Walter Horatio Pater was a representative thinker of Aestheticism who pursued a higher level of aesthetic exploration that differed from hedonism. His view of art is rooted in a subtle aestheticism that goes beyond sensual pleasure to spiritual beauty.
The Victorian-era Walter Horatio Pater, who lived an aesthetic life of seclusion, contemplating life through the window of the art he built, was born on August 4, 1839, in Shadwell, East London, the second son of John Pater, a doctor. After his father’s death, the family moved to Chase Side, Enfield, where he attended King’s School, Canterbury, and in 1858 was admitted to Queen’s College, Oxford University, where he studied mathematics. After becoming a special researcher at Braithwaite University in 1864, he traveled to Germany, Italy, and France, but spent most of his time in the university’s modest laboratory. Before his death on July 30, 1894, he returned to Oxford University to complete his final work in the shadowy, ancient laboratory.
Feather is a writer who stands between Ruskin, Arnold, and Wilde in the literary movement of Aestheticism. Just as Huxley called Arnold the “apostle of culture” and Wilde the “extreme hedonist,” Feather can be called the “hermit of art.
His belief that finding the beauty of ecstasy in art through intuition is the best thing in the world is certainly the idea that beauty is the greatest good in life, but his aestheticism can be said to be more refined and sophisticated, transcending any relationship.
Because many people take aestheticism to mean “sensual indulgence,” they often read Feather’s writings with the suspicion that they are also lighthearted, decadent literature of this kind. However, there is no trace of Wilde’s immorality in the writings of the spiritual writer Feather, who found it extremely unpleasant that others considered him a hedonist and who called himself an aesthete.
Perhaps the greatest influences on his life were Plato and Goethe. However, he limited the literary and ideological influences he received from them to aestheticism, or the aesthetic study of art. In a sense, he became a connoisseur, praising only the best beauty without cursing evil.
As for his style of writing, he pursued absolute beauty to such an extent that he could not avoid eccentricity in his expressions. In addition, he always expressed his unique sensibility in his works, so that his writing is too subjective, artificial and unnatural. His expression of delicate sensibility often produced a great deal of abstruseness and sometimes illogicality. However, there is a subtle fragrance of excellent art in it that delights the reader’s mind, a harmony of thought that soothes the reader’s soul, and an abundance of emotion that fills the reader’s heart with a sense of fulfillment.
We can get a good idea of his spiritual growth process by reading the beautiful text “A Memory of Childhood,” in which Father recalls his childhood.
Florian began to think deeply about the relative importance of sensory and conceptual elements in human knowledge. From this reflection he came to the conclusion that he should place more emphasis on perceptible objects and events than on concepts. This metaphysical thinking only reinforced his previous instinctive acceptance of the world. … Like the religion of the ancient Greeks, he found it significant that Christianity explained spiritual truths in terms of visible objects and humbly acknowledged, in part, the shortcomings of our sensual human nature.
