ABSTRACT
It is this phase that is particularly interesting in Wilde’s position in the criticism of his day, especially in his work in what he calls ‘the art-literature of the nineteenth century,’ and it is in this connection that Wilde may be allied with the tendencies in English art, and with that development of the Pre-Raphaelite doctrine and usage, that showed itself especially in the work of Walter Pater. This later connection, noted by many, was not entirely grateful to Pater; he was a little amazed, it appears, by the rather emphatic discipleship of Wilde, and, as one biographer says, ‘both disgusted and appalled’ by the recklessness with which his fatherhood was claimed for the extravagances of certain of his followers. And it must be confessed that the student of Pater’s aesthetic theory is perhaps in somewhat the same state of mind. Wilde, with his sunflowers and aestheticism, is apt, at times, to dodge behind these theories like a ridiculous or evil imp, or,
if you will, a kind of Frankenstein, an embodied reductio ad absurdum, a caricature of some of the most passionate, most severely chastened and ordered of Pater’s work.
