Walter Pater

Walter Pater
Pater in the 1890s (photograph byElliott & Fry)
Born	(1839-08-04)4 August 1839 Stepney,London, Middlesex, England
Died	30 July 1894(1894-07-30)(aged 54) Oxford,England
Resting place	Holywell Cemetery
Occupation	Academic, essayist, writer
Language	English
Alma mater	The Queen's College, Oxford
Genres	Essay,art criticism,literary criticism,literary fiction
Literary movement	Aestheticism
Notable works	The Renaissance(1873),Marius the Epicurean(1885)
Notable awards	Honorary LL.D,University of Glasgow(1894)

Walter Horatio Pater(4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist,artandliterary critic,and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book,Studies in the History of the Renaissance(1873), revised asThe Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry(1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto (whether stimulating or subversive) ofAestheticism.

Early life

Born inStepneyin London'sEast End,Walter Pater was the second son of Richard Glode Pater, a physician who had moved to London in the early 19th century to practise medicine among the poor. Dr Pater died while Walter was an infant and the family moved toEnfield.Walter attendedEnfield Grammar Schooland was individually tutored by the headmaster.

In 1853 he was sent toThe King's School, Canterbury,where the beauty of thecathedralmade an impression that would remain with him all his life. He was fourteen when his mother, Maria Pater, died in 1854. As a schoolboy Pater readJohn Ruskin'sModern Painters,which helped inspire his lifelong attraction to the study of art and gave him a taste for well-crafted prose. He gained a school exhibition, with which he proceeded in 1858 toQueen's College, Oxford.

As an undergraduate, Pater was a "reading man", with literary and philosophical interests beyond the prescribed texts.Flaubert,Gautier,BaudelaireandSwinburnewere among his early favourites. Visiting his aunt and sisters inHeidelberg,Germany,during the vacations, he learned German and began to readHegeland the German philosophers.The scholarBenjamin Jowettwas struck by his potential and offered to give him private lessons. In Jowett's classes, however, Pater was a disappointment; he took aSecondinLiterae Humanioresin 1862. As a boy Pater had cherished the idea of entering theAnglican clergy,but atOxfordhis faith in Christianity had been shaken. In spite of his inclination towards the ritual and aesthetic elements of the church, he had little interest in Christian doctrine and did not pursue ordination. After graduating, Pater remained inOxfordand taught Classics and Philosophy to private students. (His sisterClara Pater,a pioneer of women's education, later taught ancient Greek and Latin atSomerville College,of which she was one of the co-founders.) Pater's years of study and reading now paid dividends: he was offered a classical fellowship in 1864 atBrasenoseon the strength of his ability to teach modern German philosophy,and he settled down to a university career.

Career and writings

The Renaissance

Pater as a young don at Brasenose

The opportunities for wider study and teaching at Oxford, combined with formative visits to the Continent – in 1865 he visitedFlorence,PisaandRavenna– meant that Pater's preoccupations now multiplied. He became acutely interested in art and literature, and started to write articles and criticism. First to be printed was an essay on themetaphysicsofColeridge,'Coleridge's Writings', contributed anonymously in 1866 to theWestminster Review.A few months later his essay onWinckelmann(1867), an early expression of his intellectual and artisticidealism,appeared in the same review, followed by 'The Poems ofWilliam Morris' (1868), expressing his admiration for romanticism. In the following years theFortnightly Reviewprinted his essays onLeonardo da Vinci(1869),Sandro Botticelli(1870), andMichelangelo(1871). The last three, with other similar pieces, were collected in hisStudies in the History of the Renaissance(1873), renamed in the second and later editionsThe Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.The Leonardo essay contains Pater's celebrated reverie on theMona Lisa( "probably still the most famous piece of writing about any picture in the world"); the Botticelli essay was the first in English on this painter, contributing to the revival of interest in him;while the Winckelmann essay explored a temperament with whom Pater felt a strong affinity.An essay on 'The School ofGiorgione' (Fortnightly Review,1877), added to the third edition (1888), contains Pater's much-quoted maxim "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" (i.e. the arts seek to unify subject-matter and form, and music is the only art in which subject and form are seemingly one). The final paragraphs of the 1868 William Morris essay were reworked as the book's 'Conclusion'.

