II

This edition has not been printed from old plates, no chicanery of that kind: it has been printed from new type, and it was brought about by Walter Pater's evocative letter. (It wasn't, but I like to think that it was). Off and on, his letter was sought for during many years, hunted for through all sorts of portfolios and bookcases, but never found until it appeared miraculously, just as the proof of my Pater article was being sent back to the printer, the precious letter transpired—shall I say "transpired?"—through a crack in the old bookcase.

BRASENOSE COLLEGE,

Mar. 4.

MY DEAR, AUDACIOUS MOORE,—Many thanks for the "Confessions" which I have read with great interest, and admiration for your originality—your delightful criticisms—your Aristophanic joy, or at least enjoyment, in life—your unfailing liveliness. Of course, there are many things in the book I don't agree with. But then, in the case of so satiric a book, I suppose one is hardly expected to agree or disagree. What I cannot doubt is the literary faculty displayed. "Thou com'st in such a questionable shape!" I feel inclined to say on finishing your book; "shape" morally, I mean; not in reference to style.

You speak of my own work very pleasantly; but my enjoyment has been independent of that. And still I wonder how much you may be losing, both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its gaiety and good-nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many things, I must still call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of looking at the world. You call it only "realistic." Still!

With sincere wishes for the future success of your most entertaining pen.—Very sincerely yours,

WALTER PATER.

Remember, reader, that this letter was written by the last great English writer, by the author of "Imaginary Portraits," the most beautiful of all prose books. I should like to break off and tell of my delight in reading "Imaginary Portraits," but I have told my delight elsewhere; go, seek out what I have said in the pages of the Pall Mall Magazine for August 1904, for here I am obliged to tell you of myself. I give you Pater's letter, for I wish you to read this book with reverence; never forget that Pater's admiration has made this book a sacred book. Never forget that.

My special pleasure in these early pages was to find that I thought about Pater twenty years ago as I think about him now, and shall certainly think of him till time everlasting, world without end. I have been accused of changing my likes and dislikes—no one has changed less than I, and this book is proof of my fidelity to my first ideas; the ideas I have followed all my life are in this book—dear crescent moon rising in the south-east above the trees at the end of the village green. It was in that ugly but well-beloved village on the south coast I discovered my love of Protestant England. It was on the downs that the instinct of Protestantism lit up in me.

But when Zola asked me why I preferred Protestantism to Roman Catholicism I could not answer him.

He had promised to write a preface for the French translation of the "Mummer's Wife"; the translation had to be revised, months and months passed away, and forgetting all about the "Mummer's Wife," I expressed my opinion about Zola, which had been changing, a little too fearlessly, and in view of my revolt he was obliged to break his promise to write a Preface, and this must have been a great blow, for he was a man of method, to whom any change of plan was disagreeable and unnerving. He sent a letter, asking me to come to Medan, he would talk to me about the "Confessions." Well do I remember going there with dear Alexis in the May-time, the young corn six inches high in the fields, and my delight in the lush luxuriance of the l'Oise. That dear morning is remembered, and the poor master who reproved me a little sententiously, is dead. He was sorrowful in that dreadful room of his, fixed up with stained glass and morbid antiquities. He lay on a sofa lecturing me till breakfast. Then I thought reproof was over, but after a walk in the garden we went upstairs and he began again, saying he was not angry. "It is the law of nature," he said, "for children to devour their parents. I do not complain." I think he was aware he was playing a part; his sofa was his stage; and he lay there theatrical as Leo XI. or Beerbohm Tree, saying that the Roman Church was an artistic church, that its rich externality and ceremonial were pagan. But I think he knew even then, at the back of his mind, that I was right; that is why he pressed me to give reasons for my preference. Zola came to hate Catholicism as much as I, and his hatred was for the same reason as mine; we both learnt that any religion which robs a man of the right of free-will and private judgment degrades the soul, renders it lethargic and timid, takes the edge off the intellect. Zola lived to write "that the Catholic countries are dead, and the clergy are the worms in the corpses." The observation is "quelconque"; I should prefer the more interesting allegation that since the Reformation no born Catholic has written a book of literary value! He would have had to concede that some converts have written well; the convert still retains a little of his ancient freedom, some of the intellectual virility he acquired elsewhere, but the born Catholic is still-born. But however we may disapprove of Catholicism, we can still admire the convert. Cardinal Manning was aware of the advantages of a Protestant bringing up, and he often said that he was glad he had been born a Protestant. His Eminence was, therefore, of opinion that the Catholic faith should be reserved, and exclusively, for converts, and in this he showed his practical sense, for it is easy to imagine a country prosperous in which all the inhabitants should be brought up Protestants or agnostics, and in which conversions to Rome are only permitted after a certain age or in clearly defined circumstances. There would be something beyond mere practical wisdom in such law-giving, an exquisite sense of the pathos of human life and its requirements; scapulars, indulgences and sacraments are needed by the weak and the ageing, sacraments especially. "They make you believe but they stupefy you;" these words are Pascal's, the great light of the Catholic Church.