Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/169

 thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every eginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.

Let us have a case more nearly contemporary. Though it is American enough to attempt "plucking out" the heart of mysteries, it is not American to lay a long meditative siege to them, to sit brooding before a pictured woman's face till all experience seems to glimmer under her half-closed eyelids. It is not American to listen to the fall of one's phrases nor to imitate in the structure of a sentence the smooth gliding swell, the poising arch, abrupt break, and long creamy subsidence of a shattered wave. These are the marks of Englishmen infatuated with the music of their seventeenth century and with decadent Latin—modern euphuists, who weigh words like gold dust, and who are studious to preserve in the modern industrial world something of the "cadence, mysticity, and unction" of the Middle Ages. These are the marks of Pater:

If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day went back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even, as