The Mask without the Face

ELT 39:4 1996 In places MacCarthy makes occasional mistakes. Also, while wellwritten and generally well-researched, she relies perhaps too much— sometimes without adequate acknowledgement—on previous sources. For example, MacCarthy borrows from William Peterson's history of the Kelmscott Press and cites her borrowings as if they came from the original. And it could be argued that she did not do more than begin to tap libraries and archives outside the United Kingdom. Because she makes no mention of them in her Manuscript Sources, it seems unclear whether or not she went to see, for instance, the Berger Collection in California or the Morgan Library in person. In all, however, this biography is a very successful book. It is by far the best biography of Morris, the only one which covers virtually all of his life and work, from design to printing to politics to the story of his marriage and relationship with all his friends. Bonnie J. Robinson ___________ North Georgia College The Mask without the Face Denis Donoghue. Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995. 364 pp. $27.50 DENIS DONOGHUE begins by observing that in the decades bracketing the mid-twentieth century, Pater's reputation among the "masters in criticism" had been mainly as "a victim of the feminine charm of Oxford." With the sole exception of Kenneth Burke's brief discussion of Gaston de Latour, Pater's writings were dismissed by critics as merely illustrative of the genteel tradition. But the poets of the late-Victorian era and of modernism (and after, even) always knew better—Pater's influence was pervasive, if elusive. By the 1970s the older critical "take" was being radically revised; now, a century after Pater's death, Donoghue sets himself the task of reviewing Pater's significance as a subversive or "antinomian" interpreter of the AngloAmerican "law of culture." Pater opened magic casements on the foam of perilous seas—by pushing Romantic subjectivity (the Wordsworthian love of eye and ear, "both what they half create, /And what perceive") to new extremes in order to capture an elusive flux always slipping out from under explanation or stable value and, also, by initiating English literature to French and German motifs, those of Baudelaire and other exponents of alarming ideas or life-styles. Donoghue begins his account of Pater's life with his funeral—date and cause of death, mourners, obituary comments. This is a bold 470 book reviews biographical maneuver (though a good bit less brazen than the book's jacket design which superimposes the subject's name on the angles of his moustache!). Leapfrogging almost fifty-five years of tea and gossip, Donoghue's account opens with that silent, marmoreal calm beyond "the personal, domestic, social, economic, and political conditions" of Pater's life—conditions Donoghue isn't sure had anything to do with Pater's literary production. According to Donoghue, the biographic Walter barely had been introduced to the poetic Walter, certainly never went to dinner or to Italy with him. Pater's main motifs were imagined, says Donoghue; and though those motives may evanesce into semblances of his personal life, no one can specify the relationship or explain the poetic by means of the factual. Though Donoghue does recount at least one painful scandal and several illuminating anecdotes, he will not circumscribe the import of the imaginative with any real-life experience nor expose literary passages "to the censorship of blatantly reductive attention in behalf of political, social, and moral rectitude." Donoghue is not the first (nor will he be the last) to quote Henry James's perspicacious eulogy of Pater: "I think he has had—will have had—the most exquisite literary fortune: i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius), & absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face, & there isn't in his total superficies a tiny point of vantage for the newspaper to flap its wings on." Is James's "mask without the face" figuratively the death mask of the pious Walter—In te, Domine, speravi? Or that which disguises or conceals a guilty Walter? Or a stage...