Born, in London, 4 Aug. 1839. Early education at a school at Enfield. At King’s School, Canterbury, 1853–58. Matric. Queen’s Coll., Oxford, 11 June 1858; B.A., 1862; Fellow of Brasenose Coll., 1864; M.A., 1865; Junior Dean, 1866; Tutor, 1867–83; Dean, 1871; Lecturer, 1873. Contrib. to “Westminster Rev.,” “Fortnightly Rev.,” etc., from 1866. Died, at Oxford, 30 July 1894. Buried in St. Giles’s Cemetery, Oxford. Works: “Studies in the History of the Renaissance,” 1873; “Marius the Epicurean,” 1885; “Imaginary Portraits,” 1887; “Appreciations,” 1889; “Plato and Platonism,” 1893; “The Child in the House,” 1894. Posthumous: “Greek Studies,” ed. by C. L. Shadwell, 1895; “Miscellaneous Studies,” ed. by C. L. Shadwell, 1895; “Gaston de Latour,” ed. by C. L. Shadwell, 1896; “Essays from the ‘Guardian’” (priv. ptd.), 1897.

Personal

  When I had known him first he was a pagan, without any guide but that of the personal conscience; years brought gradually with them a greater and greater longing for the supporting solace of a creed. His talk, his habits, became more and more theological, and it is my private conviction that, had he lived a few years longer, he would have taken orders and a small college living in the country. Report, which found so much to misrepresent in a life so orderly and simple, has erred even to the place and occasion of his death. He was taken ill with rheumatic fever in the month of June of this year, being, as he remained to the end, not in college, but with his sisters in their house in St. Giles. He was recovering, and was well enough to be busy upon a study on “Pascal,” which he has left nearly completed, when, in consequence of writing too close to an open window, pleurisy set in and greatly reduced his strength. Again he seemed convalescent, and had left his room, without ill-effect, on July 29, when, repeating the experiment next day, the action of the heart failed, and he died, on the staircase of his house, in the arms of his sister, at ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, July 30, 1894. Had he lived five days longer, he would have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was buried, in the presence of many of his oldest friends, in the beautiful cemetery of St. Giles at Oxford.

  From the first, I never took Walter Pater for an Englishman. In appearance, in manner, he suggested the Fleming or the Hollander; in the mien and carriage of his mind, so to say, he was a Frenchman of that old northern type which had its meditative and quiet extreme in Maurice de Guérin, and its intensely actual extreme in Guy de Maupassant. Neither mentally nor physically could I discern anything British in him, save in his appreciations; and he had traits which affiliated him to those old Huguenot bearers of his name who no doubt had a strong Flemish strain in their French blood.

  I do not remember to have heard that the prospective author of “Marius” was ever a candidate for a scholarship at his college and mine; his life, in those days, [1861] was tranquil, his manner shy, even to silence, his habits were severely reserved, yet he was not unpopular even with those who knew least of him; for an innate grace of manner never failed him, and he had the instinctive courtesy of a natural gentleman. His reputation was above his known achievements, but he was the subject of rumours, complimentary alike to his modesty and his abilities, crediting him while yet a boy with the authorship of papers crowned with honours of print; and from the first had been marked out by his singularly shrewd college tutor as the sure winner of a fellowship in the fulness of time.

  For many years, however, Pater’s real home in Oxford was in his rooms at Brasenose. He is described as disliking the society of strangers; as hating all unnecessary noise and all extravagance of any kind; as loving to surround himself with beautiful things, caring nothing for their association or for their money-value, only for their beauty. He is said to have been simple in manner, and to have had a sense of fun, which was as playful as that of a child. These Brasenose rooms of Pater’s are still remembered as being “No. Seven Staircase, Room Three.” They look out onto Radcliffe Square, with slight views of All Souls and St. Mary’s. They are more cheerful than are Heber’s rooms: and Pater could almost have swung a kitten, if it were a small kitten, between his bed, his window, and his door.

  His life was self-contained, subjective, stationary; it was a life of academic amenity, singularly devoid of the “rubs, doublings, and wrenches” which afford the biographer his best, most picturesque opportunity. The annals of it are short, and, if confined to external happenings, simple. But the interpretation of them is a more difficult affair. If we can capture some clews and hints of character, however diffused and indirect, if we can partially apprehend a fugitive and recondite but strangely effective literary personality, we shall be fortunate.

Marius the Epicurean, 1885

  “Marius” I have not read. I suppose I must. But I shrink from approaching Pater’s style, which has a peculiarly disagreeable effect upon my nerves—like the presence of a civet cat. Still, I believe I must read it.

