SOURCE: “Pater's Imperative—To Dwell Poetically,” in New Literary History, Vol. XV, No. 1, Autumn, 1983, pp. 93-118.

In the following essay, Scott describes the plot of Marius the Epicurean and defends Pater against critics who, he contends, misread his appeal in “the central statement of his career.”

                                                                                I require of you only to look. 

St. Teresa of Avila

                                                                                 … yet poetically, dwells                                                                                 Man on this earth. 

Friedrich Hölderlin

When Walter Pater went up to Oxford in 1858, he was intending to take orders in the Church of England and soon fell much under the influence of the kind of theological liberalism represented by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley and Frederick Denison Maurice and Benjamin Jowett. But by 1866 he was finding it necessary to remark in his essay on Coleridge (the anonymous appearance of which in The Westminster Review in January of that year marked his first publication) that “modern thought is distinguished...