This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity.
There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative qualities of Pater's prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less frequently characterized. Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a wonderful evocative power: "the long reign of these quiet Antonines," for example; "the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills"; "far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home"; "Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers." What could be simpler than these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; what immediate pictures they make! And this magical simplicity is particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word. How lightly sketched, and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral country-house of Marius's boyhood, "White-Nights," "that exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa"—"Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles." Take again this picture:
The cottagers still lingered at their doors for a few minutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple.
And again this picture of a wayside inn:
The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished three-wicked lucernae burning cleanly with the best oil, upon the whitewashed walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.
Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the famous rhapsody on the Mona Lisa, conceiving it as always thus heavy with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift for conveying freshness, his constant happiness in light and air and particularly running water, "green fields—or children's faces." His lovely chapter on the temple of Aesculapius seems to be made entirely of morning light, bubbling springs, and pure mountain air; and the religious influence of these lustral elements is his constant theme. For him they have a natural sacramental value, and it is through them and such other influences that Pater seeks for his hero the sanctification of the senses and the evolution of the spirit. In his preoccupation with them, and all things lovely to the eye and to the intelligence, it is that the secret lies of the singular purity of atmosphere which pervades his Marius, an atmosphere which might be termed the soul-beauty of the book, as distinct from its, so to say, body-beauty as beautiful prose.
Considering Marius as a story, a work of imagination, one finds the same evocative method used in the telling of it, and in the portrayal of character, as Pater employs in its descriptive passages. Owing to certain violent, cinematographic methods of story-telling and character-drawing to which we have become accustomed, it is too often assumed that stories cannot be told or characters drawn in any other way. Actually, of course, as many an old masterpiece admonishes us, there is no one canon in this matter, but, on the contrary, no limit to the variety of method and manner a creative artist is at liberty to employ in his imaginative treatment of human life. All one asks is that the work should live, the characters and scenes appear real to us, and the story be told. And Pater's Marius entirely satisfies this demand for those to whom such a pilgrimage of the soul will alone appeal. It is a real story, no mere German scholar's attempt to animate the dry bones of his erudition; and the personages and the scenes do actually live for us, as by some delicate magic of hint and suggestion; and, though at first they may seem shadowy, they have a curious way of persisting, and, as it were, growing more and more alive in our memories. The figure of Marcus Aurelius, for example, though so delicately sketched, is a masterpiece of historical portraiture, as the pictures of Roman life, done with so little, seem to me far more convincing than the like over-elaborated pictures of antiquity, so choked with learned detail, of Flaubert and of Gautier. Swinburne's famous praise of Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin applies with far greater fitness to Pater's masterpiece; for, if ever a book deserved to be described as
The golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty,
it is Marius the Epicurean.
It has been natural to dwell so long on this "golden book," because Pater's various gifts are concentrated in it, to make what is, of course, his masterpiece; though some one or other of these gifts is to be found employed with greater mastery in other of his writings, notably that delicate dramatic gift of embodying in a symbolic story certain subtle states of mind and refinements of temperament which reaches its perfection in Imaginary Portraits, to which the later "Apollo in Picardy" and "Hippolytus Veiled" properly belong. It is only necessary to recall the exquisitely austere "Sebastian Van Storck" and the strangely contrasting Dionysiac "Denys L'Auxerrois" to justify one's claim for Pater as a creative artist of a rare kind, with a singular and fascinating power of incarnating a philosophic formula, a formula no less dry than Spinoza's, or a mood of the human spirit, in living, breathing types and persuasive tragic fables. This genius for creative interpretation is the soul and significance of all his criticism. It gives their value to the studies of The Renaissance, but perhaps its finest flower is to be found in the later Greek Studies. To Flavian, Pater had said in Marius, "old mythology seemed as full of untried, unexpressed motives and interest as human life itself," and with what marvellous skill and evocative application of learning, he himself later developed sundry of those "untried, unexpressed motives," as in his studies of the myths of Dionysus—"The spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines"—and Demeter and Persephone—"the peculiar creation of country people of a high impressibility, dreaming over their work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of its sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it"—no reader of Pater needs to be told. This same creative interpretation gives a like value to his studies of Plato; and so by virtue of this gift, active throughout the ten volumes which constitute his collected work, Pater proved himself to be of the company of the great humanists.