writer of deep humanity as well as aesthetic beauty, and the teacher of
a way of life at once ennobling and exquisite. It is no longer possible
to parody him--after the fashion of Mr. Mallock's brilliancy in _The New
Republic_--as a writer of "all manner and no matter," nor is it possible
any longer to confuse his philosophy with those gospels of unrestrained
libertinism which have taken in vain the name of Epicurus. His highly
wrought, sensitively coloured, and musically expressive style is seen to
be what it is because of its truth to a matter profound and delicate and
intensely meditated, and such faults as it has come rather of too much
matter than too little; while his teaching, far from being that of
a facile "Epicureanism," is seen, properly understood, to involve
something like the austerity of a fastidious Puritanism, and to result
in a jealous asceticism of the senses rather than in their indulgence.
"Slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had
entered Rome," he writes of Marius, as on his first evening in Rome the
murmur comes to him of "the lively, reckless call to 'play,' from the
sons and daughters of foolishness," "it was to no wasteful and vagrant
affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had committed him."
Such warnings against misunderstanding Pater is careful to place, at, so
to say, all the cross-roads in his books, so scrupulously concerned is
he lest any reader should take the wrong turning. Few writers, indeed,
manifest so constant a consideration for, and, in minor matters,
such a sensitive courtesy toward, their readers, while in matters
of conscience Pater seems to feel for them an actual pastoral
responsibility. His well-known withdrawal of the "Conclusion" to _The
Renaissance_ from its second edition, from a fear that "it might
possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might
fall," is but one of many examples of his solicitude; and surely such as
have gone astray after such painstaking guidance have but their own
natures to blame. As he justly says, again of Marius, "in the reception