Art & Creativity Quote by Walter Pater

Pater opens with a cool, almost amused distancing: “Many attempts have been made” is the critic’s eyebrow raise, a polite way of saying, We’ve watched this game for centuries and it keeps failing. The target isn’t beauty so much as the hunger to trap it - to convert an experience that’s intimate, bodily, time-bound into a “universal formula” that can travel without friction. He frames aesthetic theory as a repeated act of overreach: writers on art and poetry want the prestige of science, the security of abstraction, the authority of “general terms.” Pater’s syntax mimics the very impulse he’s diagnosing, stacking clauses like a ladder toward mastery, then letting the ladder wobble under its own weight.

The subtext is a quiet manifesto for aesthetic particularity. Pater’s larger project (especially in The Renaissance) treats beauty not as a Platonic constant but as an effect: produced in the encounter between a perceiver and a work, intensified by historical moment, temperament, and attention. In late Victorian Britain, that’s not a neutral stance. It pushes back against moralized art criticism and against systems that rank cultures and tastes as if they were natural laws. If you can “define beauty in the abstract,” you can police it; you can turn taste into a syllabus, an ideology, a gate.

What makes the line work is its restrained skepticism. Pater doesn’t rant about pedants; he simply places their ambition under a calm light and lets it look slightly ridiculous - the timeless human wish to replace the risk of feeling with the comfort of a formula.