On a spring day in 1874 Walter Pater had a ‘dreadful interview’ with Benjamin Jowett at which he was confronted with evidence of his romantic attachment to a student called William Hardinge (Inman 1991: 1). Following this meeting Jowett permanently withdrew Pater's nomination for a University Proctorship. In the months during which they had become close friends, Hardinge had sent intimate poems to Pater, and Pater had returned with letters signed ‘yours lovingly’. Details of the affair were subject to gossip and suppression but the letters alone were evidence enough for Jowett's intervention.

Although this episode was soon hushed in Oxford it was a crescendo in Pater's life and values, bringing to its height the conflict between his homoerotic ideal of sensuality and the Victorian strictures against homosexuality. Since Billie Andrew Inman brought together evidence of the romance in 1991 it has been well documented and Pater has become a familiar figure in discussions of Victorian homoerotic desire. But if Pater's flirtation with Hardinge shows his interest in desire between men, it is also necessary to understand that it illustrated to him the dangerous space between what he calls ‘being’ and ‘doing’. It is in his essay on ‘Wordsworth’ (first published that same spring, 1874) that Pater reflects that ‘the end of life is not action but contemplation – being as distinct from doing’ (A 62). The distinction became blurred with Hardinge.