ABSTRACT
Throughout the chapter, Carlyle draws on the legends of Epimenides, Peter Klaus, and Rip Van Winkle as allegorical figures for how social transformation is wrought while individual agents remain oblivious of their roles within it. Like Swinburne, Pater persistently identifies aestheticism with the rebellious and the transgressive even as he characterises it as a realm of neutrality and disinterestedness. In other words, Pater's aestheticism, like Swinburne's, may be understood as retrograde in its relationship to the Victorian liberalisation of religious questioning; he seeks to resuscitate as forms of aesthetic experience the very connections between religious doubt and ideas of heresy, transgression, and sin that Arnold laboured so hard to finesse into innocuous subtleties. In effect, Coates responds to the affinity between Pater's 'neither for God nor his enemies' ideal of aestheticism and the Arnoldian ideal of critical disinterestedness, even if Coates misses the extent to which Pater's ideal is charged with the secularising logic that Arnold was trying to mitigate.
