Confessions of a Young Man | Page 2

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