circumstances that makes so subtle the relation between subject and object. He will strip off nothing that has been brought him by the years between Marius and himself. Deliberately, he sees Marius with eyes enriched by those centuries, and, with the later knowledge that can compare Apuleius to Swift or to Théophile Gautier, takes pleasure in a reference to Wilhelm Meister and remarks that Marius thinks in the vein of St. Augustine. And so, caring more for the point of view from which he sees them than for the actual objects, that can be seen a thousand ways, he has no wish to “say the last word” on Lamb, on Pico, on Sir Thomas Browne. He does say it, however, on those men in those moods, or, more truly, on the moods in which he saw them. We often leave an essay of Pater’s with a new appreciation of someone else; but that is not because Pater has told us anything, but because, in reproducing the mood of his essay we have given ourselves a mood in which that other, Botticelli, Ronsard, Giorgione, can be more than usually significant. Thus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is as a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented. His criticism is aesthetic and personal. Though compelled to offer a profusion of theories, he is impatient of them, submits himself to a work of art, and criticises that work not by showing what he feels, but by a reproduction of the mood which that work induces in him. His criticism, always indirect, is always creative, since the reproduction of a mood, unlike the recording of opinions, is itself a work of art. It has the validity of his own temperament and circumstances, lyrical as opposed to abstract truth. We can never say of him that he was wrong, unless in the theories that he could not avoid but considered unimportant. We can only say that he was different--from ourselves, from someone else. We read this critic as we read a poet, collaborating with him in the reproduction of a mood, in the searching knowledge of the fragment of life that was coloured for him by this or that book or picture. The book or picture becomes a secondary matter, and the first is the rapid light, the weighty atmosphere that he had made his own. After reading him I remember his words on Montaigne: “A mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience.” 1912. REMY DE GOURMONT REMY DE GOURMONT I