brought to his speech the experience, not of years only, but of
centuries. He has many things to teach directly; but even when he is not
teaching so, the air you breathe with its delicate suggestion of faint
odours, the perfect taste in selection, the preferences and shrinkings
and shy delights, all proclaim a real and high culture. And, after all,
the most notable point in his style is just its exactness. Over-precise
it may be sometimes, and even meticulous, yet that is because it is the
exact expression of a delicate and subtle mind. In his _Appreciations_
he lays down, as a first canon for style, Flaubert's principle of the
search, the unwearied search, not for the smooth, or winsome, or
forcible word as such, but, quite simply and honestly, for the word's
adjustment to its meaning. It will be said in reply to any such defence
that the highest art is to conceal art. That is an old saying and a hard
one, and it is not possible to apply its rule in every instance. Pater's
immense sense of the value of words, and his choice of exact
expressions, resulted in language marvellously adapted to indicate the
almost inexpressible shades of thought. When a German struggles for the
utterance of some mental complexity he fashions new compounds of words;
a Frenchman helps out his meaning by gesture, as the Greek long ago did
by tone. Pater knows only one way of overcoming such situations, and
that is by the painful search for the unique word that he ought to use.

One result of this habit is that he has enriched our literature with a
large number of pregnant phrases which, it is safe to prophesy, will
take their place in the vernacular of literary speech. "Hard gem-like
flame," "Drift of flowers," "Tacitness of mind,"--such are some
memorable examples of the exact expression of elusive ideas. The house
of literature built in this fashion is a notable achievement in the
architecture of language. It reminds us of his own description of a
temple of Æsculapius: "His heart bounded as the refined and dainty