WALTER PATER(4 August 1839-30 July 1894)

Chris Snodgrass © 2013

Walter Pater is one of the most important figures in the development and history ofnot only British Aestheticism, but also, along with Matthew Arnold, the discipline ofliterary criticism. Just how seminally important and radical Pater's contribution was may beperhaps best crystalized as William E. Buckler has: "Walter Pater chose not simply to be acritic but to create a critical literature, as Plato had been not simply a philosopher but thecreator of a philosophical literature." Pater's landmark 1873 book Studies in the History ofthe Renaissance (re-titled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry in the 1877 and latereditions) was one of the most influential (and incendiary) texts in the nineteenth century. Indemonstrating that personal style was the aesthetic point at which means and ends becomeone, Pater was arguing that art's highest function is to help us to become something, notjust see something, the ultimate aesthetic ideal being to make life itself a created work ofart. Arthur Symons said Pater's book "gave me the key or secret of the world," and OscarWilde proclaimed it a "holy writ of beauty ... the last trumpet should have sounded themoment it was written."

Walter Horatio Pater (christened "Walter Horatio" in honor of his cousin andgodmother Mrs. Walter Horatio May) was born on 4 August 1839, the 3rd of 4 children andthe younger of 2 sons, of Richard Glode Pater (c. 1797-1842), a "surgeon" [a categoryabove an apothecary but below a full-fledged physician; a general practitioner] whoministered to the poor, and the former Maria Hill (c. 1801-54). It is perhaps ironic that theman who would dedicate his life to aestheticism was born in a squalid slum district ofLondon's East End, roughly on the "border" between the proletarian Shadwell and Stepneydockland regions just north of the Thames [at 1 Honduras Terrace, a tiny 5-house streetadjacent to what is now Hardinge Street, just off the south side of Commercial Road].Walter's father died before he was 3, precipitating the family'S move to the then-ruralvillage of Enfield eleven miles north of London, where Pater was individually tutored atEnfield Grammar School. The family moved to Canterbury in 1852, and Walter wasenrolled a year later, at age 13, in the elite King's School there, where he enjoyed a"Triumvirate" of school chums. Although he was not always enthusiastic about his assignedreading, he was awed by the magnificent cathedral and on his own read the first twovolumes of Ruskin's Modern Painters (1843-46), which certainly contributed to his love ofart. His mother died when he was 14, and he was then raised under the care of his widowedaunt Bessie before he was accepted in 1858 at Queen's College, Oxford, to pursue Classics.At Oxford, he studied under the renown Plato scholar and theologian Benjamin Jowett[rhymes with "blow it"], but managed only a mediocre Second Class in his LiteraeHumaniores exams.

After graduating in 1862, Pater hung on in Oxford, tutoring private students inClassics and Philosophy. He often spent vacations in Heidelberg or Dresden, where his auntand sisters stayed, thereby refining his German. In 1864 he became a Fellow of BrasenoseCollege, Oxford when he was offered their first non-clerical Fellowship (in Classics),

Snodgrass, Note on Pater 2

ostensibly because he could teach German philosophy. Pater was obliged to give upprevious thoughts of ordination once he was reported for unorthodoxy to the Bishop ofLondon; although drawn to the aesthetic qualities of Church ritual, he was generally put offby much of Christian doctrine. He went on to take an MA degree in 1865, beginning todevelop his imperative that truth lay in evanescent "aesthetic moments" or that, as he statedit in his essay of "Coleridge," "Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exactestimate of the subtlety and complexity of life." In late 1869 he moved into a house at 2Bradmore Road in north Oxford with his two unmarried sisters-the rather sour Hester(1837-1922) and the more intelligent (and more inviting) Clara (1841-1910), who taughtherself Greek and Latin (as well as German), arranged lectures and other educationalopportunities for women, and would become one of the founders and Vice-Principal ofOxford's Somerville College for Women in 1886.

In the 1860s and 70s, Pater garnered lavish (if sometimes cautionary) recognition asa reviewer and essayist for his work in the Fortnightly Review and in the radicalWestminster Review. But his landmark Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)catapulted him to great fame as well as significant controversy, not only because it usheredin a subjectivist/impressionistic criticism-in stark contrast to what had been the nearlyuniversally accepted objectivist principles of Matthew Arnold. It also seemed for many toendorse hedonism and amorality, and thus provoked harsh criticism from conservativeestablishment authorities, including the chaplain of Brasenose College and the Bishop ofOxford. "Discretion Always" was of course a prime directive in Victorian culture, so thefact that so many of Pater's works focused so intensely on male beauty, friendship, andlove-sometimes platonic, sometimes clearly more sexual-had always loomed as apotential liability. He no doubt employed his very distinctive, highly wrought, anddelicately nuanced prose style in part as a means of trying to mute the impact of his radicalideas. Moreover, the fact that Pater's individually published, sometimes even anonymousessays were isolated from each other likely also buffered him from damaging recrimination.But, conversely, stacking many of them together in his Renaissance, particularly whenpunctuated by the bold and prescriptive "Conclusion," impelled readers to associate himwith dangerous corruption.

