With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as with regard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute standard--even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream. There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold "Mathematic" of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well inspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us. Beauty is not Mathematical; it is--if one may say so--physiological and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and pure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth and change than we sometimes would care to allow. Walter Pater's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than when he deals with the _materials_ which artists use. And most of all, with _words,_ that material which is so stained and corrupted and outraged--and yet which is the richest of all. But how tenderly he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses and what--so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!--they apprehend. Wood and clay and marble and bronze and gold and silver; these--and the fabrics of cunning looms and deft, insatiable fingers--he handles with the reverence of a priest touching consecrated elements. Not only the great main rivers of art's tradition, but the little streams and tributaries, he loves. Perhaps he loves some of these best of all, for the pathways to their exquisite margins are less trodden than the others, and one is more apt to find one's self alone there. Perhaps of all his essays, three might be selected as most characteristic of certain recurrent moods. That one on Denys L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god--has he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched white Flesh?--leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their own too vivid days, and seek a wistful escape in some fantastic valley of dreams. Watteau's "happy valley" is, indeed, sadder than our most crowded hours--how should it not be, when it is no "valley" at all, but the melancholy cypress-alleys of Versailles?--but, though sadder, it is so fine; so fine and rare and gay!