This brief 'Conclusion' was to be Pater's most influential – and controversial– publication. It asserts that our physical lives are made up of scientific processes and elemental forces in perpetual motion, "renewed from moment to moment but parting sooner or later on their ways". In the mind "the whirlpool is still more rapid": a drift of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, reduced to impressions "unstable, flickering, inconstant", "ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality"; and "with the passage and dissolution of impressions... [there is a] continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves". Because all is in flux, to get the most from life, we must learn to discriminate through "sharp and eager observation": for

every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, – for that moment only.

Through such discrimination we may "get as many pulsations as possible into the given time": "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Forming habits means failure on our part, for habit connotes the stereotypical. "While all melts under our feet," Pater wrote, "we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, or work of the artist's hands. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us in the brilliancy of their gifts is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." The resulting "quickened, multiplied consciousness" counters our insecurity in the face of the flux.Moments of vision may come from simple natural effects, as Pater notes elsewhere in the book: "A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment – and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again."Or they may come from "intellectual excitement", from philosophy, science and the arts. Here we should "be for ever testing new opinions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy"; and of these, a passion for the arts, "a desire of beauty", has (in the summary of one of Pater's editors) "the greatest potential for staving off the sense of transience, because in the arts the perceptions of highly sensitive minds are already ordered; we are confronted with a reality already refined and we are able to reach the personality behind the work".

The Renaissance,which appeared to some to endorse amorality and "hedonism", provoked criticism from conservative quarters, including disapproval from Pater's former tutor at Queen's College, from the chaplain at Brasenose College and from theBishop of Oxford.Margaret Oliphant,reviewing the book inBlackwood's Magazine,dismissed it as "rococoEpicureanism",whileGeorge Eliotcondemned it as "quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life".

In 1874 Pater was turned down at the last moment by his erstwhile mentor Benjamin Jowett, Master ofBalliol,for a previously-promised proctorship. In the 1980s, letters emerged documenting a "romance"with a nineteen-year-old Balliol undergraduate,William Money Hardinge,who had attracted unfavorable attention as a result of his outspoken homosexuality and blasphemous verse, and who later became a novelist.Many of Pater's works focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either in aPlatonicway or, obliquely, in a more physical way.Another undergraduate,W. H. Mallock,had passed the Pater-Hardinge letters to Jowett,who summoned Pater:

"Pater's whole nature changed under the strain" (wroteA. C. Bensonin his diary) "after the dreadful interview with Jowett. He became old, crushed, despairing – and this dreadful weight lasted for years; it was years before he realised that Jowett would not use them."

In 1876 Mallock parodied Pater's message in a satirical novelThe New Republic,depicting Pater as a typically effete English aesthete. The satire appeared during the competition for theOxford Professorship of Poetryand played a role in convincing Pater to remove himself from consideration. A few months later Pater published what may have been a subtle riposte: 'A Study ofDionysus' the outsider-god, persecuted for his new religion of ecstasy, who vanquishes the forces of reaction (The Fortnightly Review,Dec. 1876).

Marius the EpicureanandImaginary Portraits

Walter Pater lived at 2Bradmore RoadinNorth Oxford(the right-hand house with ablue plaque) between 1869 and 1885 with his sisters, includingClara Pater,a pioneer of women's education.

Plaque at 2 Bradmore Road, Oxford

Pater was now at the centre of a small but gifted circle in Oxford – he had tutoredGerard Manley Hopkinsin 1866 and the two remained friends till September 1879 when Hopkins left Oxford– and he was gaining respect in the London literary world and beyond. ThroughSwinburnehe met figures likeEdmund Gosse,William Bell Scott,andDante Gabriel Rossetti.He was an early friend and supporter of the young pre-Raphaelite painterSimeon Solomon.Conscious of his growing influence and aware that the 'Conclusion' to hisRenaissancecould be misconstrued as amoral, he withdrew the essay from the second edition in 1877 (he was to reinstate it with minor modifications in the third in 1888) and now set about clarifying and exemplifying his ideas through fiction.