  While it is entirely free from anything like a sensational element, it is replete with matter that will never cease to appeal to serious and cultivated minds. As a piece of composition, it has the grace of style, the clear-cut precision, the high-bred tone, the exquisite flavour and solidity, that make literature enduring. It is the work of a scholar, but of a scholar breathing our modern air while charged with the free spirit of antiquity; of clear vision and profound experience, and the gift of delineating with fascinating art both the inner life and the outward world…. Only one familiar with the profound influences that shape and color human life, and who at the same time is furnished with the lore and saturated with the spirit of antiquity, could produce a picture so vital and faithful and instructive as this…. Nothing can be more graceful and charming than the way the story of Cupid and Psyche is told, and the use that is made of it in tracing the influences that wrought upon the plastic life of young Marius. A chapter that shows the fine dialectic power of the author is a dialogue between the sceptical poet Lucian and a gifted youth who had accepted the Stoical Philosophy as the true doctrine.

  “Marius the Epicurean” was the result of twelve years’ work, and is undoubtedly the writer’s most strenuous and beautiful book. One of the century’s masterpieces, one feels, as one turns over its felicitous pages, or lingers over some phrase of matchless magic and music. It is certainly unique in the literature of England, being our only philosophical romance. A novel it is not, in the real sense of the word; there is little incident, and it deals with subjects which are not for fiction. It is a philosophical treatise with a setting of romance. Here Marius is created that the author may show us, in the analysis of his character, a development of theories which had evidently taken place in his own mind. By using the third person the author is given a freer hand. And in addition the book is certainly more forcible than it would have been if merely cast in the form of an essay. The hero Marius is sufficiently real to make us keenly interested in the history of his mind—those of us, that is to say, who care for analysis at all.

  Perhaps the most poetic book of the latter part of the century.

General

  A style like Mr. Pater’s ought to be taken in thankfulness, without too much questioning, and only a prayer for more of the same kind. For what richness it has, and what sweetness always! Every word has its meaning with him, and its value…. If I have said half of what I feel, I have shown those who would care for Mr. Pater’s writing that they would care for it very much indeed. It is easy to praise it vaguely, but nothing can render its infinite grace and indescribable charm. You must go to the books themselves…. Mr. Pater has not dramatic power, the power of presenting characters. Neither is he a writer to go to for intellectual or moral support. Certain people might find these in him; but most of us would not. Nor is he an artist of the highest order, in spite of his style; he has not the broad, swift, unerring touch of the great masters.

  Mr. Pater’s criticism, in my opinion, suffers from the same defect as Lamb’s—excess of sympathy. In his fine perception of the motives of his authors, and in his delicate description of their styles, his “Appreciations” are all that can be desired; but he seems to me to flinch from the severe application of critical law. He exhibits invariably the taste of a refined literary epicure. But the taste of an epicure is not always that of a judge.

  Perhaps no prose writer of to-day has a more sensitive imagination or a more chaste and musical style than Walter Pater.

  Aside from “Marius the Epicurean,” there is a radical mistake on the part of those who affirm that Pater is, after all, but a subtle and seductive writer on art; meaning the arts of painting and sculpture. It is true that, from his first able essay, that on Winckelmann, to those on The School of Giorgione and the Marbles of Ægina he is the profoundest, and generally the most trustworthy of art critics; but—and again, apart from the creative quality informing each of these essays, making them not only interpretations, but works of art—he is, of course, much more than this. His volume of studies of contemporary poetry and prose, and kindred themes, is alone sufficient to base an enduring reputation upon.

  The fame of Walter Pater will not be wrecked on the holiday of an editor or the indolence of a reporter. It is grounded on the respect which has not yet failed to follow pure and distinguished excellence in the art of writing…. I have known writers of every degree, but never one to whom the act of composition was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater…. The sentences of the Oxford critic are often too long, and they are sometimes broken-backed with having had to bear too heavy a burden of allusion and illustration. His style, however, was his peculiarity. It had beautiful qualities, if we have to confess that it had the faults of those qualities. It was highly individual; it cannot be said that he owed it to any other writer, or that at any period of his thirty years of literary labour he faltered or swerved from his own path. He was to a high degree self-centered.

