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PARTISAN REVIEW
with large cultural circumstances, he nevertheless seems intermittently
throughout the text to be nibbling away at themes rather than chewing
them over - no doubt Pater's hide-and-seek manner of conducting his
intellectual life is in large measure accountable for such an impression. And
on occasion he seems driven to
longuers
of quiet exasperation: "Pater put all
his trust in consciousness because he couldn't think of anything better to
do with his time." It isn't clear to me whether in an utterance such as this
the redoubtable Donoghue was simply non-plussed and laid himself down,
so to speak, in the middle of the road, or whether the delayed influence of
his long immersion in Pater's prose caused his mind to suspend operations
for half a moment. Whatever the cause may be, this reader is prepared to
testifY that Pater can induce this effect in anyone.
Despite the fragmentary, or digressive, nature of much of this study,
Donoghue makes Pater seem more interesting, and more of a "problem,"
than he has ever been before. The scattered nuggets of observation, specula–
tion, discontinued arguments and started-up but then suspended themes and
topics that Donoghue leaves behind will be eventually picked up by lesser
commentators and made into monographs. Still, the book suffers from its
slightly broken structure, and as Donoghue's interest in Pater appears to fal–
ter and decline as he marches ahead, through, across or past one work after
another, his own prose here and there makes for heavy weather. It was prob–
ably incautious of him to commit himself to a plan that required
comprehensiveness of coverage. This estimate is, I believe, supported by the
final, sixty-page section of the book, which has no title, but which is in sub–
stance an extended essay on Donoghue's "essential Pater." This is the Pater
with whom he began the book, the first of the modernists in English, the
subdued yet unrepentant antinomian, the apostle of the autonomy of art,
someone who remains of use to us today, and for whom Donoghue can
argue with his accustomed vivacity. In particular, the Pater who originally put
forward the claim of art for art's sake comes in for his warmer approval -
If you are listening to a Beethoven quartet, you do well not
to
be
thinking of anything else, even of sin, expiation, redemption, and Cod.
I wish the doctrine 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 subject.
The first sentence of this passage is arguable, and its recommendation
is, in my view, virtually impossible to follow and perhaps even inappro–
priate to try. (In any event, it depends on which Beethoven quartet one is
talking about; if it is one of the late works, I don't see how one can avoid
