put before him, of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and
with a ring of delicate foam as it mounted in the cup, had a
reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine.

Those who judge of Pater's writing by a few purple passages such as the
famous rhapsody on the _Mona Lisa_, conceiving it as always thus heavy
with narcotic perfume, know but one side of him, and miss his gift
for conveying freshness, his constant happiness 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