflection taneous form, is less happy in subjec- of himself. The inaccessibility of tion to it. "What long sentences Plato writes!" Pater says in his "Platonism," and no doubt Plato might return the compliment. The sentences of the Oxford critic are often too long, and they are sometimes broken-backed with having had to bear Pater is another of those fables which has to be destroyed; no one was less a hermit, no one was more easily amused or better pleased to bid a congenial companion welcome. He was an assiduous host, a gracious listener; but who could tell what was passing behind those half-shut, dark grey eyes, that wildest pranks in the light of the courteous and gentle mask? He liked moon. Pater has often reminded me the human race, one is inclined to say, of some such armadillo or wombat. liked its noise and neighborhood, if it That childishness which is the signwere neither too loud nor too near, but manual of genius used to come out in his faith in it was never positive, nor the oddest way when he was perfectly would he trust it to read his secret at home. Those who think of him as thoughts. a solemn pundit of æsthetics may be amazed to know that he delighted in very simple and farcical spectacles and in the broadest of humor. His favorite among modern playwrights was Mr. Pinero, and I shall never forget going with him to see "The Magistrate,' 66 I have already suggested his likeness to Renan in the attitude of his mind. The great Frenchman has described, in his autobiography, the tendency which led him to refrain from opposition and argument, and to bow the head in the conversational house of Rimmon. when that piece was originally proWalter Pater had these concessions, duced. Not a schoolboy in the house mere escapes of the soul from undue was more convulsed with laughter, pressure, and he had, too, quite uncon- more enchanted at the romping "busisciously, some of the very tricks of ness" of the play, than the author of speech of Renan - especially the no "Marius." He had the gift, when doubt" that answered to the French- I knew him first, of inventing little man's incessant n'en doutez pas. With farcical dialogues, into which he innatures like his, in which the tide of physical spirits runs low, in which the vitality is lukewarm, the first idea in the presence of anything too vivacious is retreat, and the most obvious form of social retreat is what we call "affectation." It is not to be denied that, in the old days, Pater, startled by strangers, was apt to seem affected; he retreated, as into a fortress, and enclosed himself in a sort of solemn effeminacy. It was, at its worst, mild in comparison with what the masters of preposterous behavior have since accustomed us to, but it reminded one too much of Mr. Rose. It was put on entirely for the benefit of strangers, and to his inner circle of friends it seemed like a joke. Perhaps in some measure it was a joke; no one could ever quite tell whether Pater's strange rictus was closer to laughter or to tears. troduced his contemporaries; in these the rector of Lincoln generally figured, and Pater had a rare art of imitating Pattison's speech and peevish intonation. One playful fancy, persisted in so long that even close and old friends were deceived by it, was the figment of a group of relations - Uncle Capsicum and Uncle Guava, Aunt Fancy (who fainted when the word "leg' was mentioned), and Aunt Tart (for whom no acceptable present could ever be found). These shadowy personages had been talked about for so many years that at last, I verily believe, Pater had almost persuaded himself of their existence. Perhaps these little touches will be thought too trifling to be mentioned, but I hold that they were all a part and parcel of his complex and shrouded intellectual life, and therefore not to be forgotten. He had great sweetness and uniformity of temper, and almost the only thing that ever ruffled him was a reference to an act of vandalism committed at Brasenose while he was on the governing body. The college had a group, called "Cain and Abel," cast in lead, a genuine work by John of Bologna. For some reason or other this was thought inconvenient, and was sold for old lead, a somewhat barbarous pro ceeding. Pater, from indolence, or two terms." He grew more and more else from indifference to late Italian inclined to take an indulgent view of sculpture, did not stir a finger to pre- the young people. A year or two ago, vent this desecration, and in later years I remember his saying, when somebody a perfectly unfailing mode of rousing asked him whether the horse-play of him would be to say, artlessly, "Was the undergraduates did not disturb there not once a group by John of him. "Oh! no; I rather enjoy it. Bologna in the college?" However They are like playful young tigers, that sunken in reverie, however dreamily have been fed." He was not a "prodetached, Pater would sit up in agressive; our friend the Bishop of moment, and say, with great acidity, Peterborough recalls a serious discus"It was totally devoid of merit, no sion in common-room at Brasenose, on doubt." the burning subject of university rePater showed much tact and good form. Pater interposed in the thick of sense in his attitude towards the col- the fray with the somewhat disconcertlege life. He lectured rarely, I be- ing remark, "I do not know what your lieve, in later years; in the old days he object is. At present the undergradwas an assiduous tutor. His tempera- uate is a child of nature; he grows up ment, it is true, sometimes made it like a wild rose in a country lane; you difficult to work with him. On one want to turn him into a turnip, rob occasion, at the examination