British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

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British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile

Stefano Evangelista

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Titles include: Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors) ‘THE JEW’ IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE Between the East End and East Africa Heike Bauer ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY Translations of Inversions, 1860–1930 Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Colette Colligan THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Stefano Evangelista BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND ANCIENT GREECE Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Yvonne Ivory THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930 Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors) CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

10.1057/9780230242203 - British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece, Stefano Evangelista

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of South Florida - PalgraveConnect - 2010-03-12

Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex

Jarlath Killeen THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland

Kirsten MacLeod FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle Diana Maltz BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors) VERNON LEE Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Muireann O’Cinneide ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867 David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Julia Reid ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Anne Stiles (editor) NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920 Caroline Sumpter THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE Sara Thornton ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls Ana Parejo Vadillo WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM Passengers of Modernity Phyllis Weliver THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910 Class, Culture and Nation Paul Young GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION The Victorian New World Order Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–97700–2 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874

Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile Stefano Evangelista



British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece

© Stefano Evangelista 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54711–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54711–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For my parents



The touch upon them of the classic spirit was like the finger of a deity giving life to the dead. John Addington Symonds


List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: The Origins The afterlife of Greece: Rome to the Romantics Victorian Greece: social and intellectual background The enemies of Greece

1 6 9 12

1 Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, and the Aesthetic Life Winckelmann and the rise of modern Hellenism Pater’s Winckelmann Paganism and Christianity: Pater and Arnold Dionysus and Other Studies The aesthetic life

23 26 31 36 42 45

2

55 56 65 68 75 81 88

Vernon Lee and the Aesthetics of Doubt The child among the statues The woman among the aesthetes Lee’s un-aesthetic 1880s Women classicists: an intellectual context Spectral classicism The epilogue

3 ‘Two Dear Greek Women’: The Aesthetic Ecstasy of Michael Field Aesthetic beginnings Sapphic aestheticism Bacchic aestheticism 4

The Greek Life of Oscar Wilde The aesthetic education: Pater and Symonds The cry of Marsyas Aesthetic Hellenism Eros and philosophy vii


93 96 100 111 125 129 139 143 148


Contents

Contents

Conclusion: The End of Aestheticism – A Dream, Three Trials, Two Ghosts

158

Notes

166

Bibliography

186

Index

196



viii

1 Wilhelm Von Gloeden, Arcadian Scene (circa 1900). GWA-000905-0000. Archivio Von Gloeden / Alinari Archives, Florence 15 2 Apollo Belvedere. Vatican Museums, Rome 28 3 Simeon Solomon, Bacchus (1867). © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery 39 4 Niobe, Uffizi Gallery. Head Detail (photograph circa 1900). BGA-F-09317A-0000. Archivio Brogi / Alinari Archives, Florence 57 5 Photograph of Porto Venere (circa 1900). BGA-F-010670-0000. Archivio Brogi / Alinari Archives, Florence 83 6 Venus, Capitoline Museums, Rome. ADA-F-001796-0000. Archivio Anderson / Alinari Archives, Florence 101 7 Cover of Underneath the Bough. Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles 121 8 Caricature of Wilde as Narcissus. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Add. Mss. 81784 128

ix



List of Figures

My first debt of gratitude is to Dinah Birch and Catherine Maxwell who shared with me their knowledge of aestheticism, ancient Greece, and much else besides. Hilary Fraser, Josephine McDonagh, and Charles Martindale provided enthusiasm, advice, and important criticisms at crucial moments. Among the colleagues with whom I have been fortunate to work, in Oxford and elsewhere, I am particularly grateful, for a number of different reasons, to Stephen Bann, Kantik Ghosh, Stephen Harrison, Richard McCabe, Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Prettejohn, George Rousseau, Nicholas Shrimpton, Gesa Stedman, Marion Thain, and Carolyn Williams. Elinor Shaffer has given me encouragement and inspiration from my first day in England, many years ago. More recently, Joseph Bristow has been an ideal reader and editor, offering invaluable guidance. My thanks also to Paula Kennedy and Steven Hall at Palgrave, who have been very helpful throughout. This book started to take shape in 2004, thanks to a research fellowship in what is now the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition of the University of Bristol; it developed during a Fitzjames Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford; and was finally completed during my time at Trinity College and the English Faculty of the University of Oxford. I would like to thank these institutions and the many scholars and students who have engaged with my ideas over this period, in the seminars and conferences in which drafts of the chapters have been presented. Chapter 4 was researched during a visiting fellowship at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. The final completion of the manuscript was made possible thanks to a period of research leave generously funded by the John Fell OUP Research Fund. The images in the book are reproduced thanks to a Passmore Edwards grant issued by the English Faculty, University of Oxford. I would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce manuscript sources and copyright material: the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Mistress and Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge; the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford; the British Library; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Merlin Holland; Leonie Sturge-Moore and Charmian O’Neil. The illustrations are reproduced by kind permission of the Alinari Archives, Florence; the x



Acknowledgements

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; the British Library Board; and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Every effort has been made to trace right holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Brief sections of Chapter 2 appeared as part of my essay, ‘Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2006). These are reproduced here with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Finally, for important things said by the way, I would like to record my gratitude to Anne Alwis, Francesca Billiani, Alexander Binns, Ada Bronowski, Luisa Calè, Emma Cayley, Isobel Hurst, Kate Moran, Muireann O’Cinneide, Julia Reid, and William Whyte. All these people have contributed to the making of this book. Most of all, though, I am grateful to Philip Bullock, whose ideas are everywhere between the lines of these pages. This book is dedicated to my parents, Carla Coletti and Mimmo Evangelista, who have trusted and supported me.



Acknowledgements xi



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Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a somewhat visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, and more or less make substitution [ . . .]. Walter Pater, ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ (1880) [ . . .] and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ (1925) Virginia Woolf could not have put it more clearly: ‘it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition.’1 So why do ‘we’, moderns and Northern Europeans, want to know Greece? What is the appeal of this dead language and this primitive people which have for centuries stood in the centre of our system of education, shaping our notion of culture? What is the exact relationship between this ‘foreign’ culture and our own? And how far is it possible to bridge the geographical, historical, and ontological distance that separates modern England from ancient Greece? Woolf’s answer to these questions is both sceptical and enlightened. She dismisses the idea that ancient Greece can be viewed and understood clearly from the present through the transparent medium of the intervening history and argues instead for a model of scholarship that takes into account cultural difference and a crucial margin 1



Introduction: The Origins


of unknowability. She emphasises the danger of misunderstanding and misinterpretation that besets the efforts of modern classicists and historians. ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is a polemic against unproblematic approaches to learning: it tells readers that facts are slippery; it attacks the domesticating mentality of the museum, in which texts and objects are studied in artificial isolation; it denounces the arrogance of believing in perfect knowledge and the real ignorance that is the result of that arrogance. Greek stands in the centre of Woolf’s polemic because she recognises that its knowledge is pregnant with symbolic importance: ancient Greece influences modern cultural and social identities; it signifies intellectual ambition and the values that are attached to the intellectual lifestyle; it generates feelings of belonging to or exclusion from the educated elite; and, for individual writers and scholars, it offers a symbolic discourse of kinship with or resistance to tradition and the culture of their times. This book examines the reception of ancient Greece by writers linked to the aesthetic movement in the period that goes from the 1860s to the end of the nineteenth century. My contention is that the experience of ancient Greece stands at the very heart of literary aestheticism in its polemical and counter-cultural identities: it is to the Greeks that the aesthetes turn to formulate their late-Romantic theorisation of the aesthetic as a discourse of dissent from the dominant culture of the mid-Victorian decades, in the fields of criticism and cultural production as well as in life, inasmuch as the differences between the three are downplayed or downright erased. In its early stages the aesthetic movement developed in and around Oxford, the main centre of classical learning in nineteenth-century Britain. Its most influential figures – A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde – were trained as classicists, and for some of them teaching classics became a professional occupation, affording them a salary and the means of making their name known in the public domain. Women aesthetes like Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), although their gender made them marginal to the traditional institutions of classical learning, shared their male contemporaries’ fascination with ancient Greece and, like Woolf, used their position outside the academy to strip the knowledge of Greece from the scholarly and moral certainties passively absorbed and reproduced by some of their male peers. The works of Pater, Symonds, Lee, Michael Field, and Wilde repeatedly engage with Greek culture, its material testimonies, its ideal, its survival in time, and its relation to the present: reading their writings together reveals to us a veritable interpretative community, gathered around the impulse to



2

3

make sense of Greece, which flourished roughly from the mid 1860s to the mid 1890s. Aestheticism was not a programmatic or coherent movement: its exponents wrote independently and shared no clear sense of belonging to a school. This accounts, in part, for their all but homogenous responses to ancient Greece. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece reflects this state and therefore often dwells on difference rather than continuity. But looking at the way that Pater, Lee, Michael Field, and Wilde responded to ancient Greece also helps us formulate a context in which their works can be read together, providing critical evidence for their posthumously defined identity as ‘aesthetic writers’. In other words, examining aestheticism from the point of view of its relationship with ancient Greece gives us a perspective from which we can make new sense of its uses of history, its challenges to nineteenth-century critical and religious orthodoxies, its revival of Romanticism, and its sexual politics. Like Woolf, the aesthetic authors whose writings I analyse here repeatedly come back to the fundamental questions of how we know ancient Greece and what we do with this knowledge. In their writings, knowing Greece becomes paradigmatic for the acts of reading and interpreting the past. The dialectic between knowing and not knowing involved in this process creates the desire that motivates scholarship. The pleasure derived from it is therefore predicated on a perverse economy, which seeks gratification from incompletion, partiality, impurity, and uncertainty. In his early essay on William Morris (1868), Pater puts forward an influential model for the interpretation of Greece which anticipates Woolf’s considerations on the complexities involved in the act of reception. Pater rejects the efforts of those who strive after a perfect reconstruction of the Greek past. Such vain antiquarianism is a waste of the poet’s power. The composite experience of all the ages is part of each one of us: to deduct from that experience, to obliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of a past age, as if the Middle Age, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century had not been, is as impossible as to become a little child, or enter again into the womb and be born. But though it is not possible to repress a single phase of that humanity, which, because we live and move and have our being in the life of humanity, makes us what we are, it is possible to isolate such a phase, to throw it into relief, to be divided against ourselves in zeal for it; as we may hark back to some choice space of our own individual life. We cannot truly conceive the age: we can conceive the element it has contributed to




4


For Pater the modern knowledge of Greece is rooted in the nineteenth century’s own cultural achievement. To know Greece is to know ‘the element it has contributed to our culture’ and so, by extension, it is to know our own modernity. In Pater’s idea of history the past cannot be divorced from the present: the meaning of Greece is always created in the present. This cumulative model of history imagines the present moment as the sum total of countless historical influences and cultural networks. What Pater calls here the ‘composite experience of all the ages’ is best known through his famed description of the Mona Lisa as synthesis of ‘[a]ll the thoughts and experience of the world’, from classical Greece to the Renaissance.3 La Gioconda, as Pater, correctly, refers to this icon, is at the same time ‘the symbol of the modern idea’ and the expression of ‘what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’ (I: 126, 124). In this understanding of history, as the passage from ‘Poems by William Morris’ argues, it is possible to ‘isolate’ a single phase but it is impossible to ‘repress’ any. Even in the smile of Mona Lisa the features of Helen of Troy are still clearly discernible: traces of the Greek past survive in the present with the inevitability of genetic laws. Conversely, by proclaiming the impossibility of coming ‘face to face with the people of a past age’, Pater imagines ancient Greece as a necessary hybrid, anachronistically created by what came after it as much as by its own native culture. It is for this reason that Pater, as well as his contemporaries such as Symonds and Lee, often preferred to approach Greek culture from its later re-embodiments, especially in the Renaissance. Pater dismisses the possibility of ‘an actual revival’ of Greek culture based on the type of scholastic imitation practised by eighteenthcentury neoclassicism, making recourse to the same notion of vainness that Woolf would invoke more than 50 years later. Straightforward mimesis, what Pater calls ‘vain antiquarianism’, is wasteful, artistically sterile, and opposed to the ethos of creation like the Gospel image of the child re-entering the mother’s womb (John, 3: 4) – a rare grotesque moment in Pater’s prose. Ancient Greece is not a cultural ideal to recreate but rather to ‘aspire to’. In this open-endedness is the ‘possibility’ or enabling factor, motor, and creative impulse behind the desire to know it. A successful classicism will therefore always have to be modern as well as antique.



our culture: we can treat the subjects of the age bringing that into relief. Such an attitude towards Greece, aspiring to but never actually reaching its way of conceiving life, is what is possible for art.2

5

Pater’s essay on the poetry of Morris is a fundamental step in the consolidation of a late-Victorian counter-culture built around the discourse of art and the aesthetic. Part of this article was later turned into the famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (1873), whose doctrine to treat life in the spirit of art gained the status of a manifesto among aesthetes, causing a controversy at the time and remaining to this day the best-known and most influential single document of aestheticism. The remaining portion was reprinted in Appreciations (1889), in which Pater tellingly renamed it ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, thus providing one of the first instances in which the word ‘aesthetic’ was used to qualify modern literature. Here Pater goes back to the etymology of the word ( means ‘perception’ in Greek) and connects the modern meaning of ‘aesthetic’ with the act of reception, either of Greek or of medieval material: Morris’s poetry is ‘aesthetic’ because of the way it imaginatively recreates the Greek past using a complex model of cultural reception, which is aware of influences and contaminations, and is always on the lookout for instances of survival and anachronism that complicate linear or teleological models.4 The close textual links that emerge from the publication history of ‘Poems by William Morris’, the ‘Conclusion’, and ‘Æsthetic Poetry’ show how the reception of Greece is integral to Pater’s lifelong interest in refashioning the ‘aesthetic’ as, at the same time, a new critical sensibility and a new type of writing. Like Pater, the authors studied here ask their readers to reformulate the very idea of classicism, embodied in ancient Greece, into a radical ideal – something that could teach them how to criticise the culture of their times. When, in the earlier part of the century, Keats had had his Grecian Urn claim that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, he had used the material evidence of Greek culture to argue that the aesthetic pleasure derived from art should be liberated from didacticism and moral imperatives. Keats’s Romantic Hellenism is a fundamental influence on aestheticism’s doctrine of enjoying art for its own sake. The same strategy appears, for instance, in one of Lee’s early essays, in which she claims that the ‘lesson’ that a modern viewer can learn from an ancient basrelief is that beauty is a vital and eternal ‘fact’ and that to ‘appreciate a work of art means, therefore, to appreciate that work of art itself, as distinguished from appreciating something outside it, something accidentally or arbitrarily connected with it’.5 The victory over time of the material remains of ancient Greece serves to prove that aesthetic universals are permanent through history, while social, political, and moral codes are historically contingent and unstable.





The modern knowledge of ancient Greece is based on what in ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ Woolf calls ‘incongruous odds and ends’ (38–9): Keats’s urn, Lee’s bas-relief, and so on. It is a discontinuous canon made up of parts, incomplete oeuvres, mutilated figures, and open endings. The Greek achievement appears forever half-realised. The evocative image of the fragment, full of Romantic connotations, conveys the tension between material certainty and imagination, memory and desire, generated by the aesthetic (in Pater’s sense) reception of textual and archaeological evidence. In Pater’s words from my epigraph, the modern interpreter of this fragmented culture, forever incomplete and out of context, will be a ‘visionary’ rather than a historian, a philologist, or a scholar. Like the Romantic poet, the aesthetic writer works through completion and substitution, looking through history for the missing stories and unheard melodies, the evocative power of unrecorded voices, and the repressed discourses of human passion and invention. In this process academic and imaginary writing blend into each other. In trying to reconstruct Greece for their modern readers, aesthetic writers alert us not only to the necessary use of imagination in criticism and to the role of desire and emotion in the process of learning, but also to the instability of epistemologies, the hybridity of cultural and social identities, and to the intertextual nature of all writing.

The afterlife of Greece: Rome to the Romantics The late-nineteenth-century authors that I analyse in this book were conscious of belonging to the last phase of a long filtering process of interpretation, appropriation, and cultural contamination that has shaped the reception of ancient Greece through the centuries. The Roman conquest in the second century BC brought Greek culture to an abrupt halt, creating the conditions for a powerful myth of its survival as fragment, perfectly preserved and incomplete at the same time. The Roman Empire colonised and domesticated Hellas, bringing its artists and teachers to Italy. It translated its texts and copied its art, and transmitted it to posterity as a province of its own larger achievement. This successful contamination of Greek and Roman antiquity persisted for centuries as the new Church preserved the Latin tradition into the Christian culture of the Middle Ages. Even the classical revival of the Renaissance was almost entirely mediated through Latin culture: Greek books were mostly read in Latin, and classical imitation was based on Roman artworks, many of them copies of Hellenistic originals. While geographical Greece became orientalised under Byzantium and then under Ottoman rule, Italy consolidated its role as the homeland of Europe’s classical past.



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7

It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the independent status of Greece within the classical tradition was widely reclaimed. Starting from Germany, the first programmatic attempts to reconstruct the independent culture of Hellas were made, and these were followed by the first archaeological projects on Greek soil. Even then, Italy was still the country of antiquity. Intellectuals travelling South to look for an authentic classical experience very seldom ventured to Greece, partly also owing to its more unstable political situation. Even Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the father of modern Hellenism, declined the opportunity of going on a journey to Greece, which presented itself to him several times. And when, in 1778, Goethe, a selfconfessed enthusiast of Greek antiquity, visited the Greek temples at Paestum, in Southern Italy, he reacted with perplexity in front of the coarseness and general un-Greekness (so to speak) of the real thing.6 These were the first authentic Greek buildings he had ever seen. In the nineteenth century the reception of ancient Greece was marked by an increased commitment to authenticity: Greek culture had to be stripped of the incrustations of the Roman heritage and admired in its originality and native vigour. Paradoxically perhaps, the emerging Romanticism turned to Greece in order to overthrow the tired Latinate classicism of the previous century. The enthusiasm for Greek art and culture was matched by a revived interest in the study of the Greek language, both in schools and in universities. In Germany, thanks to the pioneering work of Alexander von Humboldt, classical learning became a scientific discipline: Altertumswissenschaft. The ‘science of antiquity’, which was from its beginnings more interested in the new field of Greek studies rather than in the established Latin, laid its emphasis on historical accuracy and advanced philological research. In the competitive high schools and ambitious universities of the German states, Greek language, literature, history, and philosophy were the staples of an education in the humanities. This system produced generations of public intellectuals – Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder, Hegel, and Nietzsche, to name but a few – for whom the study of Greek culture became a lifelong activity and who broadcast their Greek scholarship throughout Europe. In Britain, ancient Greece had remained a relatively unmapped territory until the mid eighteenth century, when a series of expeditions brought back home the testimonies of its rich material culture in the form of antiquities and architectural drawings. The society of the Dilettanti, whose members were initially distinguished more for their goliardic than their intellectual entrepreneurship, was instrumental in encouraging and financing this early interest in Greece. The Dilettanti





supported Lord Sandwich’s tour of the Aegean in 1738–39 and James (‘Athenian’) Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s trip to Athens in 1751–53. This last expedition remains of particular academic interest as it led to the publication, between 1762 and 1816, of the influential multivolume work The Antiquities of Athens, which contains accurate reproductions of ancient monuments based on measurements taken in Greece. These travels and material testimonies inspired a widespread interest in Greek culture, which appeared at once more ancient and yet newer and more exciting than the canonical Latin. The most visible product of this new fashion was a Greek architectural revival that stretched well into the first decades of the nineteenth century.7 During these years many civic buildings and private residences were built or rebuilt in Greek revivalist style and members of the aristocracy and the wealthy middle classes adorned their home interiors with statues, vases, and artefacts that had been dug up and transported from Greece. Those who had a taste for Greek things but limited financial power could obtain more affordable reproductions and casts made by British artists and artisans. In the history of the English reception of Greek culture no single episode is more famous than the dispute over the Elgin Marbles. The story of the controversy that, from 1807 to 1816, divided the major intellectuals of the times, the national press, and even the Houses of Parliament is too well-known to be retold here, and has been analysed in detail elsewhere.8 What is worth stressing again, though, is the great symbolic importance of the event, which broadened to an unprecedented extent the discussion over the cultural value of ancient Greece in modern times. The final decision of the British Museum to purchase the Marbles marks an important moment in the assimilation of ancient Greece into the cultural identity of the nation. A few years after the end of the Elgin dispute, Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed that ‘[w]e are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.’9 Romantic Hellenism, which arrived into Shelley’s Britain through the influence of German intellectuals like Goethe and Schiller, looked to ancient Greece as the idealised homeland and trans-historical guarantor of artistic culture and civilised values, often at the expense of Christianity.10 At this important turning point, Greek art and mythology were also the subjects of poems by Keats and Leigh Hunt, who popularised Greek antiquity, making it readable for the modern middle-class audiences;11 while modern Greece attracted public attention thanks to Lord Byron’s famous Hellenophilia and his involvement in the Greek nationalist cause.



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The enthusiasm of Romantic Hellenism, purged of its frank paganism, sensualism, and revolutionary energy, survived into the Victorian era. In 1834 Thomas Arnold, father of Matthew Arnold and master of Rugby school, declared that the mind of the Greek ‘is in all the essential parts of its constitution our own’.12 Not only for the advocates of Hellenism, but also for many scholars, intellectuals, and educated men and women, ancient Greece came to function as the lost original for the nineteenth century’s own modernity, its cultural and artistic ambition, its humanism and enlightenment, its democracy, and its rational and scientific culture. Ancient Greece was transformed, in Frank M. Turner’s words, into a ‘useful past’, ‘a source of humanistic wisdom [ . . .] whose values each generation must rediscover for itself and make its own.’13 Academic research and literary and popular accounts frequently emphasised its similarity to rather than difference from the modern world and so the Greeks came largely to be seen as the spiritual contemporaries of modern Englishmen.14 This myth of correspondence fed into British imperial rhetoric: like Victorian Britain, ancient Greece had been a successful nation built on commerce and colonial enterprise. And just like the modern English gentleman, the ancient Greek had been a responsible citizen and a good sportsman, loyal to the Nation and to his friends, brave in war and generous in peace, educated, well-travelled and cleanliving, a living pattern of the values of civilisation and an enemy of barbarism. Victorian England, at the height of its prosperity and political primacy, came to see itself as a modern inheritor of the Hellenic values of civility and humanism. The ideological content associated with learning Greek was transmitted through institutional education. The Victorian era saw a rise in the social prestige attached to the study of the classics, proportionately to the general increase in the value of education as formative ground of the bourgeois individual.15 The education of the higher strata of society had always had a strong classical element but in the nineteenth century the emphasis steadily shifted from Latin to Greek, which was considered to be more difficult and esoteric, and whose mastery drew a recognisable distinction between the true and the amateur scholar. In the major public schools the classical languages, and especially Greek, were pursued with a zeal that could approach fanaticism. Here Homer and heroic literature were read as textbooks of the ethical codes of mature masculinity. Greek became the language not only of the intellectual, but of the social and political elites, for whom a classics degree (typically



Victorian Greece: social and intellectual background

from Oxford) was the first step into a career in Parliament, in the Civil Service, or in the Church – that is, in some of the major institutions of the Empire. It was only in the 1870s that the prestige of a classical education started to be powerfully challenged by the combined effect of the rise of the ‘new’ scientific knowledge, the enlargement of curricula, and the creation of the first female Halls in Cambridge and Oxford. Even so, Greek studies retained an ideological stronghold in the old universities, including the traditionally more scientific Cambridge, all through the wave of educational reforms that punctuated the mid and late century.16 The compulsory Greek requirement in Oxford and Cambridge would only be abolished after the First World War. For women, who were of course excluded from the old universities and from the professional and political spheres, learning Greek was not a form of social training. Female education would generally focus on the modern rather than ancient languages, and on other ‘typically’ female accomplishments such as music and drawing. The knowledge of Greek was not deemed useful for women and they would therefore sometimes be actively discouraged from encroaching on what was seen as a masculine territory. Jane Harrison, who was among the first women to read classics at Cambridge and who was destined to become the first famous female classical scholar in Britain, remembers being caught ‘reading Greek grammar in the attic at the age of 12’, and being told that ‘it would be of no help in running a household.’17 The imagery of shame and secrecy contained in this anecdote and its repression through a rhetoric of duty and domesticity show that learning Greek in women could be construed as an act of gender subversion. Nevertheless, clever and ambitious women – from George Eliot to Elizabeth Barrett and Virginia Woolf – continued to study Greek, sometimes on their own and often openly denouncing a system of education that stifled female talent.18 Recent criticism often associates the intensification of the study of ancient Greece in the nineteenth century with reactionary ideology. In what is probably the most extreme attack on the politics of knowing Greek, Martin Bernal has provocatively argued that the rise of classical scholarship as an academic discipline in Western Europe was complicit with the deployment of the myth of white supremacy and racist and nationalist discourses.19 Even more moderate critics have identified the study of Greece as the terrain for the safeguard of conservative forces intent to ‘combat cultural and political pluralism’.20 In this view, the study of the classics in the nineteenth century ensured ‘the solidarity of elite social groups and the exclusion of their inferiors’ and ultimately



10 British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece

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provided ‘the ideological maintenance of the ruling class’.21 My intention here is to show that writers of the aesthetic movement turned the study of ancient Greece into a field of progressive thinking. Reading their writings on ancient Greece destabilises the notion that the study of the classics propagated conformism and conservative values. Writers such as Pater, Swinburne, and Michael Field (to name but a few) transformed Greek, the language of the academic, political, and moral establishment, into a language of dissent. Aestheticism looked to ancient Greece for new ways of reading history and tradition, of understanding its own role within them, and of developing tools for social and cultural criticism and artistic innovation. When aestheticism came into being, in the 1860s, what Leigh Hunt called Romantic ‘Greekomania’ had become overshadowed by the institutionalisation of Greek culture and the utilitarian approach to learning Greek as the means to accumulate cultural capital and, consequently, social distinction.22 Greece had also recently come under attack from public intellectuals such as John Ruskin, the architect A. W. Pugin, and the influential neo-medieval movement of the mid century. Ruskin famously railed against classical culture and its revival in the Renaissance, proclaiming the aesthetic and moral mistake of following a dead culture which glorified individualism and excess. He responded to the enthusiasm for Greece by stressing its difference from modern England and denouncing the inferiority of paganism to the achievements of Christianity. In contrast to the Greek revivalists and the Romantic Hellenists, Ruskin and the medievalists extolled the sympathetic and ecological culture of the Middle Ages and advocated the use of the gothic in art and architecture, a style that was claimed to be more organically English than the Hellenising experiments of the first half of the century. Ruskin’s thought played a fundamental role in the genesis of the aesthetic movement: his idea that art influences all aspects of life and his emphasis on vision and visuality pervade such apparently anti-Ruskinian writings as Pater’s Renaissance and Wilde’s Intentions. But the authors that I examine in the present study all depart from Ruskin’s moral condemnation of ancient Greece and of its revivals in the Renaissance and in more recent times. Writing about the Renaissance, for instance, Symonds is unequivocal about the importance of knowing Greek for humanist and liberal thought. The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined





Symonds observes the beneficial influence of Greece on European culture from the vantage point of the 1870s, a time in which this influence appears to have been, at least partially, realised: the critical spirit has triumphed over ‘ignorance’, science has overruled ‘superstition’, and evolutionary theory has finally disproved the ‘dream-world’ of Christianity. Symonds implicitly attacks both Ruskinian medievalism with its dismissal of the Greek achievement and institutional education with its domestication of Greece for utilitarian ends. For Symonds the study of Greece is at the origin of scientific and secular culture, but his Greece is far from being a simple precursor of positivist thought. Its emancipatory value is inseparable from its role as bastion of ‘the beautiful in art and literature’: Greece is the homeland of the aesthetic ideal. Writing about the Greeks, aesthetic authors such as Symonds redeploy the language of Romantic Hellenism, promoting a late-Romantic culture that exalts the imagination and the figure of the artist and vindicates a place for high art in the midst of the age of science. In ancient Greece, the aesthetes find the model for an anti-philistine culture which preaches a secular and rigorous cultural practice aimed at individual improvement. The ideal it embodies is invoked as a remedy against what Woolf would call the ‘vagueness’ and ‘confusion’ of modernity. This is why it becomes the most contended territory in the quarrel between aestheticism and the Christian, positivist, and philistine culture of the nineteenth century.

The enemies of Greece Scepticism and hostility towards ancient Greece were not confined to the adherents of the medievalist and neo-gothic movements. Harrison was scolded for reading Greek because, as a young woman, she should not be encouraged to undertake unfeminine pursuits; but also because Greek intrinsically carried with it a liberating or even subversive message, as the 12-year-old must have precociously realised when she chose to carry out her studies in the privacy of the attic. For while in academic and liberal circles Greek culture was largely valued



to give way before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the churchmen and the monks; it stimulated the germs of science, suggested new astronomical hypotheses, and directly led to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in art and literature.23

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as a useful knowledge for the moral education and socialisation of middle-class male (and, sometimes, female) adults, it was also seen by some as the means of a dangerous knowledge from which the impressionable minds of the young had to be sheltered. In 1856 the philosopher John Grote, brother of the famous classical scholar George, author of The History of Greece, published an article titled ‘Old Studies and New’ in which he surveyed the benefits of classical learning in the present age. Grote’s argument is in defence of keeping Latin and (especially) Greek in the centre of modern education, but he nonetheless identifies six possible objections to this: (1) the study of the classics is not practical and does not lead to a profession; (2) it is not scientific and does not rest on positive knowledge; (3) it is about a dead past and therefore obsolete; (4) it is un-English, as it deals with foreign cultures; (5) it is, by the nature of its subject matter, partial and gives an incomplete idea of Greek and Roman literature; (6) it offends modern religion and morality.24 Although he proceeds to debunk these objections at great length (interestingly, the last two are left unchallenged, ostensibly for lack of space), Grote articulates, as early as the mid century, a larger anxiety that the study of the classics could be somehow at odds with nineteenth-century British culture, its positivism, national character, Christianity, and ethical codes. The moral question raised by Grote is essentially whether it is ethically justifiable that a Christian people should derive knowledge and guidance from a pagan culture. In a similar vein, in Father and Son (1907), Edmund Gosse recollects asking his father to tell him about the old Greek gods, at the age of 13 (it would therefore have been in 1862). Gosse’s father, who was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, was morally outraged by the question: He said that the so-called gods of the Greeks were the shadows cast by the vices of the heathen, and reflected their infamous lives; ‘it was for such things as these that God poured down brimstone and fire on the Cities of the Plain, and there is nothing in the legends of these gods, or rather devils, that it is not better for a Christian not to know.’ His face blazed white with Puritan fury as he said this [ . . .]. You might have thought that he had himself escaped with horror from some Hellenic hippodrome.25 The reaction of the old Mr Gosse is certainly extreme even by mid-Victorian standards, but it alerts us to the fact that, for many people close to the numerous puritan and evangelical milieus, the Greeks were,




quite straightforwardly, heathens. The modern interest in their culture was an encouragement to vice and degeneracy. It was better not to know anything about them: ignorance was the safest weapon against corruption. Like the young Harrison, the young Gosse would then satisfy his curiosity about the classics in secret. In Father and Son, Gosse tells another story of moral outrage caused by ancient Greece. A young woman named Susan Flood, the shoemaker’s daughter in their small rural community, was taken by some ‘unconverted’ relatives to see an exhibition of casts from ancient sculptures in the Crystal Palace, in London. Here ‘Susan’s sense of decency had been so grievously affronted, that she had smashed the naked figures with the handle of her parasol, before her horrified companions could stop her. She had, in fact, run amok among the statuary’. To her relatives’ embarrassment, the girl was arrested and dismissed ‘with a warning [ . . .] that she had better be sent home to Devonshire and “looked after”’ (147). Back in Devonshire, Susan Flood’s fanatical and hysterical behaviour, a sort of puritanical bacchanal in fact, was deemed to be morally justified. In an age in which public nudity was by and large inadmissible, the fact that the Greek statues are naked is enough to affront the young Susan Flood in her ‘sense of decency’. The Greeks frequently appear naked in statues and on vases, and, in exhibitions like the one visited by Susan Flood, people were encouraged to enjoy the naked body, rewriting the erotic pleasure of contemplating the nude as an element of the cultivated taste for ancient Greece – a taste that, as we have seen, denoted not only cultural but social superiority. The passion for things Greek had involved a certain risqué appeal from the early days of the Greek revival in the eighteenth century. For instance, Sir Walter Hamilton possessed a collection of antiques that was well-known to include several pieces of ancient erotica;26 and Richard Payne Knight, a member of the Dilettanti, was the author of An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786), a treatise on phallus-worship complete with explicit illustrations. The interest in Greece lent an air of respectability to an otherwise inadmissible interest in sexuality and to the appreciation and circulation of what would otherwise be branded as pornography. This remained true even in the late-Victorian period with which I am concerned here, when popular painters like Frederic Leighton and Albert Moore used the classical tradition in order to explore the nude in painting. In these years, on a less public level, the photographs of Wilhelm Plüschow and Wilhelm Von Gloeden, depicting naked or semi-draped Italian peasant youths




15

Figure 1 Wilhelm Von Gloeden, Arcadian Scene (circa 1900). GWA-000905-0000. Archivio Von Gloeden / Alinari Archives, Florence.

in classical settings, were circulated among homophile intellectuals, creating a complex encroachment of scholarly, artistic, and erotic discourses. Symonds was an avid collector of these photographs, which he sometimes used as material for his studies on aesthetics, and Wilde, like many of his contemporaries, travelled to the small Sicilian town of Taormina in order to visit Von Gloeden’s studio. The connection between an interest in Greece and sexual curiosity became more acceptable as well as more visible when German Altertumswissenschaft, which started to penetrate into British academia before the mid century, argued that a true understanding of ancient Greek culture could not be divorced from an honest enquiry into the Greeks’ sexual practices. And the more these practices became known, the more they seemed to grate on the nineteenth century’s sense of decency. K. O. Müller’s Die Dorier (1824), for instance, which was published in English as The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race in 1839, frankly analyses the nature of pederasty as a social institution in the ancient Doric states. Readers committed to the historical method could not help noticing that male homosexuality appears with striking insistence in the ancient




Greek canon, from vase paintings to poetry and philosophy. Sympathetic scholars like Symonds started to glimpse then what we now know, that is, that Greek society did not condemn love between men but regulated its modes and morality, and, when practised within certain specifications, welcomed it as a legitimate source of pleasure and even as a desirable social bond between citizens.27 It is easy to see how this knowledge would prove uncomfortable in nineteenth-century Britain, where homosexuality was censored and policed by the state, and where homophobia was endemic and would be further institutionalised by the Labouchère amendment of 1885. If we look back to Gosse’s tale we can see that the moral outrage triggered in his father by the mention of the Greek gods is ripe with sexual anxiety. His reference to the ‘Cities of the Plain’ is to the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, and therefore implicitly to male homosexuality. What is interesting is not so much that old Mr Gosse should have a predictable puritan dread of homosexuality, but that he should immediately associate Greek paganism with homosexual practices, and perceive this as a potential moral danger to his 12-year-old son. The connection between Greek studies and the development of homosexuality was also scientifically observed by the sexologist Havelock Ellis in his 1897 study of sexual inversion. [It is] noteworthy that sexual inversion should so often be found associated with the study of antiquity. It must not, however, be too hastily concluded that this is due to suggestion and that to abolish the study of Greek literature and art would be largely to abolish sexual inversion. What has really occurred in those recent cases that may be studied, and therefore without doubt in the older cases, is that he is attracted to the study of Greek antiquity because he finds there the explanation and the apotheosis of his own obscure impulses. Undoubtedly that study tends to develop these impulses.28 Ellis is probably referring here to the case of Symonds, who collaborated with him in compiling his volume on homosexuality, making the history of his own ‘inversion’ available for medical analysis. Symonds believed, like the generic ‘subject of congenital sexual inversion’ discussed here, that studying Greek had helped him to ‘develop’ his ‘obscure impulses’ and to acquire a liberating identity as a modern homosexual man. In his posthumous Memoirs he in fact describes how, during his adolescence, a chance encounter with Plato’s frank discussion of homosexuality in the Phaedrus and the Symposium had kindled his fascination with ancient




17

Greek culture, motivating him to pursue classical studies.29 Ellis, who was also a literary critic and a reader of aesthetic writing, realised that by the late century (that is, immediately after the period discussed here) ancient Greece stood at the ideological centre of a visible homosexual subculture, for which studying Greek was an admissible public activity that helped to cement an inadmissible shared sexual identity. In the climate of repression that followed the Wilde trials, Ellis speaks up against the idea that ‘abolish[ing] the study of Greek literature and art’ might function as the cure for what conservatives saw as an infectious moral and social evil in the long-standing debate over the value of classical education. In the late century the study of Greek was sometimes denounced as a potential encouragement for deviant sexuality and, in this process, adherents to the aesthetic movement often came under attack. In an article that appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1877, for instance, Richard St. John Tyrwhitt complained of Symonds’s failure to make an explicit condemnation of Greek pederasty in his Studies of the Greek Poets (1873, 1876), calling the books ‘a rebellion against nature’ and speaking of ‘phallic ecstasy and palpitations at male beauty’.30 W. F. Barry, writing anonymously in the Quarterly Review in 1890, included the work of Pater and Symonds in a European tradition of sexually perverse literature inspired by the classics, which comprises the writings of Goethe, Gautier, and Baudelaire.31 Moreover, as Dennis Denisoff has shown, aestheticism was from its early days the object of parodies that focussed on its sexual elements. This practice, which was not necessarily intended to repress gender ambiguity and enforce normative values, nonetheless alerted the wider public to the hidden references to unconventional sexuality contained in much aesthetic writing and art.32 Parodies such as W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic (1877) and Lee’s Miss Brown (1884), both of which emphasise the Greek context, were therefore also indirectly complicit in diffusing and amplifying the association of Greek studies with the sexual radicalism promoted by aestheticism. I will come back to some of these attacks in the course of the book. What emerges even from this brief survey is how effective were aestheticism’s play on the sexual anxieties of the time and its subversion of public morals, but also how dangerous the aesthetic stance could be for public intellectuals such as Pater and Symonds, who were professionally responsible for the education of young men and who were in fact both involved in homosexual scandals which checked their careers at Oxford. The downfall of Wilde by the hand of phobic attacks in the courtroom and in the press needs hardly be mentioned.




