Walter Pater is important to English literary history because he combines a commitment to the romantic theory that art is essentially an expression of personality with a sympathetic response to the scientific and historical studies of the Victorian period that suggest how complex and ambiguous "personality" is. Pater's writings explore the ways in which biology, psychology, history, religion, and myth shape the individual's understanding of his own times and help him to interpret the bearing of the past upon the present. In this linking of aesthetics to religion, history, and science, Pater bridges, more subtly than any other writer of the late Victorian period, the dominant Romanticism of his own century and the dominant Modernism of the twentieth.

Few of his personal papers or anecdotal reminiscences by his acquaintances exist to provide a clear, accurate, or full biography of Pater. As Ian Fletcher has remarked in his 1959 volume...