SOURCE: “Pondering Pater: Aesthete and Master” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCI, No. 4, Fall, 1983, pp. 643-54.

In the following essay, Warren describes some characteristics of the aesthetic type, comments on the ways in which they do and do not apply to Pater, and speculates on Pater's religious faith.

The aesthete is a late-appearing, a decadent type of man—a man who, having the practical basis of life provided, the economic basis, and security, not for the day or the year but for a vague perpetuity, is free to enjoy. The aesthete is one kind of hedonist, of man who can, and does, live for pleasure. But his pleasures are not of the cruder sort, such as gluttony or debauchery, are not indeed sensual, but sensuous—the pleasures of discrimination (Huysmans's À rebours), the epicure's pleasures, those of the gourmet in any form, but most especially the pleasures of the...