Walter Pater was a English literary critic and essayist who was controversial in his own era for promoting living for pleasure, extolling pagan virtues and his doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. Christian clerics denounced him as immoral, but important turn-of-the-century English writers, such as Oscar Wilde and Yeats, were clearly influenced by him, and his ideas are now viewed by some as a precursor to Modernism. He lived in London, taught at Oxford, and associated with important writers such as Henry James, Thomas Hardy and John Addington Symonds. His book The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873) is considered a classic, still available today in various editions.

The autobiographical novel Marius the Epicurean was originally published in 1885. It describes the spiritual journey of its hero from paganism to the threshold of Christianity. The book was intended to refute critics of his previous works, including The Renaissance, who charged that he was a vulgar hedonist. While Pater did believe in living for pleasure alone, he also believed in careful discrimination among pleasures, and felt that this redeemed his philosophy from descending into a decadence or immorality.

Reference:

Kimball, Roger, "Art vs. aestheticism: The case of Walter Pater," Vol. 13, New Criterion, May 1, 1995, p. 11. Online at http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/People/Kimball/pater.html.