  There is not one page in Mr. Pater’s writings on which the most trivial carelessness can be detected. Think what the reader may of the beauty, or the power, or of lack of them, in this sentence or in that, he recognises the predetermination, which has set each word in its place, precisely as he finds it. Raphael, true scholar that he was, seems always, writes Mr. Pater, to be saying “I am utterly purposed that I will not offend.” It is equally so with himself. But there must always be a class of readers to whom the acts of “recollection” and of “attention,” in the spiritual sense, necessary for the enjoyment of his work, are a bodily distress; and in this, as in much else, he resembles the laborious and enduring Flaubert…. He stands quite alone. We sometimes hear of his “school,” but it does not exist: it is a genius, as was Lamb’s, unique. His Renaissance studies have induced a certain revival of interest in certain somewhat novel aspects of early France and later Italy: writers have written about certain kinds of theme, because of his writing. But none have caught his tones, their peculiar felicity and proper charm.

  In Ruskin, Newman, and certain other writers, there is to be noted a decided reaction toward the long sentence. This movement reaches in Mr. Walter Pater perhaps the limit at which the paragraph and the long period can be reconciled. Mr. Pater is conscious of the tendency of his style towards complexity and minute qualification, and he therefore conscientiously keeps to the unity of the paragraph. What is even more noticeable, he uses a large percentage of appositional clauses and phrases that, while they have partly the effect of parentheses, yet avoid the multiplication of predications and connectives. It is a weighty style, a correct style, a beautiful style in its fitting of word to notion; but it has a wholly different order of procedure from that introduced by Macaulay. The coherence, always present, but seen by the reader at some expense to his attention, depends equally upon order of words and upon connectives; very little indeed upon parallel structure.

  Persons only superficially acquainted, or by hearsay, with his writings, are apt to sum up his merits as a writer by saying that he was a master, or a consummate master of style; but those who have really studied what he wrote do not need to be told that his distinction does not lie in his literary grace alone, his fastidious choice of language, his power of word-painting, but in the depth and seriousness of his studies. That the amount he has produced, in a literary life of thirty years, is not greater, is one proof among many of the spirit in which he worked. His genius was “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” That delicacy of insight, that gift of penetrating into the heart of things, that subtleness of interpretation, which with him seems an instinct, is the outcome of hard, patient, conscientious study. If he had chosen, he might, without difficulty, have produced a far greater body of work of less value; and from a worldly point of view, he would have been wise.

  This [“Greek Studies”] is the final gift of one who gave but sparingly, yet whose rare good fortune it was to increase the conscious joy of living. Echoes of that finely tempered and restrained content which succeeded the rapturous license of youth, and which reached its highest spiritual development in “Marius the Epicurean,” relieve and lighten the more somber pages of his later studies. If he turns now and again to the “worship of sorrow,” even among the happy Greeks; if he dwells unsparingly upon the vengeful grief of Demeter, or the mysterious suffering of Dionysus (a subject which, in “Imaginary Portraits,” has awakened his subtlest powers of imagination), his true charm and helpfulness lie still in his recognition of beauty as a factor in life, and in his delicate philosophy of “happy moments,” by which we snatch, even amid sordid and fretful cares, some portion of serenity and delight. No writer of modern times has surpassed Mr. Pater in sympathetic appreciation of classic literature and art.

  Mr. Pater’s reputation extended but slowly. There must have been many readers of Mr. Mallock’s “New Republic” twenty years ago who wondered somewhat at that singular and disagreeable Mr. Rose. Who was it that could be put in along with Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin? At that time Mr. Pater was generally known only by his studies in “The Renaissance.” To-day it is not so unnatural to think of him as one of the chief critics of art and literature of our day. His seven volumes are well-known, and he is well or ill thought of by many…. A style Mr. Pater certainly had, although there exists no very valuable characterization of it. “Long-drawn music” it is called by one, and “whipt cream” by another; but more definite views are somewhat to seek. It is an interesting style, however, and one which rather challenges a man to define it. One thing obvious enough is that in the course of the thirty years in which his work was published, his style underwent a great change. Certain enduring qualities his writing always possessed,—it was always scholarly, always harmonious, always subtle, and there were also certain constant minor habits,—but in his later years his style had undergone so great a change that many admirers of “The Renaissance” must have been out of patience with “Plato and Platonism.”

  No writer since the revolutionary movement in English prose at the beginning of this century, not even Landor, has paid such extraordinary and successful attention to the architecture of the sentence. As against the snipsnap shortness of some writers, the lawless length of others, and the formlessness of a third class, his best sentences are arranged with an almost mathematical precision of clause-building, while their rhythm, though musical, is rarely poetic. Yet it must be acknowledged that this elaborate construction never became a perfectly learnt art with him; and that his sentences in his later work were sometimes apt to waver and wander. Still, on the whole, Mr. Pater, as an exponent in prose of the tendencies of which in verse Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne have been the chief masters, deserves a rank which it is impossible for any careful and impartial critic to ignore or to refuse. Few writers are fortunate in their imitators, and he has been especially unfortunate. His theories sometimes, his style often, have been the victims of a following not seldom silly, and not very seldom disgusting. But it would be unjust to charge this on the author himself. In himself, though owing a little, and not always happily, to Matthew Arnold and more to Newman, he is an extremely careful and on the whole a distinctly original producer of literature, who has chosen to make literature itself the main subject of his production, and has enforced views distinct in kind in a manner still more distinct.

