ABSTRACT
Wilde criticism has rightly emphasized the inf luence of Pater’s Renaissance on the formation of Wilde’s aestheticism. One of the series of potential candidates for Dorian’s ‘poisonous book’, Wilde would refer to it as ‘that book which has had such strange inf luence over my life’ in the ‘Epistola’ (CW, II, 102, 168). But another of Pater’s texts was also a key inf luence in the development of Wilde’s thought: the essay on ‘Style’. A relatively late text, published by Pater in the Fortnightly Review in December 1888 (he would die in July 1894), and later republished in his volume of Appreciations (1889), the essay appears just at the moment of Wilde’s transition into a serious philosophical force in his own right. Wilde was a reader of the Fortnightly, which would publish his essay ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ the following month, in January 1889, and he would certainly have known of Pater’s piece upon its first publication: according to Frank Harris, editor of the Fortnightly, Wilde had discussed style with both Pater and Arnold at a dinner party held in London in 1886, during which Harris had commissioned Pater’s essay.2 Thus, the relationship between the publication of Pater’s essay and the formation of Wilde’s own philosophy of style seems unlikely to be coincidental.
