Walter Father

Walter Horatio Pater (born August 4, 1839 in Shadwell in what is now London , † July 30, 1894 in Oxford ) was an English essayist and critic .

Life

Walter Pater was born in Shadwell, the second son of the doctor Richard Glode Pater . After the death of his father (Walter was a toddler) the family moved to Enfield . In 1853 he was sent to King's School in Canterbury . The student was influenced there by the architecture of the cathedral and John Ruskin's modern painter , which led him to study the visual arts for a while. He received a scholarship to Oxford and studied there from 1858 at Queen's College .

His life as a collegiate was uneventful; Father was shy and an outspoken book person, so he made few friends. His literary taste, which he developed later, was also not yet recognizable. The humanities scholar Benjamin Jowett recognized his potential and offered him private lessons. Although Pater turned out to be rather disappointing for him, he finished his literature studies in 1862 with the second highest grade.

Upon graduation, Father settled in Oxford teaching private students. As a child he had toyed with the idea of joining the Church of England, but at Oxford his Christian faith had been shaken. At the time of his graduation, he thought of becoming a Unitarian minister, but let go of that too. When he was offered a research position at Brasenose College , he embarked on a university career.

However, Walter Pater found academic life crippling in the end. Since the beginning of his career, his sphere of interest has expanded; he developed an interest in literature and began writing articles and reviews. His first paper to appear in print was a short essay on Coleridge , included in the Westminster Review in 1866. A few months later (January 1867), his essay on Winckelmann , the first expression of his idealism , appeared in the same journal .

The following year his research on “Aesthetic Poetry” appeared in the Fortnightly Review , followed by essays on Leonardo da Vinci , Sandro Botticelli , Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Michelangelo . These and several similar articles were collected in his book Studies on the History of the Renaissance in 1873 . Now at the center of a small circle at Oxford, Father gained recognition in London and elsewhere; among other things, he counted the Pre-Raphaelites among his friends.

In early 1885, Pater's philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean appeared , his main contribution to literature. In this work, Father presents his ideal of aesthetic life in a comprehensive way: his cult of beauty in contrast to sheer asceticism and his theory of a stimulating effect of the pursuit of beauty as an ideal in its own right. The basic ideas of the later Aesthetic Movement can in part be traced back to Father. His influence is particularly evident in one of the movement's most prominent exponents, Oscar Wilde , who was once a student of Pater at Oxford.

In 1887 Father Imaginary Portraits , four essayistic biographies of fictional people, published 1889 Appreciations, with an Essay on Style , 1893 Plato and Platonism, and 1894 The Child in the House . His Greek Studies and Miscellaneous Studies were collected posthumously in 1895, his posthumous novel on Gaston de Latour was published in 1896, and his essays from the Guardian were privately published in 1897. A complete edition of his works appeared in 1901.

In the 1890s, Father exerted considerable influence on the cultural scene. According to his good acquaintances, his religious enthusiasm also grew again. Before this religiosity had a formative influence on his work, he died of rheumatic fever at the age of 55 . He is buried in St. Giles Cemetery in Oxford.

The perfectionist Father wrote with great effort and always corrected his work pedantically. His literary style, serene and contemplative, suggests (in the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton ) an “enormous pursuit of impartiality”. The richness and depth of his language matched his philosophy of life, which was shaped by a longing "to burn with a hard, gem-like flame" and to live in harmony with the highest.

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personal data
SURNAME	Father, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Father, Walter Horatio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British writer, critic
DATE OF BIRTH	4th August 1839
PLACE OF BIRTH	Shadwell (London)
DATE OF DEATH	July 30, 1894
Place of death	Oxford