almost entirely lost control.

The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer--I have
good reason for thinking that it was _À Rebours_ by Huysmans--and how
any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater's _The
Renaissance_ answers to this description passes all understanding. A
critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, or never have read _The Renaissance_. On
the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that
Oscar Wilde was one of those "young men" misled by Pater's book, for
whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one
can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to
"that soil of human nature" into which a writer casts his seed. If that
which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something
wrong with the soil.

Let us briefly recall what this apparently so "dangerous" philosophy
of Pater's is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most
concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that
once-suppressed "Conclusion" to _The Renaissance_:

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A
counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated
dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen
in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from
point to point, and be present always at the focus where the
greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To
burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we
may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to