But we are here chiefly concerned with his prose writings. If it is the duty of the essayist to mirror the intellectuality of his age, Lionel Johnson was a mirror for the Oxford standpoint of the nineties. There still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper files. But certainly the best of his work has been lovingly collected by friendly hands, and worthily housed in _Post Liminium_. Take, for instance, this passage from an essay on books published originally in _The Academy_ (December 8th, 1900):
The glowing of my companionable fire upon the backs of my companionable books, and then the familiar difficulty of choice. Compassed about by old friends, whose virtues and vices I know better than my own, I will be loyal to loves that are not of yesterday. New poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not my company at Christmastide, but the never-ageing old. ‘My days among the dead are passed.’ Veracious Southey, how cruel a lie! My sole days among the dead are the days passed among the still-born or moribund moderns, not the white days and shining nights free for the strong voices of the ancients in fame. A classic has a permanence of pleasurability; that is the meaning of his estate and title.
Or again, Johnson in his paper on _The Work of Mr. Pater_, sets forth perhaps the best appreciation of his master that has yet appeared:
‘Magica sympathiæ!’ words borne upon the shield of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, are inscribed upon the writings of Mr. Pater, who found his way straight from the first to those matters proper to his genius, nor did he, as Fuseli says of Leonardo, ‘waste life, insatiate in experiment.’... ‘Nemo perfectus est,’ says St. Bernard, ‘qui perfectior esse appetit’: it is as true in art as in religion. In art also ‘the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts’ ... and truly, as Joubert said, we should hesitate before we differ in religion from the saints, in poetry from the poets.... There is no languorous toying with things of beauty, in a kind of opiate dream, to be found here.
While Symons has written on all the arts, the sphere of Johnson has been more limited to traditional English lines. Johnson attempts no broad æsthetical system like the former. All that he does is to illuminate the writer of whom he is speaking. And his little essays, eminent in their un-English lucidity, their scrupulous nicety, their conscious and deliberate beauty, adding to our _belles lettres_ a classical execution and finish (which perfection accounts perhaps for the classical smallness of his bookmaking) have all the bewildering charm of a born stylist. Certain of his phrases linger in the mind like music. ‘Many a sad half-murmured thought of Pascal, many a deep and plangent utterance of Lucretius.’ Or the line: ‘The face whose changes dominate my heart.’ Like the styles of Newman and Pater, on which his own is founded, he is singularly allusive. He cites critics by chapter and verse like an advocate defending a case. In fact, as in his critical _magnum opus_, _The Art of Thomas Hardy_, he is amazingly judicial. It is, too, since he is essentially academic, to the older critics he prefers to turn for guidance. As he writes: ‘Flaubert and Baudelaire and Gautier, Hennequin and M. Zola and M. Mallarmé, with all their colleagues or exponents, may sometimes be set aside, and suffer us to hear Quintilian or Ben Jonson, Cicero or Dryden.’ This habit sometimes makes him strenuous reading, particularly in longer criticisms like _The Art of Thomas Hardy_.