Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Walter Pater (1839–1894), a leading Victorian critic associated with aestheticism, often resisted grand, universal definitions in favor of close attention to particular works and individual perception. This sentence comes from the opening movement of his preface to *The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry* (first published 1873), where he frames his project against earlier critical traditions that sought abstract, all-purpose accounts of “beauty.” Pater instead proposes that criticism should begin from concrete impressions and the distinctive “virtue” of each artwork, reflecting his broader emphasis on subjective experience and the historically specific character of artistic ideals.

Pater observes that critics have repeatedly tried to pin beauty down as an abstract essence—something definable by a single, universal formula. The remark is less a neutral summary than a setup for his own method: he implies that such attempts are misguided because beauty is encountered in particular forms, moments, and sensibilities rather than as a detachable concept. The line anticipates Pater’s influential insistence on the critic’s task as registering precise, personal impressions and identifying what makes a given work uniquely itself. In doing so, he shifts aesthetic inquiry from metaphysical definition toward experiential, historically attentive description.