Walter Pater

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Walter Pater – Life, Ideas, and Enduring Influence

Discover the life, aesthetic philosophy, and literary legacy of Walter Pater (1839–1894), the English critic and essayist whose call to “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame” shaped modern thought. Explore his biography, major works, style, and notable quotes.

Introduction

Walter Horatio Pater is a name less familiar to general readers today than to students of Victorian aesthetics and literary criticism, yet his influence looms large. An English essayist, art critic, and philosopher of feeling, Pater became one of the key figures of the Aesthetic Movement and a precursor to modern ideas about subjectivity in art. His insistence on the primacy of sensation, on “moments as they pass,” and on a passionate, aesthetic approach to life challenged moralizing criticism and struck a chord with later writers from Oscar Wilde to the modernists.

Early Life and Family

Walter Pater was born on 4 August 1839 in the Shadwell / Stepney area of London (then part of Middlesex) to Dr. Richard Glode Pater, a physician. King’s School, Canterbury in 1853.

In 1854, his mother died, further deepening his sense of loss and solitude.

Education and Intellectual Formation

In 1858 Pater matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, studying Classics and broadening his interests to philosophy, literature, art, and aesthetics. Literae Humaniores (Classics and philosophy) in 1862.

Afterwards, he remained in Oxford, tutoring privately, teaching classics, and gradually turning toward writing and criticism.

Even earlier, as a younger scholar, he published essays in reviews: for instance, “Coleridge’s Writings” in 1866 and “Winckelmann” in 1867 appear in the Westminster Review.

Career and Major Works

“The Renaissance” and Aesthetic Criticism

Pater’s first major work was Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), later revised and retitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.

In the preface, Pater famously argues that the critic’s first step is to know his own impression — “to know one’s own impression, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly”.

His approach marked a sharp contrast with the moralizing or utilitarian criticism of contemporaries like Matthew Arnold; instead he sought a responsive, subjective, and aesthetic approach to literature and art. “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, especially its exhortation to extract from life “moments as they pass,” was controversial because critics read it as advocating hedonism.

Because of that reaction, Pater removed the Conclusion in the second edition (1877), though later he restored it, with modifications, in subsequent editions.

Fiction & “Imaginary Portraits”

To soften the impression of doctrinal excess in The Renaissance, Pater turned to fiction and what he called Imaginary Portraits—short, lyrical sketches blending character, introspection, and aesthetic moments.

His one full-length novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), is a subtle philosophical narrative set in 2nd-century Rome.

Other works include Appreciations, with an Essay on “Style” (1889), which gathers essays on literature, art, craft, and includes “Style,” where he famously states, “If style be the man, it will be in a real sense ‘impersonal’.” Plato and Platonism (1893), exploring Greek thought, form, and Pater’s own aesthetic dialectic between romantic play and classical restraint.

In his later years, Pater collected and published essays on Greek myth, art, and religion (e.g. Greek Studies), and posthumous works and shorter essays were assembled in Miscellaneous Studies and further Imaginary Portraits.

He died suddenly at his Oxford home of heart failure (exacerbated by rheumatic fever) on 30 July 1894, aged 54. Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.

Philosophical & Critical Ideas

Aestheticism & “Art for Art’s Sake”

Pater is widely considered one of the central proponents of Aestheticism, the late Victorian doctrine that art should be appreciated for its own sake, divorced from moral or didactic demands.

His approach to criticism is deeply subjective: the critic must first attend to one’s own impression, then seek to understand what made that impression possible.

Time, Moment, and Intensity

One of Pater’s enduring motifs is the evanescence of experience—the idea that life is composed of fleeting instants whose full richness may be apprehended only by attentiveness and intensity. Conclusion of The Renaissance) is emblematic: life should be lived with acute sensibility and awareness of beauty in the transitory.

Subjectivity, Temperaments, and the Role of Critic

Pater conceives of works of art as resonant with “temperaments” or intellectual dispositions. Critics’ role is to explore how particular temperaments find expression, tracing how form, idea, and style interweave.

Thus his criticism is not detached judgment, but imaginative empathy—feeling toward the work while reflecting on its forces and structure.

