T THE CANTUARIAN
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Walter Pater in his "Emerald Uthwart" reveals the effect that the traditions of Canterbury had on his puerile emotions. The young inexperienced Uthwart gazed away from his Sussex home to "the othe; place, which through centuries has been forming to receive him; from t.hose garden beds, now ~t their riches,t, but where all is so winsomely httle, to that place of great matters, great stones, great memories out of reach". Here in Canterbury, a city echoing with the murmurs of the past, he instinctively felt the poverty of earthly life, the transcendence of the spirit over the mundane. "Centuries of conscious endeavour" had built and shaped the place which Uthwart now entered. "Here everything, one's very games have gone by rule onwards from the dim old monastic days and the Benedictine school for novices with the wholesome severities which have descended to our own time". Such an environment inspired reverence and awe, a realisation that not all the pleasures of earth were to be sought in a pampering of the senses. "Like I~S customs, well-worn yet well-preserved, time-stained, time-engrained, tIme-mellowed, the venerable Norman or English stones of this austere beautifully proportioned place look like marble" to Uthwart reared U; a carefree world of neglect. His little mind absorbed the spirit of the 1place; .he s~w in every _movement of his companions "with their quaint confimng l.lttle gowns; In the keen, cle~r,. well-authorised dominancy of [ some, the Instant submIssIon of others, In the very emphasis laid on the Classics, a world apart, a world at rest. Nothing could better harmonise ,present with past t~an the sight of the boys here "as they shout at their games, or recIte theIr lessons over-arched by the work of medieval priors I¡ or pass to church meekly, into the seats occupied by the young monk~ before them."
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. The very place, its stone-work, its empty spaces, its native tranquillity Invade you as they invaded Pater. We feel, with him the esoteric in~ fluence of the old ecclesiastical city in which any modern touch seems "a thing out of place through negligence," in which the diluted sunlight seems "driven along with a sparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it " The view of the .finely-weathered leaden roof, the great square tow~r, the grave ma,gm~cence of t~e mo~her cathedral lies engrained in our memones, a lIfetIme posseSSIOn, a Jewel of which none can deprive us. "Here, from morning: to night, everything ~eems challenged to follow the upward lead of Its long, bold perpendICular lines". We sit with pater's Uthwart in the schoolroom-"ancient, transformed chapel of the
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