“The Golden Book” takes its place in “Marius” as a single touch in the portrait of a time: a fragment, carefully chosen, of the local colour of ideas. Just so Pater uses details more minute. Irrelevant as they may seem, to a careless observer, irrelevant as perhaps they were before he had translated them, they help in the painting of the mood of a man, as that story in the painting of a mood of the ancient world, in each case a mood of Pater’s own, half borrowed from, half lent to, man or world. This mutual creation is like that which happens in the contemplation of a work of art. It is criticism, and, even when Pater is not criticising what are known as works of art, he is criticising not the world, or a period or a man, but works of art he has already made, privately, for himself. He used “the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a quiet clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect.” He believed that criticism was a form of creation: for him it was often a second stage of creation, for he had given artistic form to his material before, in contemplation of it, he began the criticism that he offers us in its place. I do not know that this is, accurately speaking, possible, but it is at least a fable that very fairly represents the process whereby, in Pater’s books, life comes to seem at once so ordered, so tapestried, so aloof and yet so intimately known. I speak there of life in general, of the flux without, a turmoil until it has been arrested by one of those personal acts of artistic creation which it is the function of art to make more frequent, more habitual. The turbulent nature of the flux itself is disguised alike in his critical and his more obviously imaginative work. For his critical essays tend always to become imaginary portraits, no less than his studies in Greek mythology. They are not portraits of men as Pater believed them to be, but reproductions of their aspect in sudden side-lights that change them, specialise them, and for those readers who are vainly looking for a general view, simplify them a little too far. But what sometimes seems to be the reduction of a complex personality to a simple formula--Michelangelo, for example, to the repeated _ex forti dulcedo_--is not so intended. It is rather the reduction of a personality to the expression of a single mood. There is warp and woof in Pater’s essays, and the shuttle must thread parallel lines and not a maze as it weaves what is meant less as the portrait of a man than as the pattern of a mood. Pater never sacrificed his own personality to his nominal subject. He sacrificed his sitter, not himself. Nothing is more remarkable in _Marius the Epicurean_ (where it would have been easier to disclaim the writer’s own time, to waive the centuries that separated him from his supposed material) than Pater’s resolute modernity. He will not allow us to forget the distinction in