234 LIONEL JOHNSON'S PROSE laundered and then sent out again as literature. Yet this may be as much the fault of the matter as of the method. It is of books he is speaking — often of the very noblest books — and he does his Erasmus or his " Fioretti " or his " Marius " the honour of approaching them with ceremony — if he does not seem to bow it is because he will not stoop. And even when the elegance seems least appropriate it does not do to call it snobbishness. When he turns, for instance, in his essay on Pater to speak of the plain facts of his master's career and says^ — Fifty-five years of life, some thirty of literary labour : it affords room for production in goodly quantity when, as in this case, there are also leisure, felicitous circumstances, scant hindrance from the pressure of the world — we may check at the stilted "scant" and the "goodly," suspecting a mere perfumed pedantry ; but to have dropped the mantle for a moment there might have meant fumblings and an irreverent awkwardness a line or two later when he enters on an utterance like this : — In all this mode of seeing things and of undergoing their influence, the inflowing of their spirit, there is a mysticism not unlike Swedenborg's doctrine of celestial correspondences ; or that mystical interpretation of nature so necessary to Newman, as when he says of the angels, "Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God in Heaven " ; a sacramental and symbolic theory of the universe, which Spiritus intus alit ; whereby, as Mr. Pater has it, "all the acts and accidents of daily life borrow a sacred colour and significance." A perpetual wondering joy in the messages brought by beautiful things, through their visible forms, was a kind of worship to him ; he had a Franciscan poetry in the almost childlike freshness of his delight in them ; though ' ' re- fining upon his pleasure," as Crashaw put it, he carefully sought out the precise secret of the delight.