To this end he published in 1878 inMacmillan's Magazinean evocative semi-autobiographical sketch titled 'Imaginary Portraits 1. The Child in the House', about some of the formative experiences of his childhood – "a work", as Pater's earliest biographer put it, "which can be recommended to anyone unacquainted with Pater's writings, as exhibiting most fully his characteristic charm."This was to be the first of a dozen or so "Imaginary Portraits", a genre and term Pater could be said to have invented and in which he came to specialise.These are not so much stories – plotting is limited and dialogue absent – as psychological studies of fictional characters in historical settings, often personifications of new concepts at turning-points in the history of ideas or emotion. Some look forward, dealing with innovation in the visual arts and philosophy; others look back, dramatising neo-pagan themes. Many are veiled self-portraits exploring dark personal preoccupations.

Planning a major work, Pater now resigned his teaching duties in 1882, though he retained his Fellowship and the college rooms he had occupied since 1864, and made a research visit to Rome. In his philosophical novelMarius the Epicurean(1885), an extended imaginary portrait set in the Rome of theAntonines,which Pater believed had parallels with his own century,he examines the "sensations and ideas" of a young Roman of integrity, who pursues an ideal of the "aesthetic" life – a life based on αἴσθησις, sensation, perception – tempered byasceticism.Leaving behind the religion of his childhood, sampling one philosophy after another, becoming secretary to theStoicemperorMarcus Aurelius,Marius tests his author's theory of the stimulating effect of the pursuit of sensation and insight as an ideal in itself. The novel's opening and closing episodes betray Pater's continuing nostalgia for the atmosphere, ritual and community of the religious faith he had lost.Mariuswas favourably reviewed and sold well; a second edition came out in the same year. For the third edition (1892) Pater made extensive stylistic revisions.

In 1885, on the resignation of John Ruskin, Pater became a candidate for theSlade Professorship of Fine ArtatOxford University,but though in many ways the strongest of the field, he withdrew from the competition, discouraged by continuing hostility in official quarters.In the wake of this disappointment but buoyed by the success ofMarius,he moved with his sisters fromNorth Oxford(2Bradmore Road), their home since 1869, to London (12Earls Terrace,Kensington), where he was to live (outside term-time) till 1893.

Walter Pater lived with his sisters at 12Earls Terrace,Kensington (house withblue plaque) between 1885 and 1893.

Blue plaque, 12Earls Terrace,Kensington

TheBodleiancopy ofAn Imaginary Portrait(1894), re-bound for the Library in 1916 byKatharine Adams(1862–1952) with her cover-design

From 1885 to 1887, Pater published four new imaginary portraits inMacmillan's Magazine,each a study of misfits, men born out of their time, who bring disaster upon themselves – 'A Prince of Court Painters' (1885) (onWatteauandJean-Baptiste Pater), 'Sebastian van Storck' (March 1886) (17th-century Dutch society and painting, and the philosophy ofSpinoza), 'Denys L'Auxerrois' (October 1886) (Dionysus and the medieval cathedral-builders), and 'Duke Carl of Rosenmold' (1887) (the German Enlightenment). These were collected in the volumeImaginary Portraits(1887). Here Pater's examination of the tensions between tradition and innovation, intellect and sensation, asceticism and aestheticism, social mores and amorality, becomes increasingly complex. Implied warnings against the pursuit of extremes in matters intellectual, aesthetic or sensual are unmistakable. The second portrait, 'Sebastian van Storck', a powerful critique of philosophical solipsism, has been described as Pater's most subtle psychological study.

Appreciations,Plato and Platonism,andAn Imaginary Portrait

In 1889 Pater publishedAppreciations, with an Essay on Style,a collection of previously-printed essays on literature. It was well received. 'Style' (reprinted from theFortnightly Review,1888) is a statement of his creed and methodology as a prose-writer, ending with the paradox "If style be the man, it will be in a real sense 'impersonal'". The volume also includes an appraisal of the poems ofDante Gabriel Rossetti,first printed in 1883, a few months after Rossetti's death; 'Aesthetic Poetry', a revised version of the William Morris essay of 1868 minus its final paragraphs; and an essay onThomas Browne,whose mystical, Baroque style Pater admired. The essay on Coleridge reprints 'Coleridge's Writings' (1866) but omits its explicitly anti-Christian passages;it adds paragraphs on Coleridge's poetry that Pater had contributed to T.H. Ward'sThe English Poets(1880). When he reworked his 1876 essay 'Romanticism' as the 'Postscript' toAppreciations,Pater removed its references to Baudelaire (now associated with theDecadent Movement), substitutingHugo's name in their place.In the second edition ofAppreciations(1890) he suppressed the essay 'Aesthetic Poetry' – further evidence of his growing cautiousness in response to establishment criticism.All subsequent reprints ofAppreciations( "to the dismay of every reader since 1890", as Gerald Monsman put it) have followed the second edition.

