Walter Pater
gigatos | March 24, 2022
Summary
Walter Horatio Pater (Stepney, London, England, August 4, 1839 – Oxford, July 30, 1894) was an English essayist, literary critic, and art historian. Professionally, he was mainly noted as a professor at Oxford University, and for his theoretical writings (which undoubtedly contributed to define and establish aestheticism).
The son of a doctor who died when Walter was still a child, he then moved to Enfield with his family. He was a student and university lecturer at Oxford, and made sporadic trips to France and Germany, and much more assiduously to Italy. He alternated writing for newspapers and magazines with the courses he intermittently taught at Oxford.
He was a disciple of John Ruskin, although he rejected the latter”s moralizing interpretation of art; he was also a teacher of Oscar Wilde.
He wrote the philosophical novel, Mario the Epicurean (1885), which impressed his entire generation and was considered a kind of “Bible of Aestheticism”. In it he expressed his aesthetic and religious ideals at the same time. Its hero, the young Mario, lives in the time of the Antonines. At first, the warm worship of the domestic gods and country spirits fulfill all his aspirations, but the death of his mother and of his dearest friend, the poet Flavius, plunges him into uncertainty about the fundamental problems of life, which he believes to be resolved in Epicurean philosophy. Later, his decisive encounter with Marcus Aurelius inclined him towards Stoic doctrines. Finally he is seduced by the rebellious spirit and the serene fraternal and hopeful attitude of the faithful who gather in the Roman catacombs or die in the circus. William Butler Yeats went so far as to affirm that the above was the only true sacred book for his generation.
Walter Pater also excelled in the essay genre. He practiced it mainly as an art critic and historian. He wrote important essays on the Renaissance. Except for Appreciations (1889) and Plato and Platonism (1893), his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which was published in 1873 and went through four more editions, are justly famous and well known, although the definitive text only found its form in 1893 with an extra chapter, “The School of Giorgione”, and with the recovery of a paragraph that caused the scandal of the Bishop of Oxford, because “it invited to compensate the brevity of life with the intensity of some exquisite passion or some strange sensation”:
In addition to the “Preface” or “Foreword,” Pater included in The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry the essays “Two Early French Histories,” “Pico della Mirandola,” “Luca della Robbia,” “Leonardo da Vinci,” “Joachim de Bellay,” and a very interesting essay on “Winckelmann,” as well as a conclusion. Modern English editions also include as an appendix a short text from 1864 entitled “Diaphaneité”.
Inspired by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the intellectual we are dealing with here proposed a flexibilization of the most classical artistic canons, creating a new one: one that would attend in literary and artistic works to their sensitive quality, to the production of feelings and aesthetic pleasure, based on form.
Form unified all art, and, as he came to say, “all the arts tend to the condition of music, which is only form,” and what gives aesthetic pleasure is fundamentally reduced to form. That is why art is autonomous and independent of any moral principle, contrary to what Ruskin claimed.
Faced with the primacy of hedonism, the artist creates his own values that do not necessarily coincide with the Victorian morals of the time.
A writer of refined and poetic style, Walter Pater had an enormous influence on many writers of his time. In him, Hellenism left intense echoes in his aesthetic conception and in his yearning for passion and luminosity. This love of the ancient classics guided all his criticism and his aesthetics.
His influence was felt by many British writers, such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The former constructs his “epiphanies” (concrete instants in which the totality of a character”s existence is revealed, as he devised for his Dubliners), as a variant of the “impressions” that Walter Pater describes in the famous “Conclusion” of his book “The Renaissance”. The second enunciates a similar attitude to the totality of the present in the novel “To the Lighthouse”, with its famous final words: “That”s it, I”ve had my vision”.
Walter Horatio Pater undoubtedly exerted a notable influence on modern narrative and sensibility.
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Education
Born on August 4, 1839, in Stepney (in the East End of London), Pater turned out to be the youngest son of the physician Richard Glode Pater, who had arrived in London at the beginning of the 19th century. And when he was only three years old (1842), his father died. The family then left for Hackney, and then in 1847 settled in Enfield (Middlesex), where Pater attended the Enfield Grammar School, and where he received the nickname “Parson Pater” for his seriousness. In 1853, his family settled in Harbledown, near Cantorbery, where he enrolled at King”s School. In 1854, just one year later, Maria Pater, his mother, died.
