ABSTRACT
Pater and Nietzsche are men with much in common, academic classicists of the same generation whose lives ran parallel. Pater and Nietzsche both wore masks, for what, if not Nietzschean mask, sign of the spiritual ‘aristocrat’ or elitist, was the vaguely military appearance behind which the hypersensitive Pater chose to hide? One thinks of the ‘soldier-like, impassible self-command’ which Pater attributes to one of his many personae, Emerald Uthwart, and of ‘the expression of military hardness, or ascêsis’ of Cornelius in Marius the Epicurean. Henry James went further, describing Pater as the invisible man, ‘the mask without the face’. Pater’s whole work is a series of disguises; all those imaginary, part-imaginary and mostly-real portraits are masked fragments of autobiography; even the cult of beauty serves to disguise Pater’s fascination with cruelty and violence. Mann’s thesis is that Nietzsche’s system of ideas evolves out of the idea of aestheticism, there being only two basic points of view, the aesthetic and moral.