Much of the most recent scholarship on aestheticism underlines the importance of questions of gender and sexuality, following the biographical ‘outing’ of writers like Pater, Symonds, Lee, Michael Field, and, obviously, Wilde as homosexuals (or, at least, as interested in exploring homoeroticism), and the wider consolidation of queer studies as an academic discipline.33 Most of this work is indebted to the seminal theories of Michel Foucault, which have shaped queer readings of the late-Victorian era. Foucault dates the birth of the modern male homosexual identity to the 1870s, the decade that saw the flourishing of aesthetic culture. In his analysis, modern homosexuality is the product of the redefinition of male love from a series of discrete sinful acts (sodomy) to a psychological and medical category (homosexuality). The new ‘sexual sensibility’, formulated mainly in the law and in contemporary sexological writings, became the characteristic of a new identifiable social type. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.34 Much aesthetic writing belongs to the body of pioneering non-medical texts that contribute to the discursive formation, to use Foucault’s terminology, of modern homosexuality. If their sexual content is their innermost secret, it is ‘a secret that always [gives] itself away’. Their deliberate exploration of sexuality is related to the compulsive drive towards selfdefinition of the modern homosexual, a being whose ‘total composition’, as Foucault says, was everywhere affected by his sexuality. They make theirs the modern idea that deviant sexuality represents an identity, a ‘type of life’, which in their case is intimately connected to the artistic sphere and, as I hope to show, implicated in the Hellenic ideal. The study of ancient Greece played a fundamental role in this process of definition of the modern homosexual identity. Linda Dowling has persuasively argued that Greek studies provided a coded discourse through which classics dons at Oxford debated the sensitive issues of the nature of homosexuality and its place in modern education.35 British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece shows that the study of Greek antiquity




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created a connection between radical sexuality and radical aesthetics that operates beyond the confines of Oxford academia and the tradition of Hellenism. Aesthetic writers like Pater, Symonds, and Wilde turn ancient Greece into a utopia in which the gratification of homoerotic desire is a subcategory of the aesthetic, and is therefore inseparable from artistic and intellectual activities. These authors are, like Foucault, historians of sexuality or queer critics ante litteram: their aestheticism offers a radical reading of the classics that challenges Victorian sexual morality, drawing attention to the dynamics of perverse pleasure inherent in the consumption and production of all art and literature. Their contribution to the history of sexuality cannot, however, be understood in isolation from the efforts of their female contemporaries. As the following chapters will show, the work of Vernon Lee and Michael Field both draws on the male aesthetes’ experiments with ancient and modern homoeroticism, and at the same time is anxious to carve for itself a space outside male poetics, in which the liberated female identities of the female aesthete or the lesbian can be articulated. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece explores the complex networks of emancipation and repression that emerge from this process of exchange and negotiation between male and female homosexual identities. It seems appropriate that my journey into the reception of ancient Greece should start in Germany, the country from which Hellenism and then Altertumswissenschaft originated. The first chapter therefore opens with an analysis of Winckelmann’s work and its reception in lateVictorian England. My central document in this chapter is Pater’s essay on Winckelmann (1867), from which I proceed in order to explore the reception of Greece in Pater’s early writings. Pater, who is in many ways the father figure of the aesthetic culture described in the present study, was profoundly influenced by Winckelmann’s art historical writings in his formulation of ‘aesthetic criticism’ and his archaeology of male–male desire. With ‘Winckelmann’, Pater established the study of Greece as a productive direction for the nascent aestheticism, steering it away from the cult of the Middle Ages promoted by Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites. But Winckelmann’s model of Hellenism, based on the canons of ‘simplicity and grandeur’, although attractive, was not entirely convincing to Pater. In the 1870s he moved towards an increasingly complicated vision of ancient Greece which accommodated primitive, chthonic, and irrational elements and which superseded Winckelmann’s idealism and Matthew Arnold’s concept of Hellenism formulated in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Pater used the knowledge of Greece to upset religious and sexual orthodoxies and to encourage readers to rethink some of the




fundamentals of the nineteenth-century culture of art: the relationship between art and morality, and the place of art in public life. This passage from a radical reading of Greece to a counter-cultural aestheticism is particularly evident in the formulation of an ‘aesthetic’ subjectivity in the well-known ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance. In Chapter 2, I examine Lee’s contribution to aesthetic culture, from her espousal of aestheticism in Belcaro (1881) to her repudiation of its critical and ethical principles in Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895). In her early essays Lee used the study of ancient Greek art to establish her voice as aesthetic writer, promoting a radical model of critical response to art modelled on Winckelmann and Pater, in which the aesthetic overrides moral concerns. But in the writings of the late 1880s and early 1890s, Lee developed a strong sense of alienation from aestheticism’s avoidance of ethical responsibilities and from the masculine gendering of the discourse of the aesthetic. Her collection of magic tales, Hauntings (1890) rewrites the relationship between scholarship, aesthetics, and homoeroticism promoted by Pater. In her short story, ‘Dionea’, for instance, Lee polemically redeploys the theme of the survival of ancient Greek gods explored by Pater in Imaginary Portraits (1887), in order to criticise the masculine bias of Winckelmann’s classicism and of its English reception. In the early 1890s Lee came into contact with the pioneering classical scholarship of Eugénie Sellers and Jane Harrison, and she drew on their ideas to formulate a critique of classicism that marks the end of her public identification with aestheticism and art for art’s sake. The difficult negotiation of a double identity as aesthetic writer and female self is treated again in Chapter 3. My subject here is the poetry of Michael Field. Like Lee, these ‘two dear Greek women’, as they were called by Robert Browning, build on the writings of male contemporaries like Pater, Swinburne, and Symonds in order to vindicate and relaunch a marginalised tradition of female Hellenism. Bradley and Cooper were keen students of Greek language, literature, and philosophy, and their poetry is saturated with classical knowledge. The revival of ancient myth and practices of self-mythologising are central to Michael Field’s intervention into the aesthetic discourse. I structure my analysis of their poetry along the two axes of Sapphic aestheticism and Bacchic aestheticism, represented respectively by their collections Long Ago (1889) and Underneath the Bough (1893). In the early 1890s Bradley and Cooper’s aestheticism became invested with a type of neo-paganism which auspicates a radical reform of Victorian cultural and social practices. Their work at this point shows a close affinity with some of Nietzsche’s philosophical writings such as The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Twilight of the




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Idols (1888), with their rejection of the Apollonian Hellenism promoted by Winckelmann in favour of irrationality, taboo, and the exploration of extreme states of consciousness. My last chapter focusses on Wilde. Wilde’s life and work publicised aestheticism as a type of cultural and social identity; but Wilde also pushed the aesthetic away from its earlier meaning, aiding, through his personal tragedy, the degenerative readings and final downfall of aesthetic culture in the fin de siècle. Wilde came to aestheticism through the study of ancient Greece and, like the writers analysed in the previous chapters, he grounded the modern discourse of the aesthetic in a revisionist reading of ancient Greek material. From his early close study of Symonds and Pater, undertaken when he was a student at Oxford, Wilde absorbed a model for the convergence of Hellenism and aestheticism which came to dominate his work, from the unpublished early essays and reviews to his mature criticism and fiction. Like Michael Field’s Bacchic aestheticism, Wilde’s aesthetic Hellenism is both an authorial identity and a performative strategy for the regulation of emotions. In Wilde’s case it is based on a sympathetic rereading of the values of individual and personal freedom (especially sexual freedom) that had informed Winckelmann’s Hellenism. Like the other writers analysed in this book, Wilde sets the ideal of the Greek life in antithesis to the restrictions of the nineteenth century. It is only in prison that Wilde would come to call this model into doubt. This chapter includes a reading of the critical essays in Intentions (1891), in which Wilde tries to promote a new type of aesthetic criticism which synthesises and supersedes the Greek scholarship of Arnold and Pater. I finish with an analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91), in which I explore the intertwining discourses of eros and philosophy developed there, aligning the novel with the gods-in-exile tradition explored in other aesthetic texts such as Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and Lee’s ‘Dionea’. After the deaths of Symonds (1893) and Pater (1894), the public scandal of the Wilde trials (1895) marks the symbolic end of experiments with the aesthetic as a discourse of cultural and moral dissent. While I have arranged my analyses chronologically, starting from Pater and ending with the Wilde trials, I do not propose a teleological argument. That, I believe, would misrepresent the oeuvre of these writers, in which the emphasis is on multiplicity, semantic complexity, revision, ambiguity, paradox, and eclecticism. The Greece of the aesthetes is a complex edifice: it is the poetic dreamland fantasised by Symonds and the savage world of Pater’s essays on Dionysus and Demeter; it is the military and masculine Sparta and the feminine Lesbos of Sappho’s lyrics; it is home to archaic worships but also to




the sophisticated godless society of sophistic philosophy; it is the land of Dionysian anarchy and Apollonian obedience; it is a fixed standard of taste and a continuously shifting projection; it is primitive and yet nostalgic of its own Arcadian past; Asian and European; it anticipates the modernity of the nineteenth century and offers an alternative to its moral codes. None of these visions is exclusive of the others.




1

The spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this underground life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it. Pater, ‘Winckelmann’ (1867) I wish they wouldn’t call me a ‘hedonist’; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek. Pater to Edmund Gosse (1876) Walter Pater’s essay on Winckelmann appeared in the Westminster Review in January 1867 and was reprinted six years later, with slight alterations, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Far from being an incongruous addition to his studies of Renaissance artists, which mainly deal with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy and France, ‘Winckelmann’ should be read as the foundation of Pater’s first book: it contains the original formulation of his concept of renaissance as, in Pater’s words in ‘Two Early French Stories’, ‘the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life’ (I: 2). It is easy to see how the young Pater of 1867, interested in aesthetics, classical culture, German letters, and Greek love, should become fascinated by the figure of the German classicist, and why he should choose him as the subject of his second publication.1 ‘Winckelmann’ is a virtuoso piece. It is ostensibly a review of two recently published volumes, Henry Lodge’s 1850 translation of 23



Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, and the Aesthetic Life

Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art among the Greeks and Otto Hahn’s Biographische Aufsätze (1866); but it is also a biographical study of Winckelmann in its own right; it is a critique of ancient Greek art and a critique of Winckelmann’s critique of ancient Greek art; it is itself written in the style of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art among the Greeks, using the study of aesthetics in order to create a vivid sketch of the culture of a past age (in this case the German eighteenth century); and it constructs a sustained intertextuality with Goethe’s essay ‘Skizzen zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns’ (1805) and therefore contains a hidden portrait of Goethe and a reflection on the uses of classicism in Romantic and modern cultures. Written before the outrage that followed the publication of The Renaissance in 1873 and an incident of homosexual blackmailing in 1874, ‘Winckelmann’ also affords us an insight into an uncensored expression of Pater’s radical aestheticism, before the fear of scandal obliged him to seek increasingly more oblique or heavily coded ways of experimenting with his ideas on sexuality and the aesthetic.2 Pater’s essay sets up a paradigm for the history of the reception of Greece that I analyse in this book: it presents classical Greek culture both as a mythical past (the arcadia of its subtitle, ‘et ego in arcadia fui’) and as alive and able to affect the present. In this way Pater, like his Romantic predecessors in Britain and in Germany, reclaims the Hellenic ideal as a regenerative force. In the spectral imagery of the opening caption, the Greek past refuses to stick to the ‘underground life’ to which cultures are relegated in the cycles of historical evolution, and periodically resurfaces in order to ‘clarify’ and ‘correct’ the present. The knowledge of ancient Greece is presented as giving the modern reader a vantage point of view from which the moral strictures of the nineteenth century and even Christianity can be criticised with strong cultural authority. In so doing, Pater places the study of Greece in the centre of the counter-cultural mission of the fast-evolving aesthetic culture of the 1860s. It is therefore necessary to emphasise not only the important role that ‘Winckelmann’ plays in the history of Oxford Hellenism and Victorian liberal thought described by Linda Dowling, but also its influence in the development of the modern literary and artistic cultures of British aestheticism.3 The figure of Winckelmann is both a window into the classical world and an example of how ancient Greece can be used in aestheticism’s mission to forge a new culture of art for the nineteenth century. Pater claims that Winckelmann possessed an innate affinity with Hellenism, which took him to ancient Greece with the emotional charge of a homecoming (I: 179, 189). He compares Winckelmann’s ‘Greek spirit’ to ‘a relic of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien, modern atmosphere’ (I: 220).




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Readers must not doubt the authenticity of Winckelmann’s Greekness: like a material fragment of the Hellenic world, the historical Winckelmann was an anachronism in the modern period; and like a fragment he can be used as a kaleidoscope into the past, a suggestive clue for the imaginative reconstruction of antiquity.4 Winckelmann’s genetic antiquity, as it were, is nurtured through complete dedication to the aesthetic ideal, which for him as for Pater is located in the Greek past, and through which he finds historical realisation as an intellectual, as well as emotional and erotic gratification as a practising lover of other men. The implication for Pater’s modern readers is that the study of the classics and the Greek life contain a recipe for personal fulfilment, which now as in Winckelmann’s times (which would not have seemed so remote to Pater’s contemporaries) is available to those who are willing to experiment with them. The structure of the essay, which oscillates between biographical passages and more general considerations on Greek art and its role in modern culture, allows Pater to strike an elegant balance between the characterisation of the individual (Winckelmann) and the study of a wider intellectual atmosphere (both Winckelmann’s own eighteenth century and Greek antiquity). Pater would later make use of this fusion of scholarship and imaginative historical reconstruction both in his critical studies, for instance in The Renaissance, and in his fiction, notably in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Imaginary Portraits (1887). This early essay therefore not only marks a fundamental stage of Pater’s life-long engagement with classical Greece, but is at the same time Pater’s first experiment with the themes and style of his later writings. In a note now kept among his manuscripts at Harvard, Pater refers to his short story ‘The Child in the House’ as ‘the germinating, original, source, specimen, of all my imaginative work’. ‘Winckelmann’ functions in the same way for his scholarly work: it is, to use Pater’s metaphor, the germ of both his Hellenism and his aesthetic criticism. Pater, as William Shuter has shown, was a compulsive reviser of his own works: he constantly came back to his old ideas in order to give them new shades and definition.5 The aesthetic ideal formulated in ‘Winckelmann’ resurfaces in his later writings, modified and partly rewritten but never wholly discredited or substantially amended. In fact, ‘Winckelmann’ is itself a reworking of a previous unpublished piece, ‘Diaphaneitè’, an essay that Pater delivered to the Old Mortality Society in Oxford in 1864. In ‘Diaphaneitè’, Pater had sketched the characteristics of an intellectual type in whom a diaphanous or transparent temperament is the sign of radical departure from conventional morality. Some of the ideas and indeed entire sentences that Pater had used to define his ‘diaphanous’ type reappear in ‘Winckelmann’, where the





characteristics of the transparent ideal are now portrayed as the influence of Greek culture on Winckelmann’s life and work.6

More than any other single figure, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) was responsible, if not for inventing ancient Greece, at least for giving it a wholly new cultural significance. His work became the bible of Hellenism and set the tone in which discussions of ancient art would be conducted for the next century at least. His ideas travelled across national boundaries and his books, which had spread the taste for Greek art throughout Europe, were used by cultured grand-tourists as guides to the antique collections in Italy. Winckelmann’s legacy on the following generations of critics and artists, both in Germany and abroad, was therefore immense. Those engaging with ancient Greece in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no choice but either to follow him or to write against him. Winckelmann’s first published volume, Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (Gedanke über die Nachahmung der Griecher in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 1755), was the fullest account to date of the classical ideal, spelling out its characteristics and tracing a history of its evolution. The Imitation was followed by the History of Ancient Art among the Greeks (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764), Winckelmann’s most influential work, which expands on the ideas contained in his previous book. The History won Winckelmann recognition and fame throughout Europe. It was soon translated into Italian (1783–84) and French (1790–94), the erudite languages of art criticism at the time, and, although a full English translation only appeared in 1873, its ideas had been available through a partial American translation from the 1840s.7 When trying to assess Winckelmann’s reception in nineteenth-century Britain, we have to take into account the wide influence and the complex patterns of dissemination of his writings. Authors and scholars encountered Winckelmann’s theories not only in his own works (read in the original or in the French translation), but also in their endorsements in the works of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and A. W. von Schlegel, in their polemic treatment by Herder, or simply in the organisation of the galleries of ancient art in the British Museum.8 Winckelmann’s understanding of ancient Greece revolves around the fundamental principle that its art is pervaded by a sense of simplicity and grandeur (Winckelmann’s influential formula is ‘eine edle Einfalt und stille Grösse’),9 which the Greeks achieved thanks to their privileged geographical



Winckelmann and the rise of modern Hellenism

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and political situations. Winckelmann’s Greece is an embodied utopia of perfect harmony between man and nature. It is blessed with a temperate climate and devoid of dermatological and venereal diseases and of any element that might disfigure the beauty of the human form. Here the human body, and especially the body of the youthful male, was displayed and enjoyed without shame as the most perfect manifestation of nature. The gymnasia, where athletes exercised naked, were the schools of art, frequented by philosophers and artists alike. Public nakedness and physical exercise ritually enact the principle of individual freedom that is for Winckelmann the governing ideal of the Hellenic world. It is for this reason that among the visual arts of antiquity Winckelmann favours sculpture, with its interest in the idealised beautiful body, especially the male body. Then as now the ancient male nude offers a striking visualisation of the freedom to be and to become, to look, desire, delight, and enjoy that is for Winckelmann the greatest achievement of ancient Greece: it is at once a site of aesthetic pleasure and a symbol of political and intellectual freedom. Winckelmann’s aim in the History is to provide a comprehensive account of Greek art, assembling its canon, making his readers aware of its characteristics, and elevating those characteristics to a timeless standard for all subsequent schools of art. The artworks dating from the fifth and fourth centuries BC (or those that Winckelmann thought might do so) are held as the fullest realisation of the Greek ideal, and are placed on the pinnacle of a historical narrative of rise and fall of ancient civilisation. This model, which isolates a period of canonical classicism preceded by an archaic phase and followed by the long decadence of the Hellenistic school and of Roman antiquity, would prove immensely successful. Within this periodisation, Winckelmann insists on a clear separation between Greek and Roman art, which, at that time, were still sometimes conflated and confused. Winckelmann’s original practice of fusing literature, history, and the visual arts revolutionised the traditional biographical approach of art criticism. This eclectic methodology allowed Winckelmann to paint a total picture of Greek civilisation, showing that the study of art can lead to a larger understanding that amounts to a sort of cultural criticism. Later scholars have proved that many of the statues chosen by Winckelmann to illustrate his ideas on the classical period of Greek art date from much later than he thought, being either Roman copies or Hellenistic in conception and design. These inaccuracies, however, do not diminish the historical significance of Winckelmann’s work, whose general argument remains surprisingly convincing despite his faulty attributions, probably because of his extensive reliance on textual as well as material evidence.






Rather than attempt a fuller account of the History, I want to focus here on those aspects to which Pater would draw attention in his essay: what we could anachronistically call Winckelmann’s aestheticism, and his treatment of homoerotic desire. Both clearly emerge from his famed description of the Apollo Belvedere – a statue he calls ‘the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity’10 – which is here worth quoting at length.

Figure 2

Apollo Belvedere. Vatican Museums, Rome


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His build is elevated above the human, and his stance bears witness to the fullness of his grandeur. An eternal springtime, like that of the blissful Elysian Fields, clothes the alluring virility of mature years with a pleasing youth and plays with soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs. Go with thy spirit into the realm of incorporeal beauties and seek to become a creator of a heavenly nature, so that the spirit might be filled with beauties that rise above nature – for here there is nothing mortal, nothing that betokens miserable humanity [ . . .]. His sublime gaze, as if peering into infinity, reaches out from the height of his contentment to far beyond his victory. Scorn sits upon his lips, and the displeasure that he contains within swells the nostrils of his nose and spreads upward to his proud brow. But the tranquillity that hovers over him in a blissful stillness remains undisturbed, and his eyes are full of sweetness, as if he were among the Muses as they seek to embrace him [. . .]. His soft hair plays about this divine head like the tender, waving tendrils of noble grapevine stirred, as it were, by a gentle breeze: it seems anointed with the oil of the gods and bound at the crown of his head with lovely splendour by the Graces. (333–4)11 Winckelmann’s descriptions of ancient art works are full of visionary energy. They appeal to the reader’s imagination and clearly display none of the dryness of an academic treatise. The result is an idiosyncratic dramatic style, in which the voice of the author appears to engage with its object dynamically, describing a veritable ‘relationship with art’.12 This technique points directly forwards to the catechism for the aesthetic critic proposed by Pater in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, written some years after the essay on Winckelmann: ‘What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure?’ (I: viii) In Winckelmann’s writings interpretation relies on subjectivity and impression – or, in Pater’s polemical inversion of Matthew Arnold, on knowing ‘one’s own impression as it really is’ (I: viii). The critic’s personal investment, in the form of the pleasure derived from the experience of art, interacts with the art object, taking it out of its remote past and reasserting its very concrete present as object of the senses. Pater’s technique of ekphrasis, most famous through his description of the Mona Lisa, bears the clear mark of Winckelmann’s influence. Art in the History, especially Greek art, is treated as the most complete expression of the human ideal, and elevated above politics and religion.




We are still far from the aesthetic paradoxes of Oscar Wilde, but there is certainly a cultish quality in Winckelmann’s pursuit of ideal beauty, in life as in his writings, which makes him an aesthete avant la lettre. Winckelmann’s art-historical method aestheticises the process of the quest for knowledge, taking it outside the traditional terms of academic or scientific discourse. In formulating an aesthetic study of Greece, Winckelmann at the same time reformulates the very category of the aesthetic into a ‘mode of historical understanding’.13 The History therefore contains a model theory of the self-sufficiency of the aesthetic that was to have a profound influence on Romanticism, and, through the Romantic prism, on late-Victorian aestheticism. Ancient Greece stands in the centre of this new paradigm of the aesthetic, becoming the paragon for all future generations of artists and scholars and assuming the privileged role in which it would be embraced by Romantic Hellenism. The experience of the male nude, of which the Apollo Belvedere is the ultimate ideal, is fundamental to Winckelmann’s use of the aesthetic as a discourse of cultural analysis. Winckelmann’s gaze moves along the smooth surfaces of Apollo’s body, caressing it with alluring language, taking the reader with him on this exploration which is charged with erotic tension. The striking ekphrasis frequently evokes tactile fantasies: we are encouraged to identify with the springtime that ‘clothes’ his virility and ‘plays with soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs’, and with the Muses as they attempt to embrace him. In a peak of visionary erotic intensity, the statue’s marble hair is called ‘soft’, letting desire override the constraints of descriptive realism. The statue comes alive at this point, as Apollo’s hair is compared to the growing twigs of a vine, and seems animated by the ‘gentle wind’ like the clay from which Adam is fashioned in Genesis. To emphasise this sense of animation, the description is shortly followed by an allusion to the myth of Pygmalion.14 From the dead marble desire is transferred onto the live flesh: it is embodied, reclaimed from the ancient past, and re-historicised into the eighteenth century. The homoeroticism that pervades the analysis of the Apollo Belvedere is echoed in several well-known passages of the History, such as the descriptions of the Belvedere Antinous and the Belvedere Torso. As Alice Kuzniar has argued, it is precisely the infusion of homoeroticism into aesthetics that marks the significance of Winckelmann’s writings, which ‘inaugurated a cultured, hence permissible voicing of same-sex attraction’.15 This proposition deserves further attention.




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Winckelmann not only vindicates the legitimacy of homoerotic desire by showing its noble Greek ancestry, as it were, but constructs it as a mark of cultural distinction: it is a special register that the modern intellectual needs to acquire before he (for it is always a ‘he’ in Winckelmann) can come to a full appreciation of ancient art. A few lines following the citation above, Winckelmann describes how, contemplating Apollo, he himself adopts ‘an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it’ (334). He goes on: ‘My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence’ (334). It is by sharing the peculiar homoeroticism conveyed by the statue that Winckelmann the modern man can access the inner core of ancient art, absorb its vital energy, and make the Greek spirit his own. This ‘shifting projection of the ideally beautiful figure as both object of desire and desirable being with which to identify’ has been astutely recognised by Alex Potts, in his detailed account of Winckelmann’s sexual politics, as the central dialectic of Winckelmann’s investment in the ideal male nude.16 In other words, following Winckelmann’s own example, the male reader/viewer is encouraged both to aspire to the physical beauty of Apollo and to desire it as other, finding himself locked in the homoerotic narrative. The transformation of the modern viewer into ancient worshipper completes the complex play of removals and displacements that characterises Winckelmann’s homoerotic approach to ancient Greek art. As the ancient Apollos are always on the point of resuming human shapes, the living Winckelmann is forever trying to fade away into the ancient past. In this text of suspended atmospheres the ancient and modern subjects engage in a fantastic ‘love story’ that makes Winckelmann’s chest swell with romantic emotion.17 Like the union of Pygmalion with Galatea, Winckelmann’s romance with Apollo is a myth of just reward of sexual desire.

Pater’s Winckelmann Writing about Winckelmann, Pater wanted to offer a powerful example of the encounter with Greece as topos of breach and renewal. Winckelmann’s Hellenic ideal is easily assimilated into the tradition of artistic and personal freedom that informs Pater’s concept of renaissance: his experience is said to ‘reproduce’ the conditions of that time in the early Renaissance when ‘the buried fire of ancient art rose up




from under the soil’ (I: 184). Like the other artists and thinkers in The Renaissance, Winckelmann is presented as a reformer of his native culture, eighteenth-century Germany, a world trapped in a lingering medievalism and still waiting to be emancipated from its oppressiveness and untempered Gothic. The essay contains Pater’s fiercest critique of medieval art and those who celebrate it as an ideal, which he conducts in the terms derived from Winckelmann’s History. Using Winckelmann’s own aesthetic arguments, Pater argues for the superiority of Hellenism to other modes of culture, notably medieval Christianity – a ‘frozen world’ (I: 184) according to Pater, inherently inimical to artistic expression. Images of a bright and serene Hellas, reflected in the ancient statues, are set in opposition to the murky, consumptive atmosphere of the Middle Ages represented by their painted saints. The aesthetic failure of medieval culture, manifested in works which are overcharged with Christian symbolism like Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, is a visible sign of a diseased moral sense. Pater invites his readers to look with ‘regret’ at the passage from paganism to the Christian order, in which men and women ‘contend for a perfection that makes the blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world about us’ (I: 222). The Greek ideal, by contrast, is ‘facile and direct’ (I: 184), and is characterised by an overwhelming sense of harmony (one of Winckelmann’s overarching principles), both within the individual, in terms of a spontaneous integration of desire and ethics, and between the individual and nature. For moderns used to Christian obscurantism and repression, the encounter with ancient Greece is an epiphanic experience. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is that more liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. (I: 184) Winckelmann’s contribution to the long history of the Renaissance is to have brought his contemporaries back to the ‘liberal’ ideal of ancient Greece in order to correct the mistakes of the Christian Middle Ages: their mortification of the senses, their false promises of redemption, and their failure to achieve any real emancipation. Pater uses the example of Winckelmann to show that the Greek ideal, so historically remote yet ‘so near to us all the while’, is still available in the nineteenth century to those who want to look for it.




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An important part of Winckelmann’s Hellenism, for Pater, is his embrace of a pre-Christian and decidedly non-Christian sexuality, which is described as ‘shameless and childlike’, and, borrowing Hegel’s term, as Heiterkeit, ‘the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame’ (I: 222, 221). It remains ambiguous whether this pagan model of sensuality is completely divested of its sexual component or whether it is in fact so strongly based on sexual desire as to make libido a driving principle of its epistemology. Whatever the case, Pater’s Winckelmann, for all the ‘sexlessness’ of his interests, lives an intensely erotic life, practising his theory that the fulfilment of homoerotic desire is integral to the process of understanding ancient art. Pater memorably shows Winckelmann fingering ancient statues with ‘unsinged hands’ and apprehending ‘the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch’ (I: 222, 193, my italics). But Pater could not find enough material to support this claim in Winckelmann’s writings, in which, as we have seen, physical contact is realised only on a mythic level. So he based it on the evidence of his letters, which he claims to make ‘an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art ’ (I: 193). In one of these letters, which Pater calls ‘characteristic’, Winckelmann claims that ‘those who are observant of beauty only in women [. . .] seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art’ (I: 192). Pater quotes at length from Winckelmann’s correspondence with Friedrich von Berg, a young Lithuanian nobleman with whom he had fallen in love after a brief meeting: Our intercourse has been short, too short both for you and me; but the first time I saw you, the affinity of our spirits was revealed to me: your culture proved that my hope was not groundless; and I found in a beautiful body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense of beauty. My parting from you was therefore one of the most painful in my life [. . .]. (I: 191–2) There can be no doubt about the amorous intent of these sentences, which in fact convinced von Berg to sever all contact with Winckelmann, alienated by his forthcoming attitude. There can also be no doubt that Pater’s choice of quoting from the letters reveals that his treatment of Winckelmann’s homosexuality is intentional and not, as Maurizia Boscagli suggests, a ‘slip’.18 Pater deliberately insists on portraying Winckelmann’s homoerotic leanings as part of his Greekness,




unequivocally talking of an ‘affinity with Hellenism [which] was not merely intellectual’ and affording us a forbidden glance at the ‘many young men’ that Winckelmann had ‘known’ (I: 191). Pater’s descriptions of Winckelmann’s friendships with young men in eighteenthcentury Rome update to a modern setting the practice of ancient Greek pederastic eros, an acceptable bond between an elder and a younger man in which the older partner offered experience – a type of social training in effect – in exchange for the pleasure of being in contact with youth and, occasionally, sexual favours. Pater openly compares Winckelmann to one of the philosophical lovers of boys described by Plato in the Phaedrus (I: 194). Winckelmann’s relationships with young men complete his radical immersion into the Greek life: ‘[T]hese friendships, bringing him into contact with the pride of human form, and staining the thoughts with its bloom, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture’ (I: 191). Winckelmann’s active desire for the male body is presented as an important stage in the development of his understanding of ancient sculpture. Pater’s treatment of male love in ‘Winckelmann’ has rightly attracted the attention of contemporary critics who have read the essay as Pater’s debut in his life-long engagement with the treatment of homoeroticism in the arts and as one of the earliest attempts to define a modern gay sensibility.19 In this context it is important to stress just how ingrained this progressive discourse of emancipation is in the experience of the Greek past. In ‘Winckelmann’, Pater attempts the fusion of a cultural category (the study of Greece) with a psychosexual one (homoerotic desire), presenting the two as the symbiotic components of Winckelmann’s cultural achievement. Winckelmann’s homosexuality is, like his Greek temperament, innate in him but at the same time constructed through his cultural activity as a student of ancient art.20 In ‘Winckelmann’, Pater presents not only the classical Greek past but, crucially, modern Greek studies as a cultural space in which homoerotic desire can be articulated and fulfilled. This move collapses the clear distinction between the intellectual’s interest in Greece and the erotic interest of men in other men, upsetting a precarious balance between the desirable and the inadmissible in nineteenth-century British culture. In his position as tutor of young men in Oxford, Pater was aware of just how dangerous this transposition could be and in the essay he reminds his readers of this danger in his macabre description of Winckelmann’s death by the hand of one of his male lovers. Pater’s memorable image of Winckelmann among the male nudes, ancient and modern, in Rome, is an important contribution to establishing




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the aesthetic as a discourse of sexual tolerance in late nineteenth-century Britain. Oscar Wilde would wittily remark that ‘To be Greek one should have no clothes’,21 capturing in an aphorism the ethos of sexual freedom and the aesthetics of pleasure (to look as well as to expose) that Winckelmann and then Pater associated with ancient Greece. ‘Winckelmann’ made a strong impression on Wilde, who, as a student, copied out passages from it into his Commonplace Book, and who in later life incorporated some of its ideas into his short story ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ (1889) and even, as we shall see, into The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91).22 A less sympathetic commentator, W. H. Mallock, seized on Pater’s Hellenic ideal with hostility. In his satire The New Republic (1877), the aesthetic Mr Rose (a caricature of Pater and probably the first of the many caricatured aesthetes that would flood the popular culture of the 1880s) is said to ‘talk of everybody as if they had no clothes on’.23 Nakedness is here a signifier of Pater’s aestheticism, but the pleasure in the naked body that the Hellenophile aesthete elevates to a high-cultural activity is brought down to the level of pornography: it is viewed by the other characters as intrusive and is exposed as obsessive and anti-social. In The New Republic, Mallock frequently shows Mr Rose using ancient Greece in order to propose a modern cult of sensuality and overindulgence: with this Mallock not only suggests that the Greek taste in the arts goes together with perverted sexual morals, but, in several parts of his book, he also alludes to Pater’s own homosexual leanings. He openly hints at the hushed scandal of 1874, making Mr Rose the recipient of a homoerotic poem written by a ‘boy of eighteen’ and using a caricature of William Money Hardinge, the Oxford undergraduate involved in the scandal, as one of his characters (Robert Leslie).24 It is no wonder that Pater, whose reputation in Oxford had, by that point, already been compromised, should complain to Edmund Gosse about ‘the freedom of some of [the book’s] details’.25 ‘Winckelmann’ is a pioneering psychological study of how sexual preferences colour artistic taste and intellectual life more generally. Its impact is measured by the fact that, after Pater’s essay, the historical Winckelmann became a signifier of modern homosexuality in lateVictorian writing, appearing in this guise, for instance, in Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, mentioned above, but also in sexological literature by Marc-André Raffalovich, Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis among others.26 The line of influence that goes from Winckelmann to Pater and then Wilde helps us to make sense of the process through which samesex desire becomes encoded into the discourse of the aesthetic. Pater’s Winckelmann is the prototype for the persona of the homosexual aesthete that would become widespread in the fin de siècle, be crystallised by





Paganism and Christianity: Pater and Arnold It is perhaps a paradox that while Pater follows Winckelmann in stressing the supreme importance of the Greek ideal, he takes issue with him on the fundamental question of what exactly constitutes this ideal. Behind its eulogistic tone, the essay sounds a note of criticism for what Pater calls Winckelmann’s ‘limitation’: his partial – ‘exquisite but abstract’ – understanding of Greece, which is in fact blind to the elements of ‘life, conflict, evil’ (I: 223). Winckelmann values the Greek past because it offers a distinctive aesthetic formula (‘simplicity and grandeur’) to which successive ages can look as a universal norm and a corrective against the artistic mistakes of their own times. Pater, by contrast, values Greece precisely for its epistemological complexity and its refusal to be fixed into a stable historical identity or single meaning. His reconstruction of ancient Greece departs from Winckelmann’s neoclassical model. Pater is keen to point out the survival of primitive elements, which, like ‘shadows’, continue to haunt the imagination of the Greeks of the classical period (I: 224); he sees in Greek paganism anticipations of the Christian Church, with its religious mysteries, its focus on ritual, and its worship of sorrow; and speaks of a primitive pagan cult of sadness as the common origin for both Greek polytheism and Christianity (I: 200–4). David DeLaura and Richard Dellamora have eloquently argued that ‘Winckelmann’ should be read as a response to Arnold’s essay ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’ (1864).28 Pater effectively revisits the relationship between Greek, medieval, and modern cultures established by Arnold in that essay: overtly criticising Winckelmann, Pater obliquely takes issue with Arnold’s excessive polarisation between a pagan ‘religion of pleasure’ and a Christian ‘religion of sorrow’. Pater’s ancient Greek ideal is therefore not only superior to medieval Christianity for having produced an aesthetically more successful material culture, but it also robs Christianity of what was for Arnold its unique spiritual claim ‘to be a general, popular, religious sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship’.29 Pater’s awareness of this chthonic culture of ancient Greece, centred on the cult of suffering, makes his portrayal decidedly



Wilde’s iconic style, and eventually provide one of the dominant models of twentieth-century gay identity.27 The influence of ‘Winckelmann’ is not restricted to male authors, though. As I argue in the following chapters, female authors like Vernon Lee and Michael Field also repeatedly engage with the legacy of this fundamental essay in their experiments to create a place of their own within aestheticism.

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more complex than Arnold’s, and, as Frank Turner observes, also gives his Hellenism a progressive quality that is lacking in Arnold’s and indeed Winckelmann’s writings.30 The greatness of Greek civilisation as Pater conceives it is in containing within itself conflicting elements (plasticity and formlessness, centripetal and centrifugal forces, Apollonian and Dionysian, Doric and Ionic, etc.), which produce cultural dynamism and a multiplication of meaning, without striving for teleology or resolution. In the writings of the 1860s and 1870s Arnold’s thought is absorbed, amplified, and corrected by Pater. In these years Pater often echoes Arnold, from themes and stances down to specific sentences and turns of phrase.31 The differences between them should not be overstated. When Pater questions the features of Arnold’s Hellenism, for instance, he perverts but does not subvert the terms of Arnold’s critique. On a fundamental level, both Arnold and Pater believe that the ancient Greeks had something that people lacked today. They use ancient Greece to express their dissatisfaction with the state of culture in nineteenth-century England, and in this their common enemy is middle-class philistinism. But, at the same time, Pater tries to steer aesthetic culture, an increasingly powerful anti-bourgeois force of cultural dissent, away from Arnold’s monolithic Apollonian account of ancient Greece and into a vision that is informed by the post-Romantic, sensational, and perverse elements of French Symbolism and Swinburne’s early poetry. In Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866) Swinburne had reintroduced the classical subject matter after the mid-century vogue for medievalism, pioneering the use of classical references and material objects (such as the Louvre Hermaphrodite) within a discourse of perverse sexuality, formal experimentation, and art for art’s sake. After the publication of The Renaissance, Pater applied himself to the systematic study of the archaic and proto-Romantic cultures of ancient Greece, with the intent of rectifying their elision in Winckelmann’s canon and at the same time continuing his ongoing polemic with Arnold. The results of these studies are his essays ‘Demeter and Persephone’, and ‘A Study of Dionysus’, now part of Greek Studies (1895), but originally published in 1876.32 Printed in the polemical forum of the Fortnightly Review, the essays on Demeter and Dionysus still challenge Arnold’s views on Greek religion and art in ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’, but also their later development in Culture and Anarchy (1869). In this work Arnold presents ancient Greece as the historical homeland of the ‘sweetness and light’ that are the pillars of his notion of culture. Arnold uses this ideal to criticise the narrowness of English Puritanism and its negative influence on the development of a harmonious culture




for the nineteenth century. In Culture and Anarchy as in his earlier essay Arnold’s argument relies on a binary structure that opposes the Apollonian humanistic values of civility and culture associated with ancient Greece to a repressive but morally rigorous Protestantism with a clear nonconformist matrix. The features of this schematisation appear most clearly in his well-known dialectic of Hellenism and Hebraism as, respectively, the impulse ‘to see things as they really are’ and the conflicting imperative towards ‘conduct and obedience’.33 Hellenism and Hebraism are both extricated from their original historical contexts and treated as constitutive features of modern English culture. Despite his rhetorical move towards an ideal reconciliation of the two forces, Arnold’s bias is in favour of the Hellenic ideal, as is evident in his closing complaint that the last 200 years of English history have seen an excess of Hebraism. This imbalance has resulted in a weakening of the intellectual life of the nation, which has produced ‘a certain confusion and false movement’ and a loss of ‘efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves’. Arnold calls on the ‘sound order and authority’ of Hellenism to redeem this decadence.34 In the essays on Demeter and Dionysus, Pater corrects Arnold’s sanitised and bloodless idealisation of ancient Greece by focusing on the sidelined elements of primitivism, irrationality, fluidity, murkiness, and the grotesque. The cults of Demeter and Dionysus belong to a pre-classical world and, within the Greek culture of the classical age, are themselves relics of a disappeared past (VII: 81). This image of a survival within a survival outlines complex patterns of transmission; the material rarity of such testimonies invests them with an especially high cultural value. Pater brings to the reader an ancient culture that is already occupied in a sophisticated self-historicising process, negotiating the issue of how to understand its own modernity in relation to its archaic past. This historical consciousness is what makes Greece superior to other ancient civilisations, but it is also what makes it modern inasmuch as its investigations of its past predate the nineteenth century’s own. The Greece that Pater introduces in the essays is a fragmented culture, the result not only of historical change but also of geographical differences, as well as ethnic and social diversity. Pater begins the essay on Dionysus by attacking the misconception, propagated by modern criticism, that the religion of the Greeks was coherent and unified. He claims the need to speak of the ‘religions’ of the Greeks (VII: 9), alerting his readers to elements of locality and pluralism that are suppressed in Winckelmann’s and Arnold’s accounts. The cults of Demeter and Dionysus belong to a religion that is ‘nearer to the earth’ (VII: 102)




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than the lofty circle of the Olympian deities. They represent a decidedly anti-classical aesthetics that privileges the rough and monstrous, and that certainly does not share the iconography of light and tranquillity favoured by Arnold and Winckelmann. It is telling that the sources on which Pater draws for his studies are similarly marginal to the classical canon: Homeric hymns (as opposed to the epics), Orphic literature, the work of Euripides, wooden (as opposed to marble) statues, and even the modern oil painting of the pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, which is said to give ‘a complete and very fascinating realisation’ of the half-tones and the motive of melancholia that are attached to the religion of Dionysus (VII: 42). In the cults of Demeter and Dionysus ancient worshippers embraced the experience of suffering and death, of literally

Figure 3 Simeon Solomon, Bacchus (1867). © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery




being taken underground like in the myth of Persephone, in order to sound the most hidden depths of the psychological knowledge of oneself and of the human condition in general, finding themselves staring into the unconscious, the inadmissible, and the tabooed. These are what Pater calls the ‘dark possibilities’ (VII: 44) of these cults, which, in the case of Dionysus, ritualise ecstasy, violence, extreme states of consciousness, and loss of self, and, in their extreme forms, produce human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the sparagmos, a ritual dismemberment of a live animal – sometimes, as in Euripides’s Bacchae, a human being.35 At the same time, the cults of Demeter and Dionysus are in themselves complete religions, which, not unlike Christianity, offer ‘a sacred representation or interpretation of the whole human experience’ (VII: 10), a self-sufficient epistemology of the relationship of human beings to nature and its cycles. In these essays as in ‘Winckelmann’, Pater wants to show that the ‘worship of sorrow’ was an important part of pagan worship in order to argue against Arnold’s simplified representation of a morally undeveloped paganism. For Arnold the value of knowing ancient Greece, and the purpose of practising Hellenism in the present, is to revive elements of a pagan past whose ethical beliefs have been rightfully superseded but whose cultural ideal can still be validly used to improve modern culture. While Hellenism is needed to modify and enlighten Hebraism, it is bound to fulfil its role in the context of a society that still upholds at least part of the authority of Christian doctrine. It is therefore important for Arnold’s argument that Greek and Christian cultures should be treated as two neatly discrete entities. Pater, on the other hand, finds a pagan heritage for European culture that already contains the ethical sophistication of the Christian faith – ‘the perfecting of the moral nature’ (VII: 49) –, and this enables him to call into question the originality of Christianity and to make its teachings somewhat redundant. In direct contrast to Arnold, Pater therefore stresses the potential similarities between pagan and Christian religious sentiments, emphasising the proto-Christian or what DeLaura calls ‘the “Biblical” and “medieval” quality of Greek myth, its “sacredness” and “mystery”’.36 Relying on the new science of comparative mythology championed in Britain by his Oxford contemporary Max Müller, Pater repeatedly associates Dionysus with Christ: the image of the suffering Dionysus, an unrecognised ‘divine child’, prefigures the crucified Christ as ‘an emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering’ (VII: 51, 50). Elements of the myth of Dionysus are moreover identified with the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. Similarly the worship of Demeter, who pines after the unjust loss of her child,




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Persephone, snatched away by the evil forces of the underworld, prefigures the iconography and religious significance of the medieval cult of the Virgin. Perversely echoing Swinburne’s ‘Dolores’, Pater calls Demeter ‘our Lady of Sorrows, the mater dolorosa of the ancient world’ (VII: 114), and compares representations of the goddess to Michelangelo’s mater dolorosa and Leonardo’s Virgin of the Balances (VII: 145, 147). Tracing a tradition that brings together the cults of Demeter and Dionysus, the gods of corn and wine respectively, Pater also finds a pagan precedent for the symbolism of Christian communion. Demeter and Dionysus form a holy family that predates the constitutive unit of Christian worship, in its religious sentiment, to use Arnold’s phrase, and in its aesthetic and moral significance. The essays on Dionysus and Demeter show Pater at his most pagan. Pater contemplates the disappearance of the pre-classical past with genuine regret. In the essay on Dionysus he offers us a striking glimpse of the Athens of Peisistratus, with its steep rocky ways climbing among the small rustic buildings to the hilltop, destroyed by the Persians, ‘which some of us perhaps would rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the greater one’ (VII: 41). A similar romanticisation of loss is at work throughout the essays: the scattered fragments of the disappeared archaic cults hold for him the revelatory power of the half-known. But the image of the brutally destroyed pre-classical Athens also prefigures the wreck of pagan culture by the hand of Christianity, a topic that he had already treated with emotional intensity in ‘Winckelmann’. As in ‘Winckelmann’, in these essays Pater tries to make Greek paganism attractive to his readers by impressing them with its strong artistic tradition. And, as in ‘Winckelmann’, a large part of the appeal of pagan culture resides in its promise of sexual freedom in a context in which desire and gratification are not at odds with moral and social codes. In the essays on Dionysus and Demeter this liberal ideal is located in a pre-classical primitivism and is less focussed on the homoerotic than on an ideal of joyous participation in the unrepressed sexual freedom of nature, which multiplies the potential for physical pleasure but also explores those ‘dark’ possibilities of the erotic which include violence, self-destruction, and death – topics in which Pater was becoming increasingly interested in the 1870s. Even so, in ‘A Study of Dionysus’ references to artists such as Michelangelo and Simeon Solomon (who had been involved in a homosexual scandal in 1873) point the reader to a rich tradition of homoerotic art for which the myth of Dionysus functions as ur-myth, and in which Pater’s own essay begs to be read.37




Pater would go on exploring the theme of the violent suppression of an artistically and sexually liberating paganism by Christian culture in later writings. His imaginary portraits ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ (1886) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), inspired by Heinrich Heine’s myth of the return of the pagan gods in the Middle Ages, dramatise the clash between ancient Greek and medieval Christian morality. The images of extreme violence and insanity that conclude these narratives develop Pater’s warning, already present in his description of Winckelmann’s murder in Trieste, that the recreation of a pagan lifestyle in the present might be psychologically and socially unsustainable.38 Nonetheless, Pater’s essays on Greek myth of the mid 1870s argue that aestheticism should persevere in its counter-cultural and regenerative mission, espousing paganism and perversion even at the risk of alienation and, ultimately, self-destruction.

