The rescue of romanticism: John Ruskin and Walter Pater

This project is a study of Walter Pater's response to John Ruskin's powerful critique of the romantic imagination. Pater's response to Ruskin's critique salvaged the imagination as a source of compensation, but in a necessarily refashioned, less idealized form. In doing so he paved the way for the renewed aestheticism of the modern period.;Although the Pater-Ruskin relationship has not been neglected, there has not been a systematic comparison of the textual sources. This study brings to light for the first time a correspondence between lectures given by Ruskin at Oxford during his two tenures as Slade Professor and essays written by Pater during these years.;Chapter one describes Ruskin's critique of the romantic imagination by following his lifelong response to Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, the poet's most influential expression of memory and imagination as sources of compensation. Ruskin's formulation of the pathetic fallacy, in Modern Painters III, is a radical expression of victorian scepticism toward the Wordsworthian faith in the compensatory imagination. Chapter two describes Pater's critical reception of Wordsworth as a reversal of Ruskin's condemnation of the romantic poet. In his essay, "Wordsworth" (1874), Pater validates the pathetic fallacy as a vital expression of the poetic spirit. The third chapter establishes the correspondence between both critic's reception of Wordsworth and their respective visions of the Renaissance.;Chapters four through six focus on the years that both Ruskin and Pater taught at Oxford. Three of Pater's essays--"The Poetry of Michelangelo" (1871), "Romanticism" (1876), and "Dante Gabriel Rossetti" (1883)--are implicit replies to Ruskin's Oxford lectures on the same subjects. The dissertation helps to substantiate the long-supposed, but never adequately demonstrated, link between Ruskin and Pater.