In 1893 Pater and his sisters returned to Oxford (64 St Giles, now the site ofBlackfriars Hall,apermanent private hallof theUniversity of Oxford). He was now in demand as a lecturer. In this year appeared his bookPlato and Platonism.Here and in other essays on ancient Greece Pater relates to Greek culture the romanticism-classicism dialectic which he had first explored in his essay 'Romanticism' (1876). "All through Greek history," he writes, "we may trace, in every sphere of activity of the Greek mind, the action of these two opposing tendencies, the centrifugal and centripetal. The centrifugal – the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency – flying from the centre, throwing itself forth in endless play of imagination, delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, its restless versatility driving it towards the development of the individual": and "the centripetal tendency", drawing towards the centre, "maintaining the Dorian influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in society, in culture".Harold Bloomnoted that "Pater praises Plato for Classic correctness, for a conservative centripetal impulse, against his [Pater's] own Heraclitean Romanticism," but "we do not believe him when he presents himself as a centripetal man".The volume, which also includes a sympathetic study of ancient Sparta ('Lacedaemon', 1892), was praised by Jowett."The change that occurs betweenMariusandPlato and Platonism,"writes Anthony Ward,"is one from a sense of defeat in scepticism to a sense of triumph in it."

In the early summer of 1894 'The Child in the House' was for the first time issued in book form, in a limited edition of 250 copies, "reprinted with loving care"by the Daniel Press of Oxford, asAn Imaginary Portrait,and described byGosseas "a precious toy for bibliomaniacs".It sold out in under an hour."I quite love your child," wrote Emily Daniel to Pater, presenting him with a copy. Pater in reply expressed pleasure in seeing his child "so daintily attired".

On 30 July 1894, Pater died suddenly in his Oxford home of heart failure brought on byrheumatic fever,at the age of 54. He was buried atHolywell Cemetery,Oxford.

Greek Studies,Miscellaneous Studies,Gaston de Latourand other posthumous volumes

In 1895, a friend and former student of Pater's,Charles Lancelot Shadwell,a Fellow and later Provost ofOriel,collected and published asGreek StudiesPater's essays on Greek mythology, religion, art and literature. This volume contains a reverie on the boyhood ofHippolytus,'Hippolytus Veiled' (first published inMacmillan's Magazinein 1889), which has been called "the finest prose ever inspired byEuripides".In genre another "imaginary portrait", the sketch illustrates a paradox central to Pater's sensibility and writings: a leaning towardsasceticbeauty apprehended sensuously. The volume also reprints Pater's 1876 'Study of Dionysus'.

In the same year Shadwell assembled other uncollected pieces and published them asMiscellaneous Studies.This volume contains 'The Child in the House' and another two obliquely self-revelatory Imaginary Portraits, 'Emerald Uthwart' (first published inThe New Reviewin 1892) and 'Apollo in Picardy' (fromHarper's Magazine,1893) – the latter, like 'Denys L'Auxerrois', centering on a peculiarly Paterian preoccupation: the survival or reincarnation of pagan deities in the Christian era. Also included were Pater's last (unfinished) essay, onPascal,and two pieces that point to a revival in Pater's final years of his earlier interest in Gothic cathedrals, sparked by regular visits to northern Europe with his sisters.Charles Shadwell "in his younger days" had been "strikingly handsome, both in figure and feature","with a face like those to be seen on the finer Attic coins";he had been the unnamed inspirationof an unpublished early paper of Pater's, 'Diaphaneitè' (1864), a tribute to youthful beauty and intellect, the manuscript of which Pater gave to Shadwell. This piece Shadwell also included inMiscellaneous Studies.Shadwell had accompanied Pater on his 1865 visit to Italy, and Pater was to dedicateThe Renaissanceto him and to write a preface to Shadwell's edition ofThe Purgatory of Dante Alighieri(1892).

