Walter Pater carefully satiated his desire for innocuous sensations. He kept a bowl of rose petals on his desk and fresh orange peel on his window sill to create exquisite aromas (Bussell 285). Once, at a luncheon party, he was playfully asked: if he were to be a fish what kind of fish he would be. To this he replied, ‘a carp’ (qtd Seiler 1987: 105). In this dry parody of his popular image Pater would be, no doubt, an ornamental carp with luminescent silvery multi-colours to make him a fish of vivid beauty. He would exist to experience pure, unreflective, superficial sensations, aware only of himself and his immediate surroundings. Not only was he painfully conscious that his aesthetic followers conceived him as such, there was an element to Pater that wished to be this complete and unreserved aesthete. Yet it was not to be. Despite his quiet enjoyment of heightened sensations, his famous affirmations of sensual experience and the appropriation of his ideas by a generation of undergraduates, in Pater's broader aesthetic philosophy sensation has ambivalent status: it is not so much a creed as a problem.