It is not, I think, fanciful to interpret this selection of types in the light of Pater’s own life, the half-lit atmosphere in which he deliberately or perhaps temperamentally moved. They are the work of a melancholy introspective mind, dwelling wistfully upon the outer beauty of the world, but with a deeper current of mournful amazement at the brevity and the mystery of it all. No doubt Pater, too, felt his own isolation heavily rather than acutely. Did he belong, one can imagine his asking himself, in spirit, to the earlier, more fragrant, more insouciant time, when men were less shadowed by the complexity of thought and the inherited conscience of the ages? Or did he belong to some future outburst of simpler, more liberal joy, to a time when the heavy commercialism of England, its conventional politics, its moral confusion, its mercantile view of education, should be leavened by beauty and sincere joy? Whichever it was, he had fallen on evil days. Oxford itself, that should have been the home of intellectual and artistic speculation, was crowded by a younger generation, whose idea of a University was a place where, among social and athletic delights, it was possible to defer for a time the necessity of adopting practical life. The older men, those who were accepted by the academical world as men of leading, were too often men of bursarial minds, who loved business and organisation better than intellectual freedom. Even the keener spirits, both among the younger and the older men, were of the dry and rigid type, believing in accuracy more than ideas, in definite accumulation more than intellectual enjoyment. In this atmosphere Pater felt himself misunderstood and decried. The daring and indiscreet impulses of youth had died away, and his unconventionalism had cost him dear. What wonder that his thoughts took on a melancholy tinge, and that he recurred in mind to the thought of figures whose unlikeness to those about them, in spite of the fine daring, the beautiful impulses of their nature, had brought them dissatisfaction and disaster and even death! CHAPTER VI LATER WRITINGS