Dionysus and Other Studies The essays on Demeter and Dionysus, together with ‘Romanticism’, ‘Wordsworth’, and ‘The School of Giorgione’ among others, had been selected by Pater for inclusion in a collection of essays due to come out in 1879, which would have been Pater’s second book-length publication, after The Renaissance. The project was abandoned when Pater, on 30 November 1878, abruptly instructed his publishers to break up the type at his own expense.39 Laurel Brake has suggested that the libel trial Whistler v. Ruskin, which had taken place only a few days earlier, and the general anti-Greek feeling among conservative reviewers, might have been responsible for Pater’s change of mind.40 The previous year, for instance, the Contemporary Review had published an article by Richard St. John Tyrwhitt in which the Greek scholarship of Arnold and Symonds was attacked for its agnostic feelings and, in the case of Symonds, for its fascination with homoeroticism.41 On the other hand, Pater’s decision, in the months preceding the projected publication, to alter the title of the volume from ‘The School of Giorgione’ and Other Studies to Dionysus and Other Studies shows that Pater had determined to shift the focus of the whole book towards the ancient Greek theme.42 Pater probably became increasingly dissatisfied with the heterogeneous nature of the collection, which was to comprise, next to his studies of myth, essays on Measure for Measure, Love’s Labours Lost, and Charles Lamb. As his letter to Macmillan makes clear, he realised that the essays needed further revision and postponed the publication to an indefinite point in the future.43 The idea of completing a volume on Greek myth




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stayed in Pater’s mind for some time, as Lee was still able to report in 1881 that ‘Pater meditates spending one of his vacations near Rome, in order to work at his new book on Mythology’.44 The project, however, never took shape, and the essays were all published as part of other collections. The pieces on Demeter and Dionysus were not reprinted during Pater’s lifetime: together with later essays on Greek art, they became part of Greek Studies, which was put together by Pater’s executor, C. L. Shadwell, one year after his death. It is in the artificial context of that book that they have mostly been read to this day. An unpublished manuscript dating from the mid to late 1870s titled ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’ was probably written as a potential preface to the 1879 volume.45 ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’ opens with a programmatic statement about the reception of ancient Greece in modern critical practice: ‘[i]n all treatments of Gk. things at the present day, it is the rom[antic] element, the elements of strangeness, passion, colour, as opposed to the elements of [blank], the classicism of the classics wh. most needs enforcing’ (fol. 1R). The essay develops a critique of Winckelmann and of the use of his theories in Lessing’s Laocoön. Pater looks back to his 1867 essay and, while he still grants that the ‘gracious Hellenic ideal is the threshold of all true understanding of ancient art’ (fol. 4R), he argues that ‘a complete criticism requires not merely the apprehension of an abstract metaphysical ideal or type, but a sense of imaginative work, the conditions of wh. are passion and invention, energy and spontaneity, in endless variety and freedom of unclassified forms’ (fol. 5V). In a crossed-out passage we read that ‘[i]nvention and passion, in a word what we call the rom[antic] elements and wh. are really present in the complete Hellenic ideal these are the true complement of Hellenic Universality and Blitheness – of Gk. Cheerfulness & Breadth’ (fols 6R–6V). The unpublished ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’ sums up Pater’s ambition, in his Greek scholarship of the 1870s, to supersede Winckelmann and Arnold, enlarging their canons in order to include the unorthodox categories of ‘invention and passion’ – an inversion both of Winckelmann’s ‘simplicity and grandeur’ and Arnold’s ‘sweetness and light’. The repeated insistence, in the projected introduction, on the ‘romantic’ element of ancient Greece highlights important thematic links between Pater’s studies of Greek myth and his essays on Wordsworth and on Romanticism, which were also intended to go into the aborted volume. In ‘Demeter and Persephone’, for instance, Pater regrets the ‘misconception’ that brings critics to underestimate ‘the influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art’, which results




in the suppression of ‘motives of strangeness’ and ‘the beauty which is born of difficulty’ (VII: 111). Demeter and Dionysus are the manifestations of this romantic spirit, which, in Pater’s account, pre-dates the classical age of ancient Greek culture. In the essays the anachronistic romanticism of ancient Greece is repeatedly connected to the historical Romanticism of the early nineteenth century. Pater makes numerous references to Wordsworth, Shelley, Scott, and Blake. The romantic art of Simeon Solomon, with its use of pre-Raphaelite features and its psychological focus, is preferred to actual ancient examples as a full realisation of the Dionysian motive. And the rural and organic cultures of pre-classical Greece are seen to prefigure the poetics of a Wordsworthian Romanticism founded on ‘a sympathy between the ways and aspects of outward nature and the moods of men’ (VII: 96–7).46 In ‘Wordsworth’, Pater uses the same approach, arguing that to Wordsworth ‘every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse’ (V: 46–7). This time, though, the historical Romanticism of the early nineteenth century is shown to be a direct development of a neglected aspect of ancient Greek culture. Pater uses the familiar figure of ‘survival’ of ancient Greece in order to explain Wordsworth’s poetics: ‘[i]t was like a “survival”, in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive condition [ . . .] wherein all outward objects alike, including even the works of men’s hands, were believed to be endowed with animation, and the world was “full of souls” – that mood in which the old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange aftergrowths’ (V: 47–8). The projected volume, Dionysus and Other Studies, was to trace the growth, development, and survival through history of the romanticism of ancient Greece and present it as a trans-historical current that runs parallel to the classicism analysed by Winckelmann and Arnold. The characteristics of this de-historicised romanticism as ‘a spirit which shows itself at all times, in various degrees’ (V: 257) are presented most clearly in ‘Romanticism’, later to become the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations (1889), a piece that was published between the two essays on myth.47 Here Pater traces a fundamental dialectic between classicism and romanticism, which is already at work in Greek civilisation, and which is the motor for the continuous evolution of European art. The essay gestures towards a reconciliation of classical and romantic aesthetics, arguing against the tendency to polarise the two and abuse their difference. Nevertheless, as the extensive use of French Romantic sources suggests, Pater




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really aims to vindicate the breadth of romanticism as critical category and enlarge the scope of its applicability to the study of ancient Greece. He invites his readers to revisit the classical collections of the Louvre and the British Museum in order to take a fresh look at the art works there, and discover for themselves the distinctly romantic features of the material remains of antiquity. Drawing on Stendhal’s theory that ‘all good art was romantic in its day’ (V: 255), Pater tries to effect a reconciliation between the aesthetics of Homer and Pheidias and the literature of Gautier, Balzac, Hugo, Goethe, and Emily Brontë. If Dionysus and Other Studies had gone to press, its romantic Greece would have challenged the very foundations of Victorian Hellenism, bringing the ancient past closer to modern English letters than ever before.

The aesthetic life In his early writings Pater strives to impress on his contemporaries the need for a new culture that will reconcile the great historical rift between classicism and romanticism. Late-Victorian aestheticism comes into being with this very identity – as a late-Romantic culture that looks to the Greek past in order to create a new artistic norm for its times. The mission of aestheticism as Pater conceives it is not only to produce innovative art works, but to re-conceptualise the entire relationship between the individual and the experience of art, shifting it away from a strict dualistic logic that separates philosophy from sensation, ethics from desire, and, more generally, intellectual conduct from ‘success in life’ (I: 236). In ‘Winckelmann’, Pater takes Goethe as the prime example of a synthesis of ‘the Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty’ (I: 226–7). Winckelmann’s work had certainly been groundbreaking but he had failed to translate his Hellenism into original artistic creation. For this reason Pater must concede that ‘he is infinitely less than Goethe’ and that, viewed from the late nineteenth century, his work must chiefly be valued as a precondition for Goethe’s larger achievement (I: 226). Goethe’s culture absorbs and digests the ‘note of revolt’ (I: 226) struck by Winckelmann: transforming Winckelmann’s intuition into cultural practice, Goethe solves the question of how to express ‘the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal’ within an art form that contains ‘the fulness [sic.] of the experience of the modern world’ (I: 230). His experiments in poetry and fiction successfully turn the knowledge of the past into a regenerated present, scholarship into lifestyle.




The passage from Winckelmann to Goethe provides Pater with a model to conceptualise the influence and practical uses of antiquity in the nineteenth century. Modern culture is dispersive and fractured by conflicting moralities; it is haunted by its own sense of belatedness and what Friedrich Schiller calls its ‘sentimentalisch’ state of permanent estrangement from nature.48 In the modern world Greek culture is nonetheless not a ‘lost art’ (I: 227). While it would be wrong to use the knowledge of ancient Greece only for the purpose of imitation, it is now more necessary than ever to look back to the Greek past in order to apprehend ‘the eternal problem of culture – balance, unity with one’s self, consummate Greek modelling’ (I: 228). ‘Winckelmann’ ends on a prophetic note: the real challenge of Hellenism is to learn to be ancient and modern at the same time, realising the classical ideal in one’s self, and striving after ‘the completeness and serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism’ (I: 228). Every one who aims at the life of culture is met by many forms of it, arising out of the intense, laborious, one-sided development of some special talent [. . .]. But the proper instinct of self-culture cares not so much to reap all that those various forms of genius can give, as to find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life. (I: 228–9) This is Pater’s definition of Goethe’s concept of ‘life in the whole’ (Ganzheit), the ideal of a ‘higher life’ characterised by a relentless engagement with culture aimed at self-improvement. Goethe’s misquoted motto, ‘Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben’ (I: 228), is employed by Pater as the formula for a radical mode of life, derived from the ancient Greek ideal, which operates on a negative paradigm of continuous renunciation of the part (the various forms of culture) for the whole (‘the supreme, artistic view of life’).49 Pater effectively claims Goethe’s Romantic Hellenism as a historical precedent for his own late-Romantic use of the aesthetic as an instrument of cultural critique. Symonds, who believed that Goethe had ‘lived a Greek life in the nineteenth century’, would also use Goethe’s authoritative example in order to caution his readers against the dominant Victorian practice of ‘always looking for




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culture in the decidedly pure and moral’. For Symonds ‘[e]verything that is great promotes cultivation as soon as we are aware of it.’50 Similarly, Lee talks of the doctrine of art for art’s sake as a form of ‘Goethianism’.51 Among the promoters of aestheticism, Goethe came to be seen as an advocate of the need to detach art from moral learning, as the initiator of a revolt against didacticism in art that culminates in the provocative formulation of art for art’s sake. In Pater’s account of Goethe’s notion of aesthetic autonomy, the individual is challenged to abandon transcendental systems of signification and what we now call meta-narratives (including Christian dogma) in favour of a secular epistemology of sensation that concentrates on observing ‘the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life’ (I: 230). The practical aim of this doctrine is self-development or Bildung – to ‘mould our lives to artistic perfection’ (I: 230). Pater transfers the application of aesthetics from the field of interpretation of texts and material objects to the fields of psychology and social behaviour, and in so doing he effectively frees the individual (not only the artist) from moral imperatives, liberating desire, and offering a model for a conduct of life that is based on a secular and joyous experience of culture and the world of phenomena. The full force of this advocacy of aesthetic autonomy emerges from the well-known ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance. Here Pater gives the most influential formulation of the fundamental principle of aesthetic culture, that the conduct of life cannot be separated from art.52 In the ‘Conclusion’, Pater reiterates the point he had made in ‘Winckelmann’, arguing that the ‘theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us’ (I: 237–8). Pater uses the image of a world in continuous evolution, pitted against the brevity of individual life, to justify his impatience with fixity and determination and his conviction that meaning, like desire, fluctuates, continuously fragmenting and rearranging itself into new configurations. In the ‘Conclusion’, Pater expands the plea for a new ‘life of culture’, famously described here as the act to ‘burn always with this hard, gemlike flame’, which is ordered around the antinomian imperatives to ‘discriminate’, ‘see and touch’, and never to stop or acquiesce (I: 236, 237). The ‘Conclusion’ is an ambitious manifesto that urges readers to rethink the place of art and culture in the nineteenth century. Its practical argument is that culture divorced from moral teachings improves the quality of individual life. Its rhetoric infuses Arnoldian




anti-philistinism with a rich appeal to the senses. Pater quotes Novalis’s dictum ‘philosophieren ist dephlegmatisieren vivificieren’, in order to argue that the purpose of theories about culture is ‘to rouse, to startle [the human spirit] to a life of constant and eager observation’ (I: 236). And in the ‘Conclusion’, Pater offers precisely such a theory that aims to ‘dephlegmatise’ the complacent and flaccid institutions of middle-class culture; to revitalise the hoards of those who ‘sleep before evening’ (I: 237), who have been made blind and numb by habit, and who have wrongly invested in the longer term without understanding that the gratifications of culture are immediate and everywhere around us. The aesthetic life that Pater advocates in the ‘Conclusion’ is explicitly theorised in an unpublished essay datable to the late 1870s (‘The Aesthetic Life’), where he reiterates the need for a ‘life of sensation’ that possesses ‘its own moral code, has its own conscience, clear and near, and with no problematic assumptions’.53 The individual drive towards self-culture, manifested in the continuous instinct to enlarge and refine the experience of the senses, leads to a ‘new “ethick”’ (fol. 9R), which is explicitly conceived in opposition to conventional (old) moral teachings. Playing on the language of capitalist economy, Pater speculates whether this ‘“aesthetic” formula of conduct’ (fol. 9R) is a profitable addition to modern society: ‘Is it sagacious, and a true economy it may be asked, by use, to develope [sic.] further capacities already so much at a loss, which must be so constantly checked in contact with the bourgeois generation amid which after all we have to live’ (fol. 13R)? The answer is predictably in the affirmative: the dominant bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, a ‘tame’ and ‘unlovely’ scientific age, ‘for which all mysteries have been solved’, has a ‘twofold need to care for these things’ (fols 12R–14R). The radicalisation of the aesthetic ideal into a way of life lifts the individual above the ugliness of the age, setting the aesthetic subjectivity in opposition to dominant moral, social, and political superstructures. ‘The Aesthetic Life’, an unpublished and unfinished piece, contains a tone of open political critique that is rare in Pater, and that would undoubtedly have been diluted if the essay had been revised for publication. But the explicit social dissent articulated here is more implicitly at work in many of his other works. Going back to the ‘Conclusion’, it seems clear that the conduct of life that Pater advocates there is also a ‘life of sensation’ or an ‘aesthetic life’ – the two formulations, in fact, converge etymologically in the Greek term , things perceptible by the senses (as opposed to , things perceptible to the mind). The image of modernity conveyed in the ‘Conclusion’ is also one of an unlovely




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age in which science and specialisation have dislocated artistic culture from everyday life. In this context Pater’s aesthetic life must necessarily be an anti-social creed. To burn with a gemlike flame is to resist ‘habit’, that is, social conventions, and those forces that call us ‘out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action’ (I: 234). Success in life is not reached through activity, production, financial gain, middle-class materialism, or the observance of religious orthodoxies. To succeed, in Pater’s terms, is to be counter-cultural, to oppose the imperative to belong to what is mainstream and established. To live the aesthetic life is to develop one’s subjectivity in counterpoint to one’s historical moment. Pater’s doctrine in the ‘Conclusion’ revives a Romantic, and especially Shelleyan, poetics of alienation, according to which it is both the artist’s unfortunate destiny and his fortunate prerogative to inhabit an ethical realm that lies outside social structures. In Pater, though, the field of radical intervention is crucially not limited to the act of artistic creation, but extends to the appreciation of art or, even more simply, to the artistic experience of physical phenomena. This shift is made possible by Pater’s adoption of a meaning of ‘aesthetic’ that, as we have seen in the Introduction, is based on the acts of reception and reconstruction. The Shelleyan intertextuality should help us to re-qualify the accusation of elitism that has often been raised against Pater. It is true that, like the ideal of transparency outlined in ‘Diaphaneitè’, the aesthetic life is not for the hoi polloi: it only makes sense as a minority discourse, an alternative or radical choice. But Pater’s position is informed by a Shelleyan idealism according to which the life of art possesses an inherently democratic energy that can make people equal across social and national barriers. For Pater as for Shelley art is valued for its revolutionary power. Aestheticism in Pater’s early formulation is not committed to maintaining the existing order by taking the individual outside society; it rather shows that art is aligned to clarity of vision and dissent. The minorities which Pater affirms are therefore not the social and economic elites, but the communities of authors and readers that are in the margins of culture and history – like the cults of Dionysus and Demeter which he would go on to explore some years later. He argues for the importance of what in the ‘Preface’ he calls the ‘things said by the way’, and the belief that meaning is to be looked for outside the obvious and dominant. This is why Pater’s thought has been seen as a precursor of deconstruction.54 In terms of gender politics, the doctrine of the ‘Conclusion’ frees the aesthetic man from the ideal of manliness and from the dominant codes of nineteenth-century masculinity, based on work, competition, and financial success. On a larger scale, though, the aesthetic life emancipates




the individual, male and female, from structures of conformity. Between the lines, it contains an argument for sexual liberation. Although it would have been impossible for Pater to treat this subject explicitly at the time, sexual experimentation is clearly part of his incitement to gather as many impressions as we can, to multiply, and to intensify. Those who treat life in the spirit of art will seek sexual pleasure for its own sake and not for utilitarian ends (bourgeois marriage and reproduction). Following the minority discourse described above, cultural authority is displaced onto the fringes of sexual behaviour: intensity and clarity of vision are located in unorthodox forms of sexual pleasure and perversions.55 The contents of the ‘Conclusion’ have been so widely discussed in recent years that it seems unnecessary to offer a more detailed analysis here. But the widespread critical practice of seeing in it an embryonic formulation of modernist or post-modernist ideas has tended to obscure the obvious fact that the ‘Conclusion’ is first and foremost about ancient Greece, specifically about ancient Greek hedonistic philosophy.56 I believe that in order to appreciate the full force of the ‘Conclusion’ we should read it as a revival, not an anticipation. Pater brings modernity and antiquity face to face, in the form of the correspondence between ‘the tendency of modern thought’ and Heraclitus’s doctrine of the ‘perpetual flux’ referred to in the epigraph.57 The ‘Conclusion’ is a practical example of how ideas from the ancient past can be revived in order to challenge and push forward the culture of the present. As he had done in ‘Winckelmann’ and as he would do in the essays on Demeter and Dionysus, in the ‘Conclusion’, Pater tries to make ancient Greek culture attractive by highlighting its modernity, using striking visual and sensual imagery, referring it to Romantic literature and art, and claiming the authority of modern science. It is important to emphasise the Greek context in order to show how wrong it would be to think of Pater’s aestheticism, even at its most aesthetic (as it were), as being intrinsically ahistorical. Carolyn Williams has persuasively demonstrated that in Pater’s writings aestheticism and historicism feature as strictly interrelated ‘methods of knowledge or strategies of representation’.58 The ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance more than any other text shows us how central ancient Greece is in this fusion of aesthetic perception and historical (re)interpretation. Greece, liberated from the remote past but always only half-known, is the ur-text that is forever being rewritten through history and that forever proves the inexhaustibility of meaning and the possibility of radical rereading. Pater’s aestheticism is so well suited to utopian gestures of cultural reform like the ‘Conclusion’




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because it empowers the reader, taking meaning outside of the remote past and the fixed form of the text or art object and into the present and the dynamic act of reception, showing that agency is not exclusive to the creator but extends to the spectators and critics of art. Charles Martindale, drawing from a tradition that extends from Kant to Pater, describes the aesthetic as ‘the sphere of the revolutionary and of pure modernity’, where good and bad are not predetermined and every encounter between subject and art object contains the opportunity of renewal.59 Not unlike reader-response theory in the 1960s, aestheticism rises to the challenge of opening up texts in order to make art and literature interesting to a generation of disillusioned readers who had been alienated by the moralising habits and didacticism of the critical establishment. Pater shows that knowing Greece can, literally, affect the way we live now. Greece teaches modern readers another type of life, the aesthetic life that sets the individual apart from the culture of his or her times. Pater thus shows that the study of Greece can be put to a much more radical use than was allowed for by the curricula of educational institutions. This is why the ‘Conclusion’ was fiercely attacked by conservative critics when it came out, especially within Oxford; and this is why Pater was persuaded to withdraw it from the second edition of The Renaissance, admitting that ‘it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.’60 Unlike twentieth-century readers, nineteenth-century reviewers were quick not to miss the Greek content. The author of an unsigned article in the Examiner, tellingly titled ‘Modern Cyrenaicism’, objected precisely to the fact that there was ‘nothing new’ in Pater’s ‘Conclusion’, sensibly arguing that it is a straightforward retelling of Aristippus’ theory of the pleasure of the moment ( ) – the foundational premise of the school of Cyrene and of ancient Greek hedonistic philosophy. He went on to accuse Pater’s revival of this ‘pulsation philosophy’ of sensationalism, atheism, and anti-social tendencies.61 The American artist W. J. Stillman, writing in the Nation, also took issue with the revivalist ideology that is behind Pater’s concept of renaissance: ‘a renaissance that is the renewal of dead forms is not a new birth, it is a galvanic resuscitation; and the modern sympathy (like Winckelmann’s) with the Renaissance so-called, is but a morbid abhorrence of life and health, and fondness for death and artifice.’62 Stillman’s discourse of disease and unnaturalness is a critique of Pater’s anti-Darwinian practice of looking ‘backwards’ to the ancient past in order to achieve newness and regeneration; but it also hints at the perverted sexual subtext of Winckelmann’s and Pater’s writings, moral




degeneracy being supposedly a consequence of contravening the natural law of evolution, of going back to the unevolved morality of the Greeks regarding sexual customs. In a similar vein, Margaret Oliphant, in a review full of condescension and mistrust, claims that the ‘Conclusion’ shows what ‘Greek – not the language but the tone of mind and condition of thought, taken up a thousand years or so too late, on the top of a long heritage of other thoughts and conditions – may bring Oxford to. Poor, young, too rich, too clever, too dull, too refined souls! Greekness, if we may use such a word [. . .] is as different a thing from the real light-hearted Greek, in its own time and generation, as is the armour of a masquerade from the rude coats of mail in which our forefathers hacked and hewed at each other.’63 The same Darwinian rhetoric is at work in this passage, in the striking opposition between modern refinements and primitive barbarism. Pater’s Greek revival is a ‘masquerade’ that brings moral corruption to Oxford, the place in which, through a classical education, young men are turned into mature citizens. Oliphant accuses Pater of having abused his position as Oxford tutor and having betrayed his responsibility towards his students and colleagues alike. She emphasises a distinction between a proper knowledge of Greece, centred on philology, and an improper one, generated through Pater’s practice of recreating what she calls ‘the tone of mind and condition of thought’ of antiquity. I will come back to the Oxford context in my discussion of Wilde. Here I just want to draw attention to the fact that, appealing to science and philological scholarship, reviewers struggled to reconstruct official and policed boundaries around the meaning of Greece, controlling the act of interpretation and accusing Pater of lack of authenticity and anachronism. The application of aesthetic criticism to the study of the classics gave Pater, from The Renaissance onwards, a reputation of mannered amateurism that was amplified by his modernist reception, and that still, to some extent, survives to this day.64 It is telling that in his posthumous ‘Preface’ to Greek Studies, C. L. Shadwell still felt that he needed to persuade readers that Pater’s aesthetic style should not be understood to be in conflict with ‘the depth and seriousness of his studies’ (VII: 4). The publication of The Renaissance marks the onset of a hostile reception of aestheticism that would gain momentum and visibility in the remaining decades of the century. The enemies of aestheticism believed that Pater’s method generates a false knowledge that could potentially have serious consequences on the moral fibre of the intellectual culture of the nation. For instance, George Eliot, who thought The Renaissance a ‘poisonous’ book, complained of its ‘false principles of criticism and false conceptions of




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life’.65 Gosse remembers that, by the mid 1870s, newspapers were imputing to Pater ‘all sorts of “æsthetic” follies and extravagancies’.66 Pater’s complaint to Gosse, in 1876 – ‘I wish they wouldn’t call me a “hedonist”; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek’ – shows how aware Pater was that issues of interpretation and misinterpretation of things Greek were central in determining the reception of aestheticism.67 Greece assumed a paradigmatic role in the renegotiation of the relationship between knowledge and social responsibility that was launched by aestheticism. Ancient Greece became the fulcrum of the discourse of art for art’s sake around which intellectuals gathered to articulate their dissent from the dominant cultural and moral codes of the nineteenth century. For this reason, from the early 1870s onwards, writing about Greece became a rite of passage for all aspirant aesthetic writers – a necessary act to signal one’s wish to be read as an aesthete and to participate in the definition of this precarious identity. Pater’s words to Gosse also demonstrate his growing anxiety about the need to keep aestheticism pure, taking it back to its original meaning in the midst of attacks by hostile critics and the vulgarisation of its ideas in the press and, later, on the stage. This need gained particular urgency during the 1880s, when the success of popular satires such as Punch and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience made aestheticism better known through caricatures than through the earnest formulations by its exponents. The impulse towards purity motivated Pater to write Marius the Epicurean as an expansion and clarification of his controversial ideas of the ‘Conclusion’. It also motivated him, in 1889, to reprint parts of his early essay on William Morris under the new title ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, in a deliberate effort to define and control what was meant by ‘aesthetic’ – and indeed to restate its undiminished topicality – even at this later stage. But the problematic rift between the Greek and the vulgar understanding of ‘hedonism’ highlighted by Pater also implicitly reveals a doubt about aestheticism’s capacity to speak effectively to readers across the great divide, visualised as the difference between those who know and those who don’t know Greek. Pater’s position here contradicts his commitment to refute prescriptive and fixed acts of interpretation, which, as we have seen, is fundamental to aesthetic criticism. But it can be explained as a product of the personal threat posed on him by the homosexual blackmailing episode of 1874: it expresses Pater’s need to distance himself from discourses of sensual pleasure implied by the vulgar usage of the term ‘hedonist’. In fact, as Pater’s own researches into the past had striven to attest, there




can be no simple distinction between knowing and not knowing Greek, but rather a gradation of different types of knowledge: the multitude of ever changing meanings that are created in the act of knowing one’s impression as it really is. The enemies of aestheticism condemned this impressionism as unscholarly. But there were others who saw that the aesthetic knowledge of Greece promoted by Pater, liberated from the rules of the male academic establishment, could lead to new and exciting experiments in cultural criticism, gender politics, and the arts. It is to some of these that I now want to turn.




Vernon Lee and the Aesthetics of Doubt

. . . if, in such a moment of doubt, we ask ourselves, overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? we shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least. Vernon Lee, ‘The Child in the Vatican’ (1881) Vernon Lee’s debut into aestheticism takes place in the shadow of Pater’s discipleship. Her second collection of essays, Belcaro (1881), adopts the language and method of Pater’s early writings in order to launch an attack against the use of didacticism and ethical principles in art criticism. Lee was only 25 but she had already made her name known, the previous year, as the author of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). At the time of the publication of Belcaro she was paying her first adult visit to England, having been born and brought up in Continental Europe; but her knowledge of English aestheticism was nothing but up-to-date and sharp. Equally sharp was her determination to make a strong contribution to it. In Belcaro the young Lee sets up an opposition between the aesthetic theories of Ruskin and Pater, distancing herself from the former and claiming allegiance to the latter. Her portrait of Ruskin is of a thinker torn by a personal conflict between ethics and aesthetics, reason and desire, and whose writings are maimed by this fracture. Ruskin’s mistake was to have believed that art should unite moral and aesthetic qualities. Instead, Lee claims that ‘the world of the physically beautiful is isolated from the world of the morally excellent: there is sometimes correspondence between them, and sometimes conflict, but both accidental and due to no inner affinity [ . . .]: most often there is no relation at all.’1 She dismisses the search for the good in the beautiful – what she calls 55



2

‘Ruskinism’ – as a thing of the past, and defends instead a theory of art for art’s sake, clearly influenced by Swinburne and Pater, in which beauty and moral corruption can coexist and in which physical sensation is the only mean for the obtainment of an ‘abstract instinct of beauty’ (209). Beauty, for Lee, is ‘a physical quality’ that operates outside the laws of morality: ‘There is no justice, no charity, no moral excellence in physical beauty’ (210). Lee follows the critique of judgement formulated by Kant and adopted by Pater in The Renaissance, which values art precisely because it frees the spectator from moral imperatives. From Pater’s Renaissance, Belcaro adopts the ambition to offer readers a manifesto for a new culture of art: the introduction clearly states that the book intends to ‘convert’ individual readers to a type of aesthetic criticism based on antididacticism, impressions, sensation, and the emotional contact with art. This method, as in Pater’s ‘Preface’, is aimed at restoring the important element of pleasure inherent in the artistic experience, which is suppressed in historical and academic discussions. In this way, Lee creates her own persona as aesthetic critic by using Pater’s theories to criticise and overcome Ruskin. The influence of Pater, so openly embraced at this point, will come to dominate Lee’s career. From her early essays to Euphorion (1884), Juvenilia (1887), Hauntings (1890), and Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), Lee will repeatedly feel the need to come to terms with, to reread, and to rewrite Pater’s aestheticism. Many of her works are haunted (to use one of Lee’s own favourite metaphors) by Pater’s precedent, and she often discusses the crucial question of how to define her authority as aesthetic writer by comparing herself to Pater.

The child among the statues The first essay in Belcaro, ‘The Child in the Vatican’, articulates the complexities of this Paterian intertextuality. Its title clearly alludes to Pater’s short story ‘The Child in the House’ (1878), which explores the influence of sensation on the development of infantile consciousness, while Lee’s treatment of ancient sculpture takes up the argument of ‘Winckelmann’, Pater’s paradigmatic formulation of the relationship between scholarship, aestheticism, and the antique. The Vatican is a prime location in the cultural geography of aestheticism: it is there that readers then and now can find the collections that have shaped the modern canon of ancient sculpture. Its Belvedere Terrace houses the famous statue of Apollo that Winckelmann had described as the highest ideal of Greek taste, placing it in the centre of his History. Other




highlights, extolled by Winckelmann and discussed by many later art historians and aestheticians, include the Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso, and the Antinous. Lee, with characteristic ambition, writes herself into the tradition of Winckelmann and Pater, and takes her readers back to the Vatican in order to revisit the history of aestheticism that had been written by her male predecessors. ‘The Child in the Vatican’ is an eccentric piece, part aesthetic theory and part ‘fairy tale’. The main section consists of an analysis of the Niobe group, a sculptural ensemble which depicts the tale (the most complete version of which is in Ovid) of the slaughter of Niobe and her 14 children by the gods Apollo and Artemis. Several partial examples of this subject have come down to us, and Lee confusingly refers to three different works in her essay: the Chiaramonti Niobid in the Vatican, the dying boy of the Munich Glyptothek, and the famous Niobe Group of the Uffizi in Florence.2 In an essay that is ostensibly on the holdings of the Vatican

Figure 4 Niobe, Uffizi Gallery. Head Detail (photograph circa 1900). BGA-F-09317A-0000. Archivio Brogi / Alinari Archives, Florence.



Vernon Lee and the Aesthetics of Doubt 57

galleries, the choice of this particular group, fragmented examples of which are scattered around various European museums, appears out of place. But the dispersion of the Niobe group and its intricate history of reconstruction are used as a paradigm for the state of fragmentation of Greek culture in the modern period: the group simultaneously confronts the nineteenth-century viewer with the formal accomplishment of ancient art and with its dismemberment by the hand of history. The single pieces of the group must therefore be studied in isolation as they are found in the modern collections of Rome or Munich, or in the display in the Uffizi, where the viewers are encouraged, somewhat deceivingly for Lee, to regard each statue as a self-sufficient art work. In this process the critic follows what one could call a Hegelian path, focussing on individual features and using them to draw general arguments on Greek art and perhaps, more generally, on aesthetics. Lee proceeds to do this through a detailed critique of the relationship between artistic medium and subject matter that is largely indebted to the German tradition, from Winckelmann to Lessing and Hegel. Her conclusion is entirely in line with the German tradition as interpreted by Pater, even if in a simplified formulation: the lesson of the Niobe group (for a book that rejects didacticism, Belcaro is peculiarly keen on lessons) is that ‘the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible or audible’ (48). The greatest achievement of the ancient Greek artist is to have realised this important axiom and, as a consequence, to have aimed for ‘grandeur’, harmony, and ‘beauty of form’, rather than concentrate on realistic detail, as would presumably be expected of a painted or textual version of the same episode (36). In this argument Lee again follows Winckelmann and the Romantic Hellenists both in her choice of canons (‘grandeur’ and ‘harmony’ are loaded words) and in holding up Greek art as the standard for modern artists and theorists. On the way to the definition of timeless beauty, the classical object serves her as the proof that theories of art should be rooted in the experience of pleasure: art for art’s sake.3 This type of formal analysis proves, however, somewhat unsatisfactory. On the one hand, the Niobe group seems well suited to the study of composition and of the relationship of the individual element to the whole, which Lee does by comparing the play of harmonies of the sculptural group to a piece of music. But, on the other hand,




this particular art work reminds us of the fact that our knowledge of antiquity is always partial and imprecise: what was once a coherent group (or a number of coherent groups) in classical times is now permanently divided, incomplete, made up of a confusing number of copies dating from different periods, maimed fragments, and well-preserved figures. Lee alerts us to the fact that all ancient documents, both art objects and literary texts, exist in a state of perpetual intertextuality: they are the unfinished products of a long process of transmission and survival, migration and forced juxtaposition, having been subjected to the laws of history and chance, to acts of interference and constant migration across different media, and to an incessant dialectic of dismembering and piecing back together. The Niobe group wears this complex narrative more transparently than deceptively self-sufficient figures like the Apollo and the Antinous extolled by Winckelmann. Lee initially turns to the scientific method of archaeology in order to encourage her readers to question the systems of knowledge created by the modern museum: ‘Think of this Niobe group, twice humansized, standing on the weather-mellowed, delicately painted marble temple front; the ambertinted figures against the dark hollow formed by the projecting roof; the sun-shine drawing on the black back-ground, as with a luminous pencil, the great solemn masses of light and shadow, the powerfully rhythmed attitudes’ (33). Lee here follows archaeologists in proposing a rereading based on a re-contextualisation of the works. But in order to proceed to her aesthetic argument, she is willing to forego scientific methodology and accept that lack of context is the necessary condition of ancient art in modernity. In this way, she again follows the tradition of Romantic Hellenism, transforming loss into creative energy and perpetuating the myth of the lost original (the single art work but also the ‘whole’ of Greek culture) that, through epiphanic encounters and a sustained process of metonymic substitution, allows the modern student to glimpse into an abstract vision of ‘perfection’ and an ‘overwhelming positive sense of beauty’ (33–4). ‘The Child in the Vatican’ contains the seeds of a critique of Winckelmann that Lee would develop fully in years to come. Even at this early stage, though, a polemical tone is already in evidence. Lee argues for an enlarged canon of Greek art that spans from the archaic age to the late Graeco–Roman period; she refutes the limitations of an exclusive discourse of authenticity that teaches us ‘to admire only one or two schools, and abominate all the others as barbarous, decaying, Græculan, etc., without even looking at them’ (29); and, in a terse aside, she also draws attention to Winckelmann’s misattributions,




naming the Apollo Belvedere among ‘a certain number of impostors of now exploded reputation’ (30). The essay juggles two competing forces: firstly, to follow what we could call an orthodox aestheticism, spanning from Winckelmann to Pater, in which the Greeks are used to support modern aesthetic principles such as the separation of art from morality; and secondly, to resist this discourse, questioning its assumptions about the universal appeal of Greece in the present. Doubts about the real importance of Greek art, like the one expressed in my opening caption (23), are dispelled in the course of the argument but they are nonetheless there to alert the reader to polysemy and alternatives. ‘The Child in the Vatican’ is a clear precedent for Virginia Woolf’s more famous ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, which I have analysed in the Introduction. Lee, like Woolf, is anti-academic inasmuch as she is sceptical that we may be able to obtain a precise knowledge of the ancient past through scholarship. She takes away from the male academies (‘Winckelmann, . . . Quatremère, . . . Ottfried Müller’) the prestige attached to the positive act of ‘knowing’ Greek and empowers the individual reader to reconfigure her relationship with antiquity through pleasure and sensation (29). She criticises the gallery as ‘a place where art is arranged and ticketed and made dingy and lifeless’, a place where the ‘athletes and nymphs and satyrs, and warriors and poets and gods’ are exiled, tamed into an unnatural domestic setting, and held in ‘captivity’ for the scientific study of the modern age (18). Lee predates the modernist sensibility typified by Woolf, which associates the museum with the captivity of the imagination.4 The essayist fixes her gaze throughout on the gulf that separates the moderns from the ancients. But, like Woolf, Lee is seduced by the Greeks, not least because of the claim to universality with which they have been invested by the European tradition of high culture. So, in the end, she cannot help conceding that Greek sculpture might have ‘shaped and trained’ modern taste and criticism more than any other art form from any other period (23). The most effective site of Lee’s dissent is the ‘fairy tale’ that she weaves into the essay in order to complement the aesthetic argument. ‘The Child in the Vatican’ opens with a psychological experiment: Lee tries to enter the mind of a child during a visit to the Vatican museum in order to record the impressions made there by the Greek sculptures. In her reconstruction of the infantile consciousness Lee characterises ancient sculpture through her overwhelming perception of negation, given by the absence of motion, sound, colour, and psychology. The reader is reminded of Pater’s use of Hegel’s concept of Heiterkeit to identify




one of the characteristics of antiquity as ‘the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame’ (I: 221). But, unlike the mature critic, who seeks this state of negation precisely in antithesis to the crowding of impressions transmitted by modern art, Lee’s child is alienated and oppressed by it. Given the choice, the child would naturally gravitate towards painting, a medium that is better suited to express the aesthetics of modernity (22). Here Lee’s essay takes a fantastic turn that points directly forwards to Pater’s, and Lee’s own, better-known tales of gods in exile: she imagines that one day the statues in the Vatican, who ‘are merely stone imprisoned demons, dethroned gods of antiquity’ (24), cast a spell on the child, converting it, as it were, to their own aesthetics. From that day the child experiences all other forms of art in relation to ancient sculpture. In this way, its aesthetic education repeats the chronological evolution of the history of European art, broadly conceived, like in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’, as following a trajectory from sculpture to painting to literature. Lee’s use of the figure of the child is complicated to the point of being confused. On a superficial level it is still in line with a German Romantic tradition, traceable to Winckelmann but most memorably formulated by Schiller and Hegel. These thinkers often describe the Greeks as the children of humanity – childlike in their serene and joyful outlook on life – but also as the children in an evolutionary history of European culture in which old age and decay are embodied by the present. The child in Lee is therefore a figure of the naïve aesthetics of antiquity, in the sense of Schiller’s seminal distinction between naïve and sentimental poetry. Its discomfort in the museum reflects the modern exile of the ancient art objects. But in Lee’s essay the child is also a figure of modernity – of the comparative young age of the modern period. The child’s spontaneous reaction to Greek art is after all one of alienation produced by its own belatedness. It is conspicuously only through the intervention of magic that this condition can be altered. There is another Paterian intertextuality here, namely to the passage in ‘Poems by William Morris’ that I analysed in the Introduction, in which Pater argues that ‘to come face to face’ with Greece as if all intervening ages had not existed is ‘as impossible as to become a little child’. Lee endorses Pater’s point. Her fairy-tale child, who is set free from the burden of reception, is a signifier of disjunction and impossibility. Lee’s use of the supernatural places the stress on the elements of fantasy and desire that pervade classical scholarship and introduces a generic fracture within the essay that teasingly undermines its aesthetic argument. Her artificial reconstruction of the child’s consciousness is a parable of the impossible act of travelling




back in time, of recreating and possessing the past through archaeology and classical studies. The child is, finally, also a veiled autobiographical persona of the aesthetic critic, who understands art through emotion rather than bookish learning. The fairy tale of the child in the Vatican should be read side by side the introduction to Belcaro, in which Lee traces her formation as a critic to her naïve encounter with art as a child: not unlike the Vatican fairy tale, her own experience of art as a young girl in Italy is said to have reversed ‘the training of these days of culture and eclecticism and philosophy, according to which one usually knows all about art, all about its history, ethics, philosophy, schools, epochs, moral value, poetic meaning, and so forth, before one knows art itself, long before one cares a jot for it’ (10). Lee describes her mature work as aesthetic critic as a continuation of this privileged state of infantile consciousness, an effort to ‘justify that perfectly simple, direct connection between art and ourselves, which was the one I had felt, as a child’ (13). Lee’s emphasis on ‘caring’ carries with it an attack on the institutionalisation of art accomplished by theorists and educators. The child’s untutored enjoyment of art for its own sake is the condition to which the aesthetic critic has to aspire, through a negative process of un-reading and un-learning the prescriptive interpretative strategies encountered in the course of a formal education. For Lee, like Pater in the ‘Conclusion’, the aesthete’s battle against the laws of social and moral conformity is a journey backwards: the state of perfect aesthesis, in which intensity of sensation is all that matters, is located in the remote past of individual (childhood) as well as collective history (ancient Greece). The aesthetic critic goes back to these idealised pasts in order to reproduce their benefits in the present. Behind the ostensible modesty of the critic’s self-portrait as a child it is easy to spy the traits of a self-confident cosmopolitanism, which already characterises Lee’s voice at this early stage. The emphasis on her lack of formal training creates a form of self-mythology. By asserting to possess a natural taste for the arts, Lee claims a different cultural capital for herself, which increases in value and authority precisely in proportion to how much it is perceived to be unschooled. But Lee’s adoption of this persona is also a reflection of the actual circumstances of her early education, which was haphazard and unconventional even by nineteenth-century standards: it was carried out at home by a succession of Swiss and German governesses and by her free-thinking mother, who taught her the principles of her own old-fashioned eighteenth-century rational education, concentrating on rhetoric, grammar, philosophy,




and geometry.5 While she became fluent in four modern languages from a very young age, the classical languages did not play an important role in her training. When her half-brother, the future poet Eugene LeeHamilton, went to read classics at Oxford, Lee, like many other gifted Victorian girls, stayed behind and followed his poor progress with keen interest. It need not necessarily have been so. The divisions of learning between female and male children attacked by George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss (1860) were slowly but irrevocably changing. By the late 1870s Lee would already have been able to join the female undergraduates of one of the urban universities or enrol in one of the newly founded women’s colleges in Cambridge or Oxford.6 Lee, however, was never attracted by the prospect of a formal education. Besides, her genteel upper-middle-class background and ambition to become a public intellectual would have made her quite different from the majority of late-Victorian female undergraduates, who typically came from the professional, commercial, or industrial middle classes and attended university with the view of taking up paid work.7 With the peculiar gender inversion that is a constant theme through her life, Lee would have belonged more easily among the well-to-do male Oxford undergraduates, like her brother Eugene, Symonds, or Wilde, who used their training in the school of literæ humaniores as a springboard for future careers as critics and writers.8 While male schoolchildren in Britain learnt the classics through cribs and repetitive grammatical exercises, Lee’s relationship with antiquity developed on classical soil. Living in Rome in her mid teens, she experienced the ancient world in its native setting, during her ramblings through the ruins in the city and the outlying countryside. Her informal tutor in this unconventional classical education was Mary Newbold Sargent (mother of the painter John Singer Sargent), who had no classical learning, but possessed instead the leisure and curiosity of a wealthy American in Europe. The picture of the two women in the Italian sun, bonded by their desire to enjoy culture, makes a striking contrast to endless faded images of male teachers and pupils in the English public schools, and to the regime of discipline, competition, and punishment that governed these institutions. For Lee the act of knowing antiquity would always remain connected with the pleasures of exploring modern Italy and the South, with archaeological sites in the open air, the search for the genius loci, the adventure of travelling, and with the variety of sensory experiences involved in this process. This is the type of untutored learning that Lee glamorises in Belcaro, in which art, emotionally experienced and organically integrated in the texture of everyday life,




is a stimulus for pleasure and companionship. In her more mature criticism, she would keep searching for alternatives that take the experience of art away from academic study, the discourse of specialisation, and stuffiness of all sorts. This is why the encounter with ancient Greece is in Lee almost invariably visual rather than textual: it appeals to an idealised immediacy and universality of the gaze that bypasses the need for a specialised technical knowledge of the ancient languages. Lee’s stance is egalitarian in spirit: you can know Greece even without a formal classical training, as long as you can see and enjoy. The attainment of vision and aesthetic pleasure is of course also the result of a laborious learning process, but one that questions the overwhelming authority of the printed page. In this respect, Lee follows a Victorian tradition of sage and prophetic writing that runs from Ruskin to Pater, in which vision is believed to give access to a higher epistemology. Lee’s cosmopolitan lifestyle had made her as much at home in the South as in Britain from her earliest days; but it had also given her the hybrid identity of someone who is always in between cultures but never fully belongs to one – an identity that, as Hilary Fraser has argued, strongly informs her work on cultural history and aesthetics, and her interest in the genius loci.9 Writing for a British readership, Lee draws on this background to argue that the experience of the antique should never be divorced from the understanding of the cultural and social landscapes of the Mediterranean and especially of modern Italy. So, for her child in the Vatican, the spell of the ancient statues produces a love of the city of Rome as it is in the present, rather than of an idealised lost world of antiquity (26). Ancient Greece, buried in its irretrievable past but also forever living in all subsequent arts and ideas, is the luminous pattern that guides the aesthetic critic in teasing out those moments of contact, interchange, and contamination that make up the living texture of European culture. The act of reaching back to this lost world is always indirect and transversal. Greece for Lee is never simply available to the modern reader. In her writings, the ancient world appears further away than in Pater’s or Symonds’s. It cannot be read in the original. It is a matter of honesty that the aesthetic critic should deal with the distorting force of the history that separates us from antiquity and that is destined to increase as time goes on: so the Renaissance saw Greece through the eyes of Rome, and the present sees it through the already distorted lens of the Renaissance. Lee’s double pursuit of the antique and of the aesthetic ideal reveals a tale of desire and frustration, of the opportunities and the limitations that, in the 1880s, aestheticism presented to a woman writer with no conventional classical learning, but with a cosmopolitan and





formidably precocious knowledge of European culture, and the ambition to leave her mark on its course.

