lood of early
sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there, and with
all the singular expression of sacred order, a surprising cleanliness
and simplicity." Who would not give much to be able to say the thing he
wants to say so exactly and so beautifully as that is said? Indeed the
love of beauty is the key both to the humanistic thought and to the
simple and lingering style of Pater's writing. If it is not always
obviously simple, that is never due either to any vagueness or confusion
of thought, but rather to a struggle to express precise shades of
meaning which may be manifold, but which are perfectly clear to himself.

A mind so sensitive to beauty and so fastidious in judging of it and
expressing it, must necessarily afford a fine arena for the conflict
between the tendencies of idealism and paganism. Here the great struggle
between conscience and desire, the rivalry of culture and restraint, the
choice between Athens and Jerusalem, will present a peculiarly
interesting spectacle. In Walter Pater both elements are strongly
marked. The love of ritual, and a constitutional delight in solemnities
of all kinds, was engrained in his nature. The rationalism of Green and
Jowett, with its high spirituality lighting it from within, drove off
the ritual for a time at least. The result of these various elements is
a humanism for which he abandoned the profession of Christianity with
which he had begun. Yet he could not really part from that earlier
faith, and for a time he was, as Dr. Gosse has expressed it, "not all
for Apollo, and not all for Christ." The same writer quotes as
applicable to him an interesting phrase of Daudet's, "His brain was a
disaffected cathedral," and likens him to that mysterious face of Mona
Lisa, of whose fantastic enigma Pater himself has given the most
brilliant and the most intricate description. From an early Christian
idealism, through a period of humanistic paganism, he passed gradually
and naturally back to the abandoned faith again, but in readopting it he
never surrendered the humanistic gains of the time between. He accepted
in their fullness both ideals, and so spiritualised his humanism and
humanised his idealism. Anything less rich and complete than this could
never have satisfied him. Self-denial is obviously not an end in itself;
and yet the real end, the fulfilment of nature, can never by any
possibility be attained by directly aiming at it, but must ever involve
self-d