SOURCE: “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait” in Walter Pater (Modern Critical Views), edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp. 75-95.

In the following essay, originally published in 1976, Miller examines Pater's thoughts on such topics as time, virtue, personality, uniqueness, repetition, form, meaning, and subjectivity; he also contends that the various and contradictory readings of his positions are irreconcilable.

Walter Pater is, along with Coleridge, Arnold, and Ruskin, one of the four greatest English literary critics of the nineteenth century. He is also, of the four, the most influential in the twentieth century and the most alive today, although often his influence can be found on writers who deny or are ignorant of what they owe to him. Pater is effective today as a precursor of what is most vital in contemporary criticism.

Pater may be placed in various lines or triangulated on various topographical surfaces. A slightly...