Walter Pater

Abstract

Walter Pater (1839–1894) is popularly known, along with his famous supporter Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), as a card-carrying Aesthete, as one for whom Beauty is paramount, for whom the main thing in life is to ‘burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy’. Wollheim assembles an extensive case for a quite different diagnosis. Pater’s verdict on critical theory and philosophy—in particular the systems of metaphysics from Plato to Hegel—is that it is in general too speculative to win belief. What it shows, in one who does go in for it, is rather the person’s subjective temperament. This goes as well for the philosophical thesis of Aestheticism. Wollheim argues further that ‘beauty’ in Pater’s case means ‘expression’—which, for a person who did not live to see the art of the twentieth century, was a plausible line to take.