Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
Hester (Tottie) and Clara Pater gave me their brother’s Rituate. The white and violet volume is now in the library of Blackfriars, Oxford. He would have been pleased, no doubt, had he been told that his house in St. Giles (’ with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left .... a little passage leading to the back of the house, the inner arch .... surmounted with a quaint carved face’ ) was fated to be occupied by Dominicans and that learning and sanctity would dwell where his learning and his aspirations had stretched imploringly towards holiness.
His aspirations: hear him (how unlike the Mr. Rose of Mallock’s New Republic) as he meditates on the Discobolus at rest: ‘With the heavy discus still in his left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that, was the Greek’s truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development.
August 4th, 1839–July 30th, 1894.
2 A. C. Benson, Walter Pater.
3 Walter Pater, Greek Studies, 1908.
4 It was only the so-called Pater-poke.
5 At sixteen.
6 According to Mr. George Moore, who saw Pater as a Vica Verlaine.
7 Unmarried. The Greek Studies are dedicated ‘ To the memory of my brother William Thompson Pater, who quitted a useful and happy life Sunday, April 24th, 1887. Requiem etetnam dona ei Domine et lux perpetua luceat ei.’
8 A. C. Benson, Walter Pater.
9 Garton de Latour.
10 I am pleased to remember that he several times met Harry Eversfield, so successful as the boy in Pinero’s play.
11 He advised me to read Homer so as to rectify my taste. Six months later he eagerly questioned me : what had Homer done for me? What had I liked best? I answered even more eagerly that one line at least charmed me: and their bodies shall be dearer to the vultures than to, their wives. ‘ Baudelaire ! ’ he exclaimed.
12 Henry James is writing to Edmond Gosse (December 13th, 1894).