His style has been much abused by critics who have found it easy to say smart things about such tempting peculiarities. We may admit at once that the writing is laboured and shows constant marks of the tool. The same criticism applies, for that matter, to much that Stevenson has written. But unless a man's style is absolutely offensive, which Pater's emphatically is not, it is a wise rule to accept it rather as a revelation of the man than as a chance for saying clever things. As one reads the work of some of our modern critics, one cannot but perceive and regret how much of pleasure and of profit their cleverness has cost them. Acknowledging his laboriousness and even his affectation, we still maintain that the style of Walter Pater is a very adequate expression of his mind. There is a calm suggestive atmosphere, a spirit half-childish and half-aged about his work. It is the work of a solemn and sensitive child, who has kept the innocence of his eye for impressions, and yet brought to his speech the experience, not of years only, but of centuries. He has many things to teach directly; but even when he is not teaching so, the air you breathe with its delicate suggestion of faint odours, the perfect taste in selection, the preferences and shrinkings and shy delights, all proclaim a real and high culture. And, after all, the most notable point in his style is just its exactness. Over-precise it may be sometimes, and even meticulous, yet that is because it is the exact expression of a delicate and subtle mind. In his _Appreciations_ he lays down, as a first canon for style, Flaubert's principle of the search, the unwearied search, not for the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word as such, but, quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. It will be said in reply to any such defence that the highest art is to conceal art. That is an old saying and a hard one, and it is not possible to apply its rule in every instance. Pater's immense sense of the value of words, and his choice of exact expressions, resulted in language marvellously adapted to indicate the almost inexpressible shades of thought. When a German struggles for the utterance of some mental complexity he fashions new compounds of words; a Frenchman helps out his meaning by gesture, as the Greek long ago did by tone. Pater knows only one way of overcoming such situations, and that is by the painful search for the unique word that he ought to use.