Things Said by the Way

Abstract

Walter Pater (1839–1894) saw the essay as the quintessentially modern literary form: a dialectic of philosophy and poetry, yoking together the precious and the commonplace, capable of embodying the scepticism and relativism of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the literary essay was for him a rich source of experimentation in his own writing. In his critical works Pater explored the genealogy and features of essayistic style in a highly self-conscious way, tracing a history of the genre that goes from the Platonic dialogues to Montaigne, while his historical novels are punctuated with a series of digressions that gives them a distinctly hybrid, essayistic quality. In Gaston de Latour, Pater even stages an encounter between his fictional protagonist and Montaigne, in which he brings into focus his theory of the essay as revealing the importance of things found ‘at some random turn by the way’.