In 1896 Shadwell edited and published seven chapters of Pater's unfinished novelGaston de Latour,set in turbulent late 16th-century France, the product of the author's interest in French history, philosophy, literature, and art. Pater had conceivedMariusas the first novel of "a trilogy of works of similar character dealing with the same problems, under altered historical conditions";Gastonwas to have been the second, while the third was to have been set in England in the late 18th century.In 1995 Gerald Monsman publishedGaston de Latour: The Revised Text,re-editing the seven chapters and editing the remaining six which Shadwell and Clara Pater had withheld as too unfinished."Through the imaginary portrait of Gaston and Gaston's historical contemporaries –Ronsard,Montaigne,Bruno,Queen Marguerite,King Henry III– Pater's fantasia confronts and admonishes the Yellow Nineties, Oscar Wilde not least. "In an 1891 review ofThe Picture of Dorian GrayinThe Bookman,Pater had disapproved of Wilde's distortion of Epicureanism: "A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing so speedily, as completely as they can, is... to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development."

Essays fromThe Guardian,edited by Gosse, a selection of Pater's anonymous 1886–1890 book-reviews from the journal also known as 'The Church Guardian',and anUncollected Essayswere privately printed in 1896 and 1903 respectively (the latter was republished asSketches and Reviewsin 1919). AnÉdition de luxeten-volumeWorks of Walter Pater,with two volumes forMariusand including all but the pieces inUncollected Essays,was issued in 1901; it was reissued, in plainer form, as the Library Edition in 1910. Pater's works were frequently reprinted until the late 1920s.

Influence

Toward the end of his life Pater's writings were exercising a considerable influence. The principles of what would be known as theAesthetic Movementwere partly traceable to him, and his effect was particularly felt on one of the movement's leading proponents,Oscar Wilde,who paid tribute to him inThe Critic as Artist(1891). Among art critics influenced by Pater wereBernard Berenson,Roger Fry,Kenneth ClarkandRichard Wollheim:among early literary Modernists,Marcel Proust,James Joyce,W. B. Yeats,Paul Valéry,Ezra Pound,T. S. EliotandWallace Stevens;and Pater's influence can be traced in the subjective, stream-of-consciousness novels of the early 20th century. In literary criticism, Pater's emphasis on subjectivity and on the autonomy of the reader helped prepare the way for the revolutionary approaches to literary studies of the modern era. The Paterian sensibility is also apparent in the political philosophy ofMichael Oakeshott.Among ordinary readers, idealists have found, and always will find inspiration in his desire "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame", in his pursuit of the "highest quality" in "moments as they pass."

Copy ofPolykleitos' 'Diadumenos', discussed by Pater in 'The Age of Athletic Prizemen' (1894)

Critical method

Pater's critical method was outlined in the 'Preface' toThe Renaissance(1873) and refined in his later writings. In the 'Preface', he argues initially for a subjective, relativist response to life, ideas, art, as opposed to the drier, more objective, somewhat moralistic criticism practised byMatthew Arnoldand others. "The first step towards seeing one's object as it really is," Pater wrote, "is to know one's own impression, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality in life or in a book, tome?"When we have formed our impressions we proceed to find" the power or forces "which produced them, the work's" virtue "." Pater moves, in other words, from effects to causes, which are his real interest, "notedRichard Wollheim.Among these causes are, pre-eminently, original temperaments and types of mind; but Pater "did not confine himself to pairing off a work of art with a particular temperament. Having a particular temperament under review, he would ask what was the range of forms in which it might find expression. Some of the forms will be metaphysical doctrines, ethical systems, literary theories, religions, myths. Pater's scepticism led him to think that in themselves all such systems lack sense or meaning – until meaning is conferred upon them by their capacity to give expression to a particular temperament."

Theory, hypothesis, beliefs depend a great deal on temperament; they are, so to speak, mere equivalents of temperament.

— Marius the Epicurean,Chapter XX.

