Walter Pater, Three Major Texts

About the AuthorPater's personal life was rather uneventful. His father, a surgeon, died when the boy was 3, at which time his family moved to the London suburb of Chase Side, Enfield. An unremarkable student, in 1858 he matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford, where, as before, he did not especially distinguish himself. Pater was early influenced by John Ruskin, but, after a trip to the Continent in 1865, he became less concerned with the social idealism that comprises much of Ruskin's aesthetic writing and increasingly focused on expressing the concrete and individual experience of the work of art. His earliest work, an essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, appeared in 1866 in The Westminster Review; Pater soon became a regular contributor to a number of serious reviews, especially The Fortnightly, which published his essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Pico Della Mirandola, Botticelli, and the poetry of Michelangelo. All were included in his first, and perhaps most influential, book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; reissued as The Renaissance, 1877). Although not universally well received by the literary establishment, many of whom believed his aesthetics to be morbid, unscholarly, and solipsistic, Pater became a somewhat reluctant intellectual role model for many of the undergraduates, among them Oscar Wilde. Pater never was comfortable with the more outrageous expressions of the "art for art's sake" movement, preferring instead the retiring life of the university don. Nonetheless, he counted among his friends a number of London literati, including Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1885 Pater's only novel, Marius the Epicurean, appeared. Ostensibly, Marius is a historical novel, set in the time of Marcus Aurelius and tracing the philosophical development of its young protagonist and his gradual approach to Christianity. Practically, however, Marius is more a meditation of the philosophical choices that confronted Pater, or any thinker, during the late Victorian period. In light of the work's underrealized characterizations and the lack of any but intellectual action, it is difficult to justify calling it a novel in the usual sense of the term. Yet, as a highly polished prose piece, and as an argument for an austere yet intensely experienced way of life, it holds a singular place in Victorian literature. Following Marius, Pater published Imaginary Portraits (1887), a series of philosophical depictions of historical characters, and Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (1889). This latter work established Pater as a master prose stylist. Toward the end of his life, in works like "Emerald Uthwart" (1892) and "Apollo in Picardy" (1893), as well as in his unfinished Gaston de Latour, Pater evinced a continuing affinity for the themes of morbid violence, early promise, and early death that had significantly informed Imaginary Portraits. Pater's stock as a subject to critics has risen and fallen dramatically in the twentieth century. Except for The Renaissance, his major writings are difficult to characterize, and this may account for some of the ambivalence toward them.