Walter (Horatio) Pater

Critic and essayist, born in London, UK. He studied at Canterbury and Oxford, where he worked as a scholar, and became known with his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). His philosophical romance, Marius the Epicurean (1885), appealed to a wider audience, dealing with the spread of Christianity in the days of catacombs. He developed a highly polished prose style, and exercised considerable influence on the aesthetic movements of his time.

Walter Horatio Pater (August 4, 1839 - July 30, 1894) was an English essayist and art and literary critic.

Born in Shadwell, England, Pater was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a doctor, who had moved there in the early 1800s and practiced medicine among the poor.

In 1853 Pater was sent to King's School, Canterbury, where the beauty of the cathedral made an impression that would remain with him all his life. He gained a school exhibition, however, with which he proceeded in 1858 to Queen’s College, Oxford.

His undergraduate life was unusually uneventful; The scholar Benjamin Jowett was struck by Pater's potential and offered to give him private lessons. In his classes, however, Pater was a disappointment, taking only a second in literae humaniores in 1862. After graduating, he settled in Oxford and taught private pupils.

But it was not his intention to sink into academic torpor.

In the following year his study of "Aesthetic Poetry" appeared in the Fortnightly Review, to be succeeded by essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, and Michelangelo. Pater, now at the centre of a small but interesting circle in Oxford, gained respect in London and elsewhere, numbering the Pre-Raphaelites among his friends.

He next became a candidate for the Slade Professorship of Poetry at Oxford University. In it, Pater is depicted stereotypically as an effeminate English aesthete.

By the time his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean appeared, however, he had gathered quite a following. In it Pater displays, with fullness and elaboration, his ideal of the aesthetic life, his cult of beauty as opposed to bare asceticism, and his theory of the stimulating effect of the pursuit of beauty as an ideal of its own. The principles of what would be known as the Aesthetic movement were partly traceable to Pater; and his impact was particularly felt on one of the movement's leading proponents, Oscar Wilde, a former student of Pater at Oxford.

In 1887 he published Imaginary Portraits, a series of essays in philosophic fiction; in 1889, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style; in 1893, Plato and Platonism; and in 1894, The Child in the House. His Greek Studies and his Miscellaneous Studies were collected posthumously in 1895; A collected edition of Pater's works was issued in 1901.

Toward the end of his life, Pater exercised a growing and considerable influence. Those who knew him best believed that, had he lived longer, he would have resumed his boyish intention of taking holy orders. He died of rheumatic fever at the age of 55 and is buried at St. Giles cemetery, Oxford.

Pater wrote with difficulty, fastidiously correcting his work.