ABSTRACT
Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94), Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College and critic, published the widely heralded Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873. The famous ‘Conclusion’ urging its readers ‘to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions’, to ‘burn always with this hard, gemlike flame’, and to cultivate a love of ‘art for art’s sake’, was omitted by Pater in the second edition ‘as I conceived it might possibly mis-lead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall’. Wilde, who had studied with Pater at Oxford, called The Renaissance (as it was subsequently called) his ‘golden book’. When Pater wrote to praise The Happy Prince, Wilde, overjoyed, told Alfred Nutt, the publisher, ‘Mr. Pater has written me a wonderful letter about my prose, so I am in high spirits.’ (Letters, p. 219.)
My dear Wilde, I am confined to my room with gout, but have been consoling myself with The Happy Prince, and feel it
would be ungrateful not to send a line to tell you how delightful I have found him and his companions. I hardly know whether to admire more the wise wit of ‘The Wonderful[Remarkable] Rocket,’ or the beauty and tenderness of ‘The Selfish Giant’: the latter certainly is perfect in its kind. Your genuine ‘little poems in prose,’ those at the top of pages 10 and 14, for instance, are gems, and the whole, too brief, book abounds with delicate touches and pure English.