Contemporary readers fulfilled Lee’s wish to be read as an aesthetic writer. In a satirical article published in Belgravia one year after Belcaro, Lee features as the newest addition to what the author calls ‘the whole æsthetic business’. In this article, which is a playful critique of aestheticism written from the point of view of ‘an eminently respectable British Philistine’, Lee is seen to have joined in the anti-Philistine battle started by Matthew Arnold in the 1860s. Her name appears next to those of Rossetti and Symonds, masters and veterans of the aesthetic style in poetry and prose. Modern aesthetes are accused of wanting ‘to make a little esoteric kingdom of culture’ and, to this purpose, of filling up their libraries with the works of fashionable aesthetic authors, including Lee, who are said to ‘cloy a little on the uneducated palate when taken unrelieved in excessive doses’.10 There is no doubt that Lee must have been pleased to be numbered among this exclusive company. The most established aesthetic critics, Pater and Symonds, were reading Lee with interest at this point. Lee had managed to meet them both in the early 1880s. After an unpromising first meeting with Pater in Oxford, in which Lee found him ‘lymphatic, dull, humourless’, the two developed a relationship of mutual respect, fondness, and intellectual exchange.11 Lee regularly stayed with the Paters both in Oxford and in London, charmed by their hospitality and by the attention the famous man paid to her. Pater praised Belcaro as a ‘very rare’ union of ‘extensive knowledge and imaginative power’, and wrote that it had left on his mind ‘a wonderfully rich impression of a world of all sorts of delightful things, under the action of a powerful intelligence’.12 Such encouragement must have had a strong effect on the young writer who had chosen the older aesthete as her model. Lee’s next major book, Euphorion (1884), is dedicated to Pater ‘in appreciation of that which, in expounding the beautiful things of the past, he has added to the beautiful things of the present’.13 Pater’s praise for Euphorion was once again forthcoming and even higher than before. Comparing the extant archives of the two writers, while Pater features as one of Lee’s many friends and allies, Lee is unique among Pater’s correspondents in being the recipient of his honest opinions and self-criticisms. Their affinity might well have been reinforced by their mutual recognition as sexual radicals.14 It is certain that, at this stage, there was an element of collaboration in their



The woman among the aesthetes

exchange, attested by their parallel development of the imaginary portrait as an experimental hybrid genre that uses the impressionistic technique of aesthetic criticism for the fictional reconstruction of the past. Lee’s relationship with Symonds was, on the other hand, marked by conflict. She met Symonds in London, in June 1882, after they had corresponded for about two years. In one of his letters, Symonds had told Lee of having read Belcaro ‘with sustained interest & a constant sense of its power’; but he had also reproached her for over-confidence and overhastiness, and, correcting her reading of Hegel, had criticised her adoption of an iconic stance of art for art’s sake: ‘Art is not Art’s end; & Beauty is not its end; Art is the means, & Beauty is the mode chosen for the utterance of the Geist.’15 Just over a year later, writing to their mutual close friend, the poet A. Mary F. Robinson (the dedicatee of Belcaro), Symonds offered a less guarded opinion of Lee’s style: ‘she shocks & irritates by the ineffable ugliness & vulgarity into wh[ich] she so willingly plunges. Only women seem capable of that stylistic dévergardage. I do not think I am a purist [ . . .]. But really I do feel pretty strongly about Vernon’s stylistic perversities.’16 His letters to Lee over the next years abound in waspish criticisms, accusations, patronising remarks, and open reproach. As his words to Robinson make clear, Symonds’s attacks are tinged by a misogynist anxiety over female intellectuals.17 But what makes his hostility to Lee particularly interesting is that it is exacerbated by her resistance to fit into gender stereotypes. Lee is alternatively accused of displaying the shortcomings that allegedly typify women’s writings (as in the letter quoted above) and of failing to be truly feminine. In a letter of April 1884, Symonds tells her that she possesses ‘the charm of printing a clever woman’s aperçus, recording in the press her passing thoughts, stereotyping her table talk, by [her] method. But you miss, according to my notion, the supreme grace of dignity & sweetness & nobility.’ And later that month he accuses her of following ‘some crude notion that the prizes of our art are to [be] scrimmaged after by a struggle & a self assertion wh[ich] are neither feminine nor masculine’.18 Lee’s fault is a masculine-gendered, and therefore unnatural, excess of arrogance and vulgarity, by means of which she spoils both her identities of aesthete and woman writer. The point is precisely that Symonds perceives these two identities as being somehow antithetical. He thinks that Lee, in trying to combine them, ends up forsaking them both (‘neither feminine nor masculine’). Lee’s experiments in the male-defined field of aesthetic criticism produce for him a monstrous type of literary hermaphroditism, which he scorns with a Hellenic repulsion for the grotesque.




In order to obtain an idea of how heavily male-gendered the fashionable discourse of the aesthetic was at this time, we just need to turn back to the Belgravia article quoted above. Here Lee is the only woman in a masculine canon of aesthetic writers that stretches from Arnold to Rossetti, Swinburne, and Pater. For the anonymous author of the article, aesthetic culture is created and promoted by men, while it is women and young men that make up its natural readership and market. Lee disrupts this pattern. The very phrase ‘female aesthete’, which seems to describe Lee so precisely, contains an ideological tension between gender and genre expectations – a tension of which Lee was only too aware when she chose to adopt a male pseudonym, convinced that ‘no one reads a woman’s writing on art, history or æsthetics with anything but mitigated contempt.’19 The fact that Lee, in the course of her career, would be accused of plagiarism by at least two prominent writers on aesthetics, Symonds and Bernhard Berenson, similarly testifies that, while male writers collaborated to construct an aesthetic discourse on art by borrowing from and silently quoting each other, a woman’s intervention into this discourse could be perceived as illegitimate.20 The first generation of Foucauldian and ‘queer’ critics was largely interested in aestheticism because of its progressive treatment of male homoeroticism. More recent criticism, though, has tried to shift readers’ attention from the male focus of this version of the aesthetic canon. In the last few years, Kathy Alexis Psomiades and Talia Schaffer have brought to light both the important contributions made by women to aesthetic culture and the pervasive interest in representations of femininity in a literary canon that was otherwise mostly seen to be focussed on male bodies and minds.21 These readings took shape in the wake of a powerful Marxist critique of aesthetic ideology that re-examined aestheticism’s involvement in capitalist economics and bourgeois culture.22 In this revised history, one which is aware of the rehabilitated ‘low’ cultures of fashion and the mass market, and which is eager to highlight the intersection of aestheticism with the economic sphere, Lee remains crucial because she is anomalous. She is, for instance, notoriously difficult to assimilate to the ‘New Woman’ movement, the main space for radical women’s writing in the late-Victorian years. It would however be a mistake to think that, in her desire to belong among the male aesthetes, Lee silently accepts their gender politics even by an apparent disregard for issues of sexuality. As we shall shortly see, Lee’s intervention into aestheticism is intensely polemical. Lee enters the male-gendered and homoerotically tinted fields of art criticism and philosophy, and competes with the male aesthetes both in ideological terms and in the




material terms of the market. This competition generated complex gender configurations: these can be seen reflected in the fact that, in the early 1880s, Lee (a sexually ambiguous woman) and Symonds (a married but openly homosexual man) simultaneously courted the glamorous, feminine A. Mary F. Robinson.23 In this tangle of professional hostility and sexual jealousy, Symonds tried to repress Lee by emphasising the cultural gap that separates the Oxford-educated man from the amateur woman writer (his accusation of misreading Hegel) – a gap that is created and upheld by gender difference. The equation between the knowledge of ancient Greece and cultural authority, propagated through attendance to the all-male public schools and Oxbridge, stands in the middle of this gap. Lee, on her side, was attracted to aestheticism because it questioned fixed models of knowledge, using impression and emotion to move away from the hegemony of an orthodoxy of interpretation in the study of antiquity as in all things. Yet, as we have seen with Pater and now also with Symonds, there is a residual discourse of exclusion in the way that male writers could use their claim to classical knowledge in order to keep aestheticism pure. To Lee, this strategy was not available. Ancient Greece is the focal point of these gendered discourses that inform Lee’s identity as female aesthete: inclusion and exclusion, the conflicting impulses of acceptance and doubt, the desire to belong and the need to reform. Greece is attractive to Lee because of its canonicity: it is the origin of the aesthetic ideal and its knowledge in the present arbitrates the important triangulation of aestheticism, gender, and cultural authority; but it can also be an instrument for delimiting the radical discourse of the aesthetic, closing it off to detractors, popularisers, and, as she increasingly came to realise, women.

Lee’s un-aesthetic 1880s Lee’s difficult negotiation of the gender of the aesthetic is the subject of her novel Miss Brown (1884), a book that was the cause of much hostile criticism and personal resentment. Miss Brown is a roman à clef based on fairly transparent fictional transpositions of prominent members of the pre-Raphaelite circles of the 1860s and 1870s.24 It follows the tradition of Mallock’s The New Republic, a satire on intellectual faddishness that Lee read with great curiosity, in exposing the excesses committed in the name of the aesthetic as it passes from being an intellectual concern to a mode of life. But Lee’s novel departs from Mallock’s in being both a satire of aestheticism and an aesthetic text, which believes in a radical




reconceptualisation of the relationship between art and life.25 The plot of Miss Brown enacts Lee’s practice of writing simultaneously within and against aestheticism, or what Christa Zorn calls the ‘split voice’ of Lee’s intervention into the aesthetic male discourse.26 Although it would be too limiting to see in Lee’s protagonist, Anne Brown, a straightforward fictional transposition of the author, the novel certainly contains elements of an intellectual autobiography. While a detailed reading of Miss Brown is beyond the scope of this study, an example will suffice to illustrate the importance of an underlying Greek discourse in Lee’s representation of her authorial identity. Like Lee, Anne Brown is a woman among the aesthetes. Walter Hamlin, a ‘handsome, effeminate, æsthetic aristocrat’, falls in love with her and transplants her from her native Italy to the fashionable society of aesthetic London, in a Pygmalion-like experiment to turn the uneducated servant girl into a sophisticated society lady.27 In London, she becomes the object of the sexual desire of various men. But Anne Brown is a sexual radical: to the prospect of a conventional heterosexual union she prefers independence, intellectual fulfilment, and the ethical rewards of social involvement. Even when she disappointingly accepts Hamlin’s marriage offer at the end of the novel, she does so in order to ‘cure’ and redeem him (III: 278). Anne sees her approaching marriage as a form of ‘pollution’ and ‘prostitution’ (III: 280), and the only way she can rationalise her choice is in terms of ‘martyrdom’ (III: 313). Anne Brown embodies a deviant model of femininity which stands outside the marriage market, but also outside the patterns of sexual deviance of the aesthetic set. For all their encouragement of sexual experimentation and radicalism, the aesthetes in the novel turn out to be just as repressive of Anne’s own deviant sexuality as the patriarchal society whose moral narrowness they mock. Lee’s criticism of the gendering of the aesthetic emerges most clearly in her description of Anne’s realisation of her sexual difference. Some few women seem to be born to have been men, or at least not to have been women. To them love, if it come, will be an absorbing passion only of brief duration, the mere momentary diversion into a personal and individual channel of a force which constitutes the whole moral and intellectual existence, whose object is an unattainable ideal of excellence, and whose field is the whole of the world in which there is injustice, and callousness, and evil [ . . .]. Masculine women, mere men in disguise, they are not [ . . .]; they are, and can





Lee’s idealised woman radical is predicated on a negative model (‘women without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless’, my italics) and is based on an awkward model of androgyny (‘born to have been men, or at least not to have been women’). This androgynous ideal, visualised through Anne’s embarrassing masquerade as an aesthetic woman, is uncomfortably close to Symonds’s disparaging description of Lee as neither man nor woman – showing perhaps how much Symonds’s repeated attacks influenced Lee’s own self-perception. Psomiades has astutely noted that Lee’s description of Anne as ‘sexless’ in the passage above echoes Pater’s use of the same word in ‘Winckelmann’ as an ambiguous signifier of homoeroticism. Psomiades argues that the perverse content of the word travels from one text to the other, and she goes on to offer an interpretation of Miss Brown as a lesbian novel.28 One could add to her argument that, in this context, Anne is ‘sexless’ only in the eyes of male aestheticism and, more generally, of nineteenth-century society, which cannot see her sexual desire because it is directed towards other women and therefore is outside the realm of the ‘visible’. The Paterian intertextuality, though, also reveals that, in Miss Brown, Lee deliberately intervenes in the Hellenising discourse that Pater sets up in ‘Winckelmann’. Pater uses the memorable concept of ‘sexlessness’ as an aside to his discussion of Winckelmann’s ‘temperament’, in the most risqué section of the essay: ‘This temperament he nurtured and invigorated by friendships which kept him always in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty: the statues of the gods had the least traces of sex. Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance of its own’ (I: 220–1). The incongruous juxtaposition of the first sentence with the other two alerts the attentive reader to the hidden meaning of this passage: it is Winckelmann’s sexual desire for other men, evoked in the text through the intertextuality with the homoerotically charged canon of ancient Greek sculpture, that gives him the special ‘temperament’ that generates his understanding of ancient Greek culture. Pater’s ‘sexlessness’ is therefore a type of sexual freedom: his claim about ‘the least traces of sex’ is a case of the author protesting too much because he is anxious to muddle and conceal just where the perverse subtext comes closest to the surface. In this passage from Winckelmann’s sexual encounters with young men in Rome to the



only be, true women; but women without woman’s instincts and wants, sexless – women made not for man but for humankind. (II: 307–9)

homoerotic ideal of ancient Greek sculpture, Pater reverses the dominant pejorative discourse attached to male homosexuality, constructing it instead as the enabling factor for a privileged relationship with art and culture. In fact, as I have argued in Chapter 1, Pater successfully encodes male homoeroticism into the new meaning of the aesthetic as a mission of cultural criticism and reform. Lee’s adoption of this model within the feminine and polemical context of Miss Brown presents the challenge of having to create a space for a female radical out of this all-male tradition that spans from ancient Greece to the present. Lee’s assertion that Anne Brown’s sexlessness makes her ‘superior to the ordinary run of her sex’ (II: 309) is clearly indebted to Pater’s use of sexual radicalism as a signifier of cultural distinction. The concept of sexlessness deployed by both authors postulates the double need to live radically and to flee normativity in the sexual sphere. Both ground their critiques in notions of ‘enthusiasm’ (with reference to Plato’s Phaedrus in Pater, to Joan of Arc in Lee) in order to link sexual deviance to the individual’s pursuit of the ideal.29 For both of them, moreover, sexual radicalism comes to assume a semi-religious value. But while in ‘Winckelmann’ male homoeroticism gives access to the higher contemplative sphere of the aesthetic life, Anne’s consciousness of her sexual difference translates into a practical ‘ideal of excellence’ and a determination to fight ‘the injustice, and callousness, and evil’ of the world. In the passage from ‘Winckelmann’ to Miss Brown, the Greek origins of Pater’s critique are concealed but not eradicated: Lee successfully distances herself from the masculine gendering of aesthetic Hellenism without rejecting the progressive energy of its sexual critique, for it should be noted that, unlike The New Republic, Miss Brown is a novel that refuses to employ homophobia as a strategy of criticism and satire. Lee’s critique of the canonical fusion of aestheticism, Hellenism, and the masculine ideal is strikingly visualised in a disturbing scene earlier in the novel, when Anne is forced to model a revealing Greek dress especially designed by Hamlin, which he wants her to wear at an aesthetic soirée. After a tragicomic plea to be allowed to wear a long petticoat and some vain attempts not to let the dress ‘cling’, Anne looks at herself in the mirror and experiences a disarming epiphany. She was almost terrified at the figure which met her. That colossal woman, with wrinkled drapery clinging to her in half-antique, halfmedieval guise, – that great solemn, theatrical creature, could that be herself? (I: 307)




The image of Anne shrinking in front of the mirror is once again a displacement of Lee’s own anxieties about gender and authorship: a nightmarish vision of the female aesthete as a grotesque androgyne. The scene gathers in polemic energy as Lee lingers on Anne’s sense of humiliation when she is subjected to Hamlin’s invasive gaze and turned into an erotic spectacle. In this aspect, Lee follows Mallock’s characterisation of Mr Rose, portraying the aesthete’s Hellenophilia (in this case Hamlin’s desire to see Anne looking ‘Greek’) as invasive and scopophilic.30 Anne’s sexual debasement gains in poignancy when the reader recalls Lee’s own scorn of all manners of feminine dress and her notorious habit of dressing in men’s clothes. Aestheticism as conceived by Hamlin is exposed as a cosmetic ideal, in which Greece is treated as a commodity and a stage disguise (Hamlin’s dressmaker turns out to work for the Lyceum theatre). On one level, Anne Brown dressed as an ancient Greek shows just how uncomfortably women fit in aestheticism’s neo-Greek models and how theatrical and fake these models are. And yet, on the other hand, it is her act of masquerading as a Greek woman out of a Leighton canvas, and, more generally, her experience of aestheticism that gives Anne (the uneducated Italian servant girl) the means to understand and articulate her sexual difference – just as it is Pater’s Greek scholarship that literally lends Lee the terms to formulate her own feminine ideal of sexual radicalism. Miss Brown is just one instance of Lee’s withdrawal from aestheticism in the 1880s. As her disillusionment increased, she questioned the fundamental ways in which the knowledge of Greece had become ingrained in the definition and promotion of the aesthetic ideal. Her second collection of essays, Euphorion, which came out the same year as Miss Brown, downplays the Greek influence on Renaissance culture on which Pater and Symonds had insisted in their better-known works.31 Like the male aesthetes, Lee employs the trope of the encounter with Greece as an engine for regeneration and rebirth. Her advocacy of impression and emotion in the reconstruction of the past is similarly of clear Paterian and aesthetic derivation. But her intent throughout is to diminish the force of ancient Greece as an agent of cultural renewal. In the essay ‘Symmetria Prisca’, for instance, she emphasises the continuity between the Christian Middle Ages and Renaissance civilisation and at the same time draws attention to the uninterrupted influence of antiquity on medieval art. In this way Lee implicitly refuses to see the Renaissance as a unique moment of encounter and cross-pollination between the modern and the ancient worlds. At other times, she points out fundamental differences between Renaissance and ancient Greek cultures of art, as in




her essay on funerary monuments and the development of portrait art (‘The Portrait Art’). In her next collection of essays, Juvenilia, Lee further radicalises the critique of Pater’s aesthetic life undertaken in Miss Brown. Here she attacks the principles of Pater’s Hellenism in Marius, a book whose ‘impressions’ she describes as ‘sunny’ and ‘serene’, borrowing Winckelmann’s most famous catchwords.32 Like some of Pater’s reviewers cited in Chapter 1, Lee objects to the very act of going back to the Greeks to find a moral conduct that can be transferred to the nineteenth century. It is for this unnatural effort to stretch backwards rather than look into the present and the future that Paterian aestheticism, like Winckelmann’s classicism and the Greek world that they both idealise, now appears to Lee to be naïve and full of childish egotism. This criticism is evident in her reduction of the formula of the aesthetic life as it is laid out in ‘Winckelmann’ and the ‘Conclusion’: ‘The world is beautiful, or we see only its beauty: we feel, therefore, happy; and in feeling happy [ . . .], we feel also good. It is the morality of all antique art and philosophy, of the teachings of Goethe and Plato [ . . .]; and it is the morality of the youth of such of us as are best’ (I: 9). This type of aestheticism – ‘those æsthetic, classic, Goethian days’ (I: 7) – is, for Lee, a thing of the past: its imitation of antiquity is itself antiquated and therefore useless. Lee adapts to polemical purposes the persistent Romantic image of the ancient Greeks as youth of the race and depicts her own distance from Pater’s aesthetic Hellenism, at the age of 31, in terms of growth and natural progression. The juvenilia of the title, therefore, are not the contents of the present book but rather Pater’s aesthetic writings and the author’s youthful imitation of them. By cleverly inverting the common use of the term, Lee now actually offers her readers the work of her artistic maturity. And this maturity for Lee comes with the discovery ‘that to be good means, unluckily, to deal with evil [ . . .]. Of course we may still go and live with the daisies and the statues, seeing only them with the eyes of body and soul; unfortunately to live with the daisies and statues means no longer to be like unto them, but like rather to the dust-heap and the scarecrow, not much more beautiful in soul, certainly’ (I: 10–11). She diagnoses the Greek matrix of Paterian aestheticism (‘to live with [ . . .] the statues’) as a pernicious form of arrested development – as a sort of psychological aberration in fact – and an excuse to avoid social responsibilities. Lee’s introduction to Juvenilia aspires to be a new aesthetic manifesto for the 1880s, in deliberate counterpoint to Pater’s ‘Conclusion’: Lee prominently places her manifesto in the opening of her book, intending to substitute Pater’s sense of ending and belatedness with a new




aestheticism that lays the stress on activity and intervention and looks to the future rather than the past. Her play on Pater’s ideas is evident in her adoption of his language and imagery: ‘the whole of all things is ever moving, changing plan and form; and we, its infinitesimal atoms, are determining its movements’ (I: 18). It should be noted, however, that, despite her protestations, Lee still shares Pater’s fundamental belief that art and the aesthetic hold the key to a better life that dispenses with the dominant moral and social structures of the English middle class. Lee does not repudiate aestheticism and its sources (from the Greeks to Winckelmann, Goethe, German Romantic philosophy, and finally Pater) but rather channels its idealism towards a practical aim of social improvement. She turns Pater’s radicalised aesthetics of sensation ( ) into an imperative to act, refuting the Epicurean’s movement inwards and the potential deadlock posed by a poetics of ‘isolation’ (a concept on which both authors linger), and restoring a full sense of agency to the individual. This revised aestheticism is for her the adult counterpart of Pater’s juvenile experiments. The publication of Juvenilia marks an important passage in the process of redefinition of the aesthetic in the 1880s. Pater clearly felt the pressure of the challenge and, as he would again do years later when Wilde published Dorian Gray, he decided to write back, more in order to defend the purity of his own aesthetic ideal than to slight the offender. In an anonymous review in the Pall Mall Gazette he accuses Lee of ‘Puritanism’, formulating for the first time a recurrent topos in the critical reception of Lee in the twentieth century.33 The charge of Puritanism makes Lee guilty of betraying one of the most fundamental principles of aestheticism, which goes back to its embryonic formulations in Arnold: its rejection of the puritan, philistine, and prosaic forces that dominated Victorian middle-class culture. By insisting that art matters precisely because it is disengaged from the ethical realm, the aesthetes had created a culture in which the study of art constitutes in itself a criticism of Victorian values. This is the radicalism of art for art’s sake. To call Lee a Puritan therefore is not to misread an agnostic writer as a radical Christian. Pater’s Puritanism, just like Arnold’s Hebraism, has an enlarged meaning that takes the term away from its Christian roots. In fact, Pater’s label has been so successful because it identifies the precise, covert source of Lee’s critique of the aesthetic life in Juvenilia: Arnold’s dialectics between Hebraism and Hellenism in Culture and Anarchy. Lee does not refer to Arnold but his influence is evident. Like Arnold’s, her ideal of culture is a synthesis of Hellenism and Hebraism, which she presents in her own terms as, respectively, the engrossment in




‘æsthetical questions’ (I: 4) and the imperative to ‘deal with evil’ (I: 10). Her conclusions, however, are diametrically opposed to his. Where Arnold, in 1869, had believed that modern English culture needed to go back to the Hellenic principles that it had sidelined, Lee feels that, by the 1880s, there is too much Hellenism in contemporary culture, too much Greekness, serenity, and sweetness and light, and that aesthetic culture is to blame for this imbalance. Lee argues that Hellenism, both in Arnold’s trans-historical meaning and in the literal sense of the modern idealisation of Greek antiquity, must be tempered by the Hebraic and Puritan imperative to act, by the moral sense or what Arnold called ‘strictness of conscience’.34 Lee closely echoes the terms of Arnold’s analysis of Medieval Christianity in ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’, the essay to which Pater had responded in ‘Winckelmann’, sympathetically identifying with ‘the great mass of mankind, which has neither peace nor dignity, nor beauty of life’ (I: 11). To such people Hellenism offers no consolation or practical use.35 Lee’s criticism, although secular and written from within aestheticism, comes troublingly close to some of the late-Victorian conservative attacks on it. In his phobic article on the Greek spirit in modern literature, for instance, Richard Tyrwhitt had used Christian arguments in order to condemn Arnold and the Hellenic school of aestheticism as agnostic and therefore egotistic and amoral.36 The measure of Lee’s provocative defection into the Hebraic camp comes out clearly in the concluding passage of the introduction: here a Methodist preacher who ‘had never perhaps seen an antique’ is said to have ‘a closer link’ to Lee herself than ‘so many of [her] friends, whose pictures I look at, whose songs I listen to, and who are so polite as to read and praise my books’ (I: 22). In Juvenilia, Lee warns the advocates of aestheticism (her ‘friends’) that they should seriously reconsider some of the Hebraic values that they have rejected or else face the same danger of extinction that beset their self-elected predecessors in ancient Greece. This is the ‘choice’ (I: 10) with which aestheticism is confronted in the 1880s.

Women classicists: an intellectual context Lee’s disillusionment with Arnold’s and Pater’s tradition of Hellenism did not cause her to reject or ignore the ancient world. If anything, it intensified her desire to know Greece and her determination that this knowledge should be used to stir and reform aesthetic culture. An important stimulus in this direction came from her exchange with a new generation of female intellectuals for whom the study of




the classics opened a path towards emancipation and independence. In the early 1880s, during the period of Lee’s close friendship with A. Mary F. Robinson, the latter was deeply immersed in the study of Greek, and became well known for her Hellenising poetry and her translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus.37 The 1880s also saw the emergence of the first ambitious female classical scholars to have graduated from Cambridge. Among these were Jane Harrison and Eugénie Sellers (later Strong), who would be the first English women to gain fame as, respectively, Greek and Latin professional scholars. At the time they were both living in London, where they made their living through private tuition and immensely successful public lectures (Harrison was famous for her flamboyant lecturing style). Both had absorbed the aesthetic atmosphere that pervaded the new female colleges in Oxford and Cambridge in their early years, when the pre-Raphaelite fashion was at its highest, even in the traditionally more reticent Cambridge. In London, they moved in the same metropolitan aesthetic set that Lee had satirised in Miss Brown. Harrison, for instance, was repeatedly a guest of the Paters, who had moved to London in 1885;38 while Sellers was a friend of the Humphry Wards and frequented the society of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Frederic Leighton – who painted a portrait of her in 1885 – and pre-Raphaelite artists William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones.39 In the fashionable milieus of late-Victorian London, the intellectual curiosity for Greece produced a popularised classicism, reflected in the contemporary vogue for classical theatricals and classicising tableaux and in the work of popular painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Albert Moore, who specialised in representing antiquity with a winning mixture of homeliness and exoticism. The people who went to view Alma-Tadema’s exhibitions were the same people who went to hear Harrison and Sellers lecture in the British Museum: their shared public was an educated but not expert middle class who had a growing appetite for accessible and exciting accounts of antiquity and who was willing to pay for culture.40 With Alma-Tadema, Harrison and Sellers also shared a talent for translating their knowledge of art and archaeology into an appealing commodity. Recent criticism has recognised the determining impact that these early female classicists had on the development of classical studies, especially through their work on the relationship between ancient art and religion. Harrison and Sellers are remembered today for their stress on the importance of the visual arts in reconstructing the culture of antiquity and their pioneering use of archaeology in the academic study of the classics. It is beyond doubt that their gender marginalisation in a world that was made up almost exclusively of men forced these female




scholars to seek new ways and social and cultural contexts in which antiquity could be made to speak to modern culture. What still needs to be fully appreciated is the influence of aestheticism in the process of refashioning classical culture in which these scholars took part. The aesthetic culture promoted by critics like Ruskin and Pater (not necessarily in the context of antiquity), based on the heightened attention to the role of the art object in everyday life, directly enabled Sellers’s and Harrison’s revolutionary work on the experience of the art object in the ancient world. The same can be said about aestheticism’s exploration of the interrelation of verbal and visual cultures and its experiments to transcend the boundaries between media and genres. For Pater, Swinburne, and Lee, for instance, writing about the material art object is a fundamental part of the aesthetic experiment in integrating textual and visual cultures: their imaginative use of ekphrasis shows that the visual experience plays a role in determining our understanding of the literary and asks readers and viewers to question systems of classification and to revise preconceived critical categories. These aesthetic principles directly influenced Harrison’s and Sellers’s conviction that a nuanced understanding of the classics could not be divorced from the careful study of the visual arts. Moreover aestheticism, with its following among women and young men, opened an ideal space for broadcasting the interest in the antique outside the conservative and male-dominated academy and providing a framework in which the study of antiquity, especially of ancient Greece, was connected to intellectual freedom and innovation. So, while aestheticism promoted the study of Greece, the new Greek studies championed by the early women classicists helped to broadcast aestheticism and its ideas. This process of cross-pollination is evident in the pronounced aestheticism of Harrison’s early scholarship. In a work such as Introductory Studies in Greek Art (1885), it is impossible not to see the strong influence of Winckelmann, either absorbed directly or refracted through its English and German receptions. Harrison follows Winckelmann closely: she divides ancient Greek culture into a tripartite structure of primitivism, triumph (coinciding with the age of Pheidias), and decay; and she organises her critique around ideals of serene classicism and denial of ugliness. Stylistic echoes of Winckelmann seep down to her imaginative and highly personal descriptions of individual art works. In the preface to the book Harrison tellingly claims that the principal quality of Greek art is ‘Ideality’ – a concept which she defines as ‘a certain largeness and universality which outlives the individual race and persists for all time’.41 This is what Pater, in his essay on Winckelmann, had called




the ‘underground life’ of Greece. Like Winckelmann, Harrison believes in a myth of Hellas ‘untouched by time, vital for ever’, from which the moderns derive ‘an impulse to growth, moral and intellectual’.42 What makes Greek art the aesthetic standard for all times is this ability to come to life again and again through its reception by successive ages. This is exactly what makes the Greeks the aesthetic race idealised by Winckelmann, Pater, and Symonds. The same aesthetic matrix can be detected in her earlier Myths of the Odyssey (1882), a work that is concerned with the transformations of ancient material in the process of a complex reception across written and visual cultures. Here she writes that ‘[t]he Greeks were less anxious than either easterns or moderns to point a moral; their praise or blame is, as we so often see, adapted to an ethical standard which is æsthetic rather than judicial.’43 Modern students of Greece learn that it is impossible to separate aesthetic judgement from the understanding of antiquity, and that modern notions of morality will have to be questioned, or at least historicised, in this process. Greece shows that aesthetic value can determine moral structures (art for art’s sake), and that this possibility is perpetually kept alive by the very act of making Greek antiquity an object of study. Studying Greek, in other words, naturally generates aestheticism. Harrison’s mature shift from idealist Hellenism to the scientific study of ritual should also be understood in terms of continuity rather than breach with aestheticism. Her later interest in mythology and irrationality should not be seen as the overthrowing of an earlier aesthetic phase, but rather as a development that is prefigured in Pater’s evolution from ‘Winckelmann’ to the essays on Dionysus and Demeter, which emphasise primitivism and the ritualistic basis of ancient religion and culture, or, as we shall shortly see, in Lee’s own use of Greek myth to explore the irrational in her fiction. Harrison’s Greek scholarship is an important medium for the transition of aesthetic culture into the twentieth century, as it absorbed the influence of the radical aestheticism of the 1870s and transmitted it back onto Lee’s generation and beyond, to modernist authors such as Woolf, Forster, and Eliot, whose work is ready to acknowledge the ideas of the so-called myth and ritual school but is equally keen to obfuscate its unscientific and, by 1900, unfashionable aesthetic roots.44 Lee became involved in the careers of these early female classicists, who were, like her, pioneering women in a man’s world. It was, however, to Sellers rather than to the more famous Harrison that Lee was especially drawn. Sellers is mainly remembered today for her work on Roman art and archaeology but her early interest, like Harrison’s, was in




Greece. Lee and Sellers met in July 1886 in the home of Charles Newton, keeper of the classical collection of the British Museum. With characteristic bluntness Lee immediately confided to Sellers her immense dislike for Harrison’s Introductory Studies. In a letter written a few months after the episode she elaborated on their first conversation, stating that she had been prevented from writing a scathing review of Harrison’s ‘little book’ only by the fact that they shared the same publisher, but that she ‘burned’ to tell Harrison and everyone else that it was her ‘strong conviction that despite her great ability and classical knowledge, she had no instinct for art of any kind and a want of knowledge of other art besides that of antiquity (wherein I proved quite right, for she was utterly ignorant of Tuscan sculpture)’.45 Lee was to develop the last point in her essay on Tuscan sculpture in Renaissance Fancies and Studies. As Mary Beard has suggested in her biography of Harrison, Lee tried to use Sellers as an intermediary between herself and Harrison, asking Sellers to pass on her damning criticisms and contributing to a gradual process of estrangement between Harrison and Sellers that culminated in the early 1890s.46 In these years, just as Sellers and Harrison drew apart, Lee and Sellers entered a friendship that was to last into the next century, not without the tensions and moments of resentment that mark most of Lee’s relations. There is no doubt that Lee identified with the cosmopolitan Sellers who, like herself, had been brought up on the Continent. She was also struck by the physical charm of the young woman, ‘the beautiful Greek scholar’ (as she described her) whose photograph in flamboyant aesthetic dress Lee proudly displayed on her drawing room chimney piece.47 Their friendship, which was built on intellectual exchange and interspersed with elements of romantic investment, became instrumental in keeping alive Lee’s interest in the ancient world through the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their correspondence, which started immediately after their first meeting, soon became intimate in tone; and by the late 1880s the two were meeting or trying to meet as frequently as their itinerant lifestyles allowed. They also shared an apartment in London, for a while, in 1893. Lee publicly acknowledges her intellectual debt to Sellers as early as 1887, in the preface to Juvenilia. And in the preface to Renaissance Fancies and Studies, Sellers is thanked again, together with Bernhard Berenson, for furnishing Lee with ‘a little of that archaeological and critical knowledge which is now-a-days quite unattainable save by highly trained specialists’.48 Her letters to Sellers repeatedly come back to debating classical antiquity, archaeology, aesthetics, and art history. ‘I know how much I have learned from you’, she writes in an uncatalogued fragment that is preserved among Lee’s letters




to Sellers in Girton College, Cambridge. The influence was reciprocal. In a letter from Rome written in 1912, Sellers thanks Lee for having been the source of ‘some of the best intuitions of my life’. In her later days in the British School of Rome, Sellers (now Mrs Strong) would use Lee’s books to teach aesthetics to her students.49 Sellers played an important role in inspiring and directing Lee’s involvement in classical culture. In 1891, for instance, after attending Sellers’s lectures in the British Museum, Lee professed to be ‘[m]uch interested again [in] Greek sculpture’ and immediately planned her own lecture which was to deal with ‘Greek Art as a standard of all art’.50 While Lee, who did not know ancient Greek, could not share the textual and linguistic interests of A. Mary F. Robinson’s Greek scholarship, she was strongly drawn to the archaeological approach championed by Sellers and to her emphasis on visuality and the visual arts, which were closer to her own interests in aesthetics. Sellers’s knowledge of the ancient world, like Lee’s own, was based on art and material culture. She possessed a mixture of authority (as professional classicist) and marginality (as female intellectual) that made her particularly attractive to Lee. To her, Lee felt free not only to reveal her enthusiasm for the ancient world in fanatical and jocular terms (‘I am mad about antiquities!’51), but also to confess her anxiety about ‘expertise’, understood both in terms of technical competence in art history and knowledge of the ancient languages. In January 1893, in the same letter in which she reflects on her lack of expertise, Lee told Sellers that she was ‘tempted to try to learn Greek’, but regretted having ‘no time or strength’ for it.52 And later that year, as she witnessed her brother Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s gradual recovery from a psychosomatic illness that had incapacitated him for 18 years, she fantasised that he would now, at last, be able to teach her Greek.53 It is to Sellers again that Lee wrote that she had enjoyed the posthumous re-edition of Pater’s essays on Dionysus and Demeter so much that it made her ‘long to read Greek. But I could not give time and strength enough’.54 This dialectics between desire and delay is central to Lee’s relationship with ancient Greece. Hellas was a fascinating territory to her, full of intellectual appeal and imaginative possibilities; but it was also a dangerous territory, patrolled by those who possessed the increasingly ‘unattainable’ specialisms that she laments in the preface to Renaissance Fancies and Studies. As in ‘The Child in the Vatican’, the doubt whether antiquity was ‘at all important’ was always present to Lee, as was her determination to preserve a precious naivity – a condition of childlike outsiderism that remained characteristic of her intervention into aesthetic culture.55





