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.

Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism,
its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal
austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation