He becomes an
atmosphere, an attitude, a tone, a temper--and one too which may serve
us to most rich and recondite purpose, as we wander through the world
seeking the excitement and consecration of impassioned cults and
organized discriminations.
For this austere and elaborately constructed style of his is nothing
less than the palpable expression of his own discriminating days; the
wayfaring, so self-consciously and scrupulously guarded, of his own
fastidious "hedonism," seeking its elaborate satisfactions among the
chance-offered occasions of hour, or person or of place.
Walter Pater remains, for those who are permitted to feel these
things, the one who above all others has the subtlest and most
stimulating method of approach with regard to all the great arts, and
most especially with regard to the art of literature.
No one, after reading him, can remain gross, academic, vulgar, or
indiscriminate. And, with the rest, we seem to be aware of a secret
attitude not only towards art but towards life also, to miss the key
to which would be to fail in that architecture of the soul and senses
which is the object of the discipline not merely of the aesthetic but
of the religious cult.
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