1948 Editorial on Walter Pater's Emerald Uthwart

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 other place, which through centuries has been forming to receive him; from those garden beds, now at their richest, but where all is so winsomely little, 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 its 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 in a carefree world of neglect. His little mind absorbed the spirit of the place; he saw in every movement of his companions "with their quaint confining little gowns; In the keen, clear, 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 than the sight of the boys here "as they shout at their games, or recite their lessons over-arched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to church meekly, into the seats occupied by the young monks before them."