Walter Pater

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Walter Horatio Pater (August 4 1839 - July 30 1894) was an English essayist and literary critic.

Born in Shadwell, England, Pater was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a doctor, who had moved there in the early 1800s and practiced medicine among the poor. He died while Walter was an infant, and the family moved to Enfield.

In 1853 Pater was sent to King's School, Canterbury, where the beauty of the cathedral made an impression that would remain with him all his life. As a schoolboy he read John Ruskin's Modern Painters and was, for a while, attracted to the study of art, showing no signs of the literary taste which he was to develop. His progress was always gradual. He gained a school exhibition, however, with which he proceeded in 1858 to Queen's College, Oxford.

His undergraduate life was unusually uneventful; he was a shy, "reading man", making few friends. The scholar Benjamin Jowett was struck by Pater's potential and offered to give him private lessons. In his classes, however, Pater was a disappointment, taking only a second in literae humaniores in 1862. After graduating, he settled in Oxford and taught private pupils. As a boy he had cherished the idea of entering the Anglican Church, but at Oxford his faith in Christianity was shaken. By the time he took his degree, he thought of graduating as a Unitarian minister; he did not pursue this, however. Being offered a fellowship at Brasenose in 1864, he settled down into a university career.

But it was not his intention to sink into academic torpor. As he began his career, the sphere of his interests widened rapidly; he became acutely interested in literature, beginning to write articles and criticisms. The first of these to be printed was a brief essay upon Coleridge, contributed in 1866 to the Westminster Review. A few months later (January, 1867), his essay on Winckelmann, the first expression of his idealism, appeared in the same review.

In the following year his study of "Aesthetic Poetry" appeared in the Fortnightly Review, to be succeeded by essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, and Michelangelo. These, with other similar studies, were collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873. Pater, now at the centre of a small but interesting circle in Oxford, gained respect in London and elsewhere, numbering the Pre-Raphaelites among his friends.

He next became a candidate for the Slade Professorship of Poetry at Oxford University. But he soon withdrew from the competition in the wake of personal criticism, part of it spawned by W. H. Mallock in a satirical novel entitled The New Republic. In it, Pater is depicted stereotypically as an effeminate English aesthete.

By the time his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean appeared, however, he had gathered quite a following. This, his chief contribution to literature, was published early in 1885. In it Pater displays, with fullness and elaboration, his ideal of the aesthetic life, his cult of beauty as opposed to bare asceticism, and his theory of the stimulating effect of the pursuit of beauty as an ideal of its own. The principles of what would be known as the Aesthetic movement were partly traceable to Pater; and his impact was particularly felt on one of the movement's leading proponents, Oscar Wilde, a former student of Pater at Oxford.

In 1887 he published Imaginary Portraits, a series of essays in philosophic fiction; in 1889, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style; in 1893, Plato and Platonism; and in 1894, The Child in the House. His Greek Studies and his Miscellaneous Studies were collected posthumously in 1895; his posthumous romance of Gaston de Latour in 1896; and his essays from The Guardian were privately printed in 1897. A collected edition of Pater's works was issued in 1901.

Toward the end of his life, Pater exercised a growing and considerable influence. His mind, however, returned to the religious fervour of his youth. Those who knew him best believed that, had he lived longer, he would have resumed his boyish intention of taking holy orders. He died of rheumatic fever at the age of 55 and is buried at St. Giles cemetery, Oxford.

Pater wrote with difficulty, fastidiously correcting his work. His literary style, serene and contemplative, suggested, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, a "vast attempt at impartiality." The richness and depth of his language was attuned to his philosophy of life. Idealists will find inspiration in his desire to "burn with a hard, gem-like flame" and to live in harmony with the highest.

External links

*Walter Pater: An Overview
*walterpater.org - Website devoted to Pater's life, writings, ideas, milieu and influence.
*Free ebook of Walter Pater at Project Gutenberg

This article contains text from a 1911 public domain encyclopedia: it needs copyediting and rewriting into modern English