Scanned and proofed by Alfred J. Drake (www.ajdrake.com)
London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
Notes: The 1910 Library Edition employs footnotes, astyle inconvenient in an electronic edition. I have thereforeplaced an asterisk immediately after each of Pater's footnotesand a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each chapter'snotes at that chapter's end.
Pagination and Paragraphing: To avoid an unwieldy electronic copy,I have transferred original pagination to brackets. A bracketednumeral such as [22] indicates that the material immediatelyfollowing the number marks the beginning of the relevant page. Ihave preserved paragraph structure except for first-line indentation.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since ane-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliteratedPater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, itcan be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianistarchive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many othernineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
Preface: vii-xv
Two Early French Stories: 1 -29
Pico della Mirandola: 30-49
Sandro Botticelli: 50-62
Luca della Robbia: 63-72
The Poetry of Michelangelo: 73-97
Leonardo da Vinci: 98-129
The School of Giorgione: 130-154
Joachim du Bellay: 155-176
Winckelmann: 177-232
Conclusion: 233-end
To C.L.S
February 1873
[vii] Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry todefine beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most generalterms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of theseattempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetratingthings said by the way. Such discussions help us very little toenjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminatebetween what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to usewords like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precisemeaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all otherqualities presented to human experience, is relative; and thedefinition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion toits abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but inthe most concrete terms possible, to find not its universalformula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this orthat [viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true studentof aesthetics.
"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said tobe the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aestheticcriticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is,is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it,to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticismdeals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of humanlife—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: theypossess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities.What is