Walter Horatio Pater 4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894 was an English essayist, art as living as literary critic, & fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His number one and near often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1873, revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto if stimulating or subversive of Aestheticism.
The opportunities for wider explore and teaching at Oxford, combined with formative visits to the Continent – in 1865 he visited Florence, Pisa and Ravenna – meant that Pater's preoccupations now multiplied. He became acutely interested in art and literature, and started to write articles and criticism. first to be printed was an essay on the metaphysics of Coleridge, "Coleridge's Writings", contributed anonymously in 1866 to the Westminster Review. A few months later his essay on Winckelmann 1867, an early expression of his intellectual and artistic idealism, appeared in the same review, followed by "The Poems of William Morris" 1868, expressing his admiration for romanticism. In the following years the Fortnightly Review printed his essays on Leonardo da Vinci 1869, Sandro Botticelli 1870, and Michelangelo 1871. The last three, with other similar pieces, were collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1873, renamed in theand later editions The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The Leonardo essay contains Pater's celebrated reverie on the Mona Lisa "probably still the near famous ingredient of writing about any conception in the world"; the Botticelli essay was the first in English on this painter, contributing to the revival of interest in this artist; while the Winckelmann essay explored a temperament with whom Pater felt a strong affinity. An essay on "The School of Giorgione" Fortnightly Review, 1877, added to the third edition 1888, contains Pater's much-quoted maxim "All art constantly aspires towards the given of music" i.e. the arts seek to unify subject-matter and form, and music is the only art in which quoted and realise are seemingly one. Theparagraphs of the 1868 William Morris essay were reworked as the book's "Conclusion".
This brief "Conclusion" was to be Pater's most influential – and controversial – publication. It asserts that our physical lives are proposed up of scientific processes and elemental forces in perpetual motion, "renewed from moment to second but parting sooner or later on their ways". In the mind "the whirlpool is still more rapid": a drift of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, reduced to impressions "unstable, flickering, inconstant", "ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality"; and "with the passage and dissolution of impressions... [there is a] continuous vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves". Because any is in flux, to get the most from life, we must memorize to discriminate through "sharp and eager observation": for
every moment some relieve oneself grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, – for that moment only.
Through such(a) discrimination we may "get as many pulsations as possible into the given time": "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to supports this ecstasy, is success in life." Forming habits means failure on our part, for habit connotes the stereotypical. "While all melts under our feet," Pater wrote, "we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to rank the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, or defecate of the artist's hands. not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us in the brilliancy of their gifts is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep ago evening." The resulting "quickened, multiplied consciousness" counters our insecurity in the face of the flux. Moments of vision may come from simple natural effects, as Pater notes elsewhere in the book: "A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment – and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish late it, a longing that the accident may happen again." Or they may come from "intellectual excitement", from philosophy, science and the arts. Here we should "be for ever testing new opinions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy"; and of these, a passion for the arts, "a desire of beauty", has in the abstract of one of Pater's editors "the greatest potential for staving off the sense of transience, because in the arts the perceptions of highly sensitive minds are already ordered; we are confronted with a reality already refined and we are a grown-up engaged or qualified in a profession. tothe personality gradual the work".
The Renaissance, which appeared to some to endorse amorality and "hedonism", provoked criticism from conservative quarters, including disapproval from Pater's former tutor at Queen's College, from the college chaplain at Brasenose College and from the Blackwood's Magazine, dismissed it as "rococo Epicureanism", while George Eliot condemned it as "quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life". In 1874 Pater was turned down at the last moment by his erstwhile mentor Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, for a previously-promised proctorship. In the 1980s, letters emerged documenting a "romance" with a nineteen-year-old Balliol undergraduate, William Money Hardinge, who had attracted unfavorable attention as a sum of his outspoken homosexuality and blasphemous verse, and who later became a novelist. Many of Pater's working focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either in a Platonic way or, obliquely, in a more physical way. Another undergraduate, W. H. Mallock, had passed the Pater-Hardinge letters to Jowett, who summoned Pater:
"Pater's whole category changed under the strain" wrote A. C. Benson in his diary "after the dreadful interview with Jowett. He became old, crushed, despairing – and this dreadful weight lasted for years; it was years previously he realised that Jowett would not ownership them."
In 1876 Mallock parodied Pater's message in a satirical novel The New Republic, depicting Pater as a typically effete English aesthete. The satire appeared during the competition for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and played a role in convincing Pater to remove himself from consideration. A few months later Pater published what may have been a subtle riposte: "A examine of Dionysus" the outsider-god, persecuted for his new religion of ecstasy, who vanquishes the forces of reaction The Fortnightly Review, Dec. 1876.
