mortal day. That realization may prompt certain natures to unbridled
sensuality. Doomed to perish as the beasts, they choose, it would seem
with no marked reluctance, to live the life of the beast, a life
apparently not without its satisfactions. But it is as stupid as it is
infamous to pretend that such natures as these find any warrant for
their tragic libertinism in Walter Pater. They may, indeed, have found
aesthetic pleasure in the reading of his prose, but the truth of which
that prose is but the beautiful garment has passed them by. For such
it can hardly be claimed that they have translated into action the
aspiration of this tenderly religious passage:

Given the hardest terms, supposing our days are indeed but a shadow,
even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect,
our souls and whatever our souls touch upon--these wonderful bodies,
these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass
together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes,
and the intercourse of society.

Here in this passage from _Marius_ we find, to use Pater's own words
once more, "the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming,
so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories."
That theory, of course, was the doctrine of the perpetual flux of things
as taught by Aristippus of Cyrene, making a man of the world's practical
application of the old Heraclitean formula, his influence depending on
this, "that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had
fallen upon a rich and genial nature well fitted to transform it into a
theory of practice of considerable stimulative power toward a fair
life." Such, too, was Pater's nature, and such his practical usefulness
as what one might call a philosophical artist. Meredith, Emerson,
Browning, and even Carlyle were artists so far related to him and each