Again, Marius the Epicurean is a failure by Pater’s own high standard:  you would have imagined it seemed so to Mr. Benson.

Dulness is by no means its least fault.  In scheme it is not unlike John Inglesant; but how lifeless are the characters compared with those of Shorthouse.  Both books deal with philosophic ideas and sensations; the incidents are merely illustrative and there is hardly a pretence of sequence.  In the historical panorama which moves behind Inglesant, there are at least ‘tactile’ values, and seventeenth-century England is conjured up in a wonderful way; how accurately I do not know.  In Marius the background is merely a backcloth for mental poses plastiques.  You wonder, not how still the performers are, but why they move at all.  Marcus Aurelius, the delightful Lucian, even Flavian, and the rest, are busts from the Capitoline and Naples museums.  Their bodies are make-believe, or straw from the loft at ‘White Nights.’  Cornelius, Mr. Benson sorrowfully admits, is a Christian prig, but Marius is only a pagan chip from the same block.  John Inglesant is a prig too, but there is blood in his veins, and you get, at all events, a Vandyck, not a plaster cast.  The magnificent passages of prose which vest this image make it resemble the ex voto Madonnas of continental churches—­a shrine in literature but not a lighthouse.

I sometimes wonder what Pater would have become had he been a Cambridge man, and if the more strenuous University might have forced him into greater sympathy with modernity; or if he had been born in America, as he nearly was, and Harvard acted as the benign stepmother of his days.  Such speculations are not beyond all conjecture, as Sir Thomas Browne said.  I think he would have been exactly the same.

On the occasion of Pater’s lecture on Prosper Merimee, his friends gathered round the platform to congratulate him; he expressed a hope that the audience was able to hear what he said.  ‘We overheard you,’ said Oscar Wilde.  ‘Ah, you have a phrase for everything,’ replied the lecturer, the only contemporary who ever influenced himself, Wilde declared.  How admirable both of the criticisms!  Pater is an aside in literature, and that is why he was sometimes overlooked, and may be so again in ages to come.  Though he is the greatest master of style the century produced, he can never be regarded as part of the structure of English prose.  He is, rather, one of the ornaments, which often last, long after a structure has perished.  His place will be shifted, as fashions change.  Like some exquisite piece of eighteenth-century furniture perchance he may be forgotten in the attics of literature awhile, only to be rediscovered.  And as Fuseli said of Blake, ’he is damned good to steal from.’  If he uses words as though they were pigments, and sentences like vestments at the Mass, it is not merely the ritualistic cadence of his harmonies which makes his works imperishable, but the ideas which they symbolise and evoke.  Pater thinks beautifully always, about things which some people do not think altogether beautiful, perhaps; and sometimes he thinks aloud.  We overhear him, and feel almost the shame of the eavesdropper.