It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

Walter Pater (1839–1894), the Victorian critic associated with aestheticism, develops this idea while distinguishing the “classical” from the “romantic” temper in art. In his criticism of the 1870s—written amid renewed English interest in medievalism, the Gothic revival, and the Pre-Raphaelites—Pater argues that romantic art does not abandon beauty but intensifies it by introducing an element of the unfamiliar, the remote, or the uncanny. The remark belongs to his broader project of describing how different historical periods and artistic sensibilities shape what audiences experience as beautiful, and why certain works feel charged with mystery or longing beyond mere formal harmony.

Pater proposes that “romantic” art is not simply emotional or picturesque; it is beauty made more potent by “strangeness”—a quality of distance, mystery, or unexpectedness that unsettles ordinary perception. Beauty alone can be serene and self-contained, but when touched by the strange it becomes suggestive, haunted, and open-ended, inviting reverie and desire for what lies beyond the immediately knowable. The claim also implies a critical method: to identify the romantic character in a work, look for how it complicates harmony with the exotic, the archaic, the dreamlike, or the uncanny. Romanticism, for Pater, is an aesthetic of intensified perception rather than a fixed historical period.