ABSTRACT
Mr Pater's lectures are 10 in number:- 1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion; 2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest; 3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number; 4. Plato and Socrates; 5. Plato and Sophists; 6. The Genius of Plato; 7. The Doctrine of Plato (the Theory of Ideas and Dialectic); 8. Lacedaemon; 9. The Republic; 10. Plato's Aesthetics. Mr Pater, with nice artistic sense, has not striven, like most other writers, to disguise the fact of their origin as lectures, but here and there he has preserved little hortatory phrases which remind one that he is addressing himself to a band of youthful students of philosophy. Doubtless he has felt that the mere knowledge of the papers having to be thus addressed to an audience would, in however slight a degree, modify them from the essay proper, and that to attempt to disguise such modifications would be a delicate loss in sincerity of appeal. Thus a favorite exhortation, frequent in his other writings, is here more frequent than ever, constantly reminding us of the lecture-room, or rather, we would say, the Academe. 'Well! •.. ' The reader knows the charming cadence. ' Well! Life was like that.' There is something curiously seductive about this very characteristic interjection, something that puts the reader in instant rapport with the writer. It conveys the very sound of his voice into the sentences. I don't know any recent writer, except, perhaps, Mr Stevenson, who has this intimate accent. Another charm of Mr Pater's attitude to his reader is his urbane indifference in regard to the amount of his learning. He does not affect the assumption that the reader knows everything, but when he occasionally implies his possible nonacquaintance with certain matters he does it in a way that seems to say that, no doubt, the reader knows many things of which he is ignorant. Thus he doesn't even take it for granted that his students should know Wordsworth's great Ode. Literature is so vast, life so short, that they may well have not come up to it yet. But when they do ....
