Responses of readers to Walter Pater's writings have always been diverse. It is not surprising, then, that the responses of the scholars represented in this collection of essays are diverse. No critical point of view dominates the criticism of Pater's writings today any more than in the past. One may say, therefore, that the history of the reading of Pater can be described not as a succession of linear segments, each segment being characterized by a type of approach or a point of view, but as an Hegelian historical accumulation of approaches and points of view. One of Pater's first readers, Vicar William Wolfe Capes, who had been his tutor at Queen's College, denounced Pater's so-called Philosophy of Art because it was selfish in aim and found "quite a secondary place for the motive energies of social effort." (1) Although approaching Pater from a Marxist rather than a Christian point of view, Marilyn Brouwer in "Walling Out the World: Walter Pater and the Problem of Aesthetic Historicism," one of the essays in this publication, makes a quite similar (and eloquent) protest. However, Pater's aestheticism has always had its defenders, from John Morley in his review of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), to Harold Bloom in The Western Canon (1994) and Denis Donoghue in Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995). According to Carolyn Williams in "On Pater's Late Style," below, the aim of Pater's aestheticism is not self-culture alone, but mobility in shifting from personal to impersonal, when the individual "'mind and soul' of a text of an author ... suddenly gives way to the mind and 'soul of humanity'" (p. 157).
