Walter Pater.
Walter Horatio Pater (4
August 1839 - 30 July 1894) was an English
essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of
fiction.
Early life
Born in
Stepney
in London
's East
End
, Walter Pater was the second son of Richard Glode
Pater, a doctor who had moved to London in the early 19th century
and practised medicine among the poor. Dr Pater died while
Walter was an infant and the family moved to Enfield
, Middlesex
, where Walter attended Enfield Grammar
School
.
In 1853
Pater 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. As a
schoolboy he 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 shy "reading man", making few
friends. 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 he had cherished the idea of
entering the
Anglican Church, but at
Oxford his faith in Christianity had been shaken. He now thought of
becoming a
Unitarian minister, but 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.
But his
years of study and reading now paid dividends: he was offered a
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
Formative visits to the continent, combined with opportunities for
wider study and teaching at Oxford, meant that Pater's
preoccupations now multiplied. He became acutely interested in art
and literature, and started to write articles and criticism. The
first piece to be printed was an essay on
Coleridge, contributed in 1866 to
the
Westminster Review.
A few months later his essay on
Winckelmann, the first expression
of his
idealism, appeared in the same
review (1867). In the following year his sensitive study of
"Aesthetic Poetry", on
William Morris
and the literary
Pre-Raphaelites,
appeared in the
Fortnightly
Review, to be succeeded by essays on
Leonardo da Vinci,
Sandro Botticelli,
Pico della Mirandola and
Michelangelo. The last four, with other similar
pieces, were collected in his
Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873), renamed
The Renaissance: Studies in
Art and Poetry in the second and subsequent editions. The
Leonardo essay contains his celebrated reverie on the
Mona
Lisa; the Botticelli essay helped revive interest in this
great painter.
The brief “Conclusion” to
The Renaissance was to be
Pater's most influential publication. It contains the core of his
aesthetic philosophy, advocating a cultivation of intense
receptivity to beauty and to moments of sensation, in life, art,
music and literature, but saying nothing in support of the
Ruskinian emphasis on art as a source of moral or social
edification. Now at the centre of a small but gifted circle in
Oxford (he tutored
Gerard Manley
Hopkins and
Oscar Wilde), Pater was
gaining respect in the London literary world and beyond, numbering
some of the
Pre-Raphaelites among
his friends.
In 1874 he was turned down at the last moment by his erstwhile
mentor
Benjamin Jowett, Master of
Balliol, for a previously-promised
proctorship. The reason remained a mystery until recently, when
records emerged documenting an affair with a nineteen-year-old
undergraduate,
William Money
Hardinge. Hardinge had attracted unfavorable attention as a
result of his outspoken homosexuality and blasphemous verse. Many
of Pater's works focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either
in a
Platonic way or, obliquely, in a more
physical way.
Pater next
became a candidate for the Slade Professorship of Poetry at
Oxford
University
, but 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 which Pater is depicted as a stereotypically
effeminate English aesthete.
Conscious of his growing influence and aware that the "Conclusion"
to his
Renaissance could be misconstrued as amoral, Pater
now set about clarifying and exemplifying his ideas through
fiction. In his philosophical novel
Marius the Epicurean (1885), set
in the Rome of the Antonines, he displays, with much intellectual
elaboration and poetic feeling but with little narrative interest,
his ideal of the aesthetic life, his philosophy of beauty tempered
by
aestheticism, and his theory of the
stimulating effect of the
pursuit of beauty 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.
In 1887 Pater published
Imaginary Portraits, four
psychological studies of fictional characters in historical
settings, each of them in part a disguised self-portrait. The
"Imaginary Portrait" was a genre in which he came to specialise.
Here his examination of the tensions between 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 third portrait, "Sebastian van
Storck", a powerful critique of philosophical solipsism, is perhaps
Pater's most striking work of fiction.
