Early in youth he is stirred by a fine saying of Spinoza, and
sets himself to realise the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness,
separating himself more and more from the transient world of sensation,
accident and even affection, till what is finite and relative becomes of
no interest to him, and he feels that as nature is but a thought of his,
so he himself is but a passing thought of God. This conception, of the
power of a mere metaphysical abstraction over the mind of one so
fortunately endowed for the reception of the sensible world, is
exceedingly delightful, and Mr. Pater has never written a more subtle
psychological study, the fact that Sebastian dies in an attempt to save
the life of a little child giving to the whole story a touch of poignant
pathos and sad irony.

Denys l'Auxerrois is suggested by a figure found, or said to be found, on
some old tapestries in Auxerre, the figure of a 'flaxen and flowery
creature, sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes
muffled in skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but
always with a strong impress of real character and incident from the
veritable streets' of the town itself. From this strange design Mr.
Pater has fashioned a curious mediaeval myth of the return of Dionysus
among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of
wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god,
making the world mad with a new ecstasy of living, stirring the artists
simply by his visible presence, drawing the marvel of music from reed and
pipe, and slain at last in a stage-play by those who had loved him. In
its rich affluence of imagery this story is like a picture by Mantegna,
and indeed Mantegna might have suggested the description of the pageant
in which Denys rides upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment
and, for head-dress, a strange elephant scalp with gilded tusks.

If Denys l'Auxerrois symbolises the passion of the senses and Sebastian
Van Storck the philosophic passion, as they certainly seem to do, though
no mere formula or definition can adequately express the freedom and
variety of the life that they portray, the passion for the imaginative
world of art is the basis of the story of Duke Carl of Rosenmold. Duke
Carl is not unlike the late King of Bavaria, in his love of France, his
admiration for the Grand Monarque and his fantastic desire to amaze and
to bewilder, but the resemblance is possibly only a chance one. In fact
Mr. Pater's young hero is the precursor of the Aufklarung of the last
century, the German precursor of Herder and Lessing and Goethe himself,
and finds the forms of art ready to his hand without any national spirit
to fill them or make them vital and responsive. He too dies, trampled to
death by the soldiers of the country he so much admired, on the night of
his marriage with a peasant girl, the very failure of his life lending
him a certain melancholy grace and dramatic interest.

On the whole, then, this is a singularly attractive book. Mr. Pater is
an intellectual impressionist. He does not weary us with any definite
doctrine or seek to suit life to any formal creed.