Insinuation, innuendo, or even provocative steaminess, especially as delivered inPater's cautious and ambiguously convoluted prose, would not have been enough, inthemselves, to cause Pater significant trouble in Oxford's relatively tolerant (often evenpermissive) university atmosphere. But the convergence of a series of specific "scandalous"incidents did. In 1874, on the heels of The Renaissance, love letters between a notoriousBalliol undergraduate W. M. Hardinge, known as the "Balliol Bugger," and the painterSimeon Solomon-with whom Pater was close friends and who had been imprisoned in1873 for having sex in a public lavatory-were passed on to Balliol Master Jowett, whoknew of Pater's close association with both letter writers. The letters were possiblydelivered by W. H. Mallock, who two years later would parody Pater as the ultra-effeteEnglish aesthete "Mr. Rose" in his serialized satirical novel The New Republic (released inbook form in 1877)-more exposure Pater did not need. In 1875, a year after the leaking of

Snodgrass, Note on Pater 3

the incriminating letters, Oscar Browning, also known to be a good friend of Pater and onegiven to fondling undergraduates in Bradmore Road, lost his teaching post at Eton in a boy-sex scandal. In the midst of all that, Pater was blackballed for the valuable BrasenoseProctorship that he was counting on and which Jowett had previously promised him.

Aware of his growing influence and cognizant that the "Conclusion" to hisRenaissance was being misconstrued as immoral, Pater withdrew it from the second editionin 1877 (he was to reinstate it with minor modifications in the 1888 third edition) and setabout trying to "clarify" his ideas through fiction. In what followed, interspersed by revisededitions of The Renaissance in 1877, 1888, and 1893, he generally sought to soften the"decadent" implications of his previous work. He created a virtually new genre ofevocative, impressionistic, biographical fiction-"imaginary portraits," the name he wouldapply to his 1887 collection (more were collected in Miscellaneous Studies [1895])-whichshaped the short story that would rise in popularity enormously toward the end of thecentury. They had little or no dialogue and limited plots, being not so much stories asfictional psychological character studies in historical settings. Pater resigned his teachingduties in 1882 (though retaining his Brasenose Fellowship and the college rooms he hadoccupied since 1864) in order to make a research sojourn to Rome and concentrate fully ona novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), set in the time of Marcus Aurelius, metaphorical forPater's own. His goal was to correct the perception of hedonism and impress upon readershis view, as he would later write in Plato and Platonism (1893), that there is "some closeconnexion between what may be called the aesthetic qualities of the world about us and theformation of moral character, between aesthetics and ethics." Pater's Appreciations, with anEssay on Style (1889) gave impetus to thefin de siecle'« efforts to treat non-fictional prosestyle on an equal footing with poetry and fictional prose as a suitable medium for high art.Somewhat surprisingly, but consistent with Pater's quiet radicalism, his Plato andPlatonism (1893) tended to interpret Greek thought in ways not dissimilar to Nietzsche'streatments in The Birth of Tragedy (1872; reissued 1886).

In 1885, upon John Ruskin's resignation as the Slade Professor of Fine Art atOxford, Pater had himself put forward for the professorship. He was arguably the strongestcandidate, but he nevertheless subsequently withdrew from the competition in the face ofcontinuing hostility from Oxford authorities. Disappointed, he moved with his sisters fromnorth Oxford to London, settling at 12 Earl's Terrace in fashionable Kensington. In 1893 hewould move back to Oxford, to 64 St. Giles. Walter Pater died at age 54 of rheumatic feverand pleurisy on 30 July 1894 and is buried in Holywell cemetery, appropriately next door toOxford's English Faculty Building. After his death, his stature was only enhanced by thepublication posthumously of several more impressive volumes: Greek Studies (1895);Miscellaneous Studies (1895), which included additional "imaginary portraits"; Gaston deLatour (1896); and Essays from the "Guardian" (1896).

A classical scholar who was deeply influenced by later maturations of FrenchRomanticism, Pater exercised into the early twentieth century enormous influence overgenerations of writers and artists. He was at the center of the intersection of English andFrench thought that produced the "decadence" of the fin de siecle, even though he often

Snodgrass, Note on Pater 4

sought to distance himself from it. Besides Symons and Wilde, he tutored or mentored asclose friends such other formative figures as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edmund Gosse,William Sharp, William Butler Yeats, Michael Field, Herbert Horne, Lionel Johnson, JohnLane, Richard Le Gallienne, George Moore, Violet Paget [Vernon Lee], Andre Raffalovitch,Will Rothenstein, and Frederick Wedmore, many of whom considered themselves hisdisciples. Arthur Symons perhaps captured Pater's almost mythical magnitude when henoted, "I can scarcely conceive him as a man in the flesh at all, but rather an influence, anemanation, a personality, quite volatilised and ethereal." Pater's literary reputation wanedafter World War I, but since the 1960s it has enjoyed a robust resurgence, renewingappreciation of Pater as not only a central figure in the theory and practice of Victorianliterary criticism but also an indispensable one to understanding late-Victorian culture.