At King”s School, Pater read the first volumes of John Ruskin”s Modern Painters, and thus discovered the world of art. Between 1857 and 1858, the first phase of religious doubt invaded him, parallel to his initial poetic creation.
Having obtained a scholarship, he enrolled in 1858 at Queen”s College (Oxford), after having obtained a prize in Latin and religious history at Canterbury.
During his university studies and beyond recommendations and aids, Pater acquired a vast culture by reading works by Gustave Flaubert, Gautier de Costes de La Calprenède, Henry Swinburne, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Thomas de Quincey, John Keats, Walter Scott. It was at that time that he regularly translated works by Gustave Flaubert and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
It was probably in Germany, where Pater spent his vacations and where his aunt and sisters had settled, that he learned German. And consequently, from then on he also began to read works by Johann von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, and other well-known German philosophers.
At that time, he was tutored by the impressionist Benjamin Jowett, future Master of Balliol College, Hellenist and translator of Plato. In any case, in 1862 Pater did not achieve the highest distinction in his BA of literae humaniores. From his childhood, he had certainly maintained an interest in becoming an Anglican pastor, but like many of his then condicipules, he lost his faith definitively at Oxford. Denounced by a friend to the Bishop of London, he was forced to resign and turned to university education.
On the death of his aunt in 1862, he took charge of his two sisters and brought them with him to England. The youngest of them, Clara (1841-1910), would later devote herself to the education of women, giving courses in German, Greek, and Latin, beginning in 1879, and after having taken Latin courses herself under Henry Nettleship. Subsequently, she became a tutor in Greek and Latin at Somerville College (Oxford) from 1885, before also teaching in London between 1898 and 1900.
As for Pater and after obtaining his diploma in 1863, he decided to stay in Oxford, where he gave private courses, before obtaining a fellowship in Greek and Latin at Brasenose College (1864), which he achieved thanks to his good knowledge of languages and German philosophy. From there he would develop the bulk of his professional career at Oxford, and in 1869 he settled permanently with Clara and Hester at 2, Bradmore Road.
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His first publications
After a stay in Paris in 1864 with her sisters, in 1865 Pater visited Italy (Florence, Pisa, and Ravenna), in the company of Charles Lancelot Shadwell (from Oxford University). And then he began to publish articles on art and literature in various magazines of the time.
The first of these publications, “Coleridge”s Writings” was circulated in 1866 through the Westminster Review edited by John Chapman; Pater analyzed the theological writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and openly condemned theological and philosophical absolutism.
A year later, in 1867, he published an essay on Johann Joachim Winckelmann, on the occasion of the appearance of a biography on this German art historian. There, Pater goes far beyond the framework of a summary report on the aforementioned work, to also meditate on Greece and on the birth of culture and art in the European context, besides pointing out as very positive Winckelmann”s homoeroticism, which is undoubtedly a component of European culture since Antiquity.
In 1868 he published “The Poems of William Morris”, an essay on the poems of William Morris, where he praises sensuality and evokes the “Renaissance”.
Pater then became interested in John Morley”s Fortnightly Review, where articles were signed, and where John Addington Symonds, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Meredith, William Morris published. There, Pater published his essays on Leonardo da Vinci (1869), Sandro Botticelli (1870), Michelangelo Buonarroti -Miguel Ángel- (1871), and Pico della Mirandola (1872). With the exception of Coleridge”s Writings, these essays will be republished in his first major work: Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Pater added an essay on medieval court poetry and on Joachim du Bellay, as well as a “Preface” and a “Conclusion”. It is from this time that Pater adopted a method of composition based on taking fragments of his own texts, then rewriting and combining them to elaborate new writings, and thus create what could be called “echoes” of thoughts or “echoes” of reflections. It should be noted that with the exception of Marius and two other chapters of La Renaissance, all the writings just mentioned were also disseminated through the daily press and certain monthly or weekly magazines.
