Walter Pater "Gaston de Latour; An Unfinished Romance."
Walter Pate 1839-1894.
prepared for the press by Charles L. Shadwell.
The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts, composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent object which towards the southwest broke the pleasant level of La Beauce, the great corn-land of central France.
Abode in those days of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union, less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the improvement of all gentler sentiments within. From the sumptuous monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of the very ground-plan of the house itself—everywhere was the token of their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway through the world which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely together.
The work, if completed, would have been a parallel study of character to Marius the Epicurean the scene shifted to another age of transition, when the old fabric of belief was breaking up, and when the problem of man's destiny and his relations to the unseen was under going a new solution. The interest would have centered round the spiritual development of a refined and cultivated mind, capable of keen enjoyment in the pleasures of the senses and of the intellect, but destined to find its complete satisfaction in that which transcends both. Something of the same motive appears in some of the Imaginary Portraits, such as Sebastian Van Storck, and Duke Carl of Rosenmold, under taken about the same time.
Published by London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1910.
Hardcover without DJ.
Used book. Mild smudge of the covers. Quite well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong.