A mind so sensitive to beauty and so fastidious in judging of it and expressing it, must necessarily afford a fine arena for the conflict between the tendencies of idealism and paganism.  Here the great struggle between conscience and desire, the rivalry of culture and restraint, the choice between Athens and Jerusalem, will present a peculiarly interesting spectacle.  In Walter Pater both elements are strongly marked.  The love of ritual, and a constitutional delight in solemnities of all kinds, was engrained in his nature.  The rationalism of Green and Jowett, with its high spirituality lighting it from within, drove off the ritual for a time at least.  The result of these various elements is a humanism for which he abandoned the profession of Christianity with which he had begun.  Yet he could not really part from that earlier faith, and for a time he was, as Dr. Gosse has expressed it, “not all for Apollo, and not all for Christ.”  The same writer quotes as applicable to him an interesting phrase of Daudet’s, “His brain was a disaffected cathedral,” and likens him to that mysterious face of Mona Lisa, of whose fantastic enigma Pater himself has given the most brilliant and the most intricate description.  From an early Christian idealism, through a period of humanistic paganism, he passed gradually and naturally back to the abandoned faith again, but in readopting it he never surrendered the humanistic gains of the time between.  He accepted in their fullness both ideals, and so spiritualised his humanism and humanised his idealism.  Anything less rich and complete than this could never have satisfied him.  Self-denial is obviously not an end in itself; and yet the real end, the fulfilment of nature, can never by any possibility be attained by directly aiming at it, but must ever involve self-denial as a means towards its attainment.  It is Pater’s clear sight of the necessity of these two facts, and his lifelong attempt to reconcile them, that give him, from the ethical and religious point of view, his greatest importance.

The story of this reconciliation is Marius the Epicurean.  It is a spiritual biography telling the inner history of a Roman youth of the time of Marcus Aurelius.  It begins with an appreciative interpretation of the old Roman religion as it was then, and depicts the family celebrations by which the devout were wont to seek “to produce an agreement with the gods.”  Among the various and beautiful tableaux of that Roman life, we see the solemn thoughtful boy reading hard and becoming a precocious idealist, too old already for his years, but relieving the inward tension by much pleasure in the country and the open air.  A time of delicate health brings him and us to a temple of AEsculapius.  The priesthood there is a kind of hospital college brotherhood, whose teaching and way of life inculcate a mysteriously sacramental character in all matters of health and the body.