Walter Pater
born Aug. 4, 1839, Shadwell, London, Eng.
died July 30, 1894, Oxford, Oxfordshire
English critic, essayist, and humanist
whose advocacy of “art for art’s sake”
became a cardinal doctrine of the movement
known as Aestheticism.
Pater was educated at King’s School,
Canterbury, and at Queen’s College, Oxford,
where he studied Greek philosophy under
Benjamin Jowett. He then settled in Oxford
and read with private pupils. In 1864 he was
elected to a fellowship at Brasenose
College. Pater’s early intention to enter
the church gave way at this time to a
consuming interest in classical studies.
Pater then began to write for the reviews,
and his essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro
Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola,
Michelangelo, and others were collected in
1873 as Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (later called simply The
Renaissance). His delicate, fastidious style
and sensitive appreciation of Renaissance
art in these essays made his reputation as a
scholar and an aesthete, and he became the
centre of a small group of admirers in
Oxford. In the concluding essay in The
Renaissance, Pater asserted that art exists
for the sake of its beauty alone, and that
it acknowledges neither moral standards nor
utilitarian functions in its reason for
being. These views brought Pater into an
association with Swinburne and with the
Pre-Raphaelites.
Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his most
substantial work. It is a philosophical
romance in which Pater’s ideal of an
aesthetic and religious life is scrupulously
and elaborately set forth. The setting is
Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius; but
this is a thin disguise for the
characteristically late-19th-century
spiritual development of its main character.
Imaginary Portraits (1887) are shorter
pieces of philosophical fiction in the same
mode. Appreciations (1889) is a return to
the critical essay, this time largely on
English subjects. In 1893 came Plato and
Platonism, giving an extremely literary view
of Plato and neglecting the logical and
dialectical side of his philosophy. Pater’s
Greek Studies (1895), Miscellaneous Studies
(1895), and Essays from The Guardian
(privately printed, 1896; 1901) were
published posthumously; also published
posthumously was his unfinished romance,
Gaston de Latour (1896).
The primary influence on Pater’s mind was
his classical studies, coloured by a highly
individual view of Christian devotion and
pursued largely as a source of extremely
refined artistic sensations. In his later
critical writings Pater continued to focus
on the innate qualities of works of art, in
contrast to the prevailing tendency to
evaluate them on the basis of their moral
and educational value.
Pater’s early influence was confined to a
small circle in Oxford, but he came to have
a widespread effect on the next literary
generation. Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and
the aesthetes of the 1890s were among his
followers and show obvious and continual
traces both of his style and of his ideas.