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The Renaissance
In writing about the Renaissance, Pater more or less relied on the knowledge circulating at the time, but oriented his pen to transform the historical period that stretched from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, particularly as regards France and Germany, and in this text he also analyzed the movements of renewal that regularly enlivened communities and civilizations. The Renaissance then became something important, an individual and collective physical-intellectual experience.
Pater”s essay on “Leonardo da Vinci” contained the famous portrait of Mona Lisa, and the one on “Sandro Botticelli” was the first of its kind to be entirely devoted to that Italian painter (no doubt the latter contributed to place these paintings in a place of honor, as far as the opinions of art critics, historians, and connoisseurs were concerned).
Studies in The History of The Renaissance (1873) was renamed The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry after the second edition in 1877. This work was subsequently republished in 1888 and 1893, with quite substantial modifications. Indeed, in the third edition of 1888, Pater added an essay of his entitled “The School of Giorgione” previously published in 1877 in the Fortnightly Review. It is this essay that contains the famous maxim: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”.
In 1873, the “Conclusion” section of the aforementioned work sparked a polemic because of its “materialism” and “hedonism”. Pater preached an existence devoted to the search for sensation, be it provided by nature, man, or art, which makes the latter the best example of passion. Walter Pater thus denounced habits and intellectual conformism, and vindicated the art of permanent differentiation of sensations. The sensation and the enjoyment it generates may well come from nature, as Pater wrote in “Joachim du Bellay”: “A sudden luminosity transforms a trivial thing, a weathercock, a windmill, a sieve, the dust on the door step, and this perhaps lasts only an instant, but we keep the desire that this instant may be repeated by chance” (The Renaissance, p. 277). Enjoyment can come from the “intellectual excitement” provided by philosophy, science, and the arts, as well as by men, but it is necessary “to burn always with this gem-like flame, and to maintain this ecstasy” (The Renaissance, p. 362).
The Renaissance and its author were accused of “hedonism” and “amorality” by conservatives, such as William Wolfe Capes, who had been Pater”s tutor at Queen”s College, as well as by the chaplain of Brasenose, and the Bishop of Oxford. Before this board of “notables”, in 1874, Pater preferred to withdraw his candidacy for proctorship, also under pressure from his mentor Benjamin Jowett, who was in possession of a correspondence between Pater and a young Balliol student, nineteen-year-old William Money Hardinge, known for his advocacy of homosexuality.
In 1876, William Hurrell Mallock parodied Pater in a satire of intellectuals of the time, The New Republic, depicting him as an effeminate aestheticist. The novel The New Republic emerged at the time of the nomination of”professor of poetry at Oxford, and provoked, along with the controversy generated about the Renaissance, the withdrawal of Pater”s candidacy. A few months later, in December 1876, Walter Pater published in the Fortnightly the response, “A Study of Dionysus” where he staged a young foreign god persecuted for his religion. However, in 1878 Pater decided not to publish “Dionysus and other Studies”, even though the essay had been announced and was ready for printing. Pater then apparently decided to “turn the page,” and to devote himself to writing and teaching.
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Mario the Epicurean and Imaginary Portraits
From the late 1860s, Pater was the center of an advanced Oxford circle comprising Mary Ward, along with T. H. Ward, Ingram Bywater, Mark and Emilia Pattison, “C. L. Shadwell,” Mandell Creighton (future Bishop of London), and T. H. Warren, as well as Oscar Browning, at the time at Eton College. Pater was the tutor of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1866, with whom he would maintain a frank friendship until 1879, at which time Hopkins left Oxford – to begin to be known in the London literary world, which included some Pre-Raphaelites. Walter Pater then frequented the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and the painter Simeon Solomon, who made a drawing of the former.
