ABSTRACT
Swinburne and Pater at different times both suggested that aestheticism was no more than a theorisation of certain tendencies in Romantic poetry — specifically, the tendency of Romantic poetry to stray into pantheism. Although Pater and Swinburne were both disposed to encounter their own habits of mind in a vast range of historical epochs and artistic styles, the connections they perceive between Romantic pantheism and aestheticism are not merely opportunistic or arbitrary. The relationship between pantheism and aestheticism here becomes circular, with each concept justifying an imaginative receptivity to the other. The imaginative traffic between Swinburne and Pater is usually presumed to flow in one direction only, with Swinburne thought to exert a powerful influence upon Pater's early essays and his own aestheticism to have reached full development before Pater published The Renaissance. Pater, by contrast, insists upon the profoundly religious character of Bruno's pantheism.
