h Mr. Benson has a curious
tenderness for it. One sentence he abandons as absolute folly. The
grave psychological error in the story occurs where the surgeon expresses
compunction at making the autopsy on Uthwart because of his perfect
anatomy. Surely this would have been a source of technical pleasure and
interest to a surgeon, much as a butterfly-collector is pleased when he
has murdered an unusually fine species of lepidoptera. Speaking myself
as a vivisector of some experience, I can confidently affirm that a well-
bred golden collie is far more interesting to operate upon than a mongrel
sheep-dog. Nor can I comprehend Mr. Benson's blame of _Denys
l'Auxerrois_ as too extravagant and even unwholesome, when the last
quality, so obvious in _Uthwart_, he seems to condone.

Again, _Marius the Epicurean_ is a failure by Pater's own high standard:
you would have imagined it seemed so to Mr. Benson.

Dulness is by no means its least fault. In scheme it is not unlike _John
Inglesant_; but how lifeless are the characters compared with those of
Shorthouse. Both books deal with philosophic ideas and sensations; the
incidents are merely illustrative and there is hardly a pretence of
sequence. In the historical panorama which moves behind _Inglesant_,
there are at least 'tactile' values, and seventeenth-century England is
conjured up in a wonderful way; how accurately I do not know. In
_Marius_ the background is merely a backcloth for mental _poses
plastiques_. You wonder, not how still the performers are, but why they
move at all. Marcus Aurelius, the delightful Lucian, even Flavian, and
the rest, are busts from the Capitoline and Naples museums. Their bodies
are make-believe, or straw from the loft at 'White Nights.' Cornelius,
Mr. Benson sorrowfully admits, is a Christian prig, but Marius is only a
pagan chip from the same block. John Inglesant is a prig too, but there
is blood in his veins, and you get, at all events, a Vandyck, not a
plaster cast. The magnificent passages of prose which vest this image
make it resemble the _ex voto_ Madonnas of continental churches--a shrine
in literature but not a lighthouse.

I sometimes wonder what Pater would have become had he been a Cambridge
man, and if the more strenuous University might have _forced_ him into
greater sympathy with modernity; or if he had been born in America, as he
nearly was, and Harvard acted as the benign stepmother of his days. Such
speculation