ss, due to the intuition of all sane persons that only an
active synthesis of preferences and repulsions, what we imply in the
terms _character_ and _moral_, can have real importance in life, affinity
with life--be, in short, vital; and that the yielding to, nay, the
seeking for, variety and poignancy of experience, must result in a
crumbling away of all such possible unity and efficiency of living.
But even as we find in the earliest works of a painter, despite the
predominance of his master's style, indications already of what will
expand into a totally different personality, so even in this earliest
book, examined retrospectively, it is easy to find the characteristic
germs of what will develop, extrude all foreign admixture, knit together
congruous qualities, and give us presently the highly personal synthesis
of _Marius_ and the _Studies on Plato_.

These characteristic germs may be defined, I think, as the recurrence of
impressions and images connected with physical sanity and daintiness;
of aspiration after orderliness, congruity, and one might almost say
_hierarchy_; moreover, a certain exclusiveness, which is not the contempt
of the craftsman for the _bourgeois_, but the aversion of the priest for
the profane uninitiated. Some day, perhaps, a more scientific study of
aesthetic phenomena will explain the connection which we all feel between
physical sanity and purity and the moral qualities called by the same
names; but even nowadays it might have been prophesied that the man who
harped upon the clearness and livingness of water, upon the delicate
bracingness of air, who experienced so passionate a preference for the
whole gamut, the whole palette, of spring, of temperate climates and of
youth and childhood; a person who felt existence in the terms of its
delicate vigour and its restorative austerity, was bound to become,
like Plato, a teacher of self-discipline and self-harmony. Indeed, who
can tell whether the teachings of Mr. Pater's maturity--the insistance
on scrupulously disciplined activity, on cleanness and clearness of
thought and feeling, on the harmony attainable only through moderation,
the intensity attainable only through effort--who can tell whether this
abstract part of his doctrine would affect, as it does, all kindred
spirits if the mood had not been prepared by some of those descriptions
of visible scenes--the spring morning above the Catacombs, the Valley of
Sparta, the paternal house of Mariu