Style

Pater was much admired for his prose style, which he strove to make worthy of his aesthetic ideals, taking great pains and fastidiously correcting his work. He kept on his desk little squares of paper, each with its ideas, and shuffled them about attempting to form a sequence and pattern."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," wroteEdmund Gosse,who also described Pater's method of composition: "So conscious was he of the modifications and additions which would supervene that he always wrote on ruled paper, leaving each alternate line blank."He would then make a fair copy and repeat the process, sometimes paying to have drafts printed, to judge their effect. "Unlike those who were caught byFlaubert's theory of the unique word and the only epithet, "wrote Osbert Burdett,"Pater sought the sentence, and the sentence in relation to the paragraph, and the paragraph as a movement in the chapter. The numerous parentheses deliberately exchanged a quick flow of rhythm for pauses, for charming little eddies by the way." At the height of his powers as a writer, Pater discussed his principles of composition in the 1888 essay 'Style'.A. C. Bensoncalled Pater's style "absolutely distinctive and entirely new", adding, however, that "it appeals, perhaps, more to the craftsman than to the ordinary reader."ToG. K. Chesterton,Pater's prose, serene and contemplative in tone, suggested a "vast attempt at impartiality."

Modern editions

• Pater, Walter (1964), Brzenk, Eugene J (ed.),Imaginary Portraits: a new collection,NY: Harper.Contains"An English Poet",The Fortnightly Review,1931.
• ——— (1970), Evans, Lawrence (ed.),Letters,Oxford: Clarendon,ISBN0-19-953507-8.
• ——— (1973),Uglow, Jennifer(ed.),Essays on Literature and Art,Everyman Library,London: Dent.Includes several essays in their original periodical form.
• ——— (1980), Hill, Donald L (ed.),The Renaissance – Studies in Art and Poetry; the 1893 text,University of California Press.An annotated edition of Pater's revised text.
• ——— (1982) [1974],Bloom, Harold(ed.),Selected Writings,NY: Signet.
• ——— (1983),Bloom, Harold(ed.),Plato and Platonism,NY: Chelsea House.
• ——— (1986), Small, Ian (ed.),Marius the Epicurean,Oxford: World's Classics (facsimile of the 1934Everyman's Libraryedition text, with new introduction and notes).
• ——— (1994) [1985],Levey, Michael(ed.),Marius the Epicurean,Middlesex: Penguin.
• ——— (1995), Monsman, Gerald (ed.),Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text,Greensboro: ELT Press; University of North Carolina.
• ——— (2010), Beaumont, Matthew (ed.),Studies in the History of the Renaissance,Oxford World's Classics, OUP,ISBN978-0-19-953507-1,ISBN0-19-953507-8.An annotated edition of the 1873 text.

The 'Oxford' Pater

Brasenose College, Oxford (centre). Pater's rooms were on the upper floor above theoriel window,left.

Pater's grave inHolywell Cemetery,Oxford (before 1907)

The Pater family tree, from Thomas Wright's biography, 1907

From 2019 theOxford University Pressbegan publishing its ten-volumeCollected Works of Walter Pater,the first complete annotated edition. It prints Pater's latest revisions as the 'copy text', with earlier variants recorded in notes (the editors consider Pater a judicious reviser of his own work); and it includes periodical and academic articles left out of the 1901 and 1910Works,Pater's Letters, and unpublished manuscript material.

• Vol. I.The Renaissance( — )
• Vol II.Marius the Epicurean( — )
• Vol. III.Imaginary Portraits,ed. Ostermark-Johansen, Lene (2019) [nine Portraits]
• Vol. IV.Gaston de Latour,ed. Monsman, Gerald (2019)
• Vol. V. Studies and Reviews, 1864–1889 ( — )
• Vol. VI.Appreciations;Studies and Reviews 1890–1895 ( — )
• Vol. VII.Plato and Platonism( — )
• Vol. VIII.Classical Studies,ed. Potolsky, Matthew (2020)
• Vol. IX.Correspondence,ed. Seiler, Robert (2023)
• Vol. X.Manuscripts( — )

