I should not wonder if he
had never even heard of him. He was wrapped in the atmosphere of Oxford,
and though "the last enchantments of the Middle Ages" in no wise threw
their glamour over his thought, there was a cloistral distinction in his
attitude. He reminded me of my friend the Cambridge professor, who, when
the O'Shea business was filling eight columns daily of the papers that
deprecate honest art, innocently asked me if there was anything new about
Parnell. Pater did not probably carry detachment from the contemporary so
far as that, but he was in harmony with his hedonistic creed in
permitting only a select fraction of the cosmos to have the entry to his
consciousness. A delightful, elegantly-furnished consciousness it was,
with the latest improvements, and with every justification for
exclusiveness. But there is in men of Mr. Pater's stamp something of what
might be termed the higher Pod-snappery. They put things aside with the
wave of a white-gloved hand: this and that do not exist, Mr. Podsnap
himself--O the irony of it!--among them. Like Mr. Podsnap, though on a
different plane, they take themselves and their view of life too
seriously. When I told Mr. Pater that there was a pun in his "Plato and
Platonism," he asked anxiously for its precise locality, so that he might
remove it.
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