Pater as a "Moralist" WHILE PATER'S WORK was the object of severe moral criticism in the author's own lifetime, the tendency of more recent criticism has been to admit its moral seriousness. "Most readers today," wrote David DeLaura twenty years ago, "agree that Pater's aestheticism, for all its confusion of ethics and aesthetics, is essentially a special morality—not art for art's sake but art for the sake of a special conception of the perfected …showed first 75 words of 888 total…

…showed last 75 words of 888 total…that conflict. There is generally too uncritical a reliance upon key terms or categories such as "moral," "moralist," "ethics," and "ethical," and hence a tendency to replicate them without sufficiently questioning their use. One result of this situation is that it has not clearly enough been shown that the ethical crisis of the 1880s was not extrinsic but rather fully intrinsic to the positions adopted by Pater in the writings of the 1860s and 1870s.