Walter Horatio Pater was an
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
essayist,
criticA critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
of
artArt criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty...
and
literatureLiterary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
, and writer of fiction.
Early life
Born in
StepneyStepney is a district of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in London's East End that grew out of a medieval village around St Dunstan's church and the 15th century ribbon development of Mile End Road...
in
LondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
's
East EndThe East End of London, also known simply as the East End, is the area of London, England, United Kingdom, east of the medieval walled City of London and north of the River Thames. Although not defined by universally accepted formal boundaries, the River Lea can be considered another boundary...
, 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
EnfieldThe London Borough of Enfield is the most northerly London borough and forms part of Outer London. It borders the London Boroughs of Barnet, Haringey and Waltham Forest...
,
LondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Walter attended
Enfield Grammar SchoolEnfield Grammar School is a boys' comprehensive school in Enfield Town in the London Borough of Enfield in north London.-History:Enfield Grammar School was founded on the 25th. May 1558...
and was individually tutored by the headmaster.
In 1853 he was sent to
The King's School, CanterburyThe King's School is a British co-educational independent school for both day and boarding pupils in the historic English cathedral city of Canterbury in Kent. It is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference and the Eton Group....
, 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'sJohn Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
Modern PaintersModern Painters is book on art by John Ruskin which argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of the picturesque are superior in the art of landscape to the old masters. The book was primarily written as a defence of the later work of J.M.W. Turner. Ruskin used the book to argue...
, 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,
GautierPierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
, Baudelaire and
SwinburneSwinburne may refer to:* A place:**Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia**Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus in Kuching, Malaysia**Swinburne Senior Secondary College in Melbourne, Australia...
were among his early favourites. Visiting his aunt and sisters in Germany during the vacations he learned German and began to read Hegel and the German philosophers. The scholar
Benjamin JowettBenjamin Jowett was renowned as an influential tutor and administrative reformer in the University of Oxford, a theologian and translator of Plato. He was Master of Balliol College, Oxford.-Early career:...
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 humanioresLiterae Humaniores is the name given to an undergraduate course focused on Classics at Oxford and some other universities.The Latin name means literally "more humane letters", but is perhaps better rendered as "Advanced Studies", since humaniores has the sense of "more refined" or "more learned",...
in 1862. As a boy Pater had cherished the idea of entering the Anglican Church, 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 years of study and reading now paid dividends: he was offered a classical fellowship in 1864 at
BrasenoseBrasenose College, originally Brazen Nose College , is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. As of 2006, it has an estimated financial endowment of £98m...
on the strength of his ability to teach modern German philosophy, and he settled down to a university career.
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
metaphysicsMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
of
ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
, 'Coleridge's Writings', contributed anonymously in 1866 to the
Westminster ReviewThe Westminster Review was a quarterly British publication. Established in 1823 as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, it was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828....
. A few months later his essay on
WinckelmannJohann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art...
(1867), an early expression of his
idealismIn philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
and his admiration for classicism, appeared in the same review, followed by 'The Poems of
William MorrisWilliam Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
' (1868), a complementary piece on romanticism. In the following years the
Fortnightly ReviewFortnightly Review was one of the most important and influential magazines in nineteenth-century England. It was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, and six others with an investment of £9,000; the first edition appeared on 15 May 1865...
printed his essays on
Leonardo da VinciLeonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
(1869),
Sandro BotticelliAlessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance...
(1870), and
MichelangeloMichelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
(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 LisaMona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
("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 this artist. An essay on 'The School of
GiorgioneGiorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
' (
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 included 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 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". Since all is in flux, to get the most from life we must learn to discriminate through "sharp and eager observation": for "every moment some form 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 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 ) "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".
