WALTER HORATIO PATER was born at Shadwell, near London, August 4, 1839. His father, Richard Glode Pater, was a physician, and an adherent of the Church of England. The family from which he descended was Dutch and Roman Catholic. The Child in the House, that delicate and beautiful prose-poem, which Walter Pater published in 1878, is undoubtedly an account of his own early intellectual and spiritual development, though the picture of the environment of Florian Deleal is only partially reminiscent of Paters childhood home.
A silent and wonderfully sensitive child the future essayist must have been-gifted with so keen a sense of the beautiful, that he seemed to experience a passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and from which he half longed to be free. With this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death-the fear of death, intensified by the love of beauty. There was, also, an almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering; a morbid consciousness of that great machine in things, constructed so ingeniously to play pain-fugues on the delicate nerve work of living creatures. Religion was a solace and inspiration to the lonely, sensitive boy; but, characteristically, it was the artistic side of religion he loved most deeply: church lights, holy days, all that belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to have about him in actual life. One is not surprised that a brief conversation with Keble, in which the saintly poet spoke of the spiritual things, made a deep impression on the boy. When Pater went from Kings School, Canterbury, to Queens College, Oxford, at nineteen years of age, he seems to have been looking forward to the priesthood of the Church of England.
His intellectual experience in the university rendered this impossible. Classical studies brought him into contact with the Greek philosophers. Heraclitean materialism drove Christian faith from his mind; and the natural bent of his temperament drew him into contact with the spiritual succession represented by the names of Phidias, Plato, Winckelmann, Goethe, Keats, Ruskin, Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons-a curiously assorted company in many ways, but bound together by their common possession of a truly Hellenic passion for beauty. A brief review of a previous literary and artistic movement is necessary, as a means of placing Pater. The Renaissance was a revival of Roman rather than of Grecian classicism. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that Winckelmann brought the buried beauty of Greece to the light of the modern day. Goethe was professedly a disciple of that strangely winsome adventurer of the spirit. In England Keats had reacted against the commonplace and vulgar prosperity of the years following Waterloo, and sought solace in pure beauty, which was to him the only truth of life; and almost a generation later, John Ruskin, whose sense of beauty and sense of duty were almost equally keen, had begun, as a critic of art and architecture, the career which was to end as an impassioned crusade against the ugliness of modern life. Pater began to read Ruskin during his first year in Oxford. Later, in his student days, he was profoundly influenced by Goethe. A few years after graduation he made Winckelmann the subject of one of the most fervent and self-revealing of his essays-a classic on the subject of classical ideals and influence. The last three men referred to in the list above-Wilde, Johnson, and Symons - were Paters disciples.
-Homiletic Review, Volume 62