This desire for the lost world of antiquity is the subject of ‘Dionea’, one of the short stories in Lee’s celebrated collection of supernatural tales, Hauntings (1890). In the ‘Preface’ to Hauntings, Lee talks of the past (intended both as individual memory and history or collective experience) as a storehouse for ghosts. Ghosts for Lee are ‘things of the imagination’, which arise in the mind from ‘half-faded recollections’ and ‘fragmentary vivid impressions’.56 The journey into the past, whether it be the act of personal recollection or the work of the scholar (most often it is a synthesis of the two), produces that loosening of firm outlines that is for Lee the necessary condition of the supernatural.57 And, in a way, the desire to know the past has always something of the fantasy of seeing ghosts. The ghost is a figure of the violent separation between past and present and in the ghost story the spectre is a historicising device through which the present comes to see the past, and perhaps to understand it and deal with its own unresolved conflicts with it, seeking harmony and reconciliation. The ghost reveals the meaning of the past in the present. Nowhere is this narrative clearer than in ‘Dionea’, in which the spirit of antiquity materialises in the present day into a small Italian community in the form of a reincarnation of Venus Aphrodite. In this story Lee effectively uses her idea of the supernatural to portray the indeterminacy and imprecision of the moderns’ knowledge of antiquity: the result is a spectral classicism in which the unearthing of antiquity carried out by archaeology in the name of precise knowledge conjures the illicit necrophilic pleasures of the séance and the gothic taste for the re-opened tomb. The ancient world is a particularly good ground for finding ghosts: as Lee writes in the ‘Preface’, the more ‘remote’ is the past, the more easily is ‘the prose [ . . .] obliterated by distance’ (x). As the individual mind recedes into the past, objective vision becomes blurred and subjective perception and the eye of the imagination become keener. This model bears an obvious affinity to what Pater, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, had called the ‘aesthetic’ mode of understanding, in which the closed reality of ‘the object as in itself it really is’ is discarded in favour of an open-ended approach that relies on subjectivity and sensation. Therefore, as Angela Leighton has noted, the ghost in Lee is intimately connected to the rhetoric of pleasure characteristic of aesthetic criticism: it is ‘an object of desire rather than fear’ and a channel for the apprehension of beauty in history and the arts.58 Apparitionality is a mode for apprehending antiquity, as in Faust’s request to Mephistopheles for the ghost



Spectral classicism

of Helen of Troy (x) and in Lee’s own magic tale of possession in ‘The Child in the Vatican’. ‘Dionea’ takes over several themes that Lee had explored earlier in her career: like ‘The Child in the Vatican’, it approaches classical aesthetics through the trope of the supernatural; like Miss Brown, it polemically reflects on the role of women within the Hellenophile aesthetic culture of the late nineteenth century. Like most of Lee’s critiques of aestheticism, ‘Dionea’ is characteristic of Lee’s polemical writings in that it articulates her stance of being simultaneously inside and outside aestheticism, using its genres and language but exposing its restrictions and bias. The obvious precedents for ‘Dionea’ are Pater’s Imaginary Portraits – most specifically ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, the tale of the return of Dionysus to Medieval France.59 Like Pater’s tales, ‘Dionea’ is a hybrid of fiction and criticism. It is a psychological narrative in which elements of cultural history are blended with, and examined in the light of, imaginary historical reconstructions. But Lee’s story should also be situated within the broader context of a European Romantic tradition that spans from Heinrich Heine’s seminal essay ‘The Gods in Exile’ (1853–54) to Prosper Mérimée’s short story ‘Venus d’Ille’ (1837), which Lee acknowledges as one of her sources.60 Pater and Lee both draw on this cosmopolitan tradition in their writings. In this sub-genre of the fantastic, mythological characters from antiquity reappear in post-classical times as ‘exiles’ or revenants, usually to take part in episodes of violence and trauma that re-enact the disjunction between ancient and modern ethical and social codes. The authors represent the modern condition in terms of the violent repression of its classical roots, mainly by the hands of Christianity; and antiquity, following the principles of Romantic Hellenism, emerges as a desirable but terrifying common heritage, whose regenerative and disruptive powers have only superficially been dominated by the new order. The genre of the return of the pagan gods is a fertile terrain for psychological study. In one of his most influential essays, Freud refers to Heine in order to illustrate the aesthetics of the ‘uncanny’, in which the double becomes a thing of terror ‘just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons. (Heine, ‘Die Götter im Exil’)’.61 The Freudian ‘uncanny’ is created through the trope of repetition. The reappearance of the pagan god in the form of demon is an uncanny doubling of an original, benevolent, form. In Pater’s and Lee’s stories, the reception of ancient religion and ritual bears precisely this uncanny quality. It could be said that the continuous process of re-enactment and transformation that is for Pater (after Hegel) the main characteristic




of ancient Greek culture makes it inherently ‘haunting’ in Lee’s sense, or ‘uncanny’ in Freud’s. In the 1880s and 1890s Lee became increasingly interested in the relationship between art and psychology and, like Freud, she took the passage from god to ghost as a powerful means to create an evocative intersection of aesthetics and psychology.62 The setting of ‘Dionea’ might have been inspired by a little-known travel sketch by Symonds in Italian Byways (1883), which evokes the powerful genius loci of the Italian seaside village of Porto Venere. Symonds, like Lee after him, is fascinated by the overlap of pagan and Christian cultures that is strikingly materialised here by the presence of the church of St Peter, which is erected on the old site of a temple of Venus, in a panoramic position, on the tip of a rocky promontory on which the ruins of the ancient building are still visible today. Symonds emphasises the continuity between pagan past and modern Christian Italy, not only in place names, but also in religious symbolism: he draws an unlikely parallel between Venus and St Peter – ‘both, be it remembered, fishers of men’ – and refers, in a Swinburnian mode, to the pagan goddess as

Figure 5 Photograph of Porto Venere (circa 1900). BGA-F-010670-0000. Archivio Brogi / Alinari Archives, Florence. The church and temple of Venus are visible on the left-hand side of the image.




‘our Lady of Beauty’, transparently punning on the wording of Marian worship.63 Lee uses a similar method of exploiting an evocative relationship between history and geography. In her tale the mysterious child Dionea is washed on the shores of Porto Venere after a storm. Dionea, who is ‘as brown as a berry’ and speaks ‘some half-intelligible Eastern jabber, a few Greek words embedded in I know not what’ (63), is adopted by a religious order of nuns and soon grows to become an unusually attractive girl. The name Dionea evokes the Greek goddess Dione, consort of Zeus and, according to some sources, mother of Aphrodite; but her identification in the story with Venus Aphrodite is evident, as Lee gives Dionea some of the best-known attributes traditionally associated with Venus (doves, roses, and myrtle). The intertextuality with Heine and Pater is brought to light by Lee’s choice of narrating the story through the voice of the local physician, Alessandro de Rosis, who is writing a history of the fall of the pagan gods. Exactly as in Pater’s ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, Dionea becomes the centre of a pagan revival that wrecks havoc in the small rural community. Venus’s haunting takes the form of a demonic epidemic of sexual desire that transforms the quiet daily business of the villagers into a ‘little “Decameron”’ (75), in which all sorts of people fall in love with one another and even nuns and monks forget their vows of chastity. As in ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, the exile of the pagan deity brings to light the artificial restrictions placed on the individual by modern morality – specifically Christian sexual morality – conjured by the monastic setting. There is something ludicrous in the notion of a ‘love epidemic’ (76) that causes nuns to elope with sailor boys and drives monks to suicide; but at the same time the tragic events with which the narrative is punctuated are a serious reminder of how effectively modern society polices its sexual mores. Dionea is another figure of the ‘sexlessness’ of Greek paganism: she appears innocent and she herself shuns sexual contact, but simultaneously embodies the possibility of a freer sexuality, retrospectively located in Greek antiquity, in which sexual desire finds its gratification in harmony with social norms. If Dionea becomes a deadly femme fatale, it is almost despite herself: this role is forced on her by the narrative of anachronism or time travel, which brings about the clash between ancient and modern codes of sexual behaviour and is, at the same time, the source of the ‘uncanny’ quality of Dionea’s eroticism.64 Lee’s use of ancient Greece to criticise the restrictive sexual morality imposed by Christianity is in line with the writings of Pater and Symonds. But while in these authors the ideal of regeneration is inevitably embodied




by male figures, actual or idealised, Lee chooses a female icon of classicism with obvious polemical intent. ‘Dionea’ launches a feminist critique of the Hellenism promoted by the male aesthetes. This is particularly evident in the second half of the story, where Lee introduces the character of the German sculptor Waldemar, who settles in Porto Venere with his wife. Waldemar’s name, origins, and his connection with ancient sculpture – the narrator remarks that Waldemar and his work have ‘something of the old spirit’ (84) – are meant to recall Winckelmann; his name and trade also associate him with the figure of Charles Waldstein, the first lecturer in classical archaeology at Cambridge and the author of Essays on the Art of Pheidias (1885), an archaeological study of ancient Greek sculpture that is steeped in German Romantic Hellenism and that heavily draws on Winckelmann’s writings. On a more general level, Waldemar is a Northern European man who travels to Italy in order to seek artistic and intellectual training in close proximity with the unbroken classical tradition there – a recurrent type in European intellectual history, which can be traced from Winckelmann to Goethe to Symonds and his late-Victorian contemporaries. Two of the other stories in Hauntings, ‘A Wicked Voice’ and ‘Amour Dure’, present the same typology of Northern European male being subjected to the spectral powers of the Italian past. In fact, like the protagonists of these other stories, Waldemar is essentially an incomplete intellectual who undergoes a combined aesthetic and psychosexual trauma. In Waldemar’s case this limitation lies in his stubborn refusal to sculpt the female form, his subjects being exclusively ‘men and boys, athletes and fauns’ (84). Waldemar justifies his cult of the male body through spurious aesthetic theories: he claims that the female figure ‘is almost inevitably inferior in strength and beauty’ and that ‘woman is not form, but expression, and therefore suits painting, but not sculpture’, and he quotes Schopenhauer’s definition of woman as ‘the unæsthetic sex’ (90–1). Through Waldemar, Lee exposes the misogynist practice adopted by male Hellenists of looking to ancient Greek art, especially sculpture, in order to promote a rigidly masculine gendering of the aesthetic valid for all times. Winckelmann, for instance, repeatedly insists on the perfection of the young male body and on the importance of the display of the male nude, in gymnasia and other places, for the development of the instinct for beauty that distinguished the Greek race. In the English context, Symonds, in Studies of the Greek Poets, visualises the ‘Genius of the Greeks’ as ‘a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed, chapleted, and very calm’ (399). To have an authentic understanding of the Greek ‘genius’ is to be susceptible to the charms of this naked young man, who is presented




to the reader as a striking image to be desired and consumed in the tradition of Winckelmann’s erotic ekphrases (the word ‘calm’ points to the idea of ‘stille Grösse’). In the more private forum of ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’, Symonds moreover talks of the ‘aesthetic morality’ of the Greeks (clearly an immensely desirable state for him) as being inextricably bound with the appreciation of the male body and the institution of paiderastia. He tells his readers that ‘the Greeks admitted, as true artists are obliged to do, that the male body displays harmonies of proportion and melodies of outline more comprehensive, more indicative of strength expressed in terms of grace, than that of women’. And, to substantiate this point, he refers to a passage in Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’ in which Pater quotes Winckelmann on the ‘supreme beauty’ of ancient Greek art being ‘rather male than female’. To this Symonds adds that, ‘while it is true that “the supreme beauty of Greek art is rather male than female,” this is due not so much to any passion of the Greeks for male beauty as to the fact that the male body exhibits a higher organisation of the human form than the female’. In other words, he essentialises where Pater historicises the relationship between male homoeroticism and the arts. Symonds further explains, in an observation that rests entirely on ideology, that the ‘superiority of male beauty’ consists in ‘the symmetrical development of all the qualities of the human frame, the complete organisation of the body as the supreme instrument of vital energy’.65 In a similar vein, the Cambridge archaeologist Charles Waldstein claims that ‘[m]aidenhood does not essentially call forth in us the idea of grandeur’, which, after Winckelmann, he takes as one of the dominant characteristics of ancient Greek aesthetics. Then again, ‘it is a wellknown truth, felt by all artists, that whoever has the power of drawing or modelling accurately and with truth to nature a nude male figure, can render with the same correctness whatever he sees before him’.66 To these one could add many more instances in which the male nude is used not only as a synecdoche for the greatness of Greek culture, but as an icon for the practice of modern Hellenism. The male nude becomes an artistic standard for all times that sanctions a precious link between ancient and modern aesthetic sensibilities: its aesthetic enjoyment is acceptable even in the nineteenth century, provided it occurs within the context of high culture. But it has nonetheless, crucially, not lost its erotic charge. As these examples show, the male nude is in the centre of intertextual networks used to alert readers to the persistence of male homoeroticism in the long history of modern Hellenism: Symonds quoting Pater quoting Winckelmann.




Through the figure of Waldemar, Lee writes this masculine tradition into her plot in order to express her dissent from it. ‘Dionea’ contains a double ideological critique of ancient Greek sculpture (a recurrent theme in Lee, from Belcaro to Renaissance Fancies and Studies and beyond) and of its modern appropriation by the aesthetic school. ‘Dionea’ updates Lee’s criticism of the masculine and homosocial matrix of aestheticism in Miss Brown. The characterisation of Waldemar, like those of the aesthetes in Miss Brown, contains elements that hint at an unexplored homosexual subtext: Waldemar’s ideological horror feminae, his scouts for potential models among fisher boys in surrounding villages, and the narrator’s description of his wife as his ‘lover ’ – ‘I have no other word’ (89) – a term related to Greek paiderastia, which was current in the coded language of Victorian male homosexuality. And, like Miss Brown, ‘Dionea’ simultaneously pays tribute to the regenerative power of classical antiquity and corrects the misogynist bias of its nineteenth-century reception. The character of Dionea – female, primitive, dark-skinned, and resolutely untamed – embodies the real Hellenic past and resurrects a tradition of feminine aesthetics that has been sidelined by the aesthetes’ almost complete disregard for the female body as object of desire. It is possible to see elements of homoeroticism in the figure of Dionea, who, as a female counterpart of Pater’s returning pagan gods, is a representative of a buried tradition of sexual difference in which desire between women is articulated in the text in the oblique form of spectrality, apparition, and haunting.67 In this reading the uncanny revenant or returned god is a figure for the perceived ‘unnaturalness’ of same-sex sexuality: he/she ambiguously embodies both the anxieties and hopes linked to the failure to repress homoerotic desire, whether within the individual psyche or in a given society.68 The story moves to its dramatic resolution when Waldemar himself falls under the spell of Dionea’s spectral classicism and decides to use her as the model for a sculpture of Venus. But Waldemar, who is untrained in feminine aesthetics, finds himself unable to reproduce the original and breaks down under the weight of the realisation that his aesthetic philosophy might after all be flawed. Lee’s tale concludes as Waldemar enacts a pagan sacrifice in honour of Dionea/Venus in which he immolates his wife on an ancient altar of the goddess, sets fire to his studio (aptly built on the site of the old temple), and commits suicide by throwing himself off a cliff. This violent rite sanctions the culmination of Dionea’s destructive influence. The ghostly reappearance of Venus has kept alive the memory of the Greek past as a terrible power of renewal. The last sighting of the exiled goddess is of her





The epilogue Lee’s tortured engagement with aestheticism is punctuated by a series of open renunciations: Miss Brown, Euphorion, and Juvenilia. In 1895, after the deaths of Pater and Symonds and on the eve of the Wilde trials, Lee published Renaissance Fancies and Studies, a new series of essays in which she, again, revises her position in relation to aesthetic culture. The study of the Italian Renaissance had fostered the development of aesthetic criticism in the previous decades. For Pater and Symonds the Renaissance had represented a privileged stage in the reception of antiquity: the eager classicism of that era, which had resulted in unprecedented artistic and intellectual achievements, was held as a precedent for an auspicated new rediscovery of antiquity in the nineteenth century, which would be the basis for what Pater called the aesthetic life. Lee, following the work already undertaken in Euphorion, rewrites this tale of influence and renewal. As in Euphorion, Lee attacks the aesthetic myth of the Renaissance by constantly drawing attention to its neglected affinity with the Middle Ages. But in Renaissance Fancies and Studies it is antiquity itself that comes repeatedly and heavily under attack. In an essay on Tuscan sculpture, for instance, she vindicates the superiority of Renaissance sculpture over its overrated classical models. The essay should be read as a delayed reply to Harrison’s Introductory Studies and, more generally, to the influential tradition of Winckelmann’s critiques of classical art. It is an ideological rejection of Hellenism which strikes at the very heart of its iconography: the sculpted body. Lee defiantly declares that ‘antique sculpture is conventional, insipid, monotonous, without perception for the charm of detail or the interest in individuality; afraid of movement and expression, and at the same time indifferent to outline and grouping; giving us florid nudities which never were alive, and which are doing and thinking nothing whatever’ (137–8). In a statement that is full of Paterian echoes she challenges modern Hellenism, which forgets ‘that Antiquity was not wholly represented by the frieze of the Parthenon’ (139–40). Strong with the new archaeological knowledge, Lee points out that the everyday material of Greek art was not marble, but rather the more perishable bronze and clay, and



sailing on a Greek boat back into the sea, lavishly robed and singing triumphantly, victoriously disappearing again into the past and into the realm of the unconscious, uncontained and uncensored by the double plot to frame her and explain her by the hand of the sculptor Waldemar and of the doctor and mythographer De Rosis.

in this way she exposes Winckelmann’s and Hegel’s mistake of relying on the specific characteristics of marble in order to reconstruct the features of the ancient ideal. This declassing of marble into clay is symptomatic: throughout the book Greek antiquity is characterised as dull and lifeless, a danger rather than an opportunity for artists. In another essay, for instance, Lee laments the way in which Raphael and his contemporaries were indoctrinated with ‘the real spirit of classical times, [ . . .] that the essence of antiquity was to have no essence at all’ (111). In Renaissance Fancies and Studies, Lee responds to aestheticism’s fascination with ancient Greece by professing an ideological anticlassicism. As she had done in ‘The Child in the Vatican’, she adopts Hegel’s (and Pater’s) idea of the negative aesthetics of antiquity but recasts this concept in pejorative and almost vampiric terms, presenting the encounter with antiquity as a moment of creative loss. Nowhere are these criticisms more evident than in ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’, an imaginary portrait that Lee includes alongside her arthistorical essays. Like Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, ‘A Seeker’ is a hybrid of fiction and criticism, in which the narration of the fictional events is sprinkled here and there with references to actual sources (Vasari) and historical figures (Leonardo, Botticelli, etc.). Its protagonist, Domenico Neroni, ‘pictor sacrilegus’, is a fictive fifteenth-century Italian painter who falls under the spell of the antique at a time in which the relics of classical art were just starting to be unearthed and appreciated. Neroni’s inborn infatuation with the human form is set off by his first experiences of antique art during a stay in Rome. To the uneducated and medieval Neroni, antiquity appears as a confusing compound of Greek and Latin culture; but to the modern reader his passionate interest in the sculpted nude unmistakably suggests modern Hellenism and the contemporary vogue for the classical nude in painting associated with Leighton and the aesthetic art circles that Lee had satirised in Miss Brown. Neroni develops an obsession with the ancients’ ability to reproduce the human body in art. He fetishises ‘muscle’ and ‘sinew’ and desperately tries to recreate classical sculptural realism (the ‘pagan perfection’ of the title) in his own times. But, as Lee often reminds her readers, while people in the nineteenth century have been ‘brought up under the influence of the antique’ (188), the fifteenth century was still unaccustomed to seeing the naked human body in art or life, let alone to studying it and reproducing it accurately. It is for this reason that the encounter with the art of antiquity could, like in Neroni’s case, result in ‘confusion’: ‘Too much of a seeker for new things, for secret and complicated knowledge, to undergo a mere widening of style like his more gifted or more




placid contemporaries, he fell foul of his previous work and his previous masters, without finding a new line or new ideas’ (185). ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’ is Lee’s response to Pater’s portraits of Renaissance artists. Lee’s Neroni reminds readers of Pater’s Winckelmann (who is mentioned several times in the tale), being naturally drawn to the antique by the almost unconscious drive that Pater had called ‘temperamental affinity’. He is, like Pater’s Winckelmann, both a pioneer of classicism in an un-classical age and an exile in the modern period. Lee’s story, however, rejects the predictable narrative of cultural regeneration and artistic glories in favour of one of disruption and trauma. Neroni’s failed efforts and the cold contemporary reception of his works are offered by Lee as a more sober account of the complexities of Renaissance classicism than Pater’s and Symonds’s tales of the unhindered influence of the ancient ideal. These writers had invariably represented the antique as the object of enthusiastic acceptance. Symonds, for instance, evocatively literalising the meaning of Renaissance as new birth, had told of how the miraculously preserved body of a ‘most beautiful’ Roman girl was unearthed in the Renaissance and immediately became an object of popular worship as a ‘saint of the old pagan world’.69 Lee takes over the trope of burial and exhumation (present also in Pater in the image of the ‘underground life’ of antiquity) but brings out its perverse content, as she shows Neroni ‘handling horrible remains [of the corpses he used to dissect in order to study human anatomy] and talking about them like a lover about his mistress or a preacher about God’ (177). Neroni’s interest in antiquity generates a psychological perversion, which is intensified by his persistent artistic failure to imitate the ancients successfully. His fanaticism brings him to the deranged conviction that, in order to obtain the secret of antique proportions, he should also be given, like some of the ancients were said to have done, to see an ancient god with his own eyes. He therefore procures the help of a reckless humanist, learned in classical matters, with whom he plots to celebrate a black mass in honour of the pagan divinities. The two, however, are discovered just as the spirits of the gods start to materialise and are immediately sentenced to death. Lee calls ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’ a ‘strange story of the quest after antique beauty and antique gods’ (230). It is a cautionary tale about the pernicious legacy of the antique, which here takes on a much darker and more satanic character than in the tales of gods in exile. It also carries on the satire on Hellenism and the spectral classicism explored in ‘Dionea’. Neroni is, like Waldemar, an artist for whom the classical nude provides an all-absorbing aesthetic ideal, anachronistically derived from




Winckelmann. It should be noted that, in this later text, Lee’s critique of Hellenism is not conducted in terms of gender: there is no distinction between a masculine and a feminine aesthetics. There is, however, a hint to the fact that Neroni’s aesthetic perversion might have entailed forms of homoeroticism or homosociality: Lee’s description of Neroni’s ‘Greek’ idealism (the act of seeking invoked in the title) as ‘a passion for the unattainable’ (173 and cf. 187) echoes Symonds’s repeated use of the expression ‘amour de l’impossible’ in order to suggest a convergence of aesthetic and homoerotic motives.70 Like Waldemar, Neroni is subjected to a haunting that leads to his final destruction. In both of Lee’s stories the narrative culminates in perverse re-enactments of ancient ritual through which she effectively (and perhaps unintentionally) celebrates the powerful force of ancient myth. But while in the earlier tale Lee had shown sympathy with a feminine and marginalised classicism embodied in the figure of Dionea, here her attack on Hellenism is unmitigated. Lee now appears less curious about the ancient world and antiquity seems more distant than ever in this later tale from which the supernatural element is stripped almost completely, so that ancient Greece loses even the alluring charm of the fantastic. In a Ruskinian moment, referring to early Renaissance sculpture, Lee tersely declares that ‘we have had enough of antique perfection, we have had too much of pseudo-antique faultlessness, and we feel refreshed by this unconsciousness of beauty and ugliness’ (193). Related to the wider context of the volume, it is clear that ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’ is another polemic against aestheticism, its cult of beauty, and its Hellenising practises; even though it is a polemic that, after the deaths of Pater and Symonds, had lost its immediate urgency. Renaissance Fancies and Studies ends with a ‘Valedictory’ that seals the epigrammatic nature of the collection. ‘Valedictory’ is an intellectual autobiography in which Lee sums up and evaluates her achievements so far. The essay repeats the inward journey of the preface to Juvenilia written 8 years earlier, in which Lee had described her turn from art for art’s sake to an ethical aestheticism in terms of growing older and more mature. But the position of ‘Valedictory’ at the end of the present volume signals that, in 1895, Lee no longer believes in the possibility of revising or reforming aestheticism. Putting together these essays, Lee is conscious of ‘saying farewell to some of the ambitions of and to most of the plans of [her] youth’ (235). With ‘Valedictory’, aestheticism is no longer associated with the future, but rather set firmly within the past, just as Lee changes her position from aesthetic writer to reader of aestheticism, in her own work and in the work of her defunct contemporaries.




Traces of the ‘Puritanism’ that Pater had seen in Juvenilia resurface here, as Lee forcefully and at times tortuously argues that good art and moral evil must always be discrete quantities. In this vein she denounces what she now sees as the sensational and morally questionable rediscovery of the Italian Renaissance by English writers of 20 years earlier, with transparent reference to Symonds. By comparison, she treats Pater with personal fondness and intellectual respect. But Lee wants to rewrite Pater in her own image: she traces the ‘spiritual evolution’ (255) of Pater from the immature and ‘very narrow’ (256) radical aestheticism of his early work to a later, and truer, phase as an accomplished moralist. Renaissance Fancies and Studies ends with a tribute to the ‘great master’ which is an open echo of her dedication of Euphorion to Pater over 20 years earlier. This circular gesture is meant to round off Lee’s aesthetic period, enclosing it in the past and signalling her move on to a new culture of art and to the new century. It is a ritualistic burial, an act of renunciation and purification that strives to recast the defunct aestheticism as a path for the attainment of a higher morality in art and life.




‘Two Dear Greek Women’: The Aesthetic Ecstasy of Michael Field

Dower me with thine own lips! – Am I not bidden The language from thy fair Greek mouth to take To wing thy conquering arrows, till they wake The heavy world & in its heart are hidden? Edith Cooper, ‘To Apollo – the Conqueror’ (1878) These lines belong to a remarkable ode to Apollo written by the 16-year-old Edith Cooper in 1878.1 Cooper, together with her aunt Katharine Bradley, would later form the prolific poetic duo ‘Michael Field’, active under this professional name between 1884 and 1913, the year of Cooper’s death. The ode, which remained unpublished during the author’s lifetime, contains an early statement of what became the poetic mission of Michael Field: to use poetry and the Greek ideal in order to ‘wake’ a world that has been made old and ‘heavy’ by stale moral conventions and intellectual stagnation. The precocious poet feels ‘bidden’ to this ambitious task from above, and, in the rest of this ode, she casts herself in the role of a modern ‘priestess’ of Apollo. She vows to him and, in a deliberate confusion of pagan and Christian imagery, tells of having ‘seen’ the returned god lay his hands on her brow as a sign of dedication and blessing. Cooper undertakes her calling with the fervour of religious fanaticism. From the rich iconography of the god, she chooses the bow and arrows rather than the lyre as instruments of the divine power of poetry: inspired by Apollo, Cooper imagines piercing the heart of the ‘heavy world’ of the nineteenth century, making hers the type of vindictive violence associated with the god in myths such as the slaughter of Niobe’s children and the flaying of Marsyas. In the first stanza of ‘To Apollo – the Conqueror’, which precedes the lines I have quoted above, the poet shows her devotion developing 93



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through a visual encounter: ‘I watch thy sculptured form, while my heart guesses / The awful beauty of thy aureate life’. The word ‘sculptured’ here is not simply a conventional attribute of Apollo’s athletic body; it refers, quite concretely, to a statue of the god, by means of which the young Cooper comes face to face with the ancient world. Hers is, the poet honestly admits, an imperfect encounter, probably mediated by a photographic reproduction or a cast. It leaves her guessing at what the full aesthetic experience of antiquity might really be like, and in this her best guide must be emotion (‘my heart’) rather than close study. The young poet is undaunted by her limited resources. Following a recognisable Romantic tradition, Cooper turns loss into creative energy and blurred vision into visionary intensity, as she imaginatively restores to the statue the colour and texture of a living body: Apollo’s lips are ‘crimson’ and his hair ‘gold-dark’ and soft. Cooper’s ekphrasis stands in an intertextual relationship with Winckelmann’s canonical description of the Apollo Belvedere, which surfaces in her description of the ‘wave of scorn’ on Apollo’s lip, of his ‘clear brow’ which fuses beauty and pride, and of the impressive masculine hardness (the ‘manhood’s might’) made soft by the curly hair. Cooper’s investment in the Apollo is, like Winckelmann’s, erotic as well as aesthetic: she rereads Winckelmann’s suffused male homoeroticism in a female heteroerotic key, which is particularly evident in the third and final stanza of the poem, which celebrates the poet’s vow with striking images of female sexuality, sexual union, and reproduction: I feel within a joyful, onward-leaping Like to a horse turned homeward, like the sea That springs on to the far rocks joyfully. The wind of inspiration downward sweeping Lawlessly scatters all earth’s thoughts aside. In golden death, like dead leaves scattered wide. – He stays with me. – Birth from his presence springs, I am a mother to all beauteous things. The moon, night’s flower, the dark-leaved darkness breaks! I am alone, but conquered, wedded, made One with a vast divinity, arrayed With what he gives & joyed with what he takes: – He called me . . . I obeyed.




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The language of marital union that is discreetly inscribed in the plea to ‘Dower me with thine own lips’ comes into the open here as Cooper imagines herself as one of Apollo’s mythic mortal lovers. Like Coronis, mother of Asclepius, whose myth is woven into the poem, the poet has been impregnated by the god who has descended on earth in the form of a Shelleyan ‘wind of inspiration’, full of fertilising power. The conclusion adds a new meaning to the title of the poem as the poet adds her own name to the list of ancient women and men who have capitulated to the god’s powerful sexual desire. The last image is post-coital: the poet is alone, at night, after the sexual climax. The god has left her. But the triumph is not followed by bitterness: the devotee has been granted her wish to be ‘made / One’ with her god in a sublime act of reconciliation of duty and pleasure (‘He called me . . . I obeyed’). ‘To Apollo – the Conqueror’ oscillates between being a poem about myth and a myth about the birth of the poet – Cooper’s realisation that she can be ‘mother to all beauteous things’. Invocations to Apollo are a poetic cliché, but Cooper revitalises the ossified neoclassical genre by injecting it with an unusual and daring eroticism focussed on the poet’s body. The image of the lips, around which the invocation is structured, is central to this. The ‘god-curved’ lips of Apollo, an attribute of beauty but also of divine cruelty or scorn, are the overcharged site of the erotic fantasy of surrender that the poem plays out. Reaching for the divine lips, the poet attempts a ritual gesture that sanctions the sexual union between man (or rather god) and woman, as in a marriage ceremony. But this contact of lips on lips also ensures the important transmission of the poetic tradition from antiquity to modernity in which the exchanged good is not, or rather not only, eros but language. In this sense, the object of Cooper’s desire, the gift that she asks of the god, is the poetic language that is the instrument of the violent regenerative process analysed above (it is poetic language that puts the wings on the arrows aimed at the heart of the modern world). The language on which the intellectual and erotic networks of the poem converge is of course ancient Greek, Apollo’s divine language, which represents the poetic eloquence and power of perfect expression to which the young poet aspires. Cooper reflects on the modern poet’s relationship to the ancient source by making clever use of the multiple meanings of ‘dower’: in the poem she is both an enthusiastic poet-bride who wants to be endowed with divine inspiration through kissing, and a widow who, abandoned by her divine lover, asks him that she may inherit his lips in order to strengthen her poetic voice and make it effective.



‘Two Dear Greek Women’

Cooper’s skilful ode predates the birth of ‘Michael Field’ by several years but it clearly articulates some of the concerns with which I deal in this chapter: aestheticism, myth, ecstasy, ritual, eroticism, gender, and the complex interplay between private and public identities. Bradley, the other half of Michael Field, is absent from the composition of this poem, but she is nonetheless present in the dedication of the ode to ‘her who twined the ‘‘bay-wreath’’ for his priestess’. The aunt enters the scene as the officiating expert of an ancient rite, who prepares the priestess for the sacrament, and as the intended spectator of the poetic and erotic ecstasy that ensues. The poem is therefore not only about Cooper’s encounter with ancient Greece but also about the creative relationship of the two women – a relationship that is heavily mediated by the experience of Greece. By 1878, the year in which the poem was written, Bradley had already been a student at Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the Collège de France. The classics were her main academic interest. The poem captures the moment when Cooper’s understanding of antiquity becomes independent and mature (the coming of age is ritualised by the sexual union with the god), and when she becomes confident enough to acknowledge her debt to Bradley as mentor and fellow-explorer.2 The two women would shortly enrol in the recently opened University College Bristol, where they studied classics and ancient philosophy and participated actively in the life of the university. It is in this experience of studying the classics together that their collaborative poetic identity is born, first as Arran and Isla Leigh, authors of a collection of drama and verses titled Bellerophôn (1881), and finally as Michael Field, author of the plays Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund, published together in 1884.

Aesthetic beginnings Like Lee, Bradley and Cooper felt that their gender would prejudice a fair reception of their work. Much more than Lee, they were anxious that the female identity of Michael Field should not become publicly known. After the publication of Callirrhoë, they wrote to Robert Browning, an early admirer of their work, to explain that the revelation of their true identity would be ‘utter ruin’ to Michael Field: ‘the report of lady authorship will dwarf and enfeeble our work at every turn . . . . And we have many things to say that the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips. We must feel free as dramatists to work out in the open air of nature – exposed to her vicissitudes, witnessing her terrors: we cannot be stifled in drawing-room conventionalities.’3 Michael Field’s




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poetics is located outside the confines of what is intellectually and socially permissible for women to say in the nineteenth century. The poet, for them, must necessarily have direct free access to those areas of experience, identified with the ‘vicissitudes’ and ‘terrors’ of nature, from which ladies were screened by the conventions dictated by the Victorian double standard. As Bradley would reflect years later in her journal, ‘if women seek to learn their art from life, instead of what the angels bring down to them in dishes, they simply get defamed.’4 It is this thirst for experience that brought Michael Field again and again to ancient Greece, an intellectual landscape which was being liberated from drawing-room hypocrisies by aesthetic writers such as Pater and Symonds, and which was increasingly open to middle-class women, no longer only in the form of private study, but as a shared discourse of female intellectual emancipation in pioneering educational institutions like Newnham and Bristol. Yopie Prins has persuasively placed Michael Field in ‘a female homosocial context’ associated with Cambridge University, which appropriated the ‘aestheticized and eroticized vision of ancient Greece, formulated within the institutional context of Oxford Hellenism’ by Pater and others.5 I will explore the Pater connection later in this chapter. But it is important to bear in mind that Bradley and Cooper would always feel heavily drawn to the semi-secret world of Victorian male homosociality, with its sensual pleasures and protected spaces for intellectual and social interaction from which women were excluded. From 1887, the new University Club for Ladies (‘a slice of Cambridge in New Bond Street’) would provide Bradley with a welcome substitute.6 Anxieties about gender and authorship were justified by experience. As in the case of Lee, the female authors’ intervention in the heavily malegendered field of classical Greek caused condescension and hostility. In a review of their early collection of poetry and drama, Bellerophôn, which they published under female pseudonyms, they were badly faulted for their use of material from Euripides, their ‘verbiage which is the reverse of Greek’, and their inconsistent transliteration of Greek names. Some of these criticisms are undoubtedly fair, but the reviewer’s rhetoric is gendered. Mixing clichés about Victorian women poets and patronising remarks on their classicism, he concludes that ‘they might have done much better if they had chosen an ordinary motive, and had been content to think, feel, and write about it in harmony with some leading current of English sentiment and thought.’7 This was precisely how they did not want to be read. Such early responses must have been instrumental in sharpening Bradley and Cooper’s determination to publish




under a male name and to gravitate toward aestheticism, a highbrow literary movement deeply interested in Greece that asked readers to call into question those very currents of ‘English sentiment and thought’ vaguely invoked here. Bellerophôn attracted the interest of Symonds, who was curious to know more about the aunt and niece who ‘must pass their time in a Greek dream-land’. Even at this early stage Symonds remarked on what would become a recurrent criticism of Michael Field’s work – namely, that the lyrics are much stronger than the dramas. His reaction was generally positive but he pointed out, echoing his chastisement of Lee, a tendency to ‘excess and want of taste’, declaring to a friend that ‘These ladies have much to learn from their Greek models, of self-restraint, sobriety, and purity in style.’ He thought that the poems ‘dwell too much on the erotic elements of Gk. mythology, and treat them in a sentimental emotional spirit which is really alien to the sensuous simplicity of the Greeks. It is as though a new Keats had gone a-riot in the floweriest places of a classical dictionary.’8 Although partly complimentary, this last reference to Keats, who was notoriously unschooled in classical learning, provides a contemptuous picture of Bradley and Cooper as autodidacts and, as it were, Cockney classicists. A few days later, writing directly to Cooper, Symonds was full of advice about Greek myth and dramatic treatment and provided her with a reading list of ‘real Greek books’, which included Jowett’s translations of Plato, A. Mary F. Robinson’s Crowned Hippolytus, Winckelmann, Hegel, and (‘if I many venture to mention’) his own Studies of the Greek Poets, which ‘might be found helpful in a different way’.9 This letter marks the beginning of a short period of patronage, during which Symonds seems to have extended to Bradley and Cooper the benefit of the intellectual guidance he had offered to Robinson and, as we have seen, to Lee. Symonds’s support culminated after the publication of Callirrhoë, when, despite a few negative comments about the un-Greekness of some details, he praised this play as an enormous improvement on Bellerophôn.10 Gently mocking Symonds’s donnish attitude towards them, Bradley replied that they felt ‘as happy as those who first are hearing they have passed 1st class in Greats’. She then defended Michael Field from Symonds’s accusation of having perverted the classical canons of dignity and restraint, citing, not without antagonism, Robinson’s positive review of the play. But she soon reverted to a school-girlish tone intended to flatter Symonds’s pedagogic




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instincts, this time without apparent irony, asking him to ‘correct [their] work in anything you discern false in it just as strongly as you would a Latin exercise. You can teach us with authority, reverencing your blame, we can profit by it.’11 Bradley’s letter is characteristic of Michael Field’s practice of seeking the approval of established, usually male, intellectuals, but at the same time emphasising a sense of difference from them. Michael Field’s poetic authority oscillates between these two conflicting roles of anxious amateurs and confident female intellectuals. Symonds’s praise for Callirrhoë was symptomatic of a general endorsement by reviewers and critics. The play was widely noted and, apart from a few exceptions, thought to show great promise. Callirrhoë is set in ancient Greece and draws on Euripides’s Bacchae, from which it takes the theme of a polis that is subjected to divine revenge for its neglect of Dionysus; but it is modern both in form (there is no chorus, for instance) and in treatment. A detailed analysis of the play is beyond the scope of this chapter, which deals with Michael Field as aesthetic poet rather than dramatist. But it is important to note here that Michael Field’s debut is in close dialogue with two fundamental aesthetic texts: Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which, besides providing a precedent in terms of genre, had been instrumental in introducing the classical subject matter into the developing aesthetic discourse, and Pater’s essay on Dionysus (1876) which, as we have seen, had directed that discourse towards a marginal classicism rich in sensational potential.12 In the review that Bradley proudly quoted at Symonds, Robinson was the first to identify the connection with Swinburne and aestheticism. Capturing the sentiments of the ode to Apollo discussed in the beginning of this chapter, she writes that Michael Field ‘sings the glories of enthusiasm, and preaches the gospel of ecstasy to an old and chillerminded world’. Robinson detects a ‘scorn of bourgeois commonplace’ and an ‘urgent battle waged against routine’, which she associates with the Romanticism of the early decades of the century and its recent revival by Swinburne.13 The revolutionary Romanticism rightly singled out by Robinson echoes both Swinburne and, implicitly, Shelley, who is, as I have argued in my reading of Pater’s ‘Conclusion’, a fundamental precursor for aesthetic writers. Callirrhoë, like much of Michael Field’s subsequent work, follows Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ in using ancient Greek material to promote a modern poetics of ‘ecstasy’, a word that is emphatically iterated in Pater’s essay and that is key in enabling the passage from the experience of




art to individual freedom of the mind and the body.14 Like Pater’s, Bradley and Cooper’s investment in classical scholarship is intensely preoccupied with the aesthetics of reception: they look to Greece in order to experiment with new and productive ways in which ancient and modern culture can be brought into contact. It is always worth remembering that Bradley and Cooper’s interventions into the classical discourse take place at a time in which the Latin and (especially) Greek classics were being disenfranchised in their role as training for the social elite: classical texts and classical culture, threatened by the rise of English in the academy and more widely available in modern translations than ever before, were in the process of entering a new relationship with modern English culture. Bradley and Cooper saw that this was a time of creative opportunities and were determined to take part in redefining how the Greek classics should or could be read in the nineteenth century.