In literature

• W. Somerset Maugham "The Magician" (1908) Pater's essay on the Mona Lisa is quoted by Oliver Haddo in his seduction of Margaret. (Penguin 1967 edition, pp 85–86)
• Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton inThe Picture of Dorian Gray(1890) incessantly and willfully misquotes Pater'sRenaissanceandMarius.
• Pater'sThe Renaissanceis praised as a "wonderful new volume" inEdith Wharton's 1920 novelThe Age of Innocence,set in the 1870s.
• Pater is referred to inW. Somerset Maugham'sOf Human Bondageat the end of Chapter 41.
• In Sinclair Lewis'sArrowsmith(chap. 1), Professor Gottlieb tells his medical students (in his accented English), "Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater'sMarius the Epicurean,to derife [sic] from it the calmness which iss [sic] the secret of laboratory skill. "
• Lines from the "Conclusion" to Pater'sRenaissanceare quoted among the sixth formers in Julian Mitchell's 1982 playAnother Country.
• Pater, with several of his colleagues, appears as a minor character inTom Stoppard's playThe Invention of Love.
• Pater is the subject of a poem byBilly Collinstitled "The Great Walter Pater".
• Citations from Pater'sThe Renaissanceare sprinkled throughoutFrederic Tuten's novelThe Adventures of Mao on the Long March.
• Arthur Conan Doyleuses Pater as a cultural marker in his 1898 novelThe Tragedy of the Korosko.Discussing one of a party steaming up the Nile, he says "Mr. Cecil Brown...was a young diplomatist from a Continental Embassy, a man slightly tainted with the Oxford manner, and erring upon the side of unnatural and inhuman refinement, but full of interesting talk and cultured thought...He chose Walter Pater for his travelling author, and sat all day, reserved but affable, under the awning, with his novel and his sketch-book upon a camp-stool beside him."
• H. L Menckenin his workThe American Languagementions Pater twice as a contrast to common English usage in Britain.
• R. P. Listerpoked gentle fun at Pater's ideas in his poem "The Gemlike Flame".

Pater is referenced in Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors, page 21 in the Alfred Marks translation. First edition, Knopf, New York, 1968.

Sources

• Bann, Stephen,ed. (2004),The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe,Thoemmes Continuum.
• Benson, A. C.(1906),Walter Pater,London: Macmillan.[1]
• Cecil, David(1955),Walter Pater the Scholar Artist,Rede Lecture.
• Donoghue, Denis(1995),Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls,New York: Knopf.
• Gosse, Edmund(1896), "Walter Pater: A Portrait",Critical Kit-Kats,London: Heinemann.[2]
• Hough, Graham(1949),The Last Romantics,London: Duckworth.
• Inman, Billie Andrew (1991),"Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge"(PDF),Pater in the 1990s,retrieved21 December2015
• Levey, Michael(1978),The Case of Walter Pater(biography), London: Thames & Hudson.
• Sharp, W. (1912),Papers Critical and Reminiscent.
• Shuter, William F (1997),Rereading Walter Pater,Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Cambridge,ISBN0-521-01981-8{{citation}}:CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Thomas, Edward (1913),Walter Pater: A Critical Study,London: Martin Secker
• Ward, Anthony (1966),Walter Pater: The Idea in Nature,London{{citation}}:CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link).
• Wright, S (1975),A Bibliography of the Writings of Walter H. Pater.
• Wright, Thomas (1907),The Life of Walter Pater,London{{citation}}:CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link).

Further reading

Inman, Billie Andrew (1991b), "Pater's Letters at the Pierpont Morgan Library",English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920,34(4): 406–17,ISSN0013-8339.Abstract: discusses six letters of Walter Pater at thePierpont Morgan Libraryin New York City, addressed to George Moore, Arthur Symons, John Lane and others.

External links

• Works by Walter Pater in eBook formatStandard Ebooks
• Works by Walter PateratProject Gutenberg
• Works by or about Walter Paterat theInternet Archive
• Works by Walter PateratLibriVox(public domain audiobooks)
• "Walter Pater",Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• "Walter Pater: An Overview",Authors,Victorian Web.
• Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater (mr-oscar-wilde.de)
• Kaylor, Michael Matthew (2006),Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde,a 500 pp scholarly volume situating Pater among the Victorian writers ofUranian poetryand prose (the author has made this volume available in a free, open-access, PDF version).
• "Pater's Grave at Holywell Cemetery",Flickr(JPEG),Yahoo.
• Blue plaque to Walter & Clara Pater on their home in Bradmore Road, Oxford,UK: Oxfordshire blue plaques.
• "Archival material relating to Walter Pater".UK National Archives.
• Portraits of Walter Horatio Paterat theNational Portrait Gallery, London
• Archival material atLeeds University Library
• Literary Architecture by Ellen Eve Frank, pp. 15–49