Like Maurice Barrès, Pater was an egoist of the higher type; he seldom left the twilight of his _tour d'ivoire_; yet his work is human and concrete to the core. Nothing interested him so much as the human quality in art. This he ever sought to disengage. Pater was a deeply religious nature _au fond_, perhaps addicted a trifle to moral preciosity, and, as 'Mr. Greenslet says, a lyrical pantheist. His essay on Pascal, without plumbing the ethical depths as does Leslie Stephen's study of the same thinker, gives us a fair measure of his own religious feelings. A pagan with Anatole France in his worship of Greek art and literature, his profounder Northern temperament, a Spartan temperament, strove for spiritual things, for the vision of things behind the veil. The Paters had been Roman Catholic for many generations; his father was not, and he was raised in the Church of England. But the ritual of the older Church was for him a source of delight and consolation. Mr. Benson deserves unstinted praise for his denunciation of the pseudo-Paterians, the self-styled disciples, who, totally misinterpreting Pater's pure philosophy of life, translated the more ephemeral phases of his cyrenaicism into the grosser terms of a gaudy æsthetic. These defections pained the thinker, whose study of Plato had extorted praise from Jowett. He even withdrew the much-admired conclusion of The Renaissance because of the wilful misconstructions put upon it. He never achieved the ataraxia of his beloved master. And Oxford was grudging of her favour to him long after the world had acclaimed his genius. Sensitive he was, though Mr. Gosse denies the stories of his suffering from harsh criticism; but there were some forms of criticism that he could not overlook. Books like his Plato and Marius the Epicurean were adequate answers to detractors. Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work; too much the artist for art's sake, he may never trouble the greater currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers, the critic whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer of a polyphonic prose-music that recalls the performance of harmonious adagio within the sonorous spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favourite contention of his that all the arts constantly aspire toward the condition of music. This idea is the keynote of his poetic scheme, the keynote of Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius, carried his life long "in his bosom across a crowded public place--his own soul." IX IBSEN I