Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins eds., Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” This memorable quotation from Walter Pater is one of the iconic British responses to Lessing’s aesthetic theories and Baudelaire’s notion of “correspondences”, both of which exerted a strong influence on the work of nineteenth-century authors and artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne and, of course, Pater himself. Pater’s pronouncement on the relation between the arts occurs in the 1877 essay “The School of Giorgione”, w..