for schol- him of all grace, and plant him out in arships, he undertook to look over the rows. And his remark, concerning English essays; when the examiners bonfires in the quad, that they lighted met to compare marks, Pater had none. up the spire of St. Mary's so beautiHe explained with languor, "They did fully, will long be remembered. not much impress me." As something The perennial conflict in his memhad to be done, he was asked to en-bers, between his exquisite instinct for deavor to recall such impressions as he corporeal beauty on the one hand and had formed; to stimulate his memory, his tendency to ecclesiastical symbol the names were read out in alpha- and theological dogma on the other, is betical order. Pater shook his head mournfully as each was pronounced, murmuring dreamily, "I do not recall him," ," "He did not strike me," and so At last the reader came to the name of Sanctuary, on which Pater's face lit up, and he said, "Yes; I remember; I liked his name." My friend, Dr. Henry Jackson, gives me an anecdote which illustrates a more practical side to his character. In 1870, having just begun to lecture at Trinity, our Cambridge Platonist found himself seated next Pater at dinner in Brasenose. He said to him: "I believe you lecture constantly on The Republic.' How do you get through it in time? It seems as though lecturing three times a week for three terms, it would be impossible to deal adequately within a year with all the problems and the fallacies." "Oh!" said Pater, "I always begin by telling them that Socrates is not such a fool as he seems, and we get through nicely in on. the secret, I think, of what made the character of Pater so difficult for others to elucidate, in some measure also so painful and confusing for himself. He was not all for Apollo, nor all for Christ, but each deity swayed in him, and neither had that perfect homage that brings peace behind it. As Alphonse Daudet says of some thinker, "Son cerveau était une cathédrale désaffectée," and when he tried, as he bade us try, "to burn always with the hard, gem-like flame" of aesthetic observation, the flame of another altar mingled with the fire and darkened it. Not easily or surely shall we divine the workings of a brain and a conscience scarcely less complex, less fantastic, less enigmatical, than the face of Mona Lisa herself. Pater, as a human being, illustrated by no letters, by no diaries, by no impulsive unburdenings of himself to associates, will grow more and more shadowy. But it has seemed well to preserve, while still they are attainable, some of the external facts | round her; its history was at the tips EDMUND GOSSE. From The Argosy. A MYSTERY OF MODERN FLORENCE. MARGARET MERRITON lived with an aunt in Florence; her Italian mother had died when she was a child; from her she inherited dark hair and eyes and a picturesque southern look. She had been educated in Italy and spoke the language without an accent. the kindly Tuscans were her friends; it required but a small effort of imagination on her part to transform them into heroes and heroines of ancient Florentine romance. One afternoon she strolled into the baptistery and sat down to rest in the cool old building, watching with amusement and interest the ceremony of the baptism of one-day-old infants. It was a strange sight and certainly a very funny one; the grandeur of the stately edifice and the dignity of the solemn priest contrasted curiously with the rather dirty acolyte holding a guttering taper, and the old woman who mechanically stood the small, tightly swaddled, new-born mummies one after auother upon the edge of the beautiful font, where with their wizened, puffy red faces, they looked like the sugar bambini off a Christmas tree. Miss Merriton the elder was very different; like many English people, she accepted every advantage afforded her by life in the "city of flowers," with complacency, yet abused foreigners and foreign ways freely, and The murmur of the priest and the ascribed any shortcomings on her sharp responses of the acolyte echoed niece's part to the Italian blood in her round the marble walls, and the old veins. She was something of a char-woman sniffed audibly. She was eviacter; she rented a charming little dently a professional lady who underapartment on the Lung 'Arno and had took to officiate on such occasions at so furnished it with great taste; she was much the half-dozen. not altogether pleased when her brother died, and she felt bound to adopt his daughter; it rather deprived her of an air of Bohemian independeuce which she loved. She had been wont to say that in Florence a single woman could live alone without any thought of les convenances, for at any rate, if of a certain age and unmarried, no one would give them the credit of being respectable; which was about true. An old man was her only companion, and he resignedly seized each baby as it was handed down and promptly obliterated all remains of the holy water or oil by the use of a large puff charged with abundant powder. Several people had entered; a woman seated herself near Margaret and seemed at first absorbed in prayer, but presently she stared fixedly at her until the girl began to think she was going to beg from her, for well-dressed beggars are common in Italy. Her intention, however, was different; she came up It must not be thought that she aired The girl led a happy life on the "The signorina will pardon a stranger, but the signorina looks pale; she must be ill." "Thank you," said Margaret, a little surprised; "I am only tired.” "Allow me to offer the signorina my salts," the woman continued kindly, and she pressed upon her a small cut |