The Renaissance, which appeared to some to endorse "hedonism" and amorality, provoked criticism from conservative quarters, including disapproval from Pater's former tutor at Queen's, from the college chaplain at Brasenose and from the Bishop of Oxford. In 1874 Pater was turned down at the last moment by his erstwhile mentor Benjamin Jowett, Master of
BalliolBalliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
, for a previously-promised proctorship. Letters have recently emerged documenting a "romance" with a nineteen-year-old Balliol undergraduate,
William Money HardingeWilliam Money Hardinge was an English poet and author.The son of Doctor Henry Hardinge of London, William received his education at Westminster and Oxford. During his time at the Balliol College, Oxford, he gained a reputation as a notorious romantichomosexual and aesthetic, acquiring the...
, 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
PlatonicPlatonic love is a chaste and strong type of love that is non-sexual.-Amor Platonicus:The term amor platonicus was coined as early as the 15th century by the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino. Platonic love in this original sense of the term is examined in Plato's dialogue the Symposium, which has...
way or, obliquely, in a more physical way. In 1876
W. H. MallockWilliam Hurrell Mallock was an English novelist and economics writer.-Biography:He was educated privately and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize in 1872 and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874, securing his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford...
parodied Pater's message in a satirical novel
The New RepublicThe New Republic or Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House by English author William Hurrell Mallock is a novel first published by Chatto and Windus of London in 1877. The work had its genesis as a serialization...
, depicting Pater as a typically effete English aesthete. This appeared during the competition for the
Oxford Professorship of PoetryThe chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford is an unusual academic appointment, now held for a term of five years, and chosen through an election open to all members of Convocation, namely, all graduates and current academics of the university; in 2010, on-line voting was allowed....
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
DionysusDionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
' 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 HopkinsGerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...
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, numbering some of the Pre-Raphaelites among his friends. 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 entitled 'Imaginary Portraits 1. The Child in the House' about some of the formative experiences of his childhood. 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 not so much stories – plotting is limited and dialogue absent – as psychological studies of fictional characters in historical settings, often personifications of new concepts 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, dramatizing 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 made a research visit to Rome. In his philosophical novel
Marius the EpicureanMarius the Epicurean: his sensations and ideas is an historical and philosophical novel by Walter Pater , written between 1881 and 1884, published in 1885 and set in A.D. 161-177, in the Rome of the Antonines...
(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 αίσθησις, perception – tempered by
asceticismAsceticism describes a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from various sorts of worldly pleasures often with the aim of pursuing religious and spiritual goals...
. 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 effect 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 Fine ArtThe Slade Professorship of Fine Art is the oldest professorship of art at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and London.-History:The chairs were founded concurrently in 1869 by a bequest from the art collector and philanthropist Felix Slade, with studentships also created in the University of...
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 home since 1869, to London (12 Earl's Terrace, Kensington), where he was to remain till 1893 and where he was to enjoy his status of minor literary celebrity.
From 1885 to 1887 Pater published four new imaginary portraits in
Macmillan's Magazine, each set at a turning-point in the history of ideas or art – 'A Prince of Court Painters' (1885) (on Watteau and
Jean-Baptiste PaterJean-Baptiste Pater was a French rococo painter.Born in Valenciennes, Pater was the son of sculptor Antoine Pater and studied under him before becoming a student of painter Jean-Baptiste Guide. Pater then moved to Paris, briefly becoming a pupil of Antoine Watteau in 1713. Watteau, despite...
), 'Sebastian van Storck' (1886) (17th-century Dutch society and painting, and the philosophy of Spinoza), 'Denys L'Auxerrois' (1886) (the medieval cathedral-builders), and 'Duke Carl of Rosenmold' (1887) (the German Renaissance). 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, is perhaps Pater's most striking work of fiction.
Later writings
In 1889 Pater published
Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, a collection of previously-printed essays on literature. It was well received. The volume includes an appraisal of the poems of
Dante Gabriel RossettiDante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
, first printed in 1883, a few months after Rossetti's death; an essay on
Thomas BrowneSir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....
, whose Baroque style Pater admired; and a discussion of
Measure for Measure, one of Pater's most often reprinted pieces. The essay on Coleridge reprints 'Coleridge's Writings' (1866) but omits its explicitly anti-Christian passages; it also includes paragraphs on Coleridge's poetry that Pater had contributed to T. H. Ward's
The English Poets (1880). Pater suppressed, however, in the second edition of
Appreciations (1890) the essay 'Aesthetic Poetry', a revised version of his 1868 William Morris piece – evidence of his growing cautiousness in response to establishment criticism. All subsequent reprints of
Appreciations have followed the second edition.