Pater became aware of its influence, but also of the effects generated by Conclusion of the work Renaissance. And so, he set out to clarify and explain the “hedonism” he was reproached for through fiction. It was at this crossroads that, in 1878, he published in Macmillan”s Magazine a semi-autobiographical text entitled “Imaginary Portraits 1. The Child in the House”. This text, which explored the formative experiences of a child, such as the discovery of beauty and death (before exile), was the first of a series of “imaginary portraits”, a term that Pater invented and imposed in the field of literature. The “imaginary portraits” are devoid of dialogue, and are based on a simple narrative plot, in order to better concentrate on the psychological study of fictitious characters, and in different historical contexts (generally critical periods of history). The heroes of these stories are always young and beautiful men, and also unhappy, thus announcing innovations in the arts and philosophy, or staging the return to paganism (“god in exile” in Christian land).
Between 1878 and 1885, Pater was less active in terms of publications. In fact, 1880 only saw the diffusion of a few of his articles on Greek art, since the author in question was preparing a rather long romantic work, which prompted him to do different and detailed research. And in this framework of action, he made a sojourn in Rome in 1882, and abandoned his teaching post in 1883, although he kept his post at Oxford, so as to have the possibility to devote himself to his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), which is the imaginary portrait of a young man living in the time of the Antonins or Antonines. Pater drew an illustrative parallel between that era and his own, examining “the sensations and ideas” of a young Roman who pursues the ideal of a life that can integrate sensation with reflection. The aforementioned work Marius examines ancient philosophies and religions (Heraclitism, Stoicism, Christianity) with their modern counterparts of the Victorian era. Marius, after having flirted with the young poet Flavien, serves as secretary to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and meets a young Christian Cornelius, to whom he gives his freedom before dying, and after having received the last rites surrounded by Christians; it is in this novelistic context that the author develops and expounds his ideas. This work certainly aroused a great critical success, and the second edition quickly appeared in 1885, and the third in 1892. Pater made several stylistic revisions to this work, since he realized the transcendence it was having, and which assured him some recognition as a prose writer.
In 1885, when John Ruskin resigned from the Slade Pulpit of Fine Arts at Oxford, Pater thought of running for the post, but when the time came he gave it up in the face of persistent hostility from some of his colleagues. And finally, making sure to keep his place at Oxford, he left with his two sisters Clara and Hester for London, and there he settled at 12 Earl”s Terrace Kensington (London), where the family would remain until 1893. At that time Pater frequented the advanced literary circles: the poets Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, Michael Field, Marc-André Raffalovitch, and also the romantic and critic Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), as well as Mary Robinson, Charlotte Symonds Green, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, William Sharp, and probably also Oscar Wilde, whom he knew from Oxford because he studied there, but who lived in London.
The late 1880s was a very productive period for Pater, as he managed to publish four imaginary portraits in Macmillan”s Magazine, – ” A Prince of Court Painters ” -1885- (on Antoine Watteau and Jean-Baptiste Pater), ” Sebastian van Storck ” -1886- (on painting, 17th century Dutch society, and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza), ” Denys L”Auxerrois ” -1886- (on the rise of paganism in the Middle Ages), and ” Duke Carl of Rosenmold ” -1887- (on the beginnings of the German Renaissance in the 18th century). These four writings were also published together in 1887 under the title Imaginary Portraits. In addition, six chapters of his second novel “Gaston de Latour” began to be published in June 1888 and August 1889. Like Marius, Gaston was also an imaginary portrait that mixed history and fiction. In this case the action was set in France at the time of the religious wars, and through a letter, the author made Gaston the counterpart of Marius (but in another era). In any case, the novel Gaston remained unfinished, probably because of Pater”s return to criticism.
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Appreciations, Plato, and Platonism
In 1889, Pater published Appreciations; with an Essay on ”Style”; this work, which takes up writings on literature already published in the 1870s and 1880s, was well received by critics. Pater there begins with ”Style”, developing the ”prose of imagination” and the ”particular art of the modern world” rather than ”poetry”. In “Postscript”, he takes up an essay of 1876, “Romanticism”, where he studied the dialectic between romanticism and classicism, and finally concludes with two important paragraphs, exhorting contemporary writers to renew the literary art of the English language.
Appreciations also contains a study on the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (previously published in 1883, a few months after the painter-poet”s death), an essay on essayism and the 17th century man of science Thomas Browne, whom Pater admires for his style and for his texts devoted to Shakespeare. There Pater also takes up his essay “Coleridge”s Writings” (1866), deleting certain paragraphs on Christianity that seem outdated, and adding in substitution a series of considerations on the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And there Pater also reproduces his 1874 essay on the poet William Wordsworth.