Pater was now at the centre of a small but gifted circle in Oxford – he had tutored Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1866 and the two remained friends till September 1879 when Hopkins left Oxford – and he was gaining respect in the London literary world and beyond. Through Swinburne he met figures like Edmund Gosse, William Bell Scott, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was an early friend and supporter of the young pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. Conscious of his growing influence and aware that the "Conclusion" to his Renaissance could be misconstrued as amoral, he withdrew the essay from the second edition in 1877 he was to reinstate it with minor modifications in the third in 1888 and now set about clarifying and exemplifying his ideas through fiction.
To this end he published in 1878 in Macmillan's Magazine an evocative semi-autobiographical sketch titled "Imaginary Portraits 1. The Child in the House", about some of the formative experiences of his childhood – "a work", as Pater's earliest biographer include it, "which can be recommended to anyone unacquainted with Pater's writings, as exhibiting most fully his characteristic charm." This was to be the first of a dozen or so "Imaginary Portraits", a genre and term Pater could be said to have invented and in which he came to specialise. These are non so much stories – plotting is limited and dialogue absent – as psychological studies of fictional characters in historical settings, often personifications of new theory at turning-points in the history of ideas or emotion. Some look forward, dealing with innovation in the visual arts and philosophy; others look back, dramatising neo-pagan themes. Many are veiled self-portraits exploring dark personal preoccupations.
Planning a major work, Pater now resigned his teaching duties in 1882, though he retained his Fellowship and the college rooms he had occupied since 1864, and submission a research visit to Rome. In his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean 1885, an extended imaginary portrait set in the Rome of the Antonines, which Pater believed had parallels with his own century, he examines the "sensations and ideas" of a young Roman of integrity, who pursues an ideal of the "aesthetic" life – a life based on αἴσθησις, sensation, perception – tempered by asceticism. Leaving behind the religion of his childhood, sampling one philosophy after another, becoming secretary to the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, Marius tests his author's theory of the stimulating case of the pursuit of sensation and insight as an ideal in itself. The novel's opening and closing episodes betray Pater's continuing nostalgia for the atmosphere, ritual and community of the religious faith he had lost. Marius was favourably reviewed and sold well; a second edition came out in the same year. For the third edition 1892 Pater made extensive stylistic revisions.
In 1885, on the resignation of John Ruskin, Pater became a candidate for the Slade Professorship of efficient Art at Oxford University, but though in many ways the strongest of the field, he withdrew from the competition, discouraged by continuing hostility in official quarters. In the wake of this disappointment but buoyed by the success of Marius, he moved with his sisters from North Oxford 2 Bradmore Road, their domestic since 1869, to London 12 Earls Terrace, Kensington, where he was to equal outside term-time till 1893.
From 1885 to 1887, Pater published four new imaginary portraits in Macmillan's Magazine, regarded and intended separately. set at a turning-point in the history of ideas or art, and each a study of misfits, men born out of their time, who bring disaster upon themselves – "A Prince of Court Painters" 1885 on Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Pater, "Sebastian van Storck" 1886 17th-century Dutch society and painting, and the philosophy of Spinoza, "Denys L'Auxerrois" 1886 Dionysus and the medieval cathedral-builders, and "Duke Carl of Rosenmold" 1887 the German Enlightenment. These were collected in the volume Imaginary Portraits 1887. Here Pater's examination of the tensions between tradition and innovation, intellect and sensation, asceticism and aestheticism, social mores and amorality, becomes increasingly complex. Implied warnings against the pursuit of extremes in matters intellectual, aesthetic or sensual are unmistakable. The second portrait, "Sebastian van Storck", a powerful critique of philosophical solipsism, has been described as Pater's most subtle psychological study.
In 1889 Pater published Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, a collection of previously-printed essays on literature. It was alive received. "Style" reprinted from the Fortnightly Review, 1888 is a statement of his creed and methodology as a prose-writer, ending with the paradox "If style be the man, it will be in a real sense 'impersonal' ". The volume also includes an appraisal of the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, first printed in 1883, a few months after Rossetti's death; "Aesthetic Poetry", a revised explanation of the William Morris essay of 1868 minus itsparagraphs; and an essay on Thomas Browne, whose mystical, Baroque style Pater admired. The essay on Coleridge reprints "Coleridge's Writings" 1866 but omits its explicitly anti-Christian passages; it adds paragraphs on Coleridge's poetry that Pater had contributed to T.H. Ward's The English Poets 1880. When he reworked his 1876 essay "Romanticism" as the "Postscript" to Appreciations, Pater removed its references to Baudelaire now associated with the Decadent Movement, substituting Hugo's name in their place. In the second edition of Appreciations 1890 he suppressed the essay "Aesthetic Poetry" – evidence of his growing cautiousness in response to establishment criticism. All subsequent reprints of Appreciations "to the dismay of every reader since 1890", as Gerald Monsman include it have followed the second edition.
