Firmer than a watercolor, but less bold than an oil painting, Walter Pater (1839–94) had a classic pastel temperament. Hints, tints, suggestions, and subtle blends were his forte as a man and a writer. The malicious caricature of him in W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic (1876) as Mr. Rose, who delights in dimly lit churches, gorgeous fabrics, and aesthetic frissons, was uncomfortably close to home. Pater’s voice, like Cordelia’s, was ever soft: when at the end of a lecture he expressed the hope that his audience had been able to hear him, the undergraduate Oscar Wilde quipped, “We overheard you.” So, when he came to write a letter, the result was unlikely to be strident, dramatic, or confessional. Several times, in the letters edited by Robert M. Seiler for the ongoing Collected Works issued by Oxford University Press, Pater admits to being a reluctant correspondent: “letters are such poor means of communication.” There was an additional motive for reticence: the interception, in 1874, of some indiscreet letters he, as a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, had written to an undergraduate at Balliol College had caused a scandal that put promotion out of the question for him. Pater had every reason to weigh his words.
Inevitably, there are a few cavils.
Seiler’s edition, which replaces that of Lawrence Evans (1970), prints 381 letters by Pater to Evans’s 266; nearly fifty of the new items are published for the first time, although few of them