On the occasion of the second and last edition of Appreciations, in 1890, Pater deleted the essay “Aesthetic Poetry”, a revised version of his 1868 text on William Morris, no doubt to prevent any criticism. In its place, he added “Octave Feuillet”s La Morte”, a summary of Octave Feuillet”s novel, in which modern beliefs are examined.
In 1893 Pater, already ill, together with his sisters, returned to Oxford, at 64 St Giles. He immediately published Plato and Platonism, in which he took up ideas from lectures given to his students, and which had already been published in journals. In this work, the author examines pre-Socratic philosophy, and clearly defines two tendencies (represented respectively by Heraclitus and Parmenides) who will dialogue with Plato, presented as a stylist and sensualist transformed into an ascetic. In this writing Pater also explores the tension or opposition between centripetal and centrifugal forces, according to the conceptions of Greek antiquity. The aforementioned work also presents a suggestive portrait of Sparta entitled “Lacedaemon” (first published in 1892).
And sealing his return to Oxford, Benjamin Jowett praises him and wishes him well in this new stage at the University.
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Pater on the return of the Yellow Nineties
At the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the so-called Yellow Nineties, Pater adopted a steady rhythm of publications, at the same time that his interests multiplied. He wrote the introduction to the translation of Dante Alighieri”s Purgatorio (1892) for his friend Charles Lancelot Shadwell (to whom he had once dedicated The Renaissance). He also continued to publish essays on art as well as his imaginary portraits: “Art Notes in North Italy” (1892), “The Age of Atheltic Prizemen” (Contemporary Review, 1894), “Notre-Dame d”Amiens”, “Vézelay” (respectively published in June and July 1894, in James Knowles” Nineteenth Century).
On the other hand, “Emerald Uthwart” (New Review 1892) and “Apollo in Picardy” (Harper”s New Monthly Magazine, November 1893) are two imaginary portraits distinguished by their “somber tone” and by their pessimism, as to the possibility of really having a pagan world and a Greek love again, since society seemed then more and more intolerant and unbelieving. The first of the aforementioned writings, undoubtedly had its origin in the visit that on July 30, 1891 Pater made to the Canterbury School, and the second writing surely had its inspiration in the decadent manifesto of Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement”, and where he presents himself as the head of the decadent movement.
In April 1894, Pater was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Glasgow. And on July 30, 1894, the appointee died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 54. He was buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford.
Pater thus left two sisters, Clara (born in 1841 and died in 1910) and Hester (died in 1922). As for his older brother William, born in 1835, he had already died in 1887 working at the Fareham Lunatic Asylum, although relations between the two always seemed cold and distant. In any case, little is known of these family relationships, as few personal documents survive.
At the time of his death, Pater was working on a lecture on Blaise Pascal and another on Peter Paul Rubens. According to Edmund Gosse, in the last years of his life Pater oriented his philosophical-theoretical conceptions towards a more moderate skepticism, and from 1894 he frequented Frederick William Bussell, chaplain of Brasenose, more assiduously.
In 1895, his friend Charles Lancelot Shadwell, Fellow of Oriel College, compiled his texts on Greece in Greek Studies. To the essays on art, mythology, literature, and religion, he added an imaginary portrait, “Hippolytus Veiled” (Macmillan”s Magazine, 1889). And also in 1895, Shadwell collected and disseminated several imaginary portraits and essays by Pater in Miscellaneous Studies; this work included imaginary portraits of “The Child in the House,” “Emerald Uthwart,” and “Apollo in Picardy,” a literary portrait of both Prosper Mérimée and Raphael Sanzio, and also a study of Blaise Pascal.
