STEVEN MARCUS
Rekindling the Hard Gemlike Flame
During the last several decades there has been something of a reawakening
of interest in Walter Pater - who was at one time widely regarded as a fig–
ure of formidable influence and significant achievement, but whose claims
on the attention of modern readers began rapidly to diminish within a
decade after his death. For some time, indeed, representations made on his
behalf that exceeded the most constrained moderation were almost certain
to be met with dismissive gestures or with even less agreeable silence. Pater
died in 1894 while his reputation was still general and prepotent. Denis
Donoghue has written what he calls "a critical biography" of Pater, in part,
one supposes, brought forth by the centenary occasion, in part, of course,
because of his interest in the phenomenon of Pater himself. That interest, lit
up in the perspective created by Donoghue's own very substantial critical
accomplishments, sets in motion certain obligations in readers to respond.
Moreover, Donoghue's appraisal has arrived as a kind of culmination to
a considerable series of academic biographical and critical studies of Pater
during the last twenty years that have all tended in the same general direc–
tion. It puts forward from the outset the strong contention that Pater is one
of the key figures in modernism, as well as the first modernist in English,
the pressure of whose presence persists into what is virtually the immediate
present. Pater, Donoghue proposes, "is audible in virtually every attentive
modern writer - in Hopkins, Wilde, James, Yeats, Pound, Ford, Woolf,Joyce,
Eliot, Hart Crane, Fitzgerald, Forster, Borges, Stevens, Ammons, Tomlinson,
and Ashbery." That's an impressive array, although there are notable absences
from it once you come to think about the matter. Nevertheless, he goes on,
the nature of Pater's "presence is elusive. It is harder to say that he is there,
than that he has been there." Pater is, in other words, less of an unhindered
influence on other writers than he is a spectral presence for them, and even
that slippery entailment or dim assertion of appearance is apprehensible
largely as a residue, a shade, or a trace. His prolonged existence is hence prin–
cipally to be noted as either intertextual echoes or anticipations. He is almost
as
much the little man who wasn't there as he is the whispering sibilant
wraith that was. The strong contention, then, which is one of the chief
themes that Donoghue pursues throughout, tends to be counterbalanced by
the oddly recalcitrant timidity and daintiness of most of the manifestations
of Pater's prose that Donoghue's predication has to rely upon for evidence
Editor's Note:
WALTER PATER: LOVER OF STRANGE SOULS. By
Denis Donoghue.
Alfred
A.
Knopf. $28.00.
