, but above all in Francis of Assisi) has been
working through generations toward these paintings, interpreting in its
spirit, selecting and emphasising for its meaning the country in all the
world most naturally fit to express it; and thus in these paintings we
have the incomparable visible manifestation of a perfect mood: that wide
pale shimmering valley, circular like a temple, and domed by the circular
vault of sky, really turned, for our feelings, into a spiritual church,
wherein not merely saints meditate and Madonnas kneel, but ourselves in
deepest devout happiness.

IV

Thoughts such as these bring with them the memory of the master we have
recently lost, of the master who, in the midst of aesthetical anarchy,
taught us once more, and with subtle and solemn efficacy, the old
Platonic and Goethian doctrine of the affinity between artistic beauty
and human worthiness.

The spiritual evolution of the late Walter Pater--with whose name I
am proud to conclude my second, as with it I began my first book on
Renaissance matters--had been significantly similar to that of his own
Marius. He began as an aesthete, and ended as a moralist. By faithful and
self-restraining cultivation of the sense of harmony, he appears to have
risen from the perception of visible beauty to the knowledge of beauty
of the spiritual kind, both being expressions of the same perfect
fittingness to an ever more intense and various and congruous life.

Such an evolution, which is, in the highest meaning, an aesthetic
phenomenon in itself, required a wonderful spiritual endowment and an
unflinchingly discriminating habit. For Walter Pater started by being
above all a writer, and an aesthete in the very narrow sense of twenty
years ago: an aesthete of the school of Mr. Swinburne's _Essays_, and of
the type still common on the Continent. The cultivation of sensations,
vivid sensations, no matter whether healthful or unhealthful, which that
school commended, was, after all, but a theoretic and probably unconscious
disguise for the cultivation of something to be said in a new way, which
is the danger of all persons who regard literature as an end, and not
as a means, feeling in order that they may write, instead of writing
because they feel. And of this Mr. Pater's first and famous book was a
very clear proof. Exquisite in technical quality, in rare perception and
subtle suggestion, it left, like all similar books, a sense of caducity
and barrenne