like a barbarian in suggesting that no Frenchwoman of 1717
would have teen capable of it. Such prophetic criticism as this, for instance :—
" And at last one has actual eight of his work—what it is. He has brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming noblesse,—can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so naturally aristooratio P Half in masquerade, playing the drawing- room or garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real. For their frame. work they have around them a veritable architecture—a tree archi- tecture—of which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involun- tarily, The evening will be a wet one.' The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of the trees, above those sun- dried glades or lawns, where delicate children may be trusted thinly clad ; and the secular trees themselves will hardly outlast another generation."
"Denys l'Auxerrois " is the most striking of these pictures ; the most picturesque, the most characteristic, the most adorned with touches in Mr. Pater's own peculiar style. He is here on his favourite Renaissance ground ; bat it is the early Renaissance of the thirteenth century, of which he has already written in his earlier essay on" Aucassin and Nicolette." Denys, the strange, unearthly being, flashes into the solemn life of old Auxerre like an incarnation of some long-forgotten pagan deity,—Dionysus, we guess from his name, from the great vintage of the time, from the discovery of the Roman wine-flask, which seems to begin a sort of golden age at Auxerre. He takes the part of the Wine-God, too, in a morality anted in the Cathedral square. "A flaxen and flowery creature," he leads the youth of Auxerre into this new golden age of theirs. There are a few wonderful years of luxuriant fruits and flowers and perpetual summer, during which Denys, unaccountable, mysterious, often disap. pearing, is known as an unrivalled gardener,- ' keeping a stall in the great Cathedral square for the
sale of melon, and pomegranates, all manner of seeds and flowers, honey also, wax tapers, sweetmeats hot from the frying-pan, rough home-made pots and pans from the little pottery in the wood, loaves baked by the aged woman in whose house he lived He had lived on spring-water and fruit It was on his sudden return after a long journey that he ate flesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his delicate fingers in a sort of wild greed."
We quote this last as a characteristic touch ; the sensation or impression that it produces, is perhaps not exactly pleasurable ! Also the list of things that Denys brings back to his stall from that long journey,—" Seeds of marvellous new flowers, creatures wild and tame, new pottery painted in raw gaudy tints, the skins of animals, meats fried with unheard-of condiments." On the whole, it is a remarkable allegory, more striking in this way, possibly, than the author meant. Nothing but weariness and disgust comes of it all ; the gold becomes dim, frost and sunless days return ; " mysterious, dark rains prevailed through- out the summer." Denys, suspected of witchcraft, takes refuge with the monks of St. Germain, works at theunfinished cathedral, invents and builds an organ. Then comes the tragic close, proving, let us hope, that the reign of pagan gods on this earth is over. Whether Denys has really left traces of himself in stained glass and old tapestries at Auxerre, is a question we cannot answer; we have no clue to where imagination ends, and fact begins.
" Sebastian van Storek " is a young Dutch philosopher of the seventeenth century, whose portrait Van Ostade is supposed to have painted as a boy. Most people will think Sebastian less interesting than any of his three companions ; still, in the telling of his story, there is power of a very remarkable kind. It is in what one may call Mr. Pater's later manner, the manner of the philosophical part of Marina. Sebastian is a sort of hero, his life is a kind of sacrifice ; only, like other creatures without passion or affection, he is quite as ready to sacrifice others as himself. Cold, stoic, ungracious, entirely intellectual, it is yet no surprise that he gave up his life at last to save the life of a child ; and this although, " making the Infinite his beginning and his end, Sebastian had come to think all definite forms of being, the warm pressure of life, the cry of humanity itself, no more than a troublesome irritation of the surface of the one absolute mind, a passing vexatious thought or uneasy dream there, at its height of petulant importunity in the eager human creature." Sebastian is, of course, a type of the intellectual movement in Holland at that time, soon after her struggle with Spain, a movement coloured by the nature of her people and the
character of her landscape.
" Duke Carl of Rosenmold " is a figure standing in the German dawn of the early eighteenth century, one of those fore- runners whom Goethe recognised, "and understood that there had been a thousand others, looking forward to a new era in German literature with the desire which is in some sort a fore- cast of capacity,' awakening each other to the permanent reality of a poetic ideal in human life, slowly forming that public con- sciousness to which Goethe actually addressed himself." To us, Carl, bringing his " Apolline Aurora " to Rosenmold in the French fashion of the day, with Dresden china and yellow satin, a "rococo seventeenth-century French imitation of the true Renaissance," is the least attractive and least interesting portrait of the four ; yet there is a great deal of carious originality in the sad story of the young Duke.
The book leaves upon our mind a vague sensation of pleasure, and a stronger sensation of a very great want. These " portraits " have no background. There is not even a curtain between them and the infinite dreariness of space, without hope and without religion. From its very quietness, which makes it so great an advance on The Renaissance, it is the saddest book that Mr. Pater has yet written.
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