Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto (whether stimulating or subversive) of Aestheticism.Patmore, Derek, Walter Pater: Selected Writings (London, 1949), p.11Ostermark-Johansen, L. (ed.), The Collected Works of Walter Pater: Imaginary Portraits (Oxford, 2019), p.31
Early life Born in Stepney in London's East End, Walter Pater was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a physician who had moved to London in the early 19th century to practise medicine among the poor. Dr Pater died while Walter was an infant and the family moved to Enfield. Walter attended Enfield Grammar School and was individually tutored by the headmaster.
In 1853 he was sent to The King's School, Canterbury, where the beauty of the cathedral made an impression that would remain with him all his life. He was fourteen when his mother, Maria Pater, died in 1854. As a schoolboy Pater read John Ruskin's Modern Painters, which helped inspire his lifelong attraction to the study of art and gave him a taste for well-crafted prose. He gained a school exhibition, with which he proceeded in 1858 to Queen's College, Oxford..
As an undergraduate, Pater was a "reading man", with literary and philosophical interests beyond the prescribed texts. Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne were among his early favourites. Visiting his aunt and sisters in Heidelberg, Germany,Edmund Gosse, 'Walter Pater: A Portrait' (September 1894), reprinted in Gosse's Selected Essays: First Series (London, 1928), pp.27-58 during the vacations, he learned German and began to read Hegel and the German philosophers. The scholar Benjamin Jowett was struck by his potential and offered to give him private lessons. In Jowett's classes, however, Pater was a disappointment; he took a Second in Literae Humaniores in 1862. As a boy Pater had cherished the idea of entering the Anglican clergy, but at Oxford his faith in Christianity had been shaken. In spite of his inclination towards the ritual and aesthetic elements of the church, he had little interest in Christian doctrine and did not pursue ordination. After graduating, Pater remained in Oxford and taught Classics and Philosophy to private students. (His sister Clara Pater, a pioneer of women's education, later taught ancient Greek and Latin at Somerville College, of which she was one of the co-founders.Ostermark-Johansen, L. (ed.), The Collected Works of Walter Pater: Imaginary Portraits (Oxford, 2019), p.xlii) Pater's years of study and reading now paid dividends: he was offered a classical fellowship in 1864 at Brasenose on the strength of his ability to teach modern German philosophy, and he settled down to a university career.
Career and writings
The Renaissance
The opportunities for wider study 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 the second and later editions The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The Leonardo essay contains Pater's celebrated reverie on the Mona Lisa ("probably still the most famous piece of writing about any picture in the world"); the Botticelli essay was the first in English on this painter, contributing to the revival of interest in him; while the Winckelmann essay explored a temperament with whom Pater felt a strong affinity.Monsman, Gerald, Walter Pater's Art of Autobiography (New Haven, 1980), p.140 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 condition of music" (i.e. the arts seek to unify subject-matter and form, and music is the only art in which subject and form are seemingly one). The final paragraphs 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 "Walter Pater's Renaissance (1873) and the British Aesthetic Movement"], II. Reception: branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=rachel-teukolsky-walter-paters-renaissance-1873-and-the-british-aesthetic-movement Rachel Teukolsky – publication. It asserts that our physical lives are made up of scientific processes and elemental forces in perpetual motion, "renewed from moment to moment 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] continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves". Because all is in flux, to get the most from life, we must learn to discriminate through "sharp and eager observation": for
Through such discrimination we may "get as many pulsations as possible into the given time": "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain 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 set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, or work 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 before 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 behind 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 summary of one of Pater's editors in .) "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 able to reach the personality behind the work".
Reception and aftermath 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 chaplain at Brasenose College and from the Bishop of Oxford. Margaret Oliphant, reviewing the book in Blackwood's Magazine, dismissed it as "the very madness of fantastic modernism trying to foist its own refinements into the primitive mind and age" and "rococo from beginning to end,—in its new version of [...] the Epicureans’ gay despair". George Eliot condemned it as "quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life".George Eliot, letter to John Blackwood, 5 November 1873, quoted in Denis Donoghue's Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York, 1995), p.58
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 result of his outspoken homosexuality and blasphemous verse, and who later became a novelist. Many of Pater's works 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,Information given by Edmund Gosse to A. C. Benson (Benson's Diary, 73, 1 September 1905); Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact, ed. Philip Dodd (London, 1981), p.48 who summoned Pater:
In 1876 Mallock parodied Pater's message in a satirical novel The New Republic, depicting Pater as 'Mr Rose', a typically effete English aesthete.The New Republic was first published in Belgravia magazine, June to December 1876, with book publication in March 1877. The parody contributed to Pater's decision to drop the 'Conclusion' (Mallock's main source for Mr Rose) in the second edition of The Renaissance, published in June 1877. (Tillotson, G., 'Pater, Mr Rose, and the Conclusion to The Renaissance ', Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol.32, 1946, pp.44-60) 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 Study of Dionysus' the outsider-god, persecuted for his new religion of ecstasy, who vanquishes the forces of reaction (The Fortnightly Review, Dec. 1876).
Marius the Epicurean and Imaginary Portraits
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.Levey, Michael, The Case of Walter Pater (London 1978), p.112 He was an early friend and supporter of the young pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon.Levey, Michael, The Case of Walter Pater (London 1978)Kaylor, Michael Matthew, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians - Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (Masaryk University, Brno, 2006) p.82 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 "slight changes" in the third in 1888"Though they are slight in volume," wrote Geoffrey Tillotson in 1946, "they cannot be called slight in substance. Some of them change the values in sentences which use crucial terms like 'religion' and 'morality'. What was at first recommended to all as a system of life came to be recommended only to those included in the conveniently vague term 'children of this world'.") and now set about clarifying and exemplifying his ideas through fiction.Pater, Walter, explanatory footnote in reinstated 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (3rd and subsequent editions)