Sapphic aestheticism An important feature of Michael Field’s approach to the ancient world is that Bradley and Cooper are interested in piecing together a less visible female tradition that has been obscured by the comparatively abundant testimony of male art and male writing. When Bradley first visited France and Italy in 1880, her eyes were therefore immediately caught by the women, not the men, of antiquity. Writing to Cooper, who had remained in England, Bradley described the Venus de Milos as ‘the perfect woman – perfect in and of herself – with no thought of man, no entreaty for his love: yet with breasts so sweet one longs to drink from them . . . . A lovely creature, not Cupid’s mother, not Adonis’ bride; ‘‘das ewig weibliche’’ the eternal womanhood is what she expresses! I am so glad to have seen her.’ By comparison, the Venus de Medici seemed disappointing (‘entirely self-conscious’) and the Capitoline Venus only second best: The Venus of the Capitol is a perfect woman. Most happily her garments are beside her, not on her, and the lovely form from throat to foot is unmutilated . . . . The dimpled back – the real beauty of the waist is only seen in the back – made me long again and again for the attendant Scott or Blythe [her travel companions] to turn the statue for me; and all the circling beauty of the loins kept me in lingering adoration; but for the bosom heave Milo’s Venus is to me unrivalled. The face is innocent and fair, not majestic.15




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Figure 6 Venus, Capitoline Museums, Rome. ADA-F-001796-0000. Archivio Anderson / Alinari Archives, Florence.

In these extracts, Bradley asks her niece to admire how sculptors represented the ancient goddess in her feminine strength and independence, especially her independence from male-dominated myths and from the need to gratify the male viewer. Under the unabashed gaze




of Bradley’s eyes, the female nude is triumphant, self-contained, and, using Goethe’s formula, ‘eternal’. Echoes of Winckelmann are present in these and other accounts of antique sculptures in this correspondence. But to the suffused homoerotic idiom of Winckelmann’s descriptions Bradley substitutes a cheeky and wholly private language of female eroticism and desire most evident in the striking fantasy of drinking from Venus’s breasts. Her interaction with the space of the gallery is imaginative and undisciplined (she would like the statue to be turned for her) and echoes Lee’s and Woolf’s frustration with the domesticating mentality of the museum. Like Lee and Woolf, Bradley claims an epistemological independence for the female viewer of antiques. Back in England, Cooper responded enthusiastically to her aunt’s letters, receiving Bradley’s pagan gift of olive leaves, reading ancient philosophy, and writing neo-pagan poetry that mourns the dispossession of the old gods by Christianity.16 Their interest in the women of antiquity brought Bradley and Cooper, never shy of taking on a challenge, to work on the most famous female artist of the ancient world: Sappho. In 1889 Michael Field published Long Ago, a collection of poems in which a series of Sapphic fragments were, as they put it in the short preface, extended into lyrics. Long Ago was inspired by the successful 1885 edition of Sappho by Henry Wharton in which Sapphic fragments were printed alongside various English translations. The concept of ‘extension’, with its simultaneous evocation of space (from short fragment to full poem) and time (from antiquity to modernity) is an ingenious way of describing their work: it distances their writing from the more scholarly genre of translation, like Wharton’s, and gives the collection an experimental quality that makes it fully consonant with the mode of imaginative reception promoted by aesthetic writers, based on impression and visionary intensity. The fragments, which in some cases consist of as little as two or three words, provide the modern poet with condensed, evocative material on which to base the reconstruction of a complex, highly individual sensibility. The best way to read the collection is therefore as an imaginative biography of Sappho that is, in intent if not in form, close to Pater’s imaginary portraits and biographical essays in The Renaissance, and to some of Browning’s dramatic monologues. Michael Field’s lyrics are inspired by these compressed forms that use material fragments of the past (the stained glass in the Cathedral of Auxerre, the tomb at St Praxed’s, etc.) to construct psychological studies that are intensely evocative of a particular historical moment or mood. But it would be wrong to give Long Ago too much of an artificial sense of cohesion: the collection emphasises the




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plurality of possible responses to the ancient material, reflected in the variety of form and metre of the modern lyrics. The fragments are thus purposefully used in different ways: sometimes to construct psychological and biographical sketches of Sappho; at other times to imitate her voice, showing her at work, as it were – composing odes for ceremonies and public occasions; and at other times still to retell an ancient myth that has no apparent relation to Sappho’s known oeuvre. Recent research by Yopie Prins and Margaret Reynolds has alerted us to the importance of Sappho for the nineteenth-century poetic tradition.17 Michael Field’s version of Sappho needs to be understood in its intertextual relationship with this tradition, and especially with the work of other Romantic and Victorian poets such as Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., Baudelaire, and, of course, Swinburne, who had recently used Sappho’s fragments to reconstruct her voice in his sensational dramatic monologue ‘Anactoria’. Prins in particular has also drawn attention to the transversal influence of Symonds on Michael Field’s evocation of the eroticism of the Lesbian landscape and its connection to female sexuality, mediated through Wharton’s use of Symonds’s criticism and translations in his edition.18 Symonds’s chapter on the lyric poets in his Studies of the Greek Poets, the book he had recommended to Bradley and Cooper in 1881, is indeed an influential precedent for Long Ago, not least because it clearly associates Sappho with an aestheticism avant la lettre that Symonds retrospectively sees at work in the best products of ancient Greek art and poetry. In his influential but now neglected study, Symonds holds up the Greeks as the best proof for why the moderns need to emancipate art from morality and to promote secularism and sexual tolerance. Symonds portrays Lesbos as a potent concentrate of Winckelmann’s values: this island is to him more blessed with natural beauty, more sunny and serene than any other part of Greece; it is more conducive to individual freedom and especially to the ‘social and domestic freedom’ enjoyed by females there. The women of Lesbos are said to have been ‘highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history – until, indeed, the present time’, and to have ‘applied themselves successfully to literature [forming] clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music’ and studying ‘the art of beauty’.19 But, with a typical logic of inverse proportionality between the known and the worth-knowing, this especially desirable world is especially difficult to reconstruct. This is because we have only very scant remains of the lyric poetry in which this aspect of antiquity was represented, as its vast majority was systematically destroyed by zealous scribes and scholars in the Middle Ages. Yet, even though the few extant odes of Sappho,




Pindar, and Simonides are so few in number, Symonds nonetheless sees in them the proof that ‘beneath the ocean of time and oblivion remain for ever buried thousands and thousands of supreme works of art. To collect the fragments, to piece them together, to ponder over them until their scattered indications offer some suggestion of the whole which has been lost, is all that remains to the modern student. Like the mutilated marbles of Praxiteles, chips broken off from bas-reliefs and statues, which are disinterred from the ruins of Rome or Herculaneum, the minutest portions of the Greek lyrists have their value’ (114). Symonds fuses the familiar imagery of burial and resurrection with a Romantic poetics of the fragment in order to draw attention to the preciousness of this textual material, which is described as ‘splintered jewels’, ‘fragments of extinguished stars’, and ‘a small glittering heap of pure golddust’ (115). In Studies of the Greek Poets the world of ancient Lesbos is impressionistically recreated through the medium of aesthetic prose. The island is described as a place of ‘overmastering passions’ where ‘the personality of the Greek race burned [ . . .] with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling.’ Lesbos is an Arcadia within Arcadia, which surpasses the rest of Greece in ‘the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervour of personal feeling’ (127). But the history of Lesbos is a story of a fall into decadence and mannered artificiality. In this too the island is a microcosm of the narrative of rise, glory, and decline of Greek culture made popular by Winckelmann: At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known: this was the flower-time of the Æolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into the gorgeousness of Art, burning their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal troubadours, who made a literature of Love, or the Venetian painters, who based their art upon the beauty of colour, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left for Art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued. (127–8)




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Symonds’s Sappho embodies the first phase of this narrative – the full flowering of the lyric school, which precedes the moment of decadence but also clearly contains its yet unrealised potential. Homoerotic love plays an important part in Symonds’s characterisation of Sappho. His description of her ‘profounder yearnings of an intense soul after beauty, which has never on earth existed’ (130) openly recalls what he elsewhere refers to as amour de l’impossible, a sentiment that fuses psychological and aesthetic impulses, which Symonds systematically employs as a signifier of homosexuality (see Chapter 4). These implicit references to female homoeroticism are made explicit by Symonds when he talks of Sappho’s loves for Atthis and Anactoria. Symonds compares these favourably to the male poet Anacreon’s ‘facile’ loves for both women and men (‘instrumenta libidinis’), claiming that Anacreon ‘never felt the furnace of Sappho, whose love, however criminal in the estimation of modern moralists, was serious and of the soul’ (137). There is here a rare moment of solidarity with female homoeroticism, which Symonds portrays with the same rhetoric that he normally applies to male love: as natural and noble in antiquity, but as having been debased by unjust criminalisation in subsequent ages. Even more strikingly, there is an attempt to extend to female homosexuality the privileged link between male homoeroticism and the artistic temperament that was so central to the tradition of Hellenism promoted by Winckelmann and espoused by aesthetic male writers. Because of this unusual interest in female subjectivity, Symonds’s essay attracted the attention of female classicists, most notably of the young Jane Harrison, whose ‘Pictures of Sappho’ was published in the Woman’s World in May 1888, during the time of Wilde’s editorship. In this article, which is intended as a small supplement to Wharton, Harrison draws a critical portrait of the poet based on ancient pictorial images of her. Influenced by aestheticism both in her method and in her opinions, she quotes with approval Swinburne’s poetic reconstructions as showing an understanding of the past that comes ‘from within’. But it is to Symonds that Harrison is most clearly indebted as she rhapsodically evokes life on Lesbos, where ‘women were free to live, free to know, and not only just such things as should render them serviceable, but all things – to the uttermost.’ She mentions the ‘clubs and societies’ of ancient Lesbos as a precedent for the recently established female colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. And, fully in tune with Bradley and Cooper’s sentiments, she passionately argues for the beneficial effects of female homosociality ancient and modern: ‘So for camaraderie – for all absolute relaxation of social strain – for all keen




unflinching conflict of wits, we will do as the Lesbian women did, have our women’s clubs.’20 In Long Ago, Bradley and Cooper follow Symonds in displacing the modern aesthetic ideal onto an ancient community centred on the figure of Sappho. Many of Michael Field’s lyrics celebrate the aesthetic life of antiquity, implicitly lamenting its disappearance by means of a poetics of melancholia typical of Romantic Hellenism. Michael Field’s Sappho is, on a fundamental level, a promoter of art for art’s sake and a believer in the right of art to speak out against conventional morality through a language of sensation and emotional intensity. But she also clearly belongs to the ‘brilliant spring’ of the lyric school described by Symonds, rather than to the decadent sensationalism espoused by the better-known Sapphos of Swinburne and Baudelaire. One of the poems is worth quoting in full: LIV ... ADOWN the Lesbian vales, When spring first flashes out, I watch the lovely rout Of maidens flitting ‘mid the honey-bees For thyme and heath, Cistus, and trails Of myrtle-wreath: They bring me these My passionate, unsated sense to please. In turn, to please my maids, Most deftly will I sing Of their soft cherishing In apple-orchards with cool waters by, Where slumber streams From quivering shades, And Cypris seems To bend and sigh, Her golden calyx offering amorously. What praises would be best Wherewith to crown my girls? The rose when she unfurls Her balmy, lighted buds is not so good,





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To that pure band alone I sing of marriage-loves; As Aphrodite’s doves Glance in the sun their colour comes and goes: No girls let fall Their maiden zone At Hymen’s call Serene as those Taught by a poet why sweet Hesper glows. This poem belongs to the set of lyrics in Long Ago that adopt Sappho’s voice in order to create a vivid psychological portrait of the poet and at the same time to sketch a picture of daily life on Lesbos. Like all the lyrics in the collection, the poem starts with a Sapphic fragment quoted in the original Greek, which is then incorporated into the modern poem – here in the first two lines of the second stanza.21 The insight into Sappho’s psychology is most clearly conveyed by the reference to her intense sensuality at the end of the first stanza and, indeed, all through the previous lines, where expectation and desire build up as Sappho’s gaze lingers on her girls at work. Such moments of voyeurism are frequent in Long Ago, appearing, for instance, in XLIX, where Sappho watches her maids ‘lie and dream / Of happy things’ during her sleepless nights; or in XXVII, where she describes how ‘when Mnasidica doth raise / Her arm to feed the lamp I gaze / Glad at the lovely curve’. These half-licit glimpses create a poetics of frank visual desire for the female body that has placed Long Ago in the centre of the recent rereadings of Michael Field from the point of view of female homoeroticism.22 In LIV the sensuality of the maids is emphasised by the strongly synaesthetic description of the ‘Lesbian vales’ whose herbs and flowers, Sappho knows as she watches in anticipation, are being gathered for her. Prins, who identifies an intertextuality between this poem and Sappho’s fragment 2 (‘their favourite topos in Long Ago’), reads poem LIV in terms of its metaphorical exchange between Lesbian landscape and Sapphic song.23 Here, as often in the collection, natural imagery, especially in the form of flowers, is presented in close symbiosis with Sappho’s lyrics, and with poetry more generally. In poem LIV flowers are the prime ware of exchange within the female economy of the island: they are offered



So fresh as they When on my breast They lean, and say All that they would Opening their glorious, candid maidenhood.

by the maids to Sappho as a sign of their devotion and she reciprocates their gift with songs with which, in keeping with the dominant imagery, she will ‘crown’ the girls. Poems, as Sappho knows, make better gifts than flowers because they are not subject to the natural law of decay. The irony is, of course, that the songs of Sappho would in fact turn out to be as perishable as the flowers picked by the girls on the warm spring day: they will be broken and scattered in far-away corners of the ancient world during the centuries of their post-classical diaspora, in order, perhaps, to be recovered in later ages written on fragments of papyrus in an unexpected new ecological bond with the vegetable world. In contrast with Symonds’s favourite image of the lyric fragment as unearthed rock and precious stone, Michael Field’s use of the flower presents the material survival of antiquity through a new rhetoric of fragility and instability. Many poems in Long Ago use the activities of flower-gathering and garland-weaving to alert readers to the vanished contribution of women to the arts of antiquity, represented here by the ephemeral floral art works of the women of Lesbos, which are given a distinctly modern currency by the contemporary aesthetic taste for (traditionally female) domestic and decorative arts. Bradley and Cooper also exploit to the full the wellknown erotic connotations of flower imagery, which had been recently brought back into fashion by Symbolist and Decadent writing.24 In lyric I, for instance, the refrain ‘They plaited garlands’ evokes the lost world of the young ages of European civilisation glamorised by nineteenthcentury Hellenism, characterised by the sexual freedom that Pater had ambiguously glossed as ‘sexlessness’, which is here described as ‘violetweaving bliss’ (an image that connects to the free virginal eroticism of LIV); while in XXIV Sappho addresses herself to Aphrodite as ‘thy flowerweaving one’ in order to ritualise her double identity as poet and lover. The persistent association of poems with flowers and garlands also performs a metatextual function, found in the etymological origins of the Greek word ‘anthology’ as, literally, flower-gathering, and in the nineteenth-century vogue for referring to collections of verses as ‘garlands’. Michael Field’s flowers are here metaphorically mixed with Sappho’s, in the hybrid formation of fragment and ‘extended’ lyric, and offered as homage to the dead poet. But they are also used as love gifts that the two living poets exchange with each other, recreating the erotic economy of the old Lesbian singing school in the act of collaborative writing. Poetic creation and secret eroticism are persistently associated in Michael Field’s oeuvre: one is reminded of the discreet inscription of Bradley into the young Cooper’s ode to Apollo as the one who ‘twined the ‘‘bay-wreath’’ for his priestess’.




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The female community depicted in many of the lyrics in Long Ago has, as various critics have remarked, distinct homoerotic or even homosocial overtones, which are borrowed from Symonds and the discourse of Hellenism prevalent in male aesthetic circles of the time, also redeployed by Harrison. But, as in their early exchanges with Symonds, Bradley and Cooper are anxious to stress the distinctly female character of their Hellenism. This desire is reflected in a number of instances in which men are deliberately marginalised and excluded from the aesthetic community of the island. The first stanza of poem L, for instance, sets up a contrast between a masculine poetics that is learned, accomplished, of ‘undaunted style’, and sanctioned by tradition, and the poetry of feeling which is the stuff of Long Ago, imagined here as the spontaneous expression of a female community. Muse of the golden throne, my griefs assuage – Not with fresh gifts of verse – A listener at thy knees I would remain, So thou rehearse To me that strain Sung by the poet-sage, Manful, and crisp, and free, Of so undaunted style, It can command And move to clemency The tyrant, yet the terse, Clear song one feels the while, Ah, once was fashioned in a goodly land Of women fair, With voices soft as wood-doves’ through the air. Sitting at the foot of the golden throne, the poet listens to the powerful male verses but she secretly yearns for the lyric song, gendered as feminine and, once again, ephemeral, lost in the air like the voices of the doves. Looking at poem LIV again, we can certainly detect a sustained female homoerotic discourse. The presence of Aphrodite is conjured at least twice in the poem: as Cypris (the goddess that came from the sea of Cyprus) and through her doves ‘Glanc[ing] in the sun’; but perhaps also through the transversal references to Hesper, the evening star or Venus, and to the myrtle (a plant sacred to Aphrodite, which symbolises the bitterness and also the eternity of love) that the girls gather for Sappho. The goddess watches benignly over these women, reaching down to offer them ‘Her golden calyx’, and in this act she sanctions a




ritual reconciliation of real and ideal femininity mediated through the figure of Sappho and her song. The relationship between Sappho and her ‘girls’, which is the subject matter of the poem, is also portrayed through pictures of strong physical and emotional intimacy: Sappho tantalisingly recounts how the girls would lean on her breast ‘Opening their glorious, candid maidenhood’ to her – an image that we are encouraged to read in its most graphic meaning, as it is directly linked to the eroticised flower imagery that recurs in the text, to which Aphrodite’s ‘golden calyx’ also belongs. Like the male homoerotic communities celebrated by Symonds and the male Hellenists, Michael Field’s Lesbos thrives on an economy of desire and a female right to pleasure that embody a critique of the types of prohibitions and moral restrictions associated with Christianity and nineteenth-century rules of decorum. In fact, the homoeroticism of Michael Field’s poetry seems bolder than anything we find in Symonds, Pater, or even Wilde, reliant as it is on libidinal tensions and explicit genital symbolism, and on an open fascination with bawdiness and the obscene. In this respect, Bradley and Cooper exploited the relative tolerance in nineteenth-century society for the less readable images of female homoeroticism, while male aesthetic writers, more liable to public censorship, were forced to encode same-sex desire in the more ‘difficult’ forms of intertextuality or sublimation. Yet it would be wrong to see in this ancient community a straightforward representation of modern homosexuality or modern lesbian identity. Men are excluded from the female economy and female aesthetics of ancient Lesbos, but not from its erotic life. The female homoeroticism celebrated in Long Ago is sanctioned by a social contract that, like ancient male pederasty, is by no means exclusive of heterosexual desire. This model is evident in poem LIV where, as in several other lyrics in Long Ago, Sappho is both a lover of girls and their guide into a mature eros that would later take place within marriage, ‘At Hymen’s call’. It is true that Sappho’s love, connected with poetry and nature as described above, is depicted as in some way preferable to the heterosexual pleasures that are to come. The aim of Sappho’s schooling of the girls in adult love is, after all, to make them ‘Serene’ (no trace of desire here) in their passage into a different type of sexuality which the ‘pure’ maidens approach with diffidence, vulnerable as Aphrodite’s doves. It is important to recognise these homoerotic patterns that traverse Long Ago. And yet it would be inaccurate to see the collection as enacting an exclusively lesbian eroticism. Heterosexual love is celebrated mostly through epithalamia or nuptial songs (e.g. XLII, XLVII,




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LIII, and LV), a classical poetic form that entices the young bride and groom to leave childhood (and, in the case of the woman, virginity) behind and embrace the pleasures and duties of adult sexuality. These are songs that celebrate the difference between the sexes as productive and vital, even natural to the erotic life. Other poems, notably LIX, describe the sexual desire of women for men or boys. Sappho herself is, moreover, emphatically bi-sexual. Bradley and Cooper, for instance, subscribe to the myth that Sappho killed herself for love of the male boatman Phaon. As Marion Thain has rightly pointed out, in Long Ago ‘the homoerotic isn’t hidden within the heteroerotic; rather, the two are intermingled in order to invoke a deliberately multifaceted, amorphous, desire.’25 In Long Ago, Michael Field takes readers back to ancient Greece in order to explore an eroticism that thrives on the very endlessness of the possibilities of eros, none of which is prescribed, limited, or denied. In this respect aestheticism, in spite of its heavy male gendering, provided Bradley and Cooper with imaginative and fluid models that could not be found in the sociologically and scientifically minded New Woman movement that was emerging in those years, to which they, even more than Lee, were never drawn despite their homosocial leanings and overt interest in female sexuality. Their poems encourage us to explore sexual subject and object positions expressive of a plurality of desires centred on the figure of Sappho. In this refusal to place a priori limitations on desire and experience, these lyrics take on the transgressive aestheticism advocated by Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Pater’s Renaissance. Long Ago, like those texts, reveals how to multiply pleasure through a constant bending and expansion of the rigid limits of the self.

Bacchic aestheticism It was after reading Long Ago that Browning, prompted by the spontaneous classicism that pervades these poems, greeted Bradley and Cooper as his ‘two dear Greek women’.26 In his review of Long Ago, the critic John Miller Gray, who was to become a life-long friend of the poets, compared Michael Field’s classicism to Keats’s, turning on its head Symonds’s earlier dismissal of Bradley and Cooper as Cockney classicists: ‘the sympathetic insight of a modern poet has opened the secret and the beauty of old Greek life to those debarred from searching for it in the originals, and who [ . . .] are apt to carry away the impression that classicism is a tame and frigid thing’.27 In this reading, Michael Field is




the author of a laudable popularising project: the ‘secret and the beauty’ of Greece are not reached through erudition, but rather through ‘sympathetic insight’ and the ability to bring modernity and antiquity into dialogue. Pater was also impressed by the book. Bradley and Cooper had sent him a copy, together with a letter signed by ‘Michael Field’ in which the poet expressed ‘his’ hope that Pater would ‘understand the spirit of my lyrics – you who have sympathy with attempts to reconcile the old and the new, to live as in continuation the beautiful life of Greece. Renaissance is the condition of man’s thought which seems to have for you the most exciting charm. What I have aspired to do from Sappho’s fragments may therefore somewhat appeal to your sense of survival in human things – to your interest in the shoots and offspring of elder literature.’28 Seeking the recognition of a fellow-writer interested in ‘survival in human things’, Bradley and Cooper implicitly expressed a feeling of discipleship and intellectual affiliation. Pater’s reply acknowledged a sense of kinship, addressing Michael Field as ‘a true poet’ and praising the ‘golden calmness’ that is ‘the mood proper to our minds in returning, by conscious effort, to distant worlds of thought and feeling; the more so, if that mood be itself unconscious’.29 This was the start of a correspondence and a series of visits that lasted until Pater’s death. From the extant letters it is evident that Pater, like Symonds and many other readers then and now, admired Bradley and Cooper’s lyrics but was disappointed by their dramas. Pater’s customary graciousness showed clear signs of strain when he blandly praised their play, The Tragic Mary (1890) as ‘a sterling piece of literary work’. Reading through this most un-Paterian of adjectives, Bradley vowed that she would ‘never forgive Mr. Pater [ . . .]. Nothing offends us except Mr. Pater’s ‘‘sterling’’.’30 There were more grounds for resentment. Only a few days earlier Bradley had told Wilde, on their very first meeting, that ‘there was one sentence of Mr. Pater’s which I would not say I could never forgive, because I recognised its justice; but from which I suffered, and which was hard to bear – that in which he speaks of the scholarly conscience as male.’31 Despite these tensions (Bradley and Cooper’s letters and diary are full of incensed comments), Pater remained a crucial influence on Bradley and Cooper’s writing, their theories of art, their views on antiquity and, as the remark about ‘the scholarly conscience’ negatively proves, their self-positioning within the culture of aestheticism. Their papers housed in the Bodleian and the British Libraries show how closely they read Pater’s works all through the 1880s and 1890s. Like other admirers of Pater’s early aestheticism, they were disappointed by his turn to a more cautious style after the clamour of The




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Renaissance and the Money-Hardinge affair, declaring, when Appreciations was published, a ‘malicious pleasure in seeing Mr. Pater become ‘‘good’’ before one’s very eyes – all his scepticism, all his Epicureanism, all his humanism are modes of yesterday’.32 Bradley and Cooper remained committed to the sensational and radical aestheticism of the 1860s and 1870s. They nonetheless went on following Pater’s work, enthusiastically attending his lecture on Prosper Merimeé in London in November 1890 and finding new enjoyment with Plato and Platonism, a volume that they thought to be in accordance with their new interest in ‘the Present’, inspired by Bernhard Berenson.33 Pater’s name is often used as a passport into aesthetic circles: it is about Pater that Bradley talks in that first meeting with Wilde (‘[Wilde:] ‘‘There is only one man in this century who can write prose.’’ ‘‘You mean Mr. Pater.’’ ‘‘Yes – take Marius the Epicurean – any page’’ ’34); and in their letters to John Miller Gray and Arthur Symons, as well as in their long, painstakingly recorded conversations with Bernhard Berenson, Pater figures as an important intermediary in discussions on art and aesthetics. Bradley and Cooper repeatedly sought to forge intertextual links with Pater in their works. They borrowed from him the title of their verse drama The Tragic Mary (as Pater had called Mary Stuart in his essay on D. G. Rossetti in Appreciations), and also that of a remarkable collection of prose sketches called For that Moment Only, after Pater’s famous words about the fleeting nature of beauty in the ‘Conclusion’. These brief impressionistic pieces were written in the early 1890s but, although clearly intended for publication, never saw the light of day. Bradley and Cooper referred to them as ‘croquis’, after a technical term for a quickly drawn sketch, usually of a live model. They are Paterian not only in name and technique but in content, most of them being on the theme of gods in exile.35 The rare prose works in the Michael Field canon reveal a close imitation of Pater’s style and ideas which, for reasons of genre, is more difficult to detect in the poetic works but which is there nonetheless.36 For instance, in their second collection of lyrics, Sight and Song (1892), their experiments with poetic ekphrasis are clearly in dialogue with Pater’s impressionistic art-historical method.37 In the remainder of this chapter, I want to turn to Underneath the Bough (1893). This collection has not received much critical attention in the recent revival of scholarship on Michael Field, even though it contains some of the poets’ most widely anthologised lyrics.38 Underneath the Bough is an eclectic book, less unified in theme than its predecessors: it comprises new lyrics and ballads as well as excerpts from previously published plays, and translations from Verlaine, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Poliziano.




It is divided into four Books of Songs and, unlike earlier collections, has no preface to explain the rationale behind the choice and grouping of the poems – just a quotation from Edward FitzGerald’s adaptations of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, from which the title is taken, and an ‘Invocation’ to Apollo. Joseph Bristow has seen in the prominent reference to Omar Khayyám evidence for what he calls Michael Field’s ‘lyrical aestheticism’ in Underneath the Bough, their desire to place their poetry in a tradition of aestheticism and art for art’s sake best typified by Swinburne, whose early work bears the influence of the poetics of sensual pleasure that had become associated with the Rubáiyát of the Persian poet.39 The poems in Underneath the Bough certainly have clear echoes, in form and themes, of the works of both Swinburne and Rossetti; but the aestheticism of the collection is also enmeshed in the discourses of Greek classicism with which I am concerned. When compared to many of Michael Field’s earlier works, these poems are less obviously ‘Greek’ both in setting and in allusion; but they should be read as the modern revival of a pagan poetics built around the cult of Dionysus, the ancient wine god. In this practice of enacting rather than imitating the ancient models Bradley and Cooper go on being ‘Greek’, in Browning’s sense, into the 1890s. The poets’ interest in Dionysus was inspired by Pater, who, in the 1870s, as I have argued in Chapter 1, turned his attention from the Olympian Hellenism of Winckelmann to a pre-classical aesthetics centred on the archaic cults of Dionysus and Demeter. Pater wanted to explore what he calls the ‘dark possibilities’ (VII: 44) of ancient Greek culture, which had been tamed and sidelined in the long afterlife of Greece in favour of the Apollonian classicism associated with Winckelmann’s simplicity and grandeur and Arnold’s sweetness and light. The cult of Dionysus, no longer historically bound within antiquity, provides a trans-historical category for the understanding and production of culture: the Dionysian. Like Arnold’s Hellenism, the Dionysian is valid for all times, from antiquity to the present. Pater had been attracted to the Dionysian by its affinity with Romanticism and its transgressive potential, and had substituted it to Arnold’s neoclassical Hellenism as a source of cultural values for aesthetic writers. In Underneath the Bough, Bradley and Cooper espouse this Dionysian aesthetics, which is intimately connected to their lifelong interest in tragedy and the dramatic arts (Dionysus presided over these in ancient mythology), and set out to recover the untamed power of nature, death, ecstasy, intoxication, eroticism, and sexuality. Pater’s revival of Dionysian primitivism had been a long-standing source of inspiration for Michael Field. Their early drama, Callirrhoë, is based on Euripides’s Bacchae, one of the principal ancient sources for




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Dionysian worship; and, among Cooper’s early poetry, posthumously collected by Bradley in Dedicated (1914), there is a dramatic monologue titled ‘Dionysus Zagreus’, which clearly draws on Pater’s evocative analysis of the figure of the hunter god. Prins has traced this genealogy, arguing that Pater’s studies enabled Bradley and Cooper to affect an ‘imaginative identification’ with the figure of the Greek maenad (the female Bacchic worshipper), which brought them to articulate for themselves the radical social identity of the independent woman. Prins argues that Michael Field’s reading of Pater transforms male homoeroticism, subtly inscribed in Pater’s essay in the description of the masculinisation of the originally feminine Dionysian cult, into a new form of desire that can take women outside the models of female sexuality contemplated by Victorian patriarchy.40 The influence of the Dionysian, however, extends beyond the recuperation of the figure of the maenad. Through Dionysus, Bradley and Cooper formulate their individual version of the aesthetic life: their modern paganism is simultaneously an authorial identity and a revolt against the social and religious conventions of the time. This synthesis of aesthetic and socially transgressive identities is enshrined in their vow to be ‘Poets and lovers evermore’ contained in ‘It was deep April, and the morn’, one of the best-known lyrics in this collection; but it is also evident in its lesser-known companion piece, ‘Cowslip-Gathering’, another poem narrated through the double voice. Here, in the course of a walk through a forest, the autobiographical ‘twin maiden spirits’ are surprised by a benevolent pagan deity (‘dear Nature’) who, almost whimsically, decides to join them in a pagan marriage: Twain cannot mingle: we went hand in hand, Yearning, divided, through the fair spring land, Nor knew, twin maiden spirits, there must be In all true marriage perfect trinity. But lo! dear Nature spied us, in a copse Filling with chirps of song and hazel-drops, And smiled: ‘These children I will straight espouse, While the blue cuckoo thrills the alder-boughs.’ So led us to a tender, marshy nook Of meadow-verdure, where by twos and threes The cowslips grew, down-nodding toward a brook; And left us there to pluck them at our ease In the moist quiet, till the rich content Of the bee humming in the cherry-trees Filled us; in one our very being blent.




The poem updates a tradition within classical mythology, best represented by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the gods intervene in human narratives of emotion and sexual desire. Like the Sapphic fragment, ancient myth enables the poets to inhabit imaginatively the freer erotic spaces of the classical tradition, visualised here as the ‘fair spring land’, an emotional landscape uncontaminated by the traces of modernity. This pagan landscape, which provides the setting for Underneath the Bough, is a blending of the Persian past evoked by the title and the anarchic female space of Greek Dionysian worship, traditionally practised in woods and rural locations.41 But it is also an organic evolution of the Sapphic landscape of Long Ago, with its synaesthetic poetics and eroticised flower imagery, which are here modified by the strong influence of some of Rossetti’s sonnets such as ‘The Lovers’ Walk’ and, especially, ‘Silent Noon’.42 Echoes of ‘Silent Noon’ inhabit Michael Field’s poem, from the extended play on the metaphysical participation of bodies and elements of the natural world to the presence of an insect (the bee of ‘Cowslip-Gathering’ was a dragon-fly in Rossetti) in the resolution of the poems as a simple symbol for the pagan gift of love. While sexual love is disembodied and idealised by Rossetti, whose sonnet moves from the actuality of his lover’s body to abstractions about love and desire, Michael Field’s poem drives the other way, from a state of being emotionally ‘divided’ to a very physical orgasmic union in which the women are ‘Filled’ by ‘the rich content / Of the bee’ – an image in which the intentional slippage cóntent / contént puts the accent on the economy of pleasure. ‘Cowslip-Gathering’ follows aestheticism’s tradition of constructing an authorial identity that directly challenges social and religious conventions. The poets advocate a law that goes against the normative and celebrate it as legitimate: the word ‘espouse’, with its parody of the official marriage rite, is where the two systems clash. The poem playfully distorts the conventional and bourgeois ideal of marriage, the staple of Victorian plots for the domestication of sexuality, into a transgressive eroticism that is, somewhat obscenely, performed in the open air. The women’s pagan union is joyfully officiated by nature, perhaps in direct counterpoint with prominent discourses that brandished homosexual love as unnatural, through a rich erotic ceremony (perhaps of sexual initiation, certainly of intensification of the sexual act) that takes the form of flower-gathering in the ‘moist quiet’, another genital image. The pun on the etymological meaning of the word ‘anthology’, further emphasised by the title, encodes again Bradley and Cooper’s sexual/textual identity as poets and lovers. It should be noted, moreover, that the marriage celebrated in the poem further defies convention by being triangular. The




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women’s allegorical journey of experience in the fair spring land teaches them that ‘there must be / In all true marriage perfect trinity’ – a somewhat blasphemous doctrine by means of which the pagan spirit is ritually received as an active participant in their poetic and erotic partnership. An important feature of the Bacchic aestheticism of Underneath the Bough is Michael Field’s determination to explore death as part of life and of the ecstasy of erotic love. The use of death to trope physical desire as a sublime experience has a strong and immediate precedent in Swinburne, but can be more loosely connected to a long lyric tradition, often traced back to Sappho in fact, in which desire is persistently reconfigured in the form of death and mourning.43 Images of graves and cemeteries, burials and mourning are present throughout the collection, creating an intense poetics of what Yeats, in 1898, would memorably call ‘the autumn of the body’, a Decadent cult of ‘faint lights and faint colours’ which is derived from French Symbolism.44 The autumnal atmosphere of Underneath the Bough is of pre-Raphaelite derivation, and comes to Michael Field via Rossetti’s poetry, Pater’s writings on Dionysus, and the paintings of Simeon Solomon. Together with these authors, Bradley and Cooper participate in a larger late-Victorian upsurge of interest in the mystery cults of ancient Greece traced by Margot K. Louis.45 These ancient cults centre on Dionysus and Persephone, gods who had visited the underworld and who embodied for the ancients the autumnal mood described by Yeats, in which inwardness, pessimism, and Decadence harbour the promise of rebirth linked to the natural cycles of the seasons. In Underneath the Bough, Bradley and Cooper revive the ancient chthonic tradition of worshipping what is, literally, beneath the earth. In a typical instance of this cult of morbidity the poets stage an almost erotic union with death. The poem opens with an arresting revisitation of the poetic cliché of ‘eternal’ love: Solitary Death, make me thine own, And let us wander the bare fields together; Yea, thou and I alone, Roving in unembittered unison forever. And it closes with a fantasy of possession in which the Dionysian principle of union with nature is recast in a macabre key: To a lone freshwater, where the sea Stirs the silver flux of the reeds and willows, Come thou, and beckon me





The same fantasy is played out in a hymn to Thanatos, the ancient Greek god of death: Thanatos, thy praise I sing, Thou immortal, youthful king! Glorious offerings I will bring; For men say thou hast no shrine, And I find thou art divine As no other god: thy rage Doth preserve the Golden Age, What we blame is thy delay: Cut the flowers ere they decay! Anticipating some of the most famous formulations of Freudian psychoanalysis, Bradley and Cooper draw on the chthonic myths of ancient Greece in order to probe beyond rational thought, reaching inwards inside the individual towards unconscious desires, figured here by breaking the ultimate taboo of a literally suicidal ecstasy. The hymn – which concludes with the wish that ‘our endless revellings’ remain among the dead – presents the figure of the poet as a Bacchic priestess of death. Michael Field’s lyric poetry takes on the performative quality of the ancient Bacchic rituals in which intoxication and mystic ecstasy enabled participants to stage a temporary reconciliation between civilised order (represented here by the highly controlled language of the verses) and the untamed, primitive forces of nature. Around the time of the composition of these poems, Bradley and Cooper’s curiosity about death brought them to visit the Morgue on a trip to Paris in 1890. The experience is recorded in Works and Days: To the morgue this morning, quite early in the glowing sunshine. It has been our worship; the temple of death, to us the temple of the living God. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, – true there – realised – the grey marred faces within laid brother-like – freed from the mesh of life, and equal at last in their destiny – bound, all these voyagers for God [ . . .]. It is Michael’s church, that little morgue – and he found



To lie in the lull of the sand-sequestered billows: Then take the life I have called my own And to the liquid universe deliver; Loosening my spirit’s zone, Wrap round me as thy limbs the wind, the light, the river.

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it quite impossible to remain afterwards in Notre Dame, amid the mumbling and the lights. God has provided for worship in the facts of life. If we will but look deep into birth and death – unflinchingly – accepting all the physical repulsion, and read on through the letter to the indwelling mystery, we shall learn how to conduct ourselves between – under the tri-colour, and with the divine gospel written on our hearts. (111) The ‘temple of death’ is ‘Michael’s [Bradley’s] church’ – the consecrated space of a private pagan cult and aesthetic poetics of intensity. By comparison, Christianity seems inadequate, out of touch with natural life, shabby in its rituals. Visits to morgues were relatively common in nineteenth-century tourism but in Bradley and Cooper’s case their pilgrimage into the ‘temple of death’ is a chthonic journey like those undertaken in ancient myth by Orpheus, Odysseus, and Dionysus himself. In Bradley and Cooper’s mythological staging of the experience, the visit to the Morgue is a ritual of initiation into a mysteric cult: an act of purification aimed at gaining poetic power. The poets would repeat their trip to the Paris Morgue in 1892, when Cooper would look back on her ‘first look on death’ of two years earlier, comparing her feeling then to ‘the desolate terror I felt when I first looked at the sea into which I was to be dipped – I had to come point blank into contact with a new element.’46 This new element is the core of the chthonic poetics that runs through Underneath the Bough – the desire to bring out the ‘indwelling mystery’ of the familiar. Michael Field’s experience of death is primarily an aesthetic experiment: it is undertaken in order to prove their doctrine that the poet and the artist should ‘look deep’ and not shrink in front of any form of experience, defying those ‘drawing-room conventionalities’ that they had repudiated in their early letter to Browning. But their frank stare at death, in Paris and in the poems, is also, in social terms, a call for people, perhaps especially for women, to reach beyond the limits of the polite and the admissible. In the description quoted above the chthonic journey is repeatedly linked to a well-known revolutionary imagery (‘the tri-colour’, ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’) which appeals to the individual to be always ready to fight against authority, understood here in cultural more than political terms (inasmuch as it is desirable to separate the two). This jump from the dead faces in the morgue to revolutionary slogans appears less eccentric if we trace it to the same connection between aestheticism and individual empowerment that made Pater’s advocacy of the aesthetic life in the ‘Conclusion’ so politically radical.