Two other texts, “Notre-Dame d”Amiens” and “Vézelay”, were devoted to the French religious architecture that Pater was able to appreciate closely during his stays in France. Shadwell also published his friend Pater”s first text, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), probably in praise of its beauty and style, and which reflected a lecture delivered before a student association in Oxford, the Old Mortality Society, of which Pater himself had been a member since 1863 (there this English thinker imagined an ideal and transparent subject, through which the historical change that was taking place took on significance and transcendence). Also at the Old Mortality Society, Pater also delivered another lecture, “Subjective Immortality”, the content of which has not been preserved, and which in his time would have provoked many negative reactions due to the radicalism manifested therein.
Finally, in 1896, Shadwell published Pater”s second unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour. In addition, two other collections, Essays from The Guardian and Uncollected Essays (also titled Sketches and Reviews) were published privately in 1896 and 1903.
Another edition, The Collected Edition of Pater”s Works, was published in 1901 by Macmillan, which between 1873 and 1894 was the publisher of five of Pater”s works, and after the writer”s death published another three posthumously. The Collected Edition of Pater”s Works was later republished several times.
Undoubtedly Pater exerted a considerable and significant influence on “Aestheticism”, through his writing The Renaissance, which is both a subtle theoretical text and the very synthesis of the movement. Oscar Wilde will follow and deepen these reflections, during the so-called “second phase” of the movement, and where it becomes popular, also paying a sincere and deserved homage to Pater, sometimes in the form of parody, as for example in Intentions (1891) and in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-1891). The decadent generation of William Butler Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Herbert Horne, Richard Le Gallienne, make of Walter Pater their masquerade, knowing how to appreciate and respect his subtle apology of homoeroticism, as well as his discreet rejection of or qualms about marriage, the couple, and curdled identities (or immutable, or paralyzed, or unchanging, or invariant, or prototypical). Indeed, Pater undoubtedly proposes a profound and subtle “alternative masculinity”.
Pater obviously influenced art historians and critics, such as Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, Kenneth Clark, and Richard Wollheim. And in the literary field, he also significantly influenced some modernists, such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens (who undoubtedly admired his writing and approaches). And with full conviction, Pater”s ideas also significantly influenced the novels of the early twentieth century, there by emphasizing the value of the interior monologue and that of reflective consciousness, as can be seen for example in Marcel Schwob”s Vies imaginaires (1896). The emphasis that Pater places on subjectivity, and also on the autonomy of the spectator or reader, could certainly be described as revolutionary. And by the way, another of the guiding ideas of aestheticism and of Pater, is the tireless search for the beautiful. And all this, integrated into a whole, prepared the modern approaches to literary criticism.
Pater clearly defined his aesthetics in the “Preface” to The Renaissance (1873), and continued to deepen and refine it in subsequent texts. In the “Preface”, in particular, he defends a subjective and relativistic approach to life and art, while at the same time distancing himself from and expressing his reservations about the disinterestedness preached by Matthew Arnold: “The first step towards seeing one”s object as it really is, 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, to me?” (The Renaissance, p. xxix) “It is by examining the specific impressions aroused by each work that the individual becomes aware of what he is, and therefore also of what he can appreciate in relation to art and to a more intense and fuller life”. The “Conclusion” draws the portrait of man as a subject of permanent experiences, which ensures his being and his being in the world.
Pater”s literary portraits, as well as his imaginary portraits, are subtle psychological studies imbued with sensitivity, aimed much more at understanding unique relationships in the environment and in everyday life than at achieving works of erudition.
Pater undoubtedly appreciated Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, but he is not so scrupulous about historical truth; the truth necessary for him is especially of a psychological order.
Pater is admired by many for his style, for his lexical complexity and refinement, and for the rhythm of his sometimes quite long sentences. Some of his friends and close associates have pointed out Pater”s worries and nervousness when writing. According to Edmund Gosse, poet and at the time also literary critic, Pater would write ideas on small squares of paper, which he would then put together and arrange, and later take up and rewrite much of it.
While Gustave Flaubert had pointed out and demanded that the writer should seek the “right word”, Walter Pater went further, for he had an organic vision of the text, and worked on it by refining and improving each of its constituents, and moving from the word to the text but passing through the sentence and the paragraph.
For its richness, its sharpness, and its rhythm, his style blends and unites with his philosophy centered on the suffered and analyzed enjoyment of the instant.
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