In 1893 Pater and his sisters returned to Oxford (64 St Giles). He was now much 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 development 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 BloomHarold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
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', first printed in 1892), was praised by Jowett. "The change that occurs between
MariusMarius the Epicurean: his sensations and ideas is an historical and philosophical novel by Walter Pater , written between 1881 and 1884, published in 1885 and set in A.D. 161-177, in the Rome of the Antonines...
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 home of heart failure brought on by
rheumatic feverRheumatic fever is an inflammatory disease that occurs following a Streptococcus pyogenes infection, such as strep throat or scarlet fever. Believed to be caused by antibody cross-reactivity that can involve the heart, joints, skin, and brain, the illness typically develops two to three weeks after...
, 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 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 illustrates a paradox central to Pater's sensibility and writings: a leaning towards
ascetic beauty apprehended sensuously. In the same year Shadwell also 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), and two essays that point to a revival in Pater's final years of his earlier interest in Gothic cathedrals, sparked by regular visits 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 AlighieriPurgatorio is the second part of Dante's Divine Comedy, following the Inferno, and preceding the Paradiso. The poem was written in the early 14th century. It is an allegory telling of the climb of Dante up the Mount of Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil...
(1892). In 1896 Shadwell edited and published Pater's unfinished novel,
Gaston de Latour, set in 16th-century France, the product of the author's growing interest in his later years in French history, philosophy, literature, and architecture.
Essays from The GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
and
Uncollected Essays (later titled
Sketches and Reviews) were privately printed in 1896 and 1903 respectively. A Collected Edition of Pater's works, including all but the last volume, was issued in 1901 and was reprinted frequently until the late 1920s.
Influence
Toward the end of his life Pater's writings were exercising a considerable influence. The principles of what would be known as the
Aesthetic MovementAestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
were partly traceable to him, and his effect was particularly felt on one of the movement's leading proponents,
Oscar WildeOscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, who paid tribute to him in
The Critic as Artist (1891). Among art critics influenced by Pater were
Bernard BerensonBernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. He was a major figure in pioneering art attribution and therefore establishing the market for paintings by the "Old Masters".-Personal life:...
,
Roger FryRoger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
,
Kenneth ClarkKenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation...
and
Richard WollheimRichard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...
. In literature some of the early Modernists such as
Marcel ProustValentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
,
James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, W. B. Yeats,
Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and
Wallace StevensWallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
admired his writing"; and Pater's influence can be traced in the subjective, stream-of-consciousness novels of the early 20th century. In literary criticism, Pater's emphasis on subjectivity and on the autonomy of the reader helped prepare the way for the revolutionary approaches to literary studies of the modern era. Among ordinary readers, idealists have found, and always will find inspiration in his desire "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame", in his pursuit of the "highest quality" in "moments as they pass".
Method and style
Pater's critical method was outlined in the 'Preface' to
The Renaissance (1873) and refined in his later writings. In the 'Preface' he argues initially for a subjective, relativist response to life, ideas, art, as opposed to the drier, more objective, somewhat moralistic criticism practised by
Matthew ArnoldMatthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
and others. "The first step towards seeing one's object as it really is," Pater wrote, "is to know one's own impression, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality in life or in a book, to
me?" When we have formed our impressions we proceed to find "the power or forces" which produced them, the work's "virtue". "Pater moves, in other words, from effects to causes, which are his real interest," noted
Richard WollheimRichard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...
. Among these causes are, pre-eminently, original temperaments and types of mind; but Pater "did not confine himself to pairing off a work of art with a particular temperament. Having a particular temperament under review, he would ask what was the
range of forms in which it might find expression. Some of the forms will be metaphysical doctrines, ethical systems, literary theories, religions, myths. Pater's scepticism led him to think that in themselves all such systems lack sense or meaning – until meaning is conferred upon them by their capacity to give expression to a particular temperament."
