of men of my generation, to destroy
at last the sense of beauty itself, had scarce begun to show here and
there, in slight subordinate touches among the designs of great painters
and craftsmen. It could not be otherwise, for Johnson's favourite phrase,
that life is ritual, expressed something that was in some degree in all
our thoughts, and how could life be ritual if woman had not her symbolical
place?

If Rossetti was a sub-conscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful
of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy. Three or four
years ago I re-read _Marius the Epicurean_, expecting to find I cared for
it no longer, but it still seemed to me, as I think it seemed to us all,
the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began to wonder if it,
or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not
caused the disaster of my friends. It taught us to walk upon a rope,
tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet
upon a swaying rope in a storm. Pater had made us learned; and, whatever
we might be elsewhere, ceremonious and polite, and distant in our
relations to one another, and I think none knew as yet that Dowson, who
seemed to drink so little and had so much dignity and reserve, was
breaking his heart for the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating
house, in dissipation and drink; and that he might that very night sleep
upon a sixpenny bed in a doss house. It seems to me that even yet, and I
am speaking of 1894 and 1895, we knew nothing of one another, but the
poems that we read and criticised; perhaps I have forgotten or was too
much in Ireland for knowledge, but of this I am certain, we shared nothing
but the artistic life. Sometimes Johnson and Symons would visit our sage
at Oxford, and I remember Johnson, whose reports however were not always
to be trusted, returning with a sentence that long ran in my head. He had
noticed books on political economy among Pater's books, and Pater had
said, "Everything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy
of our study." Perhaps it was because of Pater's influence that we, with
an affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our
authority, instead of finding it like the young men in the age of comedy
that followed us, in some new, and so still unrefuted authority; that we
preferred what seemed still uncrumbled rock, to the still unspotted foam;
that we were traditional alike in