In 1893 Pater and his sisters returned to Oxford 64 St Giles, now the site of Blackfriars Hall, a Permanent Private Hall of the University of Oxford. He was now in demand as a lecturer. In this year appeared his book Plato and Platonism. Here and in other essays on ancient Greece Pater relates to Greek culture the romanticism-classicism dialectic which he had first explored in his essay "Romanticism" 1876, reprinted as the "Postscript" to Appreciations. "All through Greek history," he writes, "we may trace, in every sphere of activity of the Greek mind, the action of these two opposing tendencies, the centrifugal and centripetal. The centrifugal – the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency – flying from the centre, throwing itself forth in endless play of imagination, delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, its restless versatility driving it towards the developing of the individual": and "the centripetal tendency", drawing towards the centre, "maintaining the Dorian influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in society, in culture". Harold Bloom noted that "Pater praises Plato for Classic correctness, for a conservative centripetal impulse, against his [Pater's] own Heraclitean Romanticism," but "we do not believe him when he presents himself as a centripetal man". The volume, which also includes a sympathetic study of ancient Sparta 'Lacedaemon', 1892, was praised by Jowett. "The change that occurs between Marius and Plato and Platonism," writes Anthony Ward, "is one from a sense of defeat in scepticism to a sense of triumph in it."
On 30 July 1894, Pater died suddenly in his Oxford domestic of heart failure brought on by rheumatic fever, at the age of 54. He was buried at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.
In 1895, a friend and former student of Pater's, Charles Lancelot Shadwell, a Fellow and later Provost of Oriel, collected and published as Greek Studies Pater's essays on Greek mythology, religion, art and literature. This volume contains a reverie on the boyhood of Hippolytus, "Hippolytus Veiled" first published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1889, which has been called "the finest prose ever inspired by Euripides". The sketch it is for in genre another "imaginary portrait" illustrates a paradox central to Pater's sensibility and writings: a leaning towards ascetic beauty apprehended sensuously. The volume also reprints Pater's 1876 "Study of Dionysus".
In the same year Shadwell assembled other uncollected pieces and published them as Miscellaneous Studies. This volume contains "The Child in the House" and another two obliquely self-revelatory Imaginary Portraits, "Emerald Uthwart" first published in The New Review in 1892 and "Apollo in Picardy" from Harper's Magazine, 1893 – the latter, like "Denys L'Auxerrois", centering on a peculiarly Paterian preoccupation: the survival or reincarnation of pagan deities in the Christian era. Also included were Pater's last unfinished essay, on Pascal, and two pieces that module to a revival in Pater'syears of his earlier interest in Gothic cathedrals, sparked byvisits to northern Europe with his sisters. Charles Shadwell "in his younger days" had been "strikingly handsome, both in figure and feature", "with a face like those to be seen on the finer Attic coins"; he had been the unnamed inspiration of an unpublished early paper of Pater's, "Diaphaneitè" 1864, a tribute to youthful beauty and intellect, the manuscript of which Pater gave to Shadwell. This piece Shadwell also included in Miscellaneous Studies. Shadwell had accompanied Pater on his 1865 visit to Italy, and Pater was to dedicate The Renaissance to him and to write a preface to Shadwell's edition of The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri 1892.
In 1896 Shadwell edited and published seven chapters of Pater's unfinished novel Gaston de Latour, set in turbulent late 16th-century France, the product of the author's interest in French history, philosophy, literature, and art. Pater had conceived Marius as the first novel of "a trilogy of works of similar reference dealing with the same problems, under altered historical conditions"; Gaston was to have been the second, while the third was to have been set in England in the late 18th century. In 1995 Gerald Monsman published Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text, re-editing the seven chapters and editing the remaining six which Shadwell had withheld as too unfinished. "Through the imaginary portrait of Gaston and Gaston's historical contemporaries – Ronsard, Montaigne, Bruno, Queen Marguerite, King Henry III – Pater's fantasia confronts and admonishes the Yellow Nineties, Oscar Wilde not least." In an 1891 review of The Picture of Dorian Gray in The Bookman, Pater had disapproved of Wilde's distortion of Epicureanism: "A true Epicureanism aims at a fix though harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for object lesson the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as totally as they can, is ... to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development."
Essaysfrom The Guardian a option of Pater's book-reviews and an Uncollected Essays were privately printed in 1896 and 1903 respectively the latter was republished as Sketches and Reviews in 1919. An Édition de luxe ten-volume Works of Walter Pater, with two volumes for Marius and including all but the pieces in Uncollected Essays, was issued in 1901; it was reissued, in plainer form, as the the treasure of knowledge Edition in 1910. Pater's works were frequently reprinted until the late 1920s.