prose highly wrought, and yet singularly surprising one at times with, so to say, sudden innocencies, artless and instinctive beneath all its sedulous art.  It is no longer necessary, as I hinted above, to fight the battle of this prose.  Whether it appeal to one not, no critic worth attention any longer disparages it as mere ornate and perfumed verbiage, the elaborate mannerism of a writer hiding the poverty of his thought beneath a pretentious raiment of decorated expression.  It is understood to be the organic utterance of one with a vision of the world all his own striving through words, as he best can, to make that vision visible to others as nearly as possible as he himself sees it.  Pater himself has expounded his theory and practice of prose, doubtless with a side-thought of self-justification, in various places up and down his writings, notably in his pregnant essay on “Style,” and perhaps even more persuasively in the chapter called “Euphuism” in Marius.  In this last he thus goes to the root of the matter: 

That preoccupation of the dilettante with what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of things as really being, with important results, thus, rather than thus—­intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model within.

This striving to express the truth that is in him has resulted in a beauty of prose which for individual quality must be ranked with the prose of such masters as De Quincey and Lamb, and, to make a not irrelevant comparison, above the very fine prose of his contemporary Stevenson, by virtue of its greater personal sincerity.

There is neither space here, nor need, to illustrate this opinion by quotation, though it may not be amiss, the musical and decorative qualities of Pater’s prose having been so generally dwelt upon, to remind the reader of the magical simplicities by which it is no less frequently characterized.  Some of his quietest, simplest phrases have a wonderful evocative power:  “the long reign of these quiet Antonines,” for example; “the thunder which had sounded all day among the hills”; “far into the night, when heavy rain-drops had driven the last lingerers home”; “Flavian was no more.  The little marble chest with its dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers.”  What could be simpler than these brief sentences, yet how peculiarly suggestive they are; what immediate pictures they make!  And this magical simplicity is particularly successful in his descriptive passages, notably of natural effects, effects caught with an instinctively selected touch or two, an expressive detail, a grey or coloured word.  How lightly sketched, and yet how clearly realized in the imagination, is the ancestral country-house of Marius’s boyhood, “White-Nights,” “that exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa”—­“Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles.”  Take again this picture: