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This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.

This chapter shows that Johnson, Wilde, and Pater, like Eliot after them, shared the conviction that literature at its best would find profit in the circumstance that the words we receive from our linguistic community are ‘filled’ or ‘inhabited’ by the voices of others. Plagiarism, at its most intense and virtuous, came to be accommodated within later Victorian thought as a form of composition which also required this evacuation of self; this poetics of something approaching impersonality. Plagiarism was thought of, indeed, as an extreme form of empathy; an identification so acute that it required the near-total abolition of the writer's being.

This chapter explores the work of Walter Pater. It shows that he wanted more from life. His essays raise the question of what this more might be, and where it might come from. They ask how we might become both more at home in and more penetrable by the vivid world. In an early essay, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), Pater rather mysteriously proposed: “He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky.” All of Pater's subjects seem engaged in this strangely heedful notation, as if on the lookout for a particular quality of life. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit” says Pater, glossing a statement by Novalis, “is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.” Pater's writing thus speculates at the boundary point of a “quickened sense of life.”

This chapter talks about a significant re-appropriation of mainstream Cyrenaic ethics: Walter Pater's “new Cyrenaicism.” It suggests that Pater casts light on four elements that remain obscure in ancient Cyrenaic doxography: “unitemporal pleasure,” the relation of hedonism to traditional virtues, the economy of pleasures and pains, and the Cyrenaic argument against the fear of death. The chapter also argues that the narrative framework of Pater's novel communicates how and why Cyrenaicism could attract someone better than arid doxography ever could. Cyrenaic ethics arises from the interaction of particular individuals' pre-philosophical inclinations with critical reasoning, and develops through the dynamic interaction of these two elements with the satisfying or dissatisfying feedback from experience.

This chapter introduces Walter Pater's troubled individualism as a personal and intellectual problem. It presents a case for viewing Pater at the philosophical centre of British Aestheticism in the period 1864-1894 and uses Steven Lukes' seminal work of sociological history, Individualism, to define the importance of 'Romantic Individualism' in Pater's writings throughout his career. It argues that the philosophical spirit at the heart of Aestheticism has yet to be appreciated, asserting that Pater perceives the limitations of contemporary formal philosophical discourse and -- radically -- attempts to remake 'philosophy' so that it might account for the 'fugitive conditions' and spiritual uncertainties of emerging modern sensibility. This chapter sets out its argument in the cultural and intellectual contexts of mid- to late-Victorian Oxford; a tumultuous time at which the creation of university disciplines, challenges to the Church of England, and reconceptions of philosophical discourse in Oxford.

This chapter argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgement provides a compelling account of the character and conditions of possibility of what he terms ‘the judgement of taste’ (‘X is beautiful’). The concern is less about expounding Kant in a merely exegetical or antiquarian spirit, than with using him as a guide to the way the aesthetic might be approached today. The chapter explores issues related to aesthetic autonomy, universal communicability, singularity of judgement, disinterest, genius and gender, and the absence of concepts in the aesthetic. It also asks what kind of criticism might be most consonant with the Kantian aesthetic (with an Ode of Horace as an example). It looks at aspects of the Aesthetic Movement of the later 19th century, a movement largely neglected within philosophical aesthetics, in particular, the writings of Walter Pater.

This chapter considers Walter Pater’s late-career engagements with the old school and “mechanical exercise.” The chapter argues that these engagements index a refusal of the liberalism that Pater’s earlier work embraced. Whereas Pater’s readers have tended to understand this refusal as a “retreat,” this chapter reads Pater’s turn to mechanical and pedagogical—as well as ritual—forms as critical rather than reactionary or nostalgic. As he challenges what he sees as an impoverishment of thought, imagination, and memory in the present—a loss of contact with the past’s “complications of influence”—Pater returns repeatedly to “the older method” of instruction in his late essays, lectures, and fiction. Through their engagement with this method and other “survivals” from the past, these texts, including Marius the Epicurean, indirectly make the case for the old school. Pater shows that such a school produces or enforces a sociality that is at once temporal and spatial and thus contrasts starkly with the new school advocated by reformers, which isolates the individual student whom it privileges. Pater instead teaches us to affirm the relations that progressive education denies, relations that sustain a “reserve” that is also a minimal resistance.

To the Victorians, the Renaissance was itself a concept in process of some rebirth. Those Victorian writers for whom Joachim of Fiore became something of a symbol of the proto-Renaissance as well as an avatar of change in their own iron age have a rhetoric from which their aspirations are inseparable. One common source for their rhetoric would seem to have been Jules Michelet. In Michelet's account of Joachim's life and doctrine, there was much to catch the eye of English writers searching for parallels between their own age and the proto-Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These ideas attracted certain Victorians. Thus John Addington Symonds in 1890 expressed his hopes for the future of art through a surprising conjunction of the Abbot Joachim and Walt Whitman. This chapter looks at Joachimism and changing interpretations of the Renaissance in Victorian England, focusing on the views of Symonds, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis concerning self-culture, Joachimism, and the Eternal Evangel.

This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. Placing Morris's aesthetic development in the context of the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the discussion explore Morris's resistance to an emerging aesthetic that emphasized individual taste and consumption, rather than communal production. In his socialist essays, Signs of Change (1888) Morris developed an aesthetic continuum that enabled him to collapse the distinction between art and bodily labour and imagine a future of communal artistic production after the revolution. Both the radical nature of Morris's aesthetic and its preoccupation with productive masculinity are emphasized by contrasting his work to Wilde's essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891).

This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival of interest in Lucretian materialism, the chapter shows that Paterian aestheticism often portrayed physical objects as “enminded,” attenuating distinctions between inward self and outward world. The chapter shows how this idea of a vitalized aesthetic object grew from a widespread cultural reevaluation of scientific and philosophical materialisms, including in the period’s sensation fiction, and draws a connection between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and James Sully’s writing on physiological perception of music, which was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz. By contrast with George Eliot’s influential conception of the “web” of human relations described by the realist novel, writers such as Pater and Sully understood the figure of the web as made up of matter rather than of social relations.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of the ways in which Walter Pater revised the aesthetic philosophy of the famous ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, particularly in Marius the Epicurean, to broaden and strengthen the ethical basis of a ‘religion of the visible’. Central to Pater’s philosophical aesthetics is the notion of ‘indifference’, which has both an aesthetic set of meanings (the supreme repose and serenity of the greatest artworks) and a parallel set of ethical meanings, in the ascetic disinterestedness, the imperturbability of mind or ataraxia, by which Pater himself was both attracted and repelled. The chapter examines the ways in which Pater’s writings engage with the problem of evil as a fault-line that runs between the aesthetic and the ethical, the element that undermines the value of ‘indifference’, and ultimately prevents the merging of the ethical and the aesthetic ideal.

Walter Pater (1839–1894) saw the essay as the quintessentially modern literary form: a dialectic of philosophy and poetry, yoking together the precious and the commonplace, capable of embodying the scepticism and relativism of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the literary essay was for him a rich source of experimentation in his own writing. In his critical works Pater explored the genealogy and features of essayistic style in a highly self-conscious way, tracing a history of the genre that goes from the Platonic dialogues to Montaigne, while his historical novels are punctuated with a series of digressions that gives them a distinctly hybrid, essayistic quality. In Gaston de Latour, Pater even stages an encounter between his fictional protagonist and Montaigne, in which he brings into focus his theory of the essay as revealing the importance of things found ‘at some random turn by the way’.

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.