It was during my undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and
of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy
and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its
linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one
solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should
be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far
more rhyme than reason.

I may frankly confess now that at the time I did not quite comprehend
what Mr. Pater really meant; and it was not till I had carefully studied
his beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully
realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-
writing really is, or may be made to be. Carlyle's stormy rhetoric,
Ruskin's winged and passionate eloquence, had seemed to me to spring from
enthusiasm rather than from art. I do not think I knew then that even
prophets correct their proofs. As for Jacobean prose, I thought it too
exuberant; and Queen Anne prose appeared to me terribly bald, and
irritatingly rational. But Mr. Pater's essays became to me 'the golden
book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.' They are still this
to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I
certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no
love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only
about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really
unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed
opinion is always valueless.

But I must not allow this brief notice of Mr. Pater's new volume to
degenerate into an autobiography. I remember being told in America that
whenever Margaret Fuller wrote an essay upon Emerson the printers had
always to send out to borrow some additional capital 'I's,' and I feel it
right to accept this transatlantic warning.

Appreciations, in the fine Latin sense of the word, is the title given by
Mr. Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite
essays, of delicately wrought works of art--some of them being almost
Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others mediaeval
in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them
absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to
whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the
age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century one must
realise every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to
its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about
others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead
mode of life that one cannot make alive. The legacies of heredity may
make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but
intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he
who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
impulse obscure.

Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the least successful, of the
essays contained in the present volume is that on Style. It is the most
interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high
authority that comes from the noble realisation of things nobly
conceived.