- "Theory, hypothesis, beliefs depend a great deal on temperament; they are, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament."
Pater's critical method, then, sometimes seen as a quest for "impressions", is really more a quest for the sources of individual expression.
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. He kept on his desk little squares of paper, each with its ideas, and shuffled them about attempting to form a sequence and pattern. "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 GosseSir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...
, 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." "Unlike those who were caught by
FlaubertGustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
's theory of the unique word and the only epithet," wrote Osbert Burdett, "Pater sought the sentence, and the sentence in relation to the paragraph, and the paragraph as a movement in the chapter. The numerous parentheses deliberately exchanged a quick flow of rhythm for pauses, for charming little eddies by the way." As a result, Pater's style, serene and contemplative in tone, suggests, in the words of
G. K. ChestertonGilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG was an English writer. His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction....
, 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.
Editions
- Jennifer Uglow, ed. Walter Pater: Essays on Literature and Art (Everyman Library, Dent, London, 1973). Includes several essays in their original periodical form.
- Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (Signet, N.Y., 1974; 1982).
- Matthew Beaumont, ed., Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford World's Classics, OUP, 2010; ISBN: 0199535078 / 0-19-953507-8) An annotated edition of the 1873 text.
- Donald L. Hill, ed., Walter Pater: The Renaissance – Studies in Art and Poetry; the 1893 text (University of California Press, 1980). An annotated edition of Pater's revised text.
- Michael Levey
Sir Michael Vincent Levey, LVO was a British art historian and was director of the National Gallery for thirteen years, from 1973 to 1986.-Biography:...
, ed., Walter Pater: Marius the EpicureanMarius the Epicurean: his sensations and ideas is an historical and philosophical novel by Walter Pater , written between 1881 and 1884, published in 1885 and set in A.D. 161-177, in the Rome of the Antonines...
(Penguin, Middlesex, 1985; 1994).
- Ian Small, ed., Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean, (World's Classics, Oxford, 1986).
- Eugene J. Brzenk, ed., Imaginary Portraits by Walter Pater: a new collection (Harper, N.Y., 1964). Contains 'An English Poet', first published in The Fortnightly Review, 1931.
- Gerald Monsman, ed., Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text (ELT Press / University of North Carolina, Greensboro, 1995).
Books about Pater
- Michael Levey
Sir Michael Vincent Levey, LVO was a British art historian and was director of the National Gallery for thirteen years, from 1973 to 1986.-Biography:...
, The Case of Walter Pater : a biography (Thames & Hudson, London, 1978)
- William F. Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge, 1997); 'Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture' series, ISBN: 0521019818 / 0-521-01981-8
In literature
- Pater's The Renaissance is praised as a "wonderful new volume" in Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton , was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.- Early life and marriage:...
's 1920 novel The Age of InnocenceThe Age of Innocence is a novel by Edith Wharton published in 1920, which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s. In 1920, The Age of Innocence was serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine, and later released by D...
, set in the 1870s.
- Lines from the 'Conclusion' to Pater's Renaissance are quoted among the sixth formers in Julian Mitchell's 1982 play Another Country
Another Country is a play written by English playwright Julian Mitchell that premiered in 1981 at the Greenwich Theatre in south-east London and later transferred to the West End in March 1982. In the summer of 2000 the play was revived at The Oxford Playhouse. From 4 September 2000 until 28...
.
- Pater, along with several of his colleagues, appears as a minor character in Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
's play The Invention of LoveThe Invention of Love is a 1997 play by Tom Stoppard portraying the life of poet A.E. Housman, focusing specifically on his personal life and love for a college classmate. The play is written from the viewpoint of Housman dealing with his memories towards the end of his life and contains many...
.
- Pater is the subject of a poem by Billy Collins
Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida...
named The Great Walter Pater.
- Citations from Pater's The Renaissance are sprinkled throughout Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March , Tallien: A Brief Romance , Tintin in the New World: A Romance , Van Gogh's Bad Café and The Green Hour – as well as one book of inter-related short...
's novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March.
External links