148
PARTISAN REVIEW
and persuasion. He has in other words set himself a task that in its difficulty
is suitable to his ingenuity and resourcefiilness as a critic of modern litera–
ture. Part of the interest in reading Donoghue's book lies in point of fact in
following how and estimating whether he is able successfiilly to sustain that
contention through concentrating upon the paradoxical challenge that he
has formulated as a test for it.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Donoghue abjures biographical read–
ings of Pater's texts, even when they are unmistakably autobiographical, as
in the exceptionally interesting account called "The Child in the House."
First printed in
Macmillan's Magazine
in 1878, it was not published in book
form until
Miscellaneous Stlldies
appeared in 1895, after Pater's death. Pater
called it an "imaginary portrait," but when he came to issue a volume called
Imaginary Portraits,
in 1887, he rather pointedly left this portrait, which is by
far the best of them, out. None of this detail impresses Donoghue, who sets
himself severely against any such interpretive tendency "is no good."
Donoghue regards himself as being a scrupulous adherent and transmitter of
the old New Criticism in its highest form, and he seems content to reaffirm
- with perhaps some slight officiousness - T. S. Eliot's assertion that the
more complete the artist, the more separate in him will be the man who suf–
fered and the mind that created. But is Pater that complete an artist?
Apparently not. Donoghue admits as much, and more. "There is a relation
between life and work. Blake's works did not issue from Wordsworth's life.
But the relation is occult; it can't be specified." Not quite; and not in
absolute measure. The relation is not
entirely
occult, though some opacity
will always remain. And the relation can't be
filfly
specified, though some, or
even numerous, specifications can be usefully put forward with propriety. In
a similar sense, he remarks that the mysterious character of the mind of an
artist "can't finally be explained or explained away" by a recitation of the
conditions "personal, domestic, social, economic, and political" that went
into "its production." "Finally" is satisfactory, but it doesn't go quite far
enough. Moreover, no one seriously believes in explaining anything "away."
And explanation needs further modification in the direction of either fully
or adequately. My guess or intuition is that there is an excess of protesta–
tion here, and perhaps some displacement.
This supposition is supported by what comes next. For after having
delivered himself of these reservations, Donoghue goes on, surprisingly, to
write a "Brief Biography" of Pater that takes up about ninety pages of the
book. It is an admirable and acute series of sketches, though it is hardly
brief and only notionally biographical. Within the commonly accredited
sense of the term, Pater's biography contains very little to talk about;
almost nothing appears to have happened to him, and when something did
he had as a rule almost nothing
to
say about it. Which does not mean that
