e it a new method of art
criticism. As for his style, it is curiously ascetic. Now and then, we
come across phrases with a strange sensuousness of expression, as when he
tells us how Denys l'Auxerrois, on his return from a long journey, 'ate
flesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his delicate
fingers in a kind of wild greed,' but such passages are rare. Asceticism
is the keynote of Mr. Pater's prose; at times it is almost too severe in
its self-control and makes us long for a little more freedom. For
indeed, the danger of such prose as his is that it is apt to become
somewhat laborious. Here and there, one is tempted to say of Mr. Pater
that he is 'a seeker after something in language, that is there in no
satisfying measure, or not at all.' The continual preoccupation with
phrase and epithet has its drawbacks as well as its virtues. And yet,
when all is said, what wonderful prose it is, with its subtle
preferences, its fastidious purity, its rejection of what is common or
ordinary! Mr. Pater has the true spirit of selection, the true tact of
omission. If he be not among the greatest prose writers of our
literature he is, at least, our greatest artist in prose; and though it
may be admitted that the best style is that which seems an unconscious
result rather than a conscious aim, still in these latter days when
violent rhetoric does duty for eloquence and vulgarity usurps the name of
nature, we should be grateful for a style that deliberately aims at
perfection of form, that seeks to produce its effect by artistic means
and sets before itself an ideal of grave and chastened beauty.

Imaginary Portraits. By Walter Pater, M.A., Fellow of Brasenose College,
Oxford. (Macmillan and Co.)

A GOOD HISTORICAL NOVEL

(Pall Mall Gazette, August 8, 1887.)

Most modern Russian novelists look upon the historical novel as a faux
genre, or a sort of fancy dress ball in literature, a mere puppet show,
not a true picture of life. Yet their own history is full of such
wonderful scenes and situations, ready for dramatist or novelist to treat
of, that we are not surprised that, in spite of the dogmas of the ecole
naturaliste, Mr. Stephen Coleridge has taken the Russia of the sixteenth
century as the background for his strange tale. Indeed, there is much to
be said in favour of a form remote from actual experience. Passion
itself gains something from picturesqueness of surroundings; distance of
t