Hiddenness

The hiddenness of perfect things; a shrinking delicacy and mysticism of sentiment (...) the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were in itself something illicit and isolating; the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the vulgar--these were some of the impressions, forming as they do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan sentiment, from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story [the Metamorphoses of Apuleius] enforced on him. A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident ranks with us for something more than its independent value.

Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885)

Stupidity and vulgarity

To discriminate schools, of art, of literature, is, of course, part of the obvious business of literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production, it is easy to be overmuch occupied concerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to the form.

Walter Pater, "Romanticism", Macmillan's Magazine, November 1876

Form and mere matter

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.

Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, Plato and Platonism. A Series of Lectures, Second Edition, 1895, Macmillan and Co., Limited, London, 1902, p. 8