his work.  It is the work of a solemn and sensitive child, who has kept the innocence of his eye for impressions, and yet 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 AEsculapius:  “His heart bounded as the refined and dainty magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood of early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there, and with all the singular expression of sacred order, a surprising cleanliness and simplicity.”  Who would not give much to be able to say the thing he wants to say so exactly and so beautifully as that is said?  Indeed the love of beauty is the key both to the humanistic thought and to the simple and lingering style of Pater’s writing.  If it is not always obviously simple, that is never due either to any vagueness or confusion of thought, but rather to a struggle to express precise shades of meaning which may be manifold, but which are perfectly clear to himself.