Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists.

As a schoolboy Pater read John Ruskin's Modern Painters, which helped inspire his lifelong attraction to the study of art and gave him a taste for well-crafted prose.

(His sister Clara Pater, a pioneer of women's education, later taught ancient Greek and Latin at Somerville College, of which she was one of the co-founders.

[6]) Pater's years of study and reading now paid dividends: he was offered a classical fellowship in 1864 at Brasenose on the strength of his ability to teach modern German philosophy,[7] and he settled down to a university career.

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."

"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.

In the 1980s, letters emerged documenting a "romance"[19] 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.

A few months later Pater published what may have been a subtle riposte: 'A Study of Dionysus' the outsider-god, persecuted for his new religion of ecstasy, who vanquishes the forces of reaction (The Fortnightly Review, Dec.

[27][28] Conscious of his growing influence and aware that the 'Conclusion' to his Renaissance could 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.

[31][32] 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.

[33] 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.

Leaving behind the religion of his childhood, sampling one philosophy after another, becoming secretary to the Stoic emperor Marcus 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.

[35] In 1885, on the resignation of John Ruskin, Pater became a candidate for the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford University, but though in many ways the strongest of the field, he withdrew from the competition, discouraged by continuing hostility in official quarters.

[36] In the wake of this disappointment but buoyed by the success of Marius, he moved with his sisters from North Oxford (2 Bradmore Road[23]), their home since 1869, to London (12 Earls Terrace, Kensington), where he was to live (outside term-time) till 1893.

From 1885 to 1887, Pater published four new imaginary portraits in Macmillan's Magazine, each a study of misfits, men born out of their time, who bring disaster upon themselves – 'A Prince of Court Painters' (1885) (on Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Pater), 'Sebastian van Storck' (March 1886) (17th-century Dutch society and painting, and the philosophy of Spinoza), 'Denys L'Auxerrois' (October 1886) (Dionysus and the medieval cathedral-builders), and 'Duke Carl of Rosenmold' (1887) (the German Enlightenment).

Here Pater's examination of the tensions between tradition and innovation, intellect and sensation, asceticism and aestheticism, social mores and amorality, becomes increasingly complex.

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".

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"[46] by the Daniel Press of Oxford, as An Imaginary Portrait, and described by Gosse as "a precious toy for bibliomaniacs".

[50] In genre another "imaginary portrait", the sketch illustrates a paradox central to Pater's sensibility and writings: a leaning towards ascetic beauty apprehended sensuously.

This volume contains 'The Child in the House' and another two obliquely self-revelatory Imaginary Portraits, 'Emerald Uthwart' (first published in The New Review in 1892) and 'Apollo in Picardy' (from Harper'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.

In 1896 Shadwell edited and published seven chapters of Pater's unfinished novel Gaston 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 conceived Marius as the first novel of "a trilogy of works of similar character dealing with the same problems, under altered historical conditions";[55] Gaston was to have been the second, while the third was to have been set in England in the late 18th century.

[56] In 1995 Gerald Monsman published Gaston 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.

An Édition de luxe ten-volume Works of Walter Pater, with two volumes for Marius and including all but the pieces in Uncollected Essays, was issued in 1901; it was reissued, in plainer form, as the Library Edition in 1910.

Among art critics influenced by Pater were Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, Kenneth Clark and Richard Wollheim: among early literary Modernists, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens;[43] and Pater's influence can be traced in the subjective, stream-of-consciousness novels of the early 20th century.

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."

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 by Matthew Arnold and others.

Abstract: discusses six letters of Walter Pater at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, addressed to George Moore, Arthur Symons, John Lane and others.