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