Michael Field’s chthonic poetics is in fact partly inherited from Pater, who was heavily drawn to what in ‘Leonardo’ he memorably calls ‘the secrets of the grave’ (l: 125). Pater’s fascination with death, especially with violent death, had been particularly in evidence in the studies of Dionysus and ‘Denys L’Auxerroise’. As in these writings and in Lee’s spectral classicism, Michael Field’s aesthetics of morbidity and death serves the double function of lamenting the restrictions of what Arnold calls the ‘Hebraism’ of the modern age and displacing an impossible homoerotic desire, expressed here in the form of mourning and a cult of suffering. The Paterian mark on Michael Field’s Bacchic aestheticism is strongest in the unpublished prose sketches mentioned above, For that Moment Only. These pieces, which were written just after the publication of Underneath the Bough, continue the collection’s intent of providing a series of condensed and highly individual impressions of nature. In fact, Cooper thought that they succeeded in doing this better than their nature poems.47 In the Bodleian archives these papers are preserved in a folder adorned with the emblem of two wreaths or wedding bands joined together by a thyrsos, the sacred staff topped with a pine cone that in ancient iconography is associated with Dionysus and his cult. This symbol, which represents the Dionysian partnership of Michael Field (the ambiguity wreaths/rings reflects their ambiguous identity as ‘poets and lovers’), had already appeared inside the pages of their play Stephania (1892) and then, prominently, on the cover of Underneath the Bough. But, around this time, Bradley and Cooper also started to use this Dionysian signature in their private papers in a clear effort to close the gap between their private and public identities. The Dionysian theme runs through the stories of For that Moment Only, which contains several sketches written in the gods-in-exile tradition. One of these, ‘An Agony’, narrates the return of an androgynous, suffering, distinctly Paterian Dionysus, who plainly symbolises modernity’s frustration of a type of individual freedom associated with ancient paganism. In another of the pieces, ‘A Mænad’, the ‘imperishable truth of the Bacchic legend’ is reincarnated among a group of Victorian women walking in the English countryside. One of them is suddenly possessed by the spirit of the god and breaks into a frenzy of pagan dancing under the eyes of the narrator, who longingly watches her friend’s body and movements ‘in an ecstasy of delight’. Repeating the narrative climax of the Bacchae and ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, the women narrowly desist from performing a sparagmos, the bloody ancient ritual in which a live creature is dismembered by ecstatic




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Figure 7 Cover of Underneath the Bough. Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Bacchic worshippers, as they contemplate tearing to pieces a group of men who happen to pass by, interrupting the female homosocial ritual and thus profaning ‘one of those sights that are sacred to half the world of mortals’.48 In the early 1890s, the aesthetic and the Dionysian became mutually reinforcing discourses for Bradley and Cooper: ‘Bacchic’ and ‘aesthetic’ came to be almost synonymous in their private papers. Like Pater, they wanted to recover an epistemology of the senses, buried in the remote past of Greece, which revises the relationship between art and morality, and, more broadly, art and life in the present. In this respect, the Bacchic aestheticism of Michael Field represents an English counterpart to Nietzsche’s better-known theories expressed in his controversial early




work The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and taken up again in the later Twilight of the Idols (1888). Nietzsche too tried to alert his contemporaries to the marginalised Dionysian aesthetics of ancient Greece, manifested in music, tragedy, and ecstasy, and to elevate this above the Apollonian art forms of sculpture and epic poetry and the philosophical rationalism of Socrates. Nietzsche claimed that, behind the successful images of Apollonian order, ancient Greece was shaken by anti-rational forces and by an essentially tragic understanding of life, which he mythically identified with Dionysus. He argued that all European culture, from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, was caught in a dialectics between these opposing Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Nietzsche, who called himself ‘the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus’,49 thought that the Dionysian still worked as an active principle of dissent and regeneration, which in an early phase he associated with Wagner’s operas. This modern cult of the Dionysian enabled Nietzsche to launch an impassioned cultural critique based on the following premises: to break free from Winckelmann and his Romantic followers’ ideal of a happy and serene Greece;50 to criticise the primacy of rationality in philosophical thinking that went back to the Enlightenment but also to the Socratic tradition; and to attack Christian morality, which he saw as a cult of weakness and fear that went directly against the natural principles of life. The recovery of Dionysus also led Nietzsche to formulate a radical aestheticism that postulates the necessary sacrifice of all moral restraints in favour of an exalted, purely artistic view of life which is in tune with the irrationality of nature and its destructive, as well as generative, powers – an extreme version of Pater’s ideal of the aesthetic life, which had a strong legacy on European Decadent literature and art. Bradley and Cooper read Nietzsche for the first time in the mid 1890s with an immediate sense of deja vu. On first reading Twilight of the Idols in October 1895, Cooper, using an appreciative Dionysian locution, writes in their diary that ‘Nietzsche gives one a sense of wine at the heart.’ She records how, before she had read a word of Nietzsche, she had already ‘reached so many of Nietzsche’s positions, just facing the problems of art squarely and making my brain behave as a simple, fearless thing’. Cooper retrospectively recognises in Nietzsche’s extreme aestheticism, formulated through the Dionysian doctrine of fearlessness, a parallel for Michael Field’s determination to be exposed to the vicissitudes and terrors of nature. The sense of recognition intensified with reading the Birth of Tragedy the following month: this book is described as ‘the only prose-statement of the Dionysiac attitude toward Life that exists’ and as ‘the mirror in which we see our naked errors and offences exposed, our




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achievements revealed, our hopes tested – It is our review of Reviews.’ Never shy of idolising a male fellow-writer, in 1895, after their disappointment with Berenson, Bradley and Cooper elected Nietzsche as their new intellectual guide. In fact, they now came to believe that Berenson (previously called ‘the new Bacchus’ in their diary) had been passing off Nietzsche’s ideas as his own and indeed that he had cunningly stood in their way of reading Nietzsche on purpose, so that they would not realise that his own thoughts on aesthetics were entirely derivative.51 Cooper must also be among the first critics to have noticed a close correspondence between Nietzsche’s dualism of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles in art and what Pater calls the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in Greek art and culture.52 Pater probably never read Nietzsche, who was little known in England before the 1890s.53 Yet what Cooper identifies as the ‘same tendencies’ of the two thinkers are striking, and must be understood as a parallel but independent revolt against Winckelmann, for which the ground was clearly rife in the 1870s. Both Pater and Nietzsche had come to realise that the dark, irrational, and anticlassical Dionysian worship could not only be employed to correct Winckelmann’s successful model, but that, following the same principles of neoclassicism, it could be de-historicised and reclaimed from the past as an authentic type of classicism, and as such used to test the artistic and moral beliefs of the present. Nietzsche had argued that the Dionysian should be understood to be in irreconcilable opposition to Christ, and had been ready fully to embrace the anti-Christian stance. Pater, more interested in continuity and reconciliation, had striven after an unlikely synthesis of Dionysian and Christian ritual and aesthetics both in the critical essays and in ‘Denys’.54 Michael Field’s poetry of the early 1890s should be retrospectively recognised as Nietzschean in all the radical implications of this term. Like Nietzsche, Bradley and Cooper embraced the total claim of the Dionysian cult with its glorification of sexuality and intoxication, its revolutionary energy, radical aestheticism, and virulent hostility towards protestant Christianity. Bacchic aestheticism was not only a literary practice for them, but a way of conducting their daily life, as is testified by the widely noticed eccentric practices recorded in their letters and diaries: their private mythology of wine, the Bacchanalian dances performed to celebrate the arrival of good news, the erection of an altar to Dionysus in their garden and of a ‘Bacchic library’ in their study, in which they collected all works of literature that made use of the Dionysian theme, from Villon to Poliziano and Shakespeare. By turning the Dionysian aesthetics of ancient Greece into a sometimes bizarre set of rituals, Bradley and Cooper sought




to understand antiquity by performing it. In this respect they deliberately departed from a masculine, solitary, and text-based study of the classics, in favour of a feminine and perhaps lesbian model in which understanding is generated through collaboration and performance – that is, involving the senses and the body as well as the mind. Unlike Lee, Bradley and Cooper never thought of this type of modern Greekness as a stage disguise. On the contrary, they were always keen to emphasise the theatricality of Victorian Hellenism. Similarly, they never doubted aestheticism on ethical or practical grounds. Bacchic aestheticism provided a way of keeping alive their belief in art for art’s sake after their disappointment with Pater’s turn towards caution. Their revival of ancient Dionysian ritual builds a bridge between the world of phenomena and the world of art, between Bradley and Cooper and Michael Field, that works by turning ‘experience’ (in Pater’s full meaning of the word) into art, aestheticising daily life, heightening it in meaning and intensity, and translating select moments into a more meaningful level. This is Bradley and Cooper’s highly individual version of the aesthetic life, characterised by self-staging and the performance of a flamboyant aestheticism which departs from the model of internalised enthusiasm advocated by Pater and comes closer to the aestheticism of pose and masks most strongly associated with Oscar Wilde.




4

I have long ago ceased to care what [newspapers] write about me – my time being all given up to the gods and the Greeks. Wilde to an unidentified correspondent (1881)1 Oscar Wilde remembered that it was at the age of 16 that ‘the wonder and beauty of Greek life began to dawn’ upon him: ‘I began to read Greek eagerly [ . . .], and the more I read the more I was enthralled.’2 Frank Harris, who reports this story, is a notoriously unreliable source of anecdotes on a notoriously unreliable raconteur. But Wilde’s brilliant academic career proves that there must have been at least some truth in this one. After studying at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Wilde read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Oxford, winning prizes and distinctions in both universities. His first publication, in the November 1875 issue of the Dublin University Magazine, was an English rendition of the chorus of cloud-maidens in Aristophanes’ Clouds. And, from that moment onwards, Greek culture is a thread that runs through most of his writings, in the form of reference and allusion, as in his poetry, or philosophical speculation, as in his critical essays and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Greek culture is an influence not only on Wilde’s intellectual development, but also on his public work, as well as his private codes of self-understanding and his incessant experiments in self-styling. Ancient Greece is the foundation on which Wilde’s identity as aesthete, critic, and writer is built. It is a constant presence in his oeuvre, even when its solid features become harder to discern in the midst of the labyrinthine arguments of Wilde’s philosophical provocations. Again and again, in both his public and private writings, Wilde openly invokes his knowledge of Greek as a discourse of authority, a marker of taste and of his ability to discern and judge in the fields of modern as 125



The Greek Life of Oscar Wilde

well as ancient literature. Wilde’s journalism reveals that he always kept alive his interests in ancient history, archaeology (which he had inherited from his father), classical translation, and in contemporary productions of Greek drama.3 Even his work as editor of the Woman’s World (1887–89) is characterised by an opening of the magazine to the classical scholarship of new women graduates of the old universities, featuring, among others, Jane Harrison’s early essay on pictorial representations of Sappho quoted in Chapter 3. Wilde always took great pride in his achievement as a classical scholar, which was confirmed by a rare double first at Oxford but frustrated by his failure to secure a fellowship there. It would be a mistake, however, to see his interest in Greece as purely textual or academic. It was the ‘Greek life’ that exhilarated Wilde as a young adult and that continued to exercise its influence on the mature writer. The study of Greece transcended the usual parameters of the textual or visual encounter and translated into a sustained commitment to a set of artistic, ethical, and social values. For Wilde, as for Michael Field, the ‘Greek life’ involved a performative dimension that he was able to exploit in the construction of his successful public image as flamboyant aesthete and eccentric. In the most intimate sphere Greece, moreover, provided a discourse for the regulation of emotions, notably, of his sexual desire for other men. This use of Greek can be seen, for instance, in the love letter that was infamously used as incriminating evidence in the trials, in which he tells Alfred Douglas of knowing that ‘Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.’4 Greek myth enables the lovers to articulate, share, and enjoy the emotions that would have been (as indeed they would be) publicly declared to be perverted and criminal. Rewriting Douglas as Hyacinthus, Wilde looks for an aesthetic understanding of his own homosexuality: this is why, in court, he would try to defend himself by claiming that the letter should be read as a prose poem.5 This technique of simultaneous intensification and removal highlights the urgency of homoerotic desire but lifts it safely away from the taint of corruption and insanity with which the nineteenth century regarded it. In other words, in the ‘Greek life’ Wilde finds both an aesthetic framework and a code of ethical behaviour for his relationship with Douglas. It is telling that when, in De Profundis, Wilde repudiates his attachment to Douglas, he does so by interpreting his former lover’s actions as a fall from the ancient ideal. Quoting Euripides and Aeschylus at him, Wilde accuses himself of having mistaken for true Greek in Douglas what was in actual fact a cult of excess that is antithetical to the classical ideals of virtue and friendship.6




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Wilde’s Greek life extended from the performance of simple daily tasks, such as his affectation of using Greek characters and punctuation in his English handwriting, to fundamental questions of intellectual allegiance, specifically his allegiance to literary aestheticism. In the tradition of Arnold and Pater, Wilde consistently invoked Greek culture as an antidote to English middle-class Philistinism. Like his Oxford predecessors’, Wilde’s formation as a classicist was influenced by Winckelmann and German Romantic philosophy, especially Hegel, modified, in Wilde’s case, through French Symbolism. Wilde used this background to launch an essentially modernist programme of cultural renewal, in which Greece figures at once as a lost ideal and an ideal aim for modern advocates of experimentation and art for art’s sake. This ‘new Hellenism’, as Wilde liked to call it, would always remain the backbone of his aestheticism. Wilde, of course, only started to establish himself as an author in the early 1880s, with Poems (1881) and with his American lecture tour of the following year. Both enterprises met with a critical reception that can at best be described as mixed. At a time when authors like Swinburne and Pater were already retreating from their radical positions of the 1860s and early 1870s, Wilde’s aestheticism seemed distinctly insincere or second-hand. In the words of an anonymous reviewer of Poems, which can be taken as representative of many critics’, Wilde’s aesthetic doctrine differed from other gospels ‘in coming after, instead of before, the cult it seeks to establish’.7 And yet, for this very reason, Wilde was able to choose aestheticism as an already well-defined authorial identity, unlike Pater or Symonds, from whom the young Wilde borrowed many of his ideas and ambitions. Unlike Lee and Michael Field, who belonged to the same second generation of aesthetic writers, Wilde’s gender and social position enabled him to absorb and make his the orthodox aestheticism of the 1860s and 1870s with fewer modifications. Wilde, who has come down to us as the most prominent in the relatively marginal canon of aesthetic authors, was a successful populariser of the aesthetic ‘craze’ that followed the satirical portrayal of aesthetes in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience and that was fuelled by the famous caricatures in the pages of Punch, through which Wilde effectively became the public face of a more domesticated aestheticism than the one espoused earlier on by more radical writers like Swinburne and Pater. Wilde’s rise in popularity coincided with the sliding of aestheticism into popular culture, the moment captured by Vernon Lee in Miss Brown, when the very word ‘aesthetic’ was expropriated by satirists and debased into a brand name, and was emptied of any intellectual let alone radical meaning.8




The same is true of aestheticism’s interest in Greece, which, at this time, is seized on as a signifier of recognisable fashionable affectations. One of the many contemporary caricatures of Wilde shows the aesthete as Narcissus gazing at himself in the pond, in a set-up that fuses aestheticism’s love of beauty and its love of Greece as elements of a silly, self-obsessed iconoclasm. Pushing this further, if we read the ancient myth of self-love as a tale of sexual sameness, images like this can be seen to contain the germ of the homophobic critique of Wilde that would emerge at the time of the trials and that would persist well into the twentieth century. Wilde’s success as icon of this popularised, Hellenophile aestheticism of the 1880s would turn his downfall into a symbolic event, which brought into the open and effectually pushed to their limits the experiments with authorial identities, cultural politics, and private desires that the discourse of Greek studies had made possible in the previous decades.

Figure 8 Caricature of Wilde as Narcissus. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Add. Mss. 81784





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Wilde saw his arrival in Oxford as a turning point in his life.9 Oxford was for him the first stepping stone into a cosmopolitan career as critic and artist that would take him to London, America, and, most significantly for him, Paris. Wilde was an undergraduate at Magdalen College from 1874 to 1878. After his success in the final examinations his scholarship was renewed for one further year. Wilde had come to Oxford after studying classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he had distinguished himself by winning the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, which was the highest award for classics there. In Dublin he had studied with the young professor of ancient history John Pentland Mahaffy, who exercised a strong influence over the young Wilde. It was probably Mahaffy who encouraged Wilde to try for the Magdalen Demyship, the prestigious scholarship that would enable him to go to Oxford. Wilde developed a lasting friendship and engaged in some form of intellectual collaboration with his former tutor: they travelled together to Italy in the summer of 1875 and then to Greece in the Easter vacation of 1877. This trip included visits to the archaeological sites at Olympia and Mycenae, Argos, Aegina, and Athens. Wilde famously failed to get back to Oxford in time for the start of the new term, which caused him to be rusticated and fined the equivalent of half of his scholarship for the year. As he would put it to Charles Ricketts years later, he had been ‘sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia’.10 Wilde also provided some form of help, probably in the form of proofreading, to Mahaffy for his books Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874) and Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876). The first of these, which aimed to reconstruct ‘the subjective side’ of Greek life, ‘the feelings of the Greeks in their temples and their assemblies, in their homes, and their wanderings’ and to portray the Greeks as ‘thoroughly modern’ and ‘men of like culture with ourselves’, obviously fostered the young Wilde’s interest in recovering the meaning of the Greek life in the present.11 It was in Oxford that Wilde fully developed the connection between Greek life and modern aestheticism that was to absorb him so intently in the years to come.12 As his extant undergraduate notebooks show, Wilde’s reading at this point was heavily focussed on ancient philosophy, and especially on Aristotle and Plato.13 As was characteristic of the nineteenth-century Oxford school of Literae Humaniores, Wilde was trained to bring ancient and modern philosophies into a dialogue with each other and was encouraged to use classical studies as a platform for discussing broader questions of historiography, religion, ethics, rhetoric,



The aesthetic education: Pater and Symonds

politics, and science. The names of Descartes, Bacon, Comte, Kant, Hegel, Mill, and Spencer appear frequently in his extant notes. Most important, though, was the immediate context of Wilde’s academic milieu. If the young Wilde had been drawn to Oxford partly by his intense admiration for Swinburne, who had studied classics there from 1856 to 1860, he arrived at the moment in which the old university town was at the centre of aesthetic culture. The year 1873 had seen the publication of Pater’s Renaissance and Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets. In Oxford and across Britain both works were met with hostile receptions by conservative critics who drew attention to their dangerous aestheticism and corrupting potential. The echoes of these controversies were in the air when Wilde arrived in the university in October 1874. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Wilde read both Pater and Symonds very closely and transcribed quotations from them in his notebooks side by side his notes on ancient Greek sources. Wilde seems to have been particularly interested in their ways of comparing ancient and modern art, in their historicist analyses of the relationship between antiquity and modernity, and in their thoughts on the ideal of plasticity in Greece.14 These last are to be found especially in Symonds’s chapter on ‘The Genius of Greek Art’ and in Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’, traces of which survive throughout Wilde’s work, from his American lectures to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s heavily annotated copies of the two volumes of Symonds’s Greek Poets, now housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, suggest that Wilde also paid particular attention to Symonds’s historicist reading of the Greeks’ sexual morality – a topic that, as I have discussed earlier on, is also central to Pater’s argument in ‘Winckelmann’. While The Renaissance has been rightly acknowledged as a fundamental document in the history of aestheticism, Symonds’s Greek Poets has been badly overlooked. In fact, as Wilde’s close parallel study of them reveals, the two texts were in dialogue with each other in pioneering the study of Greek as a discourse for the promotion of aesthetic culture. Published in two volumes that came out in 1873 and 1876, Studies of the Greek Poets is a bold work, perhaps unguardedly frank in its interests in homoeroticism and religious scepticism. Symonds reviews the history of Greek poetry and drama, dividing it up into chapters that deal either with artistic schools (‘The Idyllists’) or with isolated case studies (‘Aristophanes’). His ideology is clearly derived from German Hellenism, absorbed thorough Winckelmann, Goethe, and, of course, Hegel. Greek Poets is not so much a scientific study (Symonds is often dismissive of comparative philology and other modern scientific approaches to antiquity) as an impassioned




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plea for a return to an aesthetics of pleasure in modern culture. It is a heartfelt attack on Victorian prudery and didacticism. The emotional tone is particularly in evidence in ‘The Genius of Greek Art’, which functions as a conclusion to the first volume. This essay is structured around a series of striking ekphrases that range from sunkissed ancient landscapes to several descriptions of the male body in art or in the flesh, as Symonds imagines athletes at play in the fields of the disappeared Arcadian world. In this way, Symonds sets up a relentless dynamic of scopophilia and voyeurism, intensified by the insertion of piquant details from classical sources, such as Plato’s account of Socrates’ blush on illicitly glimpsing the breast of the boy Charmides within his tunic. The purpose is to create a vivid economy of desire to juxtapose to the prohibitions of modern moral and religious codes and to the enforced self-censorship of Victorian writers and artists in matters of Greek love. The conflict between the two worlds comes out in the final footnote, marked by Wilde in his copy, which is packed with allusion and delayed meanings: After all, the separation between the Greeks and us is due to something outside rather than within – principally to the Hebraistic culture we receive in childhood. We are taught to think that one form of religion contains the whole truth, and that one way of feeling is right, to the exclusion of the humanities and sympathies of races no less beloved of God and no less kindred to ourselves than were the Jews. At the same time the literature of the Greeks has for the last three centuries formed the basis of our education; their thoughts and sentiments, enclosed like precious perfumes in sealed vases, spread themselves abroad and steep the soul in honey-sweet aromas. Some will always be found, under the condition of this double culture, to whom Greece is a lost fatherland, and who, passing through youth with the mal du pays of that irrecoverable land upon them, may be compared to visionaries, spending the nights in golden dreams and the days in common duties.15 Symonds suggests a new psychological reading of Arnold’s well-known dialectic of Hebraism and Hellenism: through the medium of aesthetic prose, he turns Arnold’s ‘double culture’ back inside the individual, describing the mind of the modern aesthete as being split between feelings of exile and homecoming, sickness and health, darkness and light, duty and pleasure, secrecy and visibility. The rhetoric of doubleness and secrecy deployed here (the ‘sealed vases’, the ‘golden dreams’)




hints at a homoerotic subtext, intensified by the lurking sense of nervous pathology (the vision, the sleepless nights, the ‘mal du pays’). Symonds’s figure of the Hellenophile aesthete is clearly akin to Pater’s Winckelmann – the eager student of Greece in a dark provincial German town, who spends his nights dreaming of the freer life of the South. The difference is that Pater takes his readers to the scene of Winckelmann’s fruition, showing him ‘fingering’ the ancient marbles and befriending young men, while Symonds’s readers must be content with images of pleasure that are enshrined in a lost word and with his final injunction that they too must try and approximate the Greeks’ ‘free and fearless attitude of mind’ (423). ‘The Genius of Greek Art’, like ‘Winckelmann’, uses the study of ancient Greek sculpture and the idea of plasticity to question the relationship between desire and aesthetics, pleasure and culture, in the nineteenth century; and, like the essay on Winckelmann, it contains a hidden intellectual autobiography, in which the dominant tone of melancholia connotes the frustration of homosexual desire enforced by modern social and ethical conventions. In several points in the Studies, notably in the chapter on Aristophanes (also heavily annotated by Wilde), Symonds comes very close to Pater’s arguments, partly because they are both drawing on Winckelmann’s History, but also because Symonds deliberately wanted to forge intertextual links with Pater in opening up creative and emotional possibilities for modern aestheticism. In his analysis of the ancient comedian, he follows Pater quite closely in speaking of the Greeks’ lack of shame (what Pater had called ‘sexlessness’), their pride in the body, and high esteem of physical beauty, implicitly lamenting the arrival of the repressive economy of Christian sexual morality. Symonds, who would always be drawn to a certain pornographic relish, goes further than Pater as he links the Greeks’ lack of shame to the concept of ‘Phallic ecstasy’ (240), painting an altogether more fleshy picture of the Greeks’ sexual lives, which cost him a fierce ad hominem attack in the periodical press.16 The intertextuality with Pater becomes stronger in the second series, published three years after the first. This volume, which was brought out after both Symonds and Pater had been denounced by conservative critics, includes a ‘Conclusion’ in which the author responds to some of these criticisms. Here Symonds reiterates his claims on the primacy of plasticity in ancient aesthetics and defends himself against accusations of having ignored the ‘sterner’ side of the Greek spirit. This was actually a fair criticism. For while in ‘Winckelmann’, Pater had wanted to promote a ‘sunny and serene’ version of Hellenism but had also spoken of it




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as a ‘limitation’ to a full understanding of ancient Greece, Symonds had wholeheartedly embraced Winckelmann’s simplified vision of the Greek achievement. This distinction will, as we will see, be of great importance to Wilde. In answer to his critics, Symonds conceded that while the Greeks might indeed have ‘felt’ Weltschmerz, they never made it ‘the substance of their mightiest works’.17 He added that the Greek artist ‘sought to produce a harmony in his work which should correspond to health in the body and to temperance in the soul, to present a picture of human destiny, not darkened by the shadows of the tomb, but luminous beneath the light of day’ (377). He also tentatively stood by his former defence of ancient homoeroticism quoting the work of Wilde’s former tutor Mahaffy, as having proved that ‘even paiderastia had its honourable aspects’ (384). Symonds’s ‘Conclusion’ of 1876 consciously rewrites Pater’s celebrated ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, which the more cautious Pater would decide to withdraw from the second edition of his book in 1877. In this document Symonds both conspires, as it were, with Pater in promoting aestheticism, and competes with him. Like Pater’s influential essay, Symonds’s ‘Conclusion’ is based on a modern understanding of the world of phenomena regulated by evolutionary and physical science, according to which ‘the very seat of our supposed liberty, our desires and personal peculiarities, distinctive tastes and special predilections, are determined for us in great measure by circumstances beyond our control’ (394). Employing a recognisably Paterian image of ‘the web of the world [that] is ever weaving’ (398), Symonds argues that there can be no definitive knowledge or fixed moral systems in a history of culture that is in perpetual flux. This type of moral relativism is the most important lesson to be learnt from studying the Greeks. If scientific study gives us the key to life, Greek studies give us the key to the good life. Science is of course a convenient prop for Symonds, as it was for Pater, in advancing a fully secular code of moral conduct, set out in a manifesto-like style that once again follows Pater’s precedent. In a final statement that reads like a direct reply to those critics who had accused Pater’s aesthetic doctrine of hedonism, Symonds states that there is ‘no reason to apprehend that personal license should result’ from this system: ‘[o]n the contrary, we may expect from the establishment of such a system a code of conduct more stringent in all that can concern the well-being of the individual than any that has yet been conceived’ (398–9). This is the morality of the aesthetic life, which is the outcome of a fastidious programme of self-culture rather than of the adherence to a universal set of moral prescriptions.




This dialogue between Symonds’s Greek Poets and Pater’s Renaissance is formative of Wilde’s early aestheticism: it is from studying these texts that Wilde learns how to create productive relationships between antiquity and modernity, ancient Greek art and modern science, pagan and Christian moralities – all of which point in the direction of a secular aestheticism. The intertextuality between Symonds and Pater also contains a more hidden link between early aestheticism and transgression, though: for, around this time, both Symonds and Pater were implicated in homosexual scandals at Oxford which put severe strain on their careers.18 In 1862, Symonds, who had been awarded an open fellowship at Magdalen College straight after graduating, had been accused of interfering with one of the college’s choir boys. Although he was cleared of the accusation, which turned out to be an attempt to blackmail him, the pressure of the events caused a mental and physical breakdown that forced Symonds to abandon academia and, eventually, to move abroad. In 1874, the year after the publication of The Renaissance, Pater was accused of being erotically involved with an undergraduate of the university, William Money Hardinge of Balliol College. There was no public scandal but Hardinge was quietly sent home for a year and Pater was, from then onwards, systematically thwarted in his academic ambitions at Oxford, mainly by the hand of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College and translator of Plato. Wilde undoubtedly became acquainted with news of these scandals during his Oxford years, especially given his active interest in these two authors. Magdalen, the theatre of the Symonds events, was Wilde’s own college, and news of this sort was more than likely to survive for a long time in the gossipy underworld of the common rooms. The Pater scandal took place the very year of Wilde’s arrival in Oxford. Besides this, Hardinge, Pater’s undergraduate friend, was much in evidence in the small community of the university, initially as the ‘Balliol bugger’, the reckless author of openly homoerotic verse, and then, in 1876, as the winner of the prestigious Newdigate Prize, the same poetry prize that Wilde would be awarded two years later for his poem ‘Ravenna’. The controversies were moreover to erupt once again during the time of Wilde’s undergraduate career: in 1877 both Pater and Symonds had decided to stand for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry once held by Matthew Arnold, and in April of that year, when Wilde was in Greece with Mahaffy, both of them withdrew from the competition as a result of pressures from within the university. It must be supposed that they were pushed to step down both because of implications of atheism and because of what was euphemistically referred to as their ‘arcadian’ interest. Dellamora, who gives an




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account of the events of 1877, points out the important role played by Richard Tyrwhitt’s timely denunciatory review of Greek Poets, which was published by the Contemporary Review in March of that year, bringing the politics of Oxford aestheticism onto the national stage.19 Wilde, who already at this point was not naïve of the existence of choir-boy intrigue in his college and who would later come to know Alfred Douglas when the latter was involved in some form of sexual scandal at Oxford, was then aware, from his early undergraduate days, of a strong connection between Greek studies, aestheticism, and the practice of male love.20 The knowledge of this context certainly coloured his reading of Symonds and Pater, drawing him to aestheticism as an exhilarating discourse of artistic innovation and intellectual and sexual freedom, but also alerting him to the very concrete danger to which it exposed individuals both within the university and nationally. In the summer of 1876 Wilde worked on a review of Symonds’s Greek Poets. The essay, which was clearly intended for publication but was left incomplete, survives in manuscript form under the title ‘Princess Nausicaa’. Here Wilde focusses on what is probably the most imaginative chapter in Symonds’s second series, ‘The Women of Homer’, which traces the reception of the figure of Helen in antiquity and in modern art and then reconstructs, as it were, the Odyssey from the unfamiliar perspective of its female characters. Wilde’s intended review subverted Symonds’s hierarchy by centring on a relatively marginal figure, Nausicaa – the daughter of the Phaeacian king Alcinous – who first gives aid to Odysseus after his shipwreck, and by subordinating the other characters to her as the prime type of beauty and perfection in the poem. Besides being unfinished, Wilde’s essay is clearly unpolished in its imitation of an archaising pre-Raphaelite style. The manuscript is interesting, though, as a document of Wilde’s reading of Symonds at this early stage. While he faults Symonds for overlooking sources and for occasionally lacking psychological finesse, Wilde implicitly endorses him by following the practice of using the Greek material in order to move from Hellenism to modern aestheticism: so Greek literature comes ‘to us across the waste waters of time like sweet and soothing music’, showing moderns how to use the doctrine of art for art’s sake in order to reform a culture of art stifled by didacticism.21 Wilde praises Symonds’s style, comparing it to the accomplished prose of Ruskin, Pater, and, ‘at times’, Ouida, and defends Symonds from accusations of morbidity: ‘though the tone of sadness that hangs over so much of his writings is akin to the [love of the impossible] that to the Greeks was [disease




of the soul], yet there is nothing morbid or sentimental in it. It is only part of that great sadness that seems in these days to have seized on so many upright and cultivated men.’22 Wilde detects Symonds’s practice of representing the culture of the modern Hellenophile aesthete as a form of pathology, but dismisses the danger of immorality by diluting it within a generalised late-Romantic Weltschmerz. Wilde is specifically referring here to a passage in the chapter ‘Ancient and Modern Tragedy’ in Symonds’s first series, thick with Paterian intertextuality. Here Symonds had used the same Greek proverb, glossed through the French expression ‘l’ amour de l’impossible’, to lament the destruction of the ‘free, frank sensuality of Paganism’ by the hand of Christianity and the inability of modern art to be ‘satisfied with merely aesthetic forms’; he had suggested that the Christian sense of sin should itself be regarded as a form of disease.23 The expression ‘l’ amour de l’impossible’ forges a mythic understanding of the relationship between modernity and antiquity in terms of exile and longing. It contains a strong homoerotic energy, which translates the ‘impossibility’ (social and legal) of modern male love into larger cosmic conflicts between desire and duty entertained by science and religion. This idea of a love of the impossible (in its Greek and French renditions) recurs frequently in Symonds’s oeuvre. Like Lee, Wilde understood the semi-coded meaning of this phrase. Starting from this early review, he reworked it in several of his own writings, from his unpublished poem ‘Heart’s Yearning’, where it is used as a subtitle, to ‘The Critic as Artist’. While, as I have argued in Chapter 2, Lee picked up on this expression in order to expose an enfeebling, socially noxious aestheticism, Wilde singled it out to signal his allegiance to Symonds’s ideal of Hellenism. ‘Hellenism’ is, in fact, the title of Wilde’s next essay (written in 1877 but unpublished during his lifetime) which survives to this day in fragmented manuscript form.24 Wilde follows Pater’s essay on Dionysus, published the previous year, in opening with a plea that we must understand ancient Greece as being anything but unified in customs and culture. Unlike Pater, though, Wilde tackles the issue of fragmentation by turning to the dominant nineteenth-century tradition of describing Hellenism, or the unifying spirit of the Greeks, in terms of ‘a one sided enthusiasm’ (an expression that echoes Pater’s language in ‘Winckelmann’) for ideas that essentially resemble modern codes of civilisation and personal dignity. From here, he moves on to describing life in ancient Sparta. If some of Wilde’s arguments seem to anticipate Pater’s ‘Lacedaemon’ (1892), it is because they both draw on the same sources: K. O. Müller, Grote, Michelet, and the Plato of the Laws.




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These early unpublished writings are important in that they allow us a glimpse into Wilde’s work in progress, as it were, in constructing his own authority as critic. They show us Wilde training to be a scholar and an aesthete, participating in the discourse of academic aestheticism that had developed around the school of classical studies at Oxford over the previous decade. Wilde’s ambition to undertake an academic career crystallised after his brilliant final results and the renewal of his scholarship. The young Wilde was attracted to the cultural authority to which a career at Oxford would give him access. Besides, a fellowship in one of the colleges would provide him with the financial security of a fixed income that would enable him, to a certain degree, to step aside from the pressures of commercial publishing. In the period shortly following his graduation, Wilde also entered into negotiations with George Macmillan (son of the famous publisher Alexander Macmillan and one of Wilde’s former companions on his trip to Greece) to produce translations from Herodotus and Euripides, in what Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small have argued was Wilde’s attempt to build his academic credentials in preparation for an Oxford fellowship. These translations, as well as a projected blank-verse tragedy and some essays on Greek art, never saw the light of day.25 Another essay written during this period, ‘Historical Criticism’, displays Wilde’s desire to fit into the Oxford school of classical studies by performing his knowledge of recent scholarly trends and his familiarity with an impressive range of ancient sources.26 The essay, which Wilde submitted for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize in 1879, is partly based on some of the notes preserved in Wilde’s philosophy notebooks. The main argument, derived largely from Hegel, is that historical criticism originated in ancient Greece at a time in which its people ‘reached that critical point in the history of every civilized nation, when speculation invades the domain of revealed truth, when the spiritual ideals of the people can no longer be satisfied by the lower, material, conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the old bottles of a narrow and trammelling creed’ (5).27 Wilde deals with various authors, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Polybius (a large part of the essay is intended as a revaluation of the latter). His conclusions are in line with Symonds, whom Wilde often quotes verbatim, and with his and Pater’s practice of establishing a privileged connection between antiquity and modernity that sidelines the Christian Middle Ages: ‘The only spirit which is entirely removed from us is the mediaeval: the Greek spirit is essentially modern’ (66). Here and throughout the essay, the Greeks’ scepticism is seen as the intellectual precedent for the nineteenth century’s secularism, as, in




a stereotyped Romantic image, the two cultures ‘join hands’ across the gulf of time. Like the other unpublished essays from this period, ‘Historical Criticism’ lacks the polish of Wilde’s later published work. The essay, however, does develop a fundamental link between criticism and transgression, scepticism, and departure from normativity, to which Wilde would repeatedly come back in the future. Wilde’s concept of historical criticism is certainly indebted to Pater’s aesthetic criticism in that it follows Pater’s shift from empiricism to subjectivity and reception in order to empower the individual politically as well as intellectually. This position is theorised in the very opening of the essay, where Wilde defines historical criticism as ‘part of the complex working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against authority’ (3). This is what made the Greeks, in a Darwinian sense, evolved, while the Romans’ ‘conservative respect for tradition’ impeded their intellectual progress (62). This idea, partly derived from Hegel, helps Wilde to conceptualise the transgressive imperative of aestheticism in the present, and to formulate his identity as a critic as a type of antinomianism. This concept would inform Wilde’s mythic understanding of his life in De Profundis, a work in which the antinomian identity of the aesthetic critic – a concept that can be traced back all the way to Pater’s analysis of the diaphanous temperament – is pessimistically portrayed as an agent of alienation and self-destruction. In the end, Wilde did not manage to obtain an academic position at Oxford. Magdalen did not offer him a fellowship and his competition for a post at Trinity College was also unsuccessful. These failures convinced Wilde to leave Oxford and start on a metropolitan career, earning his living and making his name known largely through a dense calendar of public lecturing and paid journalism. The university for him would always remain associated with romanticised notions of high culture and intellectual freedom. It was at Oxford, studying the works of the classical authors and the modern writings of Pater and Symonds, that Wilde saw an appealing continuity between the Greek life and the practice of modern aestheticism. Studying Greek became for Wilde the prototype and mirror image of the process of cultivation of the self that is both the aim of aestheticism and the starting point for a provocative rethinking of questions of private morality and social duty. His careful reading of Pater’s Renaissance and Symonds’s Greek Poets, and his proximity to the homosexual scandals in which these authors were involved, alerted Wilde to the presence of a daring homoerotic discourse in modern aestheticism. His writings from this period do not explore this difficult subject – which is hardly surprising for a young man who was trying





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The cry of Marsyas The Romantic Hellenism that Wilde absorbed from Symonds and German philosophy informs his view of the value and significance of Greece in the present. It is, tellingly, only when he was in prison that Wilde would come to have doubts about it. In De Profundis, where he uses myth as a narrative of self-understanding, Wilde rethinks his own Hellenism through the myth of Apollo and Marsyas. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of the Greek satyr Marsyas who became so good at playing the flute that he challenged Apollo to a musical contest. They agreed that the winner would be able to do of the other whatever he wanted. When, inevitably, Apollo (who played the lyre) won, he cruelly tied Marsyas to a tree and flayed him alive. This myth, which has attracted the interest of many painters and sculptors in the post-classical age, is one of a series of myths about the culture of art in antiquity. In The Queen of the Air (1869), a work with which Wilde was familiar, Ruskin provides an interpretation of the myth which focuses on the different characteristics of the two musical instruments played by the two competitors: Apollo’s lyre, unlike Marsyas’s flute, allows the musician to sing while playing, and therefore the god’s victory should be read as a triumph of the music in which ‘words and thoughts lead’ over the one in which ‘the wind or impulse leads’. More generally, Ruskin argues, the story represents the Greeks’ preference for the ‘intellectual’ over the ‘brutal, or meaningless’ in art.28 Marsyas’s punishment can certainly be read as a brutal parable for the Greeks’ privileging of ‘high’ over popular culture. Wilde had used the myth of Apollo and Marsyas in ‘The Decay of Lying’ in order to argue that, in aesthetic criticism, art must be completely divorced from utilitarian ends: Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than the vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts. Of course, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence, are always under the impression that it is for them that the Muses are talking,



to obtain a position in one of the colleges. Symonds and Pater, though, would provide Wilde with strategies for discussing the possibility of modern Greek love and, more generally, with reflections on the complicated relationship between cultural practice and the imperatives to desire and enjoy, with which he would experiment in his later works.

always trying to find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo, but Marsyas. Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness.29 In this intricate passage dense with philosophical allusion, Vivian, the Wildean persona in the dialogue, reads the myth of Apollo and Marsyas as a justification of the theory of art for art’s sake, anchoring his interpretation in Pater’s essay on Giorgione. Vivian uses the myth to distinguish between a high form of Apollonian criticism that detaches art’s meaning from humanity and its ‘burden’ (and therefore acknowledges that art is primarily about form) and a vulgar type of criticism that strives to find a moral meaning for art by seeing it as a mirror for human emotions. Marsyas – ‘the singer of life’ – represents this latter, flawed school of interpretation, which Wilde, in the larger context of the essay, connects with nineteenth-century realism. Invoking the authority of Greek myth, he dismisses this realist epistemology as false. Following the tradition of Winckelmann, Apollo appears here as the type of an authentic, desirable classicism, connoted by ‘calm dignity’. Marsyas stands for an attitude of dogged misunderstanding of the classical ideal. The brown-skinned satyr is an effective icon for the undesirable, anti-classical categories of ugliness and the grotesque. To Darwinian eyes, his biological proximity to the animal world connotes a primitive stage of human development that would naturally be supplanted by the fully formed humanity of Apollo. In De Profundis, Wilde rereads this myth. Here he writes that in the victory of Apollo over Marsyas ‘perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine’ (127). To this list he adds further examples from Chopin, Burne-Jones, and Arnold. Wilde now uses the same myth to expose a mistake of the Greek life that has actually been corrected by the moderns. He is referring to what Ruskin had memorably called the Greeks’ lack of ‘ugly dreams’– the deliberate exclusion of sorrow and suffering from their art.30 In De Profundis, Wilde looks back on his own aestheticism, criticising his former belief




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in Apollo as the highest ideal of Greek culture. In the tradition of modern Hellenism, Apollo was the fullest realisation of the Greek ideal of plasticity. Taken outside antiquity, he became the recognisable icon of neoclassical values and of the trans-historical aesthetic ideal, so bitterly denounced by Nietzsche, which is based on rationality, clarity of vision, and on the perfect fusion of form and matter. Following Winckelmann, the figure of Apollo moreover acquired a special status in modern homoerotic readings of the Greek canon. In the Memoirs, for instance, Symonds recounts of having worshipped Apollo as a young man (‘His divine beauty penetrated my soul and marrow. I stretched out my arms to him in worship’); and, in ‘Apollo in Picardy’, Pater uses a fantastic tale of the return of the ancient god to medieval France for his most explicit treatment of male homoerotic desire.31 Apollo, the god of music and the arts, could be at once the public god of aesthetes and worshippers of art for art’s sake and the more private god of homosexual men for whom his suggestive power was fully visible in the invariably attractive youthful male form through which he has been represented through the ages. For Wilde more than for Symonds and Pater, Apollo had come to serve a similar function to what Dionysus represented for Michael Field: he had been the idol of a cultish performative aestheticism simultaneously aimed at the intensification of experience in everyday life and at the critique of the narrow artistic and sexual morality of the age. In De Profundis, Wilde stages a conversion away from this Apollonian aestheticism to a new aesthetics of sorrow: I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at the moment [ . . .]. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art. (105) The silent reference to Pater’s essay on Giorgione heightens the intertextuality between this passage and Wilde’s previous reading of the myth of Marsyas in ‘The Decay of Lying’. This epiphanic realisation, with which




Wilde recants his previous loyalty to Apollonian values, is the basis for what Wilde, after Dante, calls his ‘New Life’: a course of reform through which he proposes to correct his former exclusive preoccupation with light, perfection, and pleasure by engaging in a systematic study of sorrow and suffering. It should be noted that this does not call into question the basic principles of aestheticism: sorrow represents a perfect convergence of form and matter. While in prison, Wilde had been reading Pater’s Greek Studies – the new collection brought out after Pater’s recent death, which opened with a reprint of the essays on Dionysus and Persephone. As I have shown in Chapter 1, these essays had argued for a radical epistemological shift in modern Hellenism – a shift that Wilde had overlooked. In moving away from Apollo, Wilde belatedly comes to terms with Pater’s correction of Winckelmann’s ‘limitation’ and with his interest in suffering and the ‘dark possibilities’ of Greek paganism. The argument of De Profundis is self-contradictory: Wilde speaks of the Greeks’ mistake in ignoring the cry of Marsyas but, at the same time, he closely follows Pater in tracing the existence of what Goethe had called a ‘religion of sorrow’ within paganism and ancient aesthetics. Wilde turns his back on the Olympian gods, condemning Apollo’s cruelty to Marsyas and describing Demeter and Dionysus as the two ‘most deeply suggestive figures’ for Greek religion and art (115). The conversion from Apollo to Dionysus directly introduces a long discussion of Christ as the emblematic enemy of Philistinism and as ‘one far more marvellous than the mother of Proserpina or the son of Semele. Out of the Carpenter’s shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or at Enna, had ever done’ (115). Following a progressive nineteenth-century tradition exemplified by Pater, Wilde connects the cult of Dionysus with Christian worship. He takes great ‘delight’ in learning that Christ spoke Greek and not Aramaic as previously supposed, and in imagining him in conversation with Socrates, Plato, and even Charmides, the beautiful boy that made philosophers blush with desire in the gymnasium (118). The language of Wilde’s New Life is therefore still ancient Greek. In fact, while in prison, Wilde used to read a dozen or so verses of the Gospels every morning; but he wanted to read them in Greek rather than English, for, in an image that conveys the terrible dislocation between his former and present lives, he felt that when ‘one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some narrow and dark house’ (118). Broken by





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prison life, Wilde would not produce any more literary works after 1898. ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is the only testimony we have of his artistic conversion to the Dionysian aesthetics of suffering.

