Love Quote by Walter Pater

Pater is doing what he always does best: canon-building with a velvet glove. He opens by praising Rousseau, but the real subject is a particular kind of selfhood Pater wants to legitimate - the self as an instrument tuned to aesthetic experience. By singling out the moment in Confessions where the "literary sense" awakens, he frames artistry not as craft learned in public, but as an inner dawn, a private conversion story. That matters in a 19th-century culture still suspicious of art that doesn’t justify itself morally, politically, or economically. Pater’s move is to make the aesthetic impulse look like a form of "wisdom", not indulgence.

The phrasing is telling: "poetic passion", "desire of beauty", "love of art for its own sake". This is aestheticism’s creed delivered in the respectable tones of criticism. He stacks near-synonyms to create pressure - not argument so much as atmosphere - until the reader feels the inevitability of the conclusion: the highest cultivation is the cultivation of perception. Rousseau becomes a useful witness because his Confessions already pioneered the modern notion that interior life is a legitimate narrative. Pater piggybacks on that authority to smuggle in a different sanctity: not confession for salvation, but confession for sensation.

Even the fragmentary ending ("has most") hints at Pater’s characteristic restraint, as if the thought exceeds the sentence. It’s a performance of refinement: art’s deepest justification can’t be fully cashed out in prose, only approached, reverently, by those trained to feel it.