Truth, then, is the essential quality, truth of conception, truth of expression; and style must be characteristic and expressive of personality, and though taking its form from the conception, must take its colour from the temperament; and indeed that it should do so, that it should indicate the personal colour, is but another manifestation of sincerity. Thus it will be seen that whether art is good depends upon the soul of the creator, whether it is great depends upon the mind; and then in memorable words he adds that if art “be devoted further to the increase of men’s happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul—that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure,—it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life.” I have dwelt at length on this essay, because in one sense it is the summary of Pater’s artistic creed. It is perhaps the only direct and personal revelation of his theory of his art; but it will be observed throughout that he is speaking not to the outer circle, not even to the critical reader; it is not a _concio ad populum_, but a _concio ad clerum_. The audience whom he had in mind were the initiated, the craftsmen; and the whole oration presupposes a species of mystical apprehension of the work of the artist; hence comes his insistence on the delight that arises from the sense of difficulties overcome, a delight which only the artist who has striven much and failed often can share. It is therefore a technical discourse; and dealing with it from this point of view, it must be confessed that in two points it falls short of perfect catholicity and reveals the personal bias. The first of these is the point that has just been indicated, that from the highest art of all, such as the art of Shakespeare and Virgil, Dante and Homer, the sense of effort, of obstacles surmounted, disappears. _Celare artem_, that is the triumph; that the thing should appear simple, easy, inevitable. For in the pleasure that the artist takes in seeing a difficulty successfully wrestled with and overcome, there creeps in a certain self-consciousness, a species of gratified envy in seeing that, supreme as the process is, the difficulty was there; the absence, indeed, of this sense of effort is what keeps many critical students of art away from the highest masterpieces, and allows them to feel more at their ease in art where the mastery is not so complete. But this is a condition that one desires to remove rather than to emphasise; it is based on weakness and fallibility, rather than on strength and confidence.