Pater’s imagination loved not action but intellectual circumstance, and the significance not of deeds but of the promise of deeds yet unperformed. The story of Marius, the story of Gaston, as far as it had been carried, was the story of exceptional character in particular intellectual environment; and for us, perhaps, the interest lies as much in the one as in the other. When I think of the second of those two books, I think less of that scrupulous, finely strung youth than of Montaigne, whose portrait, in the old tower above his open house, seems to me at least equally important. Now to offer the reader a choice between the part and the whole is not the way of the perfect artist. Again, it is idle to say that the narrative of “Marius the Epicurean” is broken by the inclusion of that lovely rendering of the tale of Cupid and Psyche. It is idle to point to that tale as an interruption, when there is nothing for it to interrupt, nothing that is not already in repose. In Pater’s books it is the reader who moves from one contemplation to another, and, in “Marius,” quite naturally, from Pisa and the boy’s education there, and his friendship with Flavian, to the tale they read together on hot Italian afternoons. In a way the inclusion of that tale is an illustration on a large scale of Pater’s invariable manner of using detail. It was the work of another man, and, before placing it in his book, Pater made it his own by translating it into a prose which, if purposely and also necessarily a little different from that of the rest of the book, was yet his. Just so smaller details, fragments of observation of external nature, for example, are not directly set upon the page, with no more than the imprint of the hands that plucked them to give them a spurious unity with the rest. They are all translated, idiomatically, until they are so wholly his that it seems he has looked within for them and not without. The light through the arched windows of the old church, the spires of London, the burial vault of the Dukes of Rosenmold: these things are so intimately imagined, so completely veiled in Pater’s mood that when we recognise them in life we accuse ourselves of plagiarism because we cannot see them other than as he saw them, and they come to us, almost, as remembered sentences.