Walter Horatio Pater

Walter Horatio Pater , 1839-94, English essayist and critic. In 1864 he was elected a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and he subsequently led an austere and uneventful life. An exemplar of Victorian aestheticism and a proponent of the doctrine of "art for art's sake," Pater believed that the ideal life consisted of cultivating an appreciation for the beautiful and the profound. His first work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), established his reputation. Then followed his masterpiece, Marius the Epicurean (1885), a study of the intellectual and spiritual development of a young Roman in the time of Marcus Aurelius. His other works include Imaginary Portraits (1887); Appreciations (1889); Plato and Platonism (1893); The Child in the House (1894); and two posthumous publications, Greek Studies (1895) and Gaston de Latour (1896). His style is noted for its precision, subtlety, and refinement.

Bibliography: See biography by T. Wright (2 vol., 1907; repr. 1969); critical biography by D. Donoghue (1995); studies by R. Crinkley (1970), F. C. McGrath (1986), and C. Williams (1990).

Pater, Walter (Horatio) (1839–94), born in Stepney, educated at The Queen's College, Oxford, he became a Fellow of Brasenose in 1864. He lived with his unmarried sisters first at Oxford, then in London, in a style much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites: among his friends were Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, the Humphry Wards (See Ward, M.), and the Mark Pattisons. He achieved recognition through Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which included essays on Winckelmann and the then- neglected Botticelli, and his celebrated evocation of the Mona Lisa in his essay describing her as one ‘who has learned the secrets of the grave’. The volume had a profound influence on the undergraduates of the day and was acclaimed by Wilde as ‘the holy writ of beauty’. Marius the Epicurean (1885), a fictional biography set in the days of Marcus Aurelius, reflected his responses to paganism, Christianity, and Rome. Imaginary Portraits, historical fantasies on a favourite theme of early promise and early death, appeared in 1887, and with Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (1889). Plato and Platonism (1893) collected his earlier lectures. His lecture on Mérimée (1890), his two short historical romances, ‘Emerald Uthwart’ (1892) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), and his unfinished Gaston de Latour (1896) clearly reveal a preoccupation with the cruelty, beauty, and religious sensibility of a largely imaginary ‘impassioned past’. Pater's works have long been associated with the ‘art for art's sake’ movement, and the cultivation of decadence in the 1880s and 1990s. Yeats insisted that Pater's writings are ‘permanent in our literature’ because of their ‘revolutionary importance’.