  A Keats in prose was this Walter Pater; endowed with the same genius for rendering sensations in words vivid as colour, definite as marble, he was yet a Greek in body as well as in spirit—a Keats with health, maturity, and a placid indifference to passion. Thanks to a rare conjunction of physical serenity and intensely delicate sensibilities, he brought æsthetic hedonism to its perfect type…. Pater’s style has little of the charm of personality—that constant presence behind the words of a smiling face or the gleam of ardent eyes. This is the charm of Heine or Renan or Robert Louis Stevenson. Pater’s work delights us with a series of beautiful pictures; the charm is in the words themselves; it is, so to speak, objective. This is due to the absence of emotion, rhythm, eloquence. It is the art of a painter—the patient and flawless rendering of sensations, of colours and forms, and of fleeting, delicate impressions. It is a style made up of words and phrases that are truly magical in their power to evoke images, to convey “with a single touch,” as he says of Cornelius Fronto, “the sense of colours, textures, incidents.” And these wonderful phrases are curiously heaped together into sentences whose construction is frequently hideous. But what phrases!

  In those pages there are, it is true, occasional lapses from a perfectly sound method; there is at times a loss of simplicity, a cloying sweetness in the style of this accomplished writer. There are, however, the perils of a very sensitive temperament, an intense feeling for beauty, and a certain seclusion from the affairs of life. That which characterises Mr. Pater at all times is his power of putting himself amid conditions that are not only extinct, but obscure and elusive; of winding himself back, as it were, into the primitive Greek consciousness and recovering for the moment the world as the Greeks saw, or, rather, felt it.

  Of the critics who have written during the last sixty years, Mr. Pater is probably the most remarkable. His work is always weighted with thought, and his thought is always fused with imagination. He unites, in a singular degree of intensity, the two crucial qualities of the critic; on the one hand a sense of form and colour and artistic utterance; on the other hand a speculative instinct which pierces behind these to the various types of idea and mood and character that underlie them. He is equally alive to subtle resemblances and to subtle differences; and art is to him not merely an intellectual enjoyment, but something which is to be taken into the spirit of a man and to become part of his life…. With wider knowledge and a clearer consciousness of the deeper issues involved, he may be said to have taken up the work of Lamb and to have carried it forward in a spirit which those who best love Lamb will be the most ready to admire.

  The book of “Studies in the Renaissance,” even with the rest of Pater to choose from, seems to me sometimes to be the most beautiful book of prose in our literature. Nothing in it is left to inspiration: but it is all inspired. Here is a writer who, like Baudelaire, would better nature; and in this goldsmith’s work of his prose he too has “rêve le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime.” An almost oppressive quiet, a quiet which seems to exhale an atmosphere heavy with the odour of tropical flowers, broods over these pages; a subdued light shadows them.

  Of Pater’s style much has been said in praise and detraction. It expresses his hunger for perfection in its extreme polish, its elaborate form, its verbal nicety. But it is never spontaneous, and its art is sometimes artifice. Its merits are perhaps too evident to make of it a great style. Yet it will always witness to the value of patience and of conscientiousness in the handling of words: furthermore, it is an effective key to the otherwise shadowy personality of Pater; to the complex nature, tinged with morbidness, in which end-of-the-century passions broke in upon classic, perhaps pseudo-classic calm.

  Pater was, indeed, pre-eminently a scholarly writer. This does not mean that he was quite a purist. He was not above coining a form if it served his turn, and for certain French words and relative constructions he had a fondness hardly warranted under the self-denying ordinance of the purist. But he was a scholarly writer in his use of the rich resources of the English tongue. He plays deftly, for example, with the archaic, radical meaning of words like express, entertain, or mortified, never using the inherent, hidden meaning so crassly as to perturb the untutored reader, yet always with a retrospective, pictorial turn which delights the scholar. Like all good writers he was exquisitely sensitive to the expressive shading and colour of language. With him, as with Marius, “his general sense of a fitness and beauty in words became effective in daintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking of figure to abstraction.” This linking of figure to abstraction is, perhaps, the most salient feature of Pater’s style.