{\b Walter Pater}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 4 August 1839

{\b Date of Death}.: 30 July 1894

{\b Works}.

Aesthetic Poetry  (1868), The Child in the House  (1878), Studies in the 
History of the Renaissance  (1873), Marius the Epicurean  (1885), Imaginary 
Portraits  (1887), Appreciations  (1889). 

{\b Featured Works}.

'Mona Lisa'.

{\b General Comment}.

Walter Pater, English critic and novelist, was born in Shadwell, East London. 
One of four children, and the son of a doctor, his father died when he was 
five. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury. Shortly after going to 
King's, his mother died and the four children were thereafter cared for by an 
aunt. The Child in the House  (1878), his first published short story, deals 
with a child's homesickness and probably draws on his own experiences. In 1858 
he entered Queen's College, Oxford and read Classics. He also studied German 
philosophy himself. During his undergraduate years (1858-62) he heard and 
enjoyed the lectures of Matthew Arnold who was then Professor of Poetry. After 
graduation, he remained  at Oxford as a tutor of classics, and was noted for 
his shyness.

His collection of 1873 essays,  Studies, established his reputation as a 
scholar. His Victorian predecessors viewed the message they contained highly 
radical. They advocated that the quest for 'Truth' is pointless given that it 
is at all times relative. In addition, the essays recommended that everyone 
should live for the day and be carefree, as life is too short. Although a 
relatively simple message, it was uncharacteristic for its time, and was 
delivered in a heavy and ornate prose style, difficult to read. This was 
because Pater believed prose to be as difficult an art as poetry, and was 
painstaking in his efforts to achieve the right rhythms and vocabulary for his 
message. The 'Conclusion' to Studies which proposed his radical philosophy of 
'art for art's sake' created a stir and was dropped from the 1877 edition. His 
range of subjects was wide, and included the dialogues of Plato, the paintings 
of Leonardo da Vinci, and the plays of Shakespeare, and studies of Wordsworth, 
Coleridge and Lamb. W.B. Yeats included his description of the 'Mona Lisa' as 
poetry in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse  (1936). His views on Renaissance 
and classical art were influential in his day and were published in The 
Academy, The Athenaeum , The Pall Mall Gazette  and The Contemporary Review. 
Marius the Epicurean  (1885), a novel which charts the spiritual progress of a 
young Roman, was to be the first of three romances, but only part of a second, 
'Gaston De Latour' was written. Imaginary Portraits  (1887) incorporates four 
fictionalised projections of his ideas. Appreciations  (1889) is a collection 
of his critical essays which appeared in literary periodicals. Pater was 
highly praised by Oscar Wilde, and is firmly established as perhaps the most 
important critical writer of the late Victorian period.