Relationship to Religion, Morality, and Doubt

Pater began life in a religious milieu, but his criticism and essays increasingly moved toward skepticism and aesthetic irony. “Subjective Immortality”) caused controversy for challenging orthodox Christian views. Marius, the protagonist moves through religious, philosophical choices, reflecting Pater’s own ambivalent attitude toward faith, ritual, and mysticism.

Pater’s later essays on Plato and Greek culture show his continuing engagement with spiritual and metaphysical themes, though always filtered by his aesthetic lens.

Style and Artistic Virtues

Pater is often praised — and sometimes critiqued — for the purity, elegance, and subtlety of his prose.

• His sentences are refined, evocative, and often elliptical, cultivating a contemplative tone.

• He frequently concentrates on visual and tactile detail, color, texture, spatial relations, and the look of things in time.

• He was a meticulous reviser, constantly polishing his essays to achieve the desired tonal and rhythmic effect.

• Critics such as A. C. Benson called his prose “absolutely distinctive and entirely new,” though more appealing to the connoisseur than to the casual reader.

• G. K. Chesterton remarked that Pater’s prose evoked a serene, contemplative distance.

Pater’s essays often fuse criticism, meditation, and imaginative reverie; they are as much literary as technical commentaries.

Legacy and Influence

Though Pater published relatively little and was not prolific in fiction, his intellectual and stylistic impact has been profound.

• He significantly shaped Aestheticism and the broader Decadent sensibility in late Victorian Britain.

• Writers such as Oscar Wilde took from Pater’s emphasis on art, sensation, and anti-moralism; Wilde paid homage in The Picture of Dorian Gray and in The Critic as Artist.

• His focus on subjectivity, temporality, and impression anticipated features of Modernism (e.g. stream-of-consciousness, interiority) and influenced authors such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens.

• In art criticism, figures like Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, and later aesthetic theorists cited his methods of perception and critique.

• In literary and cultural theory, Pater’s idea of the critic as a sensitive, responsive interpreter helped foreshadow reader-oriented, subjective approaches in 20th-century criticism.

• His essays continue to be reprinted and studied; modern annotated editions of his Collected Works are underway.

Though not a household name today, in intellectual circles Pater remains a kind of hidden locus—a touchstone for anyone interested in aesthetics, modernism, or the art of beautiful criticism.

Famous Quotes & Aphorisms

Pater does not have as many pithy quotes as some writers of aphoristic bent, but the lines he left are among the more resonant in criticism and cultural thought:

• “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” (The Conclusion to The Renaissance)

• “The first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is is to know one’s own impression, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.” (from The Renaissance preface)

• “If style be the man, it will be in a real sense ‘impersonal.’” (from Appreciations, “Style”)

• “All through Greek history … the centrifugal — the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency — flying from the centre … delighting in brightness and colour … its restless versatility driving it towards the development of the individual.” (from Plato and Platonism)

• “Mr. X’s works are practically meaningless until they lie side by side as representatives, or specimens, of a temperament of the same class.” (on criticism & temperaments)

These lines encapsulate Pater’s convictions about style, sensibility, subjective experience, and the critic’s stance.

Lessons and Relevance Today

1. Beauty and Sensation as Experience
   Pater reminds us that life is lived in perceptions, impressions, and fleeting moments. He urges paying attention, sharpening one’s sensibility to the richness all around.

2. Criticism as Empathy and Interpretation
   Rather than judgment, Pater models a criticism that listens, reflects, senses. This remains a useful corrective in modern debates about objectivity in criticism.

3. Art Autonomy & Resistance to Moralism
   In eras when art is often coopted or politicized, Pater’s stance that art deserves its own realm remains provocative and vital.

4. The Role of the Artist / Writer
   For creators, Pater suggests cultivating intensity, internal vision, and personal integrity, rather than pandering to external norms.

5. Bridging Traditions & Modernity
   Pater embodies a bridge between Victorian sensibility and modernist concerns—us both grounded and restless, aware and questioning.

Conclusion

Walter Pater may not be as widely known today as some of his successors, but his intellectual daring, stylistic subtlety, and aesthetic philosophy continue to speak across the decades. He challenged his own era’s moral expectations, planted seeds of modern subjectivity, and offered in his essays a model of criticism as art. His maxim to “burn with gemlike flame” resonates as both aesthetic aspiration and life motto. For those interested in the philosophy of art, the craft of criticism, or the architecture of sensibility, Walter Pater remains a luminous, if enigmatic, guide.