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John Ruskin’s claim that what is essential in all art is to fashion by hand what the eye sees clearly, blurred the divide between the fine arts and the decorative arts. Advocating a renewed experience of nature proper to disclose truth to the beholder, he inspired William Morris with a new form of interior design that promoted craftsmanship as a way to counter mass production and restore man’s dignity. The revival of the gothic style was for him a way to renew Victorian culture by emphasizing the close observation of nature, as well as the values of craftsmanship. While the decorative arts created an environment conducive to a better appreciation of natural beauty, they also sheltered the aesthete from the ugliness of the industrial age. Patterns designed by Morris were loved by aesthetes who wanted their homes to mirror their dreams and aspirations and who embraced Walter Pater’s epicurean aesthetics. Pater’s celebration of music in The Renaissance as the ideal towards which all arts aspire, fostered the idea of interior design as a musical composition enhancing pure perception for the aesthetic mind. The essay examines to what extent aesthetic interiors show this ambiguity between the desire to re-discover natural beauty and truth and the retreat into aesthetic dreams.

Old age in Walter Pater's works is the time when the individual has the opportunity to think thoroughly upon life and culture. The feeling of growing old may first engender melancholy and bitterness as one considers all those lost days of youth. However, Pater's characters generally take the opportunity to start again and fulfill their quest of wisdom. Old people are more sympathetic with the sorrows of humankind. Looking back upon their own past, they remember their childhood and their first experiences and reflect on their own identity, on the human condition and on culture. Ageing is also an essential element in the arts, especially in architecture as buildings mature and ripen in the course of years and centuries. Old worn stones, old aesthetic forms are for future generations witnesses of immemorial times, allowing Pater's nineteenth-century arts critic to spiritually restore the past and contribute to the development of culture thoughout the ages.

The hypertext is becoming a new medium for scholarship, allowing quick and universal sharing of knowledge as well as providing for scholarly criticism a new text model. Walter Pater raised the issue of scholarship in his time and his view may help us assess how the hypertext could best be used in Paterian studies. The hypertext may be appropriate for highlighting intertextuality and presenting Pater’s extensive culture. However, is the author’s intention not undermined when texts are opened to other texts while Pater saw his works as fully composed structures? The problem is even more complex when it comes to hypermedia. The hypertext suggests a new area of research around time/space scale shifts in Pater’s works, for which Jacques Fontanille’s comparative semiotics provide a methodology. After raising the issue of scholarship, the hypertext then leads us to consider Pater’s style in a new light and to explore relations between literature and the spatial arts in his works.