Appreciations; with an essay on style

Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist and art historian of the 19th century, the main ideologist of aestheticism, an art movement that professed the motto "art for art's sake." In 1889, Pater first published Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, a collection of previously published essays on literature, which was well received. "Style" is an exposition of Pater's creed and methodology as a novelist, ending with the paradox: "If style be the man, it will be in a real sense 'impersonal'." The volume also includes an assessment of the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, first printed in 1883, a few months after Rossetti's death. "Aesthetic Poetry", a revised version of an 1868 essay by William Morris without the last paragraphs; and an essay on Thomas Browne, whose mystical baroque style Pater admired. The Essay on Coleridge reprints Coleridge's Writings but omits its apparently anti-Christian passages; he adds paragraphs on Coleridge's poetry that Pater contributed to T.H. Ward's The English Poets. When Pater revised his 1876 essay "Romanticism" as a "Postscript" to the Appreciations, he removed the Baudelaire references from it, replacing them with Hugo's name. In the second edition of Appreciation (1890), which this book is, he hid the essay "Aesthetic Poetry", evidence of his growing caution in responding to Establishment criticism. All subsequent reissues of Appreciations have followed the second edition.