Appreciations, with an Essay on Style was published in
1889, with a revised second edition in 1890. Its "Preface" argues
for a subjective, impressionistic response to art and literature,
as opposed to the drier, more objective and somewhat moralistic
criticism practised by
Matthew Arnold
and others. Pater's suppression in the revised edition of his fine
essay on "Aesthetic Poetry", however, suggests either an increasing
conservatism on his part, or (more probably) a growing cautiousness
in face of hostile criticism by an establishment unnerved by his
reputation for "hedonism".
In 1893 appeared his scholarly
Plato and Platonism, which
includes a sympathetic study of ancient Sparta, and in 1894 the
evocative semi-autobiographical Imaginary Portrait,
The Child
in the House. His mind, however, was returning to the
religious interests of his youth. Those who believed they knew him
best believed that, had he lived longer, he would have resumed his
youthful intention of taking holy orders. This was probably wishful
thinking. The evidence of his later writings points rather to no
more than a revival of his earlier interest in Gothic cathedrals,
sparked by regular visits to northern Europe with his sisters, with
whom he now lived in north Oxford. Pater died on a college
staircase, of heart failure brought on by
rheumatic fever, at the age of 55. He was
buried at Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.
Pater's
Greek Studies, with its poetic reverie on
Hippolytus, and his
Miscellaneous Studies, were collected
posthumously in 1895. The latter contains another two obliquely
self-revelatory Imaginary Portraits. His unfinished novel,
Gaston de Latour appeared posthumously in 1896, the
product of a growing interest in his later years in French
philosophy, history, literature, and architecture; and his
Essays from The Guardian were
privately printed in 1897. A Collected Edition of Pater's works was
issued in 1901, and was reprinted frequently until the late
1920s.
Toward the end of his life Pater's writings were exercising a
considerable influence. The principles of what would be known as
the
Aesthetic Movement were partly
traceable to him, and his effect was particularly felt on one of
the movement's leading proponents,
Oscar
Wilde. Some of the early Modernists such as
Marcel Proust,
Andre
Gide, and
W. B. Yeats admired his
writing, and his influence can be traced in the subjective,
stream-of-consciousness novels of the early 20th century. Idealists
have found, and always will find inspiration in his desire to "burn
always with this hard, gemlike flame", and in his pursuit of the
"highest quality" in "moments as they pass".
Method and Style
Pater was much admired for his prose style, which he strove to make
worthy of his own aesthetic ideals, taking great pains and
fastidiously correcting his work. "I have known writers of every
degree, but never one to whom the act of composition was such a
travail and an agony as it was to Pater," wrote
Edmund Gosse, who also described Pater's method
of composition: "So conscious was he of the modifications and
additions which would supervene that he always wrote on ruled
paper, leaving each alternate line blank." As a result, Pater's
style, serene and contemplative in tone, suggests, in the words of
G. K. Chesterton, a "vast attempt at
impartiality". Indeed in its richness, depth, and acuity, in its
sensuous rhythms, his style was perfectly attuned to his philosophy
of life.
[39792] Pater's Grave at Holywell
Cemetery
Editions
- Richard Aldington, ed., Walter Pater: Selected
Writings (Heinemann, London, 1948).
- Kenneth Clark, ed., Walter Pater: The Renaissance - Studies
in Art and Poetry (with the essay on Raphael from 'Miscellaneous
Studies') (Collins, London, 1961; 1964; 1976).
- Harold Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater
(Signet, N.Y., 1974; 1982).
- Donald L. Hill, ed., Walter Pater: The Renaissance -
Studies in Art and Poetry; the 1893 text (University of
California Press, 1980).
- Michael Levey, ed., Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean
(Penguin, Middlesex, 1985; 1994).
- Eugene J. Brzenk, ed., Imaginary Portraits by Walter Pater:
a new collection (Harper, N.Y., 1964).
In literature
References
- Edmund Gosse, "Walter Pater: A Portrait" (September 1894), from
Critical Kit-Kats (1896).
- G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature
(1913), Ch. 1.
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search