These words, which Walter Pater wrote at the outset of his career and reprinted in his first book, dogged him until he died; denounced in the pulpits of Oxford, and celebrated and castigated in the magazines of the 1870s, they reappeared in the obituaries of the 1890s. Much of his subsequent writing was an attempt to explain them, both to the censorious and to his admirers. This implant of defensiveness was not confined to Marius the Epicurean, Pater's second book and his only finished novel, which was published twelve years after Studies in 1885. It affected Studies itself: the second edition (1877) excluded the ‘Conclusion’ entirely; the third (1888) amended and restored it with a nervous explanation which linked it to Marius, in which ‘the thoughts suggested by it’ are ‘dealt [with] more fully’ (Ren. (1888), 246). It persisted to affect important late work, theoretical essays such as ‘Style’ and his last collection of lectures on Plato and Platonism. Pater's writing career and his conduct of it might be construed as a trajectory of fight and flight from the cultural and historical ‘moment’ of 1873–4.

In parallel, its influence on his conduct of his life might be read as greater, as Pater purposefully left no diaries, journals, or notebooks, and only the most circumspect, and in the vast majority of cases brief, letters. Those who knew him best declined to write a biography, and the job was left to a trio of strangers who began to publish their versions of his life only a decade after his death.