ABSTRACT
To the outside world Pater seemed the quintessential Oxford man, but in reality he was no less an outsider in Oxford than he was in the world outside. Born in 1839, Walter Pater went up to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1858, reportedly with 'a tendency to value all things German', this being both a personal interest and a reflection of the times. The effect of his German reading was to lead him in the direction of the aesthetic paganism which Nietzsche was shortly to experience more radically. In 1862 he became a member of Old Mortality, a small and select literary and philosophical society, of which Swinburne, who had gone down two years earlier, had been a founder member. 'In aesthetic criticism,' Pater wrote 'the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly.'.
