Following Pater

Abstract

Abstract This chapter shows how Pater’s work is centrally concerned with different types of persons drawing different conclusions from the same philosophical formulae, and with how and why philosophical axioms may lead to bad ways of living as well as to good. Divergence is a deeply ambivalent pathway inscribed within interpretation itself and the principle defining feature of Pater’s true aesthetic culture, I suggest, is the ease with which it may be misconstrued. In this he offers a particularly complex instance for thinking about the theory of literary reception and its pathways of interpretation through different personalities and temperaments, with relevance to the phenomena of Decadence and antinomianism at the fin de siècle. The chapter offers a new reading of his relationship with Oscar Wilde through Pater’s last, unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour (1896), and considers the perpetual self-returns, and indeed repentances, of Pater’s own writing.