SOURCE: “Walter Pater's Renaissance,” inThe Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 58, No. 2, Spring, 1982, pp. 208-20.

In the following essay, Barolsky extols The Renaissance as a literary work of art that is at once historical, autobiographical, philosophical, and poetical.

A flood of publications on the elusive Victorian scholar-aesthete, Walter Pater, has appeared during the last two decades. As plans for a critical edition of his works are now being made, the writings on him continue to flow from the presses, threatening to submerge his achievement in their vastness, as they seek to sustain it. Books, articles, anthologies, Ph.D. dissertations, symposia, and now the May 1981 issue of Prose Studies—where the interested reader will find a detailed summary of recent bibliography on Pater—have scrutinized seemingly every facet of the man, from his place in the history of literature to the significance of his moustache. This is not to say...