Wilde’s self-criticism in De Profundis seems fair. His understanding of the Greek life had been a simplified one, perhaps intentionally so, for the sake of promoting a type of aestheticism that would be as provocative and sensational as possible. While Pater was complicating and enlarging the possibilities for the modern reception of Greece through the 1870s, Wilde championed a vision of Hellenism that was still basically consonant with Symonds’s Greek Poets and with Arnold’s ideals of sweetness and light. This is particularly evident in Intentions (1891). The essays in this collection represent the culmination of Wilde’s attempt to establish himself as a serious critic after giving up his academic ambitions and after years of paid work as a journalist.32 They are, in a sense, position pieces, in which Wilde writes himself into the traditions of imaginative criticism and aesthetic prose that had been so crucial in the development of literary aestheticism. In his Pall Mall Gazette articles of the late 1880s, Wilde distanced himself from some of his former influences: he wrote very lukewarm reviews of Symonds in which he chastised his prose and his historical method, and a damning review of Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought (1887), which he dismissed as provincial and a work of bad scholarship.33 After the death of Arnold in 1888 and Ruskin’s retirement from public debate, Pater was now effectively the last remaining active member of an influential generation of Victorian prose writers. Pater had recently reasserted his authority by bringing out a new edition of The Renaissance with the reinstated ‘Conclusion’ (1888) and the well-received volume of Appreciations. In the essays in Intentions, Wilde stages a dialogue with Pater, which is carried out in a mixture of admiration and gentle mockery, already asserted by the droll assonance between the two titles. Wilde and Pater knew each other quite well by this point. Pater had invited the young Wilde to call on him after reading his article on the Grosvenor Gallery published in the Dublin University Magazine (1877). Wilde was very proud of receiving a letter from the famous author of The Renaissance, in which Pater praised his ‘quite exceptionally cultivated tastes’ and his ‘considerable knowledge also of many beautiful things’.34 Years later, in an attentive review of Pater’s Appreciations, Wilde would recall how, on their first meeting, Pater encouraged him



Aesthetic Hellenism

to write prose rather than poetry (a suggestion that Pater seems to have made to most aspiring young poets he knew). In the same review he also recollects that reading The Renaissance brought him to realise ‘what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-writing really is, or may be made to be’. He claims that Pater’s essays have been to him ‘“the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty”’ (the quotation is from Swinburne’s ‘Sonnet’ on Mademoiselle de Maupin), adding that it ‘is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.’35 Despite the characteristic dose of irony, Pater is the one contemporary English writer whom Wilde praises most openly and consistently, and the only one to whom he is willing to show himself to be intellectually affiliated. Wilde admired Pater’s prose style immensely and often tried to imitate it, especially in his early works. Most of Wilde’s writings (except the plays) contain open references or allusions to Pater. While the two probably saw more of each other when Wilde was at Oxford than they did in later years, it is in the period around 1890 that they engaged with each other’s work most closely. In 1887 Wilde wrote a sympathetic review of Imaginary Portraits, followed, in 1890, by the review of Appreciations. The two are supposed to have corresponded about Dorian Gray in the summer and autumn of 1890, Pater offering Wilde suggestions for revising his work from magazine to novel form – a process in which, as Joseph Bristow has recently shown, Wilde used passages from Pater’s Gaston.36 The following year Pater also wrote an important review of Wilde’s novel, to which I will come back in the end of this chapter, in which he links Dorian Gray to Wilde’s critical essays in Intentions. Of the essays in Intentions, ‘The Critic as Artist’ is both the most ambitious and the one in which Wilde’s dialogue with other nineteenth-century critics is most intense. Originally published in the Nineteenth Century in two parts, in July and September 1890, it coincides with the peak in Wilde’s intellectual exchange with Pater. Critics immediately drew attention to this connection, characterising Wilde as ‘a popular Pater’ (a definition to which he might have objected) or, in Richard Le Gallienne’s more sympathetic formulation, as an ‘affectionate’ disciple. Wilde was also publicly compared to Vernon Lee as having a claim ‘to be named as a contributor of something fresh, something original and stimulating, amongst the mass of matter about art that has been written during the last twenty years’.37 Pater himself thought that Wilde’s most immediate influence was Arnold. The original title of the periodical version of




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Wilde’s essay, ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’, establishes a strong intertextual link with Arnold, openly recalling his ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1865). Pater, who read Wilde as attentively as Wilde read him, drew attention to Wilde’s ‘wholesome dislike of the common-place, rightly or wrongly identified by him with the bourgeois, with our middle-class – its habits and tastes’.38 It is possible to read, together with Linda Dowling, Wilde’s exacerbated elitism in Intentions as a reaction to his enforced participation in the emergent culture industry and its vulgarising forms of art.39 The Wilde of the critical essays fundamentally inherits Arnold’s ideal of culture, repeating his calls for the reform of English middle-class attitudes towards the arts and intellectual knowledge. Behind the superficial hedonism that pervades the essays, Wilde comes out as a supporter of Arnold’s belief that culture leads to the improvement of society and that the intellectual has a duty to be publicly involved in this cultural battle. Where he departs from Arnold and other Victorian critics like Carlyle, Ruskin, and Pater is that he fights this battle through pose, irony, and playfulness. ‘The Critic as Artist’ draws heavily on the unpublished ‘Historical Criticism’, from which Wilde repeats several passages. Like the earlier piece, this essay argues that the Greeks invented ‘the critical spirit’, which has subsequently become one of the strongholds of a secular modern culture. In rewriting ‘Historical Criticism’ into ‘The Critic as Artist’, Wilde switches from Symonds to Arnold as his main source for the modern meaning of Hellenism. Echoes of Arnold’s canonical definition of Hellenism in Culture and Anarchy sound all through Wilde’s essay. The Greek life is here characterised by ‘perfection’, a word that haunts both Arnold’s and Wilde’s descriptions of the Greeks; and it translates in the present as the duty to wage the culture war against ‘Puritans’ and ‘Philistines’ – Arnoldian categories that Wilde, again, seamlessly absorbs. For both of them Greece is an essentially negative ideal: it lacks all that in modern England they regard as hostile to intellectual life or simply vulgar, in the etymological meaning of the term as being close to the ‘vulgus’. In a characteristic passage, one of the interlocutors slightly misquotes Arnold, declaring that ‘By the Ilyssus, says Arnold somewhere, there was no Higginbotham’ (134): aptly enough, the tone of intellectual aristocracy and high seriousness that marks Arnold’s Hellenism is always reproduced in the spirit of slight misquotation in Wilde’s essay – mirrored but distorted in a way that must make the reader suspect the presence of a mild irony. The very characters of this dialogue are partly parodies of the intellectual elitism and exaggerated exquisiteness associated first with Arnold and then with aestheticism. They are, to be precise, parodies of parodies, as they are fashioned after the




popular caricatures of the utterly utter aesthetes that had been in the press for nearly a decade. To these slippery intertexual hybrids Wilde entrusts the complicated task of discussing a viable future for aestheticism. It is opportune to remember in this context that Arnold’s ‘Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, the work evoked by the original title of Wilde’s essay, was written as a defence of the place of Greek in liberal education. For Wilde as for Arnold, the value of studying Greece in the present is to promote a disinterested idea of culture (‘curiosity’ is the word they both use) which is essentially secular, and which privileges the ideal of self-development or Bildung over action. This reading of Arnoldian liberalism is at the basis of Wilde’s apology for ‘the contemplative life’, which echoes well-known theorisations of aestheticism by Pater and Nietzsche among others: ‘the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming – that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragic-comedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford’ (178–9). Where Wilde departs from Arnold is in seeing the life of culture as a way to personal pleasure – a type of Greek happiness heavily connoted through Winckelmann’s notion of serenity, which deliberately alienates the self from the collective emotional life: as Gilbert declares, ‘the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual. [ . . .] It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought’ (182–3). As Wilde fuses Paterian aestheticism with the emergent dandyism of the 1890s, the Apollonian ideal finds a modern form in the emotional coldness of the dandy. This is the type of simplified Hellenism that Wilde would come to abjure in De Profundis. There is something deliberately old-fashioned in Wilde’s choice to go back to Arnold at a time in which aestheticism had already superseded his writings so radically. ‘The Critic as Artist’ is, of course, not a straightforward revival of Arnold, but rather a synthesis of Arnold and Pater, from which Wilde was hoping to emerge as the new leading critic of the nation. In this essay, Wilde returns again and again to using and defining the words ‘aesthetic’ and ‘aestheticism’, much more so than in any other work associated with the aesthetic movement, in an effort to create a new meaning for these concepts after their




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popularisation in the 1880s. Wilde can be seen as working together with Pater, who had just republished the essay on William Morris as ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ in Appreciations, in an emphatic gesture to control the meaning of the word (see Chapter 1). Both Wilde and Pater, at this point, strongly associate aestheticism with the act of reception – mainly, but not exclusively, with the reception of ancient Greek material. This is what Pater describes as the transfiguring power of aesthetic writing. Wilde adopts this notion in the form of a radical aesthetics of reception in which the distinction between criticism and imaginative literature is deconstructed: ‘just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty [ . . .], so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent [ . . .]. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and thought’ (153); and, in a more markedly Paterian mood – ‘the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have already been added’ (154). Lawrence Danson rightly points out that, in passages such as these, Wilde retains the full authority with which Arnold had invested the concept of ‘criticism’, but valorises it by Paterian aesthetic standards.40 Through frequent silent quotation of the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, Wilde rewrites the definitions of aesthetic criticism that Pater had given there. The aesthetic critic, constant only to the principle of beauty in all things, will ever be looking for fresh impressions, winning from the various schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, before foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at strange new gods. What other people call one’s past has, no doubt, everything to do with them, but has absolutely nothing to do with oneself. The man who regards his past is a man who deserves no future to look forward to. When one has found expression for a mood, one has done with it. (185) This is Wilde’s version of the aesthetic life theorised by Pater in the ‘Conclusion’, a text that is inscribed in Wilde’s own text in the form of pastiche. Wilde borrows the language of evolution in describing his aesthetic critic as ‘the flawless type’ (196) – a utopian being, the harbinger of a new age in which ‘we shall be able to realize, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity’ (176). Wilde’s




aestheticism in Intentions is more radical, his smashing of beliefs and certainties more extreme, than any other aesthetic writer’s. Freed from moral responsibilities enshrined in the notions of truth and objectivity, the work of Wilde’s aesthetic critic ‘need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises’ (159). Wilde pushes to its extreme the notion of aestheticism as dissident reading practice that Pater had initiated in The Renaissance. While Pater’s radicalism is inscribed in his late writings in the form of difficulty – compression and allusion – Wilde’s is deflected through the thinner devices of paradox and an idiosyncratic camp style. In his utopian vision, aesthetic criticism will ‘annihilate raceprejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms’ and it will ‘bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding’ (203). ‘The Critic as Artist’ presents aestheticism as a modernist movement of reform. It promotes a utopian cosmopolitanism which brings the peoples of Europe together across national boundaries and religious differences. Wilde’s ambition in the essay is to export aestheticism out of England, as he had done in his American tour of 1882, and to turn it into a transnational avant-garde movement. Arnold’s and Pater’s serious commitment to cultural reform seems often undercut by Wilde’s ironies and paradoxes; but we must still strive to read, in this unstable text, a belief in a politically empowering, sustained, and egalitarian cultural critique based on minority or countercultural reading.

Eros and philosophy Reading through the Wilde archive, it is striking to see the same ideas migrating from his undergraduate notebooks to his unpublished early essays to his essays in Intentions, over a period of more than 10 years. This long process of delay and, literally, transcription is also a process through which Wilde effectively rewrites his ancient sources, altering their meaning to suit the evolving beliefs of modern aestheticism. So, for instance, Wilde’s extensive undergraduate notes on the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle speaks of contemplation as ‘perfect happiness’ and ‘the highest form of activity’,41 make their way into ‘The Critic as Artist’, where he writes that happiness is reached through ‘the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being’ (178). In this same essay, Wilde calls the Poetics (a text, like the Nicomachean Ethics, on which he worked extensively as an undergraduate) ‘a perfect piece of aesthetic criticism’ and uses Aristotle’s theory of catharsis to lead to




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the argument that ‘[a]ll art is immoral’ (174). Ancient philosophy continued to be an important source for Wilde’s mature aestheticism long after he had left Oxford. Aristotle and Plato are constantly quoted or invoked in ‘The Critic as Artist’; but, in line with the practices of imaginative reception embraced by the other aesthetic writers, Wilde finds the meaning of ancient sources by modifying them freely as they are re-contextualised for modern readers. In this way, Wilde enlarges the boundaries of ancient philosophy by bringing it into contact with other genres and periods. Drawing attention to this characteristic of his writings, in De Profundis, Wilde would pride himself on having challenged discrete systems of knowledge, claiming to have ‘made art a philosophy and philosophy an art’ (95). The various undergraduate notebooks that have come down to us reveal a deep affinity with ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, whom Wilde obviously studied closely. But they also show Wilde investigating both the efficacy and shortcomings of ancient philosophy, and expressing his dissatisfaction with the traditional language of philosophy as an academic discipline. This can best be seen in his detailed notes on Plato’s ideal of [dialektiké], contained in his recently recovered ‘Philosophy Notebook’ in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Dialektiké, or the dialectical method, is a fundamental principle of Plato’s philosophy, which posits that ideas originate and are best classified through a process of questions and answers that is the sole rigorous means of seeing them in all their implications. Plato tried to enact the principles of dialektiké by using the dialogue form in his writings. The notebooks show that Wilde was keen to test the intellectual and practical limits and the social dimensions of this method, setting it against Aristotle for comparison. The notion of dialektiké would remain important for Wilde. Both the essays in Intentions and his fiction show him elaborating an updated version of Platonic dialektiké that would effectively fuse art and philosophy in the context of modern literary culture: in these writings Wilde addresses the question of how to embody philosophical discourse in a literary genre that would preserve the open-endedness of conversation and, at the same time, make justice to the haphazard workings of the imagination. This is what Wilde admired in Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, a work that is an influential precedent for both Intentions and Dorian Gray, and that he had perceptively described as having made Greek philosophy into a new method of art criticism.42 In the critical dialogues in Intentions, dialektiké works in a variety of complementary ways. On the most basic level, Wilde’s choice of reviving Plato’s use of the dialogue form enables him to dramatise the process of




birth and development of critical ideas by setting it in time.43 Wilde also adopts Plato’s successful technique of setting a strong Socratic character (Vivian, Gilbert) against a weaker interlocutor (Cyril, Ernest) whose role is to be proved wrong and to be coached. The dramatic form also allows him to shake off some of the burden of authorship, redeploying the techniques used by Pater in Imaginary Portraits and, before him, by poets like Browning and Swinburne in their experiments with the dramatic monologue. Writing criticism in the form of dialogue, Wilde is free to play with ideas that might seem radical or absurd by inserting a distance between the written word and authorial intention – a technique that is quite destabilising in the genre of criticism, which traditionally depends on reliable narrators and transparent discourses of authority. But dialektiké is also at work in Wilde’s literary experiments with playfulness, irony, and paradox, all of which are used to defamiliarise readers of Victorian criticism, even of aesthetic criticism, and to make language work against the monologic structures of traditional philosophical discourse. This is why Regenia Gagnier has compared Wilde’s use of paradox and epigrams to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘dialogism’, inasmuch as it triggers a process of deconstruction of ‘bourgeois categories of thought’.44 We are back to Pater’s critique of Wilde’s ‘wholesome dislike’ of the bourgeois in the essays. Wildean paradox complicates ideas of voice, meaning, and intentionality (an issue to which readers are alerted by the title), freeing the speaker from responsibilities to logic and truth – a vexed topic in Victorian criticism. The same set of principles brought Wilde to place great emphasis on the social performance of his aestheticism (the term dialektiké derives from the Greek word for ‘conversation’), by which contemporary accounts set great store, as more effective than his written works. In Wilde’s aesthetic performance of the Greek life, philosophy was inseparable from the notion of eros. Already in his Commonplace Book, Wilde had identified these two concepts as ‘two sides of one thing’, defining eros as ‘the impassioned search after truth, as well as the romantic side of that friendship so necessary for philosophy’. Following Plato’s argument in the Symposium, Wilde forged a solid link between physical desire and philosophical thought, speaking of a natural progression from ‘the love of the beautiful object’ to ‘the ideal ’ and, in explicitly homoerotic terms, ‘from Charmides to the [idea of the good]’.45 In dialogues like the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato argues that the love of boys is not only compatible with, but desirable for philosophical activity. Dowling has shown how a revisionist reading of the Symposium enabled Wilde, alongside Pater and the Uranian poets




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among others, to formulate a counter-discourse for the ethical justification of male homosexuality in modern culture.46 Wilde, for whom Plato always remained an important source, realised that eros, increasingly understood in distinctly homoerotic terms, is fundamentally akin to the aesthesis promoted by Pater and the other authors discussed here: it is a form of epistemology which postulates that knowledge is dependent on physical sensation, specifically on the sensation of pleasure. His writings of the late 1880s and early 1890s show Wilde trying to claim a space for the Platonic idea of eros within the aesthetic life, pushing to its limits aestheticism’s use of ancient Greek material in its experiments with modern sexual identities. In his ‘Preface to the Fourth Edition’ of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1920), Freud claims Plato’s conception of eros as an identical precedent for the ‘enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis’.47 Drawing on the same Platonic notion as Freud, Wilde’s aestheticism anticipates psychoanalysis in attempting to ‘enlarge’ the nineteenth century’s understanding of sexual desire, rejecting pathology (science) and criminalisation, and boldly stating that eroticism and perversion uncomfortably belong right at the heart of civilisation. In the 1890s Wilde’s aestheticism becomes a discourse for integrating knowledge and desire at a moment in history in which social conventions demanded that high culture and libido should be kept strictly separate. In its Platonic twinning with philosophy, male eros is a dormant presence in the critical dialogues in Intentions, where the dramatic settings and the tone of the speakers hint at a possible homoerotic subtext. But it is in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a canonical text of aestheticism and iconic document in the history of homoerotic writing, that Wilde fully develops the mechanisms of erotic exchange that he had sketched in Intentions. Dorian Gray, along with the short story ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ to which it is strictly related, follows Intentions in that it aims to fuse together philosophy and imaginative writing. In this respect, it also continues the experimental realignment of imaginative and critical discourses proposed by Pater in Imaginary Portraits. The magic portrait in Wilde’s novel functions like the material art objects in Pater’s stories: it is a metaphysical bridge between history (embodied in the object’s materiality) and a purely aesthetic system of signification (traditionally located in antiquity) which frees the individual from constricting moral and social imperatives, and which offers a desirable but dangerous alternative to the present. Dorian Gray belongs to the body of aesthetic works that negotiate the legacy of Pater’s essay on Winckelmann in endeavouring to find




emotional possibilities for the experience of antiquity in the present. The character of Dorian bears traces of mythic figures of gods in exile like Pater’s Denys and Lee’s Dionea. His very name is, like theirs, a signifier of his Greek identity.48 And, as in those stories, the supernatural plot of Dorian Gray relies on a Greek mythic archetype – the myth of Narcissus – a tale to which Wilde was repeatedly drawn. The trope of Dorian as revenant from the classical past is set up from the beginning of the novel, where Wilde describes him as having ‘kept himself unspotted from the world’ (181), conveying his affinity with the childlike and what Symonds calls the purely ‘aesthetic’ morality of the Greeks, untainted by the Christian preoccupation with sin.49 The clash between this aesthetic system of signification, associated with antiquity and represented by the magic canvas, and the morality of the modern age is precisely what brings about Dorian’s final destruction, revealing the impossibility of living the Greek life in nineteenthcentury England. The gods-in-exile plot, which is normally employed in the short-story form, is of course substantially complicated by Wilde as he eclectically develops it through the aid of conventions from the gothic and sensation genres, and from the novel of ideas. Yet Dorian Gray retains the basic characteristics of this genre, such as the comparative exploration of the conflicting imperatives of eros and duty, which, as in Pater’s ‘Denys’ and Lee’s ‘Dionea’, allows for the insinuation of the covert homoerotic motif. Dorian’s influence on the painter Basil Hallward is cognate with the impact of classical antiquity on Renaissance artists as described by Pater and Symonds. Like a material object or ghostly emissary from the ancient world (Winckelmann’s Apollo, Keats’s Urn), Dorian has a strong artistic and emotional impact on Basil, enabling him to articulate a critique of his historical present by setting it in comparison with an idealised, disappeared past easily identifiable with antiquity: ‘The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an identity that is void’ (177). Basil’s epiphany is worded in a language that is closely modelled on Pater’s words in The Renaissance, but the narrative of neo-pagan idolatry and psycho-sexual obsession that results from this meeting has more in common with the spectral patterns of Lee’s ‘Dionea’ and ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’. As Basil confesses in a pathetic scene later in the novel, his artistic interest in Dorian had triggered a pathological compulsion to represent the young man over and over again in a series of settings which feature recognisable icons of homoeroticism drawn from the classical world, including the recurrent Narcissus theme: ‘I had drawn




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you as Paris in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman’s cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of Adrian’s barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile. You had leant over the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water’s silent silver the marvel of your own face’ (264). The classical tableaux merge into a phantasmagoria in which Dorian’s body is transposed in time, translated into the artistic medium, and consumed through intertextuality. Basil subconsciously enacts his desire for the other man by setting it in antiquity, where it can be visualised and enjoyed outside of the repressive economy of the present. The haunted picture of the title completes this process of compulsive sublimation. Here Dorian is not portrayed ‘in the costume of dead ages’ (264) but rather in his own dress and in the present time: the painting is thus an unguarded representation of homoerotic eros in the nineteenth century which, like the novel itself, stretches the limits of the admissible in art. Basil would later become conscious of having ‘told too much’, of having ‘put too much of myself into it’ (265). To the discerning reader, the picture clearly contains a confession of homosexuality. This is why it must be hidden away (Basil, even before Dorian, determines that the picture should never be exhibited) and why, on the few occasions in which it is unveiled, it (literally) represents moral and criminal transgression and personal shame. Basil’s pagan and sexual idolatry of Dorian is a form of what Symonds called l’amour de l’impossible, glossed here as ‘the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream’ (264) – a spectral manifestation of antiquity that preys on susceptible modern aesthetes. Wilde diagnoses this condition through Dorian, who perceptively locates Basil’s ‘love’ for him in its classical context, as a version of the male eros described by Plato in the Phaedrus and Symposium, and then refracted through a long history of reception: ‘The love that [Basil] bore him – for it was really love – had nothing in it that was not noble or intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself’ (269). This genealogy of modern male homoeroticism is rooted in Plato’s mythic understanding of eros, in the Phaedrus, as a form of divine madness or enthusiasm (en-theos literally means ‘possession by a god’) which is beneficial to philosophy and art. In Dorian Gray, Wilde develops the character of Basil along the mythic pattern employed in the Phaedrus, as his erotic investment in Dorian evolves from sexual obsession to the creative triumph of the painting – from madness to genius.




Years earlier Pater had drawn attention to the ‘wholly Greek’ affinity of Winckelmann with Plato (182): he had used the Platonic notion of enthusiasm to characterise Winckelmann’s instinctive understanding of antiquity and to broach the risqué topic of his ‘fervent friendships’ with young men in Rome (191). Building on Pater, Wilde asks us to read the homoerotic desire treated in this novel within a canonically strong tradition that takes us all the way back to the Greeks by way of the Paterian figures of Michelangelo and Winckelmann. The same genealogy of modern male love had already been explored by Wilde in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, a precursor to Dorian Gray in its study of homoerotic desire as possession. In this short story Winckelmann is said to have been ‘initiated’ into ‘the secret of Greek art’ by a ‘romantic friendship with a young Roman of his day’.50 The fact that Wilde would again draw on this same genealogy in court, in his celebrated denunciation of the nineteenth century’s misunderstanding and persecution of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, shows just how much Wilde’s ideal of the Greek life operates on a slippage between authorial and private identities.51 In Dorian Gray, Wilde goes back to one of his earliest interests, developing the discussions on the Greek ideal of plasticity that he had followed as a young man in the exchanges between Symonds and Pater. Dorian, with his arrested youth and physical good looks, embodies the Apollonian ideal celebrated by Romantic Hellenism. The discourse of survival entails a very material aspect. Dorian, who is said to possess ‘beauty such as old Greek marbles kept for us’ (199), is obsessively objectified throughout the course of the narrative. The modern body and antique objet d’art are identified and confused from Dorian’s first entrance into Basil’s studio – an aesthetic space where all objects are invested with the higher intensity of the aesthetic life. In this fundamental early scene, the theme of ancient sculpture is fully in evidence as Dorian steps onto the dais ‘with the air of a young Greek martyr’ in order to pose for his portrait in front of the two other men (182). Like Winckelmann in his famous ekphrasis of the Apollo Belvedere, Wilde invites us to linger on the details of Dorian’s anatomy, which recreate the ancient ideal of physical perfection. The reader is encouraged to discard the psychological interpretation that dominates the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel and, instead, to ‘read’ the character of Dorian in completely plastic terms, as if he were a statue, in the first clear instance of the plot of uncanny reversal of life and art developed in the novel. Dorian’s body is carefully scrutinised by the two other men, who assess him aesthetically in their respective roles as artist and connoisseur, but who, in this act, are free to consume him as the object




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of erotic desire. The intertextuality with Winckelmann and ekphrastic writing on sculpture subtly encourages the reader to visualise Dorian’s body unclothed, mimicking the desire of the two other men and (in the case of the male reader) participating in the homoerotic fantasy malgré lui. But the conventions of aesthetic removal present in art-historical writings crumble in Dorian Gray, where the reader remains conscious of the fact that Dorian’s body is not marble but flesh, and that its display does not take place in the public galleries of a museum, with their strict hands-off regime, but behind the closed doors of Basil’s studio. It is, tellingly, during this scene that Lord Henry’s fatal seduction of the young Dorian begins. There is more than a hint of Pater’s Winckelmann (or perhaps of a Mephistophelian Pater) in Wilde’s Lord Henry – a worshipper of beauty who is described as having a ‘romantic olive-coloured face and worn expression’ and ‘cool, white, flower-like hands’ which ‘moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own’ (185). The unusual characterisation of these sensual, ‘flower-like’ hands evokes Pater’s memorable description of Winckelmann’s homoerotic touch as he ‘fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands’ (I: 222). Lord Henry prepares the ground for his friendship with Dorian by using Pater’s language as an effective means of seduction: he speaks of forgetting ‘the maladies of mediævalism’ and returning to ‘the Hellenic ideal’ (183), and, bringing the discourse of plasticity into the open, tries to persuade Dorian to see his beauty as ‘a form of Genius’ (186); following Pater’s ‘Conclusion’, he urges the younger man to be ‘always looking for new sensations’ and to be ‘afraid of nothing’ (187). Eros and philosophy mingle in Basil’s studio, where wisdom is exchanged for the promise of the pleasure of the body. The conversation between the Socratic Lord Henry and the beautiful naïve Dorian recreates the dynamics of the Attic symposium described by Plato, which Wilde had already updated to the present in Intentions. In the nineteenth century, the recognisable aesthetic interior of Basil’s studio thereby provides a legitimate space for the performance of homoerotic eros, encoded into the text in the form of Lord Henry’s use of Paterian language and imagery. In this very contemporary setting, Lord Henry’s aesthetic philosophy maintains that the world is not to be ordered or rationalised, but intensified and experienced purely through pleasure. The novel’s final commitment to this ideal is notoriously unstable. The violent clash between the free but ultimately impossible eros of the enclosed room (a trope that operates on several layers in the narrative) and the repressive laws outside it constitutes the ‘problem’ of Dorian Gray. The ‘new Hedonism’ advocated by Lord Henry presents aestheticism as a theory of eros in the sense of Plato and Freud: the instinct to pleasure and




the act of letting go of repression, in all their anti-rational and anti-social implications, lead to an enlarged aesthetic understanding of phenomena, which stretches to life as well as art. As Lord Henry’s choice of language indicates, this theory is essentially like Pater’s plea for intensity of perception in the ‘Conclusion’. But Pater himself thought otherwise. In his perceptive review of Dorian Gray he tried to prevent easy identifications of Wilde with himself. Pater reads the novel as a Bildungsroman, inviting and then dismissing the implicit comparison with his own Marius. Just as Marius had been written as an extended explanation of the radical aestheticism of the ‘Conclusion’, Dorian Gray is seen as a case study or practical application of the ‘aesthetic philosophy’ that Wilde had promoted in Intentions. But Pater, however, laments the ‘intrusion of real life and its sordid aspects’ in Wilde’s novel, signalling its kinship with a tradition of naturalist writing that is extraneous to aestheticism. Moreover he repeatedly, ambiguously praises Wilde’s work for being ‘clever’ – a studied word that strikes a chill through the piece and that re-establishes the proper hierarchy between master and disciple. Pater’s review of Dorian Gray is a skilful piece of writing: it encourages readers to see Wilde’s work in relation to his own, only to highlight points of departure and differences which are recast as shortcomings. Pater is generally positive about Dorian Gray: his is one of the few sympathetic reviews of the novel. But this relatively unassuming article is also the stage for the last public battle over the meaning of aestheticism in the 1890s, before the debacle of the Wilde trials, and the last document we have of the interaction between the two foremost aesthetic writers of the time. The battle hinges over the meaning of ‘Epicureanism’, a concept that had been of extreme significance to Pater, who had selected it in Marius to qualify his aestheticism in order to rescue it from conservative attacks and sensational and popular appropriations. Epicureanism is a term packed with the ideological discussions I have analysed in this book: the meaning and value of ancient Greece for the present, the place of morality in the aesthetic life, the tensions between orthodox and popular readings of aestheticism. Pater accuses Wilde of a false Epicureanism: for him, both Dorian and Lord Henry lose ‘too much in life to be a true Epicurean’. If an orthodox Epicureanism, which is Pater’s ideal of the aesthetic life, ‘aims at the complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism’ (that is, including his moral sense), Wilde’s ‘new Hedonism’ appears to Pater to cause loss of complexity, ‘to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development’. Pater thereby implicitly refers the reader back to his own careful distancing from the




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word ‘hedonism’, which, as I have argued, Pater regarded as fraught with the potential to mislead.52 Pater is an anxious reader of Dorian Gray. He feels his own uncomfortable presence in it and yet predicts the novel’s success at offering an iconic model for aesthetic culture in the new decade. After his review, Pater would renew his claim on an orthodox aestheticism, rooted in Greek antiquity, in his fourth edition of The Renaissance (1893) and in his confident late writings on the Greek theme (‘Apollo in Picardy’, Plato and Platonism). Wilde, finally recognised by the public in his efforts as playwright, would concentrate on his successful dramatic career before the tragic events of 1895.




I tremble to think how difficult in the face of this Oscar business, it will be to go on singing the praise of youth & beauty & all those things that from the beginning of the world have been priceless to every artist. Katharine Bradley to Bernhard Berenson (1895)1 One night, in April 1895, Edith Cooper had a bad dream. She dreamed that, while travelling in Italy with Bradley (as they indeed were at the time), they were accosted by a woman in a restaurant who claimed to have ‘heard things against [them]’.2 Inferring this to be a remark about their writings, Bradley becomes confrontational: she declares to have ‘no fear’ about their works, adding, in front of all the assembled guests, that she knew quite well that they all came from Satan. The dream ends in a spiralling feeling of fear and claustrophobia, as the nervous Cooper vainly tries to restrain her aunt, begging her to be quiet and to ‘remember the Oscar scandal’. Wilde had not yet been sentenced at this point but the trials were in full swing. Cooper’s nightmare conveys her well-founded fear that the Wilde scandal would bring about a change in the cultural climate of the fin de siècle – a change that would most strongly affect writers, like them, connected with aestheticism. In Cooper’s dream, the doctrine of fearlessness that had been so important to Michael Field is brutally put under scrutiny in the unlikely setting of a foreign restaurant, where it is distorted into a narrative of vulnerability and hysteria. Rumour and prejudice travel fast and reach everywhere. Nameless strangers hear ‘things’ about writers. And writers no longer feel safe in public, not even abroad. Caught off their guard, they are provoked into confessing that writing is a Satanic doctrine, in a nightmarish re-enactment of witch hunts from other ages. The ‘Oscar scandal’, the transparent subject of the nightmare, is a cautionary tale for Michael Field, something to be remembered and feared. The dream is therefore, on a fundamental level, an anxious identification with Wilde. When Cooper nervously whispers to her aunt to ‘remember the Oscar scandal’ she is very conscious that Wilde’s sexual secret was, after all, also Michael Field’s secret. Cooper’s nightmare reproduces the same confusion of authorial identity and private morality that surrounded the Wilde trials: it shows the aesthetic writer fallen in the 158



Conclusion: The End of Aestheticism – A Dream, Three Trials, Two Ghosts

hands of a hostile public that condemns her as a sexual deviant, witch, pagan, and demon. Cooper’s dream proved to be an omen of Wilde’s impending downfall: one month later he would be found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labour. But the dream was also an eerily accurate premonition of a wave of public attacks on aestheticism that was, in April 1895, only a few weeks in the future. After the deaths of Symonds and Pater, Wilde had become the major public voice of aestheticism. His writings had already attracted public threats and censorship even before the scandal of the trials: one just has to think of the hostile responses to Dorian Gray or the ban on performing Salomé. But the trials marked the final stage in the ongoing confrontation between the aesthetic avant-garde and the bourgeois critical establishment. Their influence on the literary culture of the fin de siècle was profound. Since the early days of the 1860s, enemies of aestheticism had suspected that the emphasis on individualism and the cult of pleasure and sensation promoted by the aesthetes contained an encouragement towards degenerate and immoral behaviour. Now they had their proof. Wilde’s profligacy and sexual perversions were shamefully exposed in the courtroom and his much quoted exchanges with the prosecutors made their way to the press. Wilde appeared in the dock in the company of rent boys and blackmailers. Were these low-life criminals the real objects of the aesthetic cult of beauty? Were these immoral activities, punishable by English law, the sordid secret of the aesthetic life? In the 1860s Arnold had started the process of questioning the middle class’s right to the intellectual ownership of art and culture that would become so crucial to the aesthetic authors that I have discussed here. Arnold’s success is attested by the popularity of his concept of Philistinism, which informs the anti-bourgeois stance that kept being redefined through critical writings such as Pater’s Renaissance, Lee’s Belcaro, and Wilde’s Intentions. These works envisaged desirable alternatives to the narrow standard of Philistinism identified by Arnold – alternatives based on selfdevelopment, counter-cultural values, and utopian ideals of artistic and social freedom. After the Wilde trials, to be a Philistine became something to be unmistakably proud of.3 It meant being sane in mind and healthy in body, being a good citizen and the possessor of a critical intelligence predicated on the very standard of narrowness against which the aesthetes had fought. Conservatives could claim to have known all along that ‘the idea at the root of the aesthetic craze was morbid, uncleanly, and unnatural and had nothing in common with the loveliness and the healthiness of fine art’.4 They welcomed ‘the fall of the great high-priest of aestheticism’



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and rejoiced in the fact that ‘the aesthetic movement [had] been dragged into the mud.’5 Aestheticism was debased and publicly disfigured. The dominant register now was very different from the satire used in most anti-aesthetic writings of the previous decades. Wilde was described as a ‘pestiferous poseur’ and the trials as the ‘antiseptic to the poison which has been sent coursing through the veins of our social life’.6 Images of infection, disease, and putrescence echoed each other from article to article in what Linda Dowling has described as a ‘ritual of purification’ of late-Victorian society.7 Already after the first trial, reviewers proclaimed the beginning of a ‘healthy reaction in favour of old conventions, which, narrow though they may be in the eyes of the decadents, were not so narrow as to stifle the great men and women who form the glory of our literary art’.8 Validated by the moral victory of the trials, reactionary critics launched a conservative backlash against innovation in literature and the artist’s right to freedom of expression. Censorship was now said to be the ‘absolute duty’ of the critic and there were widespread calls for self-censorship on the part of writers and artists and for a stricter control over publishing practices.9 The public were urged ‘to a sterner impatience with those who, under the name of Art, or some other pretence, insidiously poison our stage, our literature, our drama, and the outskirts of our press’.10 These open incitements to intolerance and hatred were aimed at convincing the public that culture and intellectual ambition were suspect things. The promotion of self-culture and the cosmopolitan attitude of aestheticism were quenched through a xenophobic rhetoric that aimed to protect England from foreign (Greek, French, German) plagues ‘unsuited to British soil’.11 Wilde’s utopian dream that a transnational aestheticism would bind Europe together across borders was replaced by a rampant nationalism that erected barriers around a narrow and exclusive notion of Englishness based on wholesomeness, puritanical Christianity, and political conservatism. In what was essentially a series of phobic attacks against progress and modernity, aestheticism was deliberately confused and compounded with Decadence, naturalism, anarchism, communism, and the New Woman movement. This last connection was particularly persistent. In light of the aesthetes’ uneasy relationship with New Women’s views on gender and sexuality, this alliance appears clearly misleading. But accuracy was not a major concern of these public attacks, which operated through simplification and caricature. Wilde and the New Women were grouped together as sexual heretics intent on plotting the overthrow of conventions of decency and morality, the double standard, and the bourgeois institution of marriage. One reviewer could even claim that the New Woman was a creature ‘of Oscar Wilde’s fancy’.12 He was




probably referring to Wilde’s role in the English reception of Ibsen; yet Wilde’s homosexuality and the New Women’s interest in female sexual behaviour were by many seen to belong to a similar pathology vaguely connected to contemporary notions of ‘inversion’. This paranoia was amplified by the fact that the trials happened to coincide with the publication, in several close editions, of the English translation of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892). In his infamous argument on the degeneracy of the genius, Nordau had actually used Wilde as one of his case studies. The scandalous revelations of the trials now seemed to some to have proved his spurious theories. Many enemies of Wilde and aestheticism openly followed Nordau’s arguments in their articles, denouncing a culture that seemed to go against nature in elevating the weak (and, in their eyes, degenerate) above the naturally dominant healthy type. Some reviewers explicitly commented on the history of Greek reception that I have examined in the preceding chapters. The very concept of a new Hellenism came under fire as part of the campaign against artistic innovation and modernity. An article titled ‘Literary Degenerates’, for instance, lamented the fact that, instead of seeking sound classical knowledge, contemporary female authors drew inspiration from the ‘new Hellenism’ promoted by Wilde, Swinburne, and Symonds, which was described as ‘a mis-reading of Mr. Pater’ and denounced as spurious.13 Another commentator similarly tried to salvage the Greek classics from the perverse cultural practices of aestheticism, deliberately flattening its diverse modes of reception. He argued that ‘in the spasmodic search for ancient graces and what was falsely thought the classic vein, the worst and boldest of these innovators set themselves to import into healthy and honest English art and life the paganism of bygone times, with all its cynicism, scepticism, and animalism.’ In this view the aesthetes had perniciously resurrected from antiquity the ideas that they knew would be most noxious to modern English society in order to sabotage its institutions and values. Their attempts to liberate the knowledge of the classics from academies and museums are dismissed by calling for a return to normative readings. Like the modern France of Decadence and Symbolism, ancient Greece is undesirable inasmuch as it causes ‘innovators’ (a term of abuse in its own right in this context) to call into question conservative artistic and cultural practices deviously dressed here as Englishness. In a striking image that reverses traditional discourses of the classical body, the sensational and ‘spasmodic’ Greece of the aesthetes is unfavourably contrasted to the ‘healthy’ body of modern England. In the eyes of this hostile reviewer the modern Greek revival is not only unchristian in promoting immorality and vice, but also unscientific in




contravening the natural law of evolution, holding ‘the monstrous doctrine that the race must advance by moral retrogression’.14 These arguments are essentially the same as those used against Pater and Symonds in the 1870s. The difference is that these denunciations, no longer isolated instances, now flooded the press, building a climate of hostility, intimidation, and censorship. One reviewer hinted at the connection between Hellenism and homosexuality that Wilde himself had drawn in court in his famous speech on ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, claiming that ‘[r]ecent events, which shall be nameless, must surely have opened the eyes of those who have hitherto been blind to the true inwardness of modern aesthetic Hellenism’. While this commentator sees Wilde and the aesthetes as the modern representatives of an authentic Greek classicism, classical knowledge itself is presented as inherently perverse and undesirable. The one consolation for him is that the novelty value of these harmful artistic doctrines was wearing thin and that the people were ‘growing sick of aesthetic Hellenism, Hedonism, and such-like “gracious and Greek” revivals’.15 Many more examples could be added to these. While aestheticism had looked to ancient Greece in order to argue that knowledge, learning, and the arts lead to emancipation and to a better life in the present, reviewers now invited readers to be aware that knowledge and the very act of reading are fraught with invisible dangers. After the scandal Wilde was often described as the ‘embodiment’ of aestheticism. Hostile critics used this term to present the trials as a symbolic event – the final episode in a moral tale of decline and fall – and to suggest that the moral corruption, and perhaps the actual crime, of which Wilde had been proved guilty were in fact endemic to a set of literary and artistic practices shared by other authