Walter Pater, Lover of Strange Souls, by Denis Donoghue
A review written for ND Quarterly

A few years ago, J. Hillis Miller made the case that the time was ripe for a definitive biography of Walter Pater. Though he has written a very good book indeed, Denis Donoghue has not written that book. To be fair, he probably did not try. His book is not organized like the  standard literary biography that integrates life and work into a seamless (and often interminable) story. At 329 pages,  Donogue's effort is more modest. Also, he has divided the book into two parts: a 100-page "brief life" followed by relatively  short essays on Pater's individual works, concluded by  four chapters opening out into larger issues.  
   
So, though the definitive biography for our time still remains to be written, Donogue is responding to the spirit of Miller's encouragement, seeing Pater as a central figure in the development of 20th century critical thought. Within the limitations it accepts,  the book could not  be any better.  Every page, often every paragraph, yields delight. In the end, even the book's flaws and limitations are a pleasure to contemplate, because they focus us so nicely on things we need to be thinking about.
  
 Let me begin with the pleasures, which grow from Donogue's  knowledge, diligence, style, and power as a reader. Besides his 16 published books, Donoghue is a prolific book reviewer. On one database, I counted 64 reviews in the last four years, about one every two weeks. Evidently, he remembers what he reads. Neitzsche, Levinas, Yeats, Schiller, Mallarme, and countless others are each brought in effortlessly to bear on different aspects of Pater's work.  Anything that Pater touched carelessly (which was a lot) Donogue has mastered. If Pater looked at a painting by Leonardo in order to use a launching pad for his own mind, Donogue has looked up the scholarship on the painting and can tell us what Pater noticed or failed to notice and how that bears on Pater's case.  
Donogue's prose is enough to restore our faith in explication--in case it was beginning to wane. Again and again, he will give us an extended passage of Pater and then work patiently but gracefully through it, using the vocabulary of grammar (preposition, particle, adjective clause) in ways that send us back to the passage asking, Is that really all there? and finding, Yes, it really is.  His comparisons are likewise wondrous. Single paragraphs on Hawthorne or James or Joyce, besides illuminating  Pater, seem to me some of the best single paragraphs on those authors I can remember reading.
   
The Pater that emerges is in some ways the Pater that we thought we  knew. This is not a revisionist book. Pater is still the timid, (probably non-practicing) homosexual Oxford don, the composer of purple passages, fragments of which, read once, linger in the mind: ("she is older than the rocks she sits among"; "to be burn always with a hard and gemlike flame"), the esthete who made experience into a religion, who tried to focus  upon each moment as it melts away, making the very meltingness of the moment its point. Donoghue shows us how Pater's prose style grows out of  his philosophy.

That is,  Pater wants us to postpone our conclusions about life, so he postpones the conclusions of his sentences--qualifying every noun, sticking in prepositional phrases, delaying the moment when the subject must, at last, encounter a verb--often as not an "is." Donoghue also stresses how determinedly impressionistic Pater is, how quick he was in everything he analyzed to pass from description of the thing itself  to the state of mind the thing induced in him   

Donoghue is wonderfully descriptive of all this, but there is a problem with the tone: Donoghue is seldom enthusiastic about the qualities he so perceptively analyzes. In fact, he often seems distant from them, sometimes condescending or even scolding. (quote). In fact, there are large sections where Donoghue doesn't seem to like Walter Pater very much. Eventually one finds oneself asking Donoghue, Why did you write this book? Even if Pater were as important as you says he is, how did you sustain the massive energies it takes to write a book about a person when you lack fundamental enthusiasm for his point of view?
   
Then, suddenly, almost in flash of irritability, Donoghue, reveals his hand. It comes late in the book, in a chapter called "Art for Art's sake," where he is opening out into larger critical issues. Donoghue has been quarreling (as he often does in this book) with Eliot, in this case about Eliot's essay on Pater and Arnold. Generally, Donoghue follows conventional critical judgment in opposing these two critics, seeing the moralists (Arnold and Ruskin) in one camp lined up against the esthetes, (, Baudealaire, Wilde, Pater)  in the other. But Eliot (shrewdly, I think) points out that Arnold and Pater are alike in wanting to make literature into something that could replace the religion that was fading away as a force in the British mind. But Donoghue skips over this point and says:
Eliot's' denunciation is extravagant. Pater's doctrine (if it is that) is merely a claim that there are some experiences which are best approached on the assumption that their value is extrinsic.  .  . If you are listening to a Beethoven quartet, you do well not to be thinking of anything else, even of sin, expiation, redemption, and God. I wish the doctrine [art for art's sake] could be given a second chance, now that we are admonished to regard a work of art as merely a disguised ideological formation and to attend to it as a detective interrogates a suspect (285).
    
So the cat is out of bag. The man who wrote Connoisseurs of Chaos in 1977 has written a fine study of the greatest connoisseur of them all. But--one might argue--the real issue is  buried in that four-word parenthetical statement in the paragraph I just quoted: "if it is that." That is, if art for art' sake is a doctrine. Well,  is art for art's sake a doctrine or not? Is it a morality or not? Those questions--one might argue--are behind much of the fuss about modernism and postmodernism, and Donoghue's failure to mention this distinction at all is both strange and telling.
   
I understand it, though.  Postmodernism is in danger of becoming a word that means everything and so means nothing. Perhaps Donoghue thinks it's a fad word that will fade away, so he ignores it and hitches his wagon to the star of modernism. He may turn out to be right,  but it seems hard to write a study of Pater for our time without confronting, at least as buzzword, the concept (postmodernism) that seems to be driving most serious discussions of art in our fin de sciecle time.
   
Donoghue wants to see Pater as the great modernist, and he wants to see modernism (Joyce, Eliot, James, Stevens) as following Pater in what he calls the Great Refusal, the refusal to be caught up in the strident, materialist, positivist, moralistic, self-improvement of main-stream Victorian England--what dwindles down to become (I suppose) Ozzie and Harriet.  But for some us, the Modernists hardly seem like connoisseurs preening their minds in front of works of art, which is what Donoghue basically agrees Pater did best.  Late (very late) in the book, Donoghue hedges  his bets by claiming  that he means only the early Eliot, the early Yeats (before he read Neitzsche), the early Stevens.  But that doesn't really wash. In the introduction, he said nothing about early.
   
For some of us, the Modernists--early and late--were made of sterner stuff. When  I was inviting them in to rearrange my mind in the 50's and 60's, I  took them to be saying something about "reality," not about the state of their own mind. The modernists, I took it, were not offering art as an alternative to General Motors and industrial reality, a place to escape and let the rest of the world go by,  but rather, heroically offering art as a force with the power to transform and reclaim all kinds of reality, not as alternative reality but as a way to see reality.   It hard to see Pater, even in Donoghue's portrait, in heroic terms.  It is hard to see Eliot and Pound and Stevens and Yeats as anything else, even if we have stopped reading them. Even if we think they were all racist misogynists.
   
Another strategy might begin by noticing  that post-modernism exists in two flavors: Ludic postmodernists (out of Barthes, by Derrida?) which really does want to let the rest of the world go by (or deny it exists) and political postmodernists, who wants to remake the world and who see canonical art as The Enemy, the wall that must come tumbling down. In this scheme, Pater reads pretty well as a Ludic Postmodernist .
   
It is presumptuous of anyone to argue with Denis Donogue about modernism. It is especially presumptuous of me,  but I would-- nevertheless--predict we have not heard the last about Walter Pater in our time.  And I hope we have not heard the last from Denis Donoghue whose sane, gracious, lucid scholarship and writing is one of the gifts of our time.