Art & Creativity Quote by Walter Pater

Pater is doing that very Victorian thing: politely eviscerating the intellectual hobbyhorse without sounding like he spilled the tea. The target here is the kind of talk-about-art that treats “beauty” and “poetry” as if they’re self-evident categories, or worse, as moral badges. He’s not anti-theory; he’s anti-theory that can’t cash out in perception. If a discussion doesn’t sharpen your ability to actually enjoy a work, or to tell the difference between good and great, it’s just fog with footnotes.

The sentence’s craft mirrors its argument. Pater piles up practical verbs - enjoy, discriminate, use - then undercuts lofty abstractions (“beauty, excellence, art, poetry”) by stressing “more precise meaning.” That’s the subtext: precision isn’t pedantry, it’s ethics for the senses. He’s asking criticism to be accountable to experience, to train attention rather than inflate vocabulary.

Context matters. Writing in the aesthetic movement’s orbit, Pater is resisting both evangelical moralism in criticism and the era’s appetite for grand systems. He wants the critic as a calibrated instrument, not a preacher or a taxonomist. There’s a quiet elitism here - not everyone is trained to “discriminate” - but it’s an elitism of discipline, not pedigree. The jab lands because it flatters the reader’s intelligence while demanding work: stop using big words as placeholders, and start using them as tools that cut.