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Walter Pater led a remarkably quiet life. In a certain sense he seems to have projected into his critical writing and critical theory the very virtues of intensity and deep feeling that he seemed to exclude from so much of his life. He was born in London in 1839, but lived many years rather reclusively as an Oxford don. Elected a fellow of Brasenose College in 1864, he led the abstemious life of a solitary intellectual in one of Oxford's duller establishments. Yet Pater was clearly a man of exquisite sensitivity and rich emotion, and we can only estimate the gap there may have been between his aspirations for a more varied life and his dedication to his work. Pater cultivated the doctrine of art for its own sake because, in his early writing at least, he saw little possibility of using art toward some higher metaphysical or moral purpose. His first work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), made his reputation, partly in consequence of the radical relativism he espoused in the book's "Conclusion." For all of the distance we may feel from Pater as a person and, indeed, as a critic, he remains a crucial figure in the development of modern thought. He recognized acutely the fundamental role that prose discourse would have in modern literature as well as the irreducible skepticism that attends all value judgments in modern thinking. Using his native reticence to displace the merely (and meretriciously) personal and subjective in his writing, Pater nevertheless wrote about the preeminence of personal and subjective consciousness in all of our deepest thinking and aesthetic experience. He did so in a prose that, like Coleridge's and Carlyle's, is always beautifully intricate and penetrating, especially at those points where it seems simply difficult.
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