STEVEN MARCUS
155
at some points thinking about such ultimate matters as Donoghue refers
to.) The second sentence, however, in which he deplores the kind of polit–
ically correct usages prevalent in recent critical practices is directly on the
mark. He recurs to this matter once more at the very end where he again
strenuously takes issue with the
disastrous ... subjection of Ii terature and art to the censorship of bla–
tantly reductive attention in behalf of political, social and moral
recti tude. Eliot was right: if you read
Ii
terature, it is as
Ii
terature that
you must read it and not as another thing ... poli tics, religion, democ–
racy, any ideology one cares to name.
If we read literature only to find in it evidence of bad faith, right–
wing poli tics, the atroci ties of Empire, racial and sexual prejudice, or
any other attitude we disapprove of, we should give it up and confine
our attention to
TV
and letters to the editor. If we no longer respect
the difference between a work of art and an editorial, the game is up.
Literature and art add objects to the world and, in so doing, call for
aesthetic attention .
Donoghue is once more al together right, I believe, in his articulation
of critical animus against such current, continuing tendencies in academ–
ic literary pursuits toward reductive politicization. How strong an ally - or
fellow combatant - Pater, the Pater who chose "standing aside" as his
strategy of moral choice, makes in these critical skirmi shes and ideologi–
cal hand-to- hands remains problematical. Donoghue himself is aware of
such difficulties. He comes back one more time to the relation of litera–
ture to music: "We should read literature in the spirit in which we enter
a concert hall. This is difficult because literature is verbal and shares with
other forms of discourse a semantic capacity."
Again, the first sentence is both suggestive and dubious. The second
sentence is of course correct, and it is where Pater is once more likely to
fail us. After all, the general tendency of his writing is to move away from
the thematic and the referential, and toward verbal expressions of mood, of
distinctions so exquisi tely fine that they can "fine down" to prolix insub–
stantiality. Nevertheless, Donoghue has made the best case I know for
Pater's continuing interest and salience today, and that is no trivial achieve–
ment. Pater does remain of interest; he is the first of the modernists (along
with Wilde) in English. And he continues to refresh us in his refusal of the
ideological. Whatever his shortcomings, these qualities are not hollow or
gratuitous appeals to our minds as they seek to find again the tract of intel–
lectual ground out of which the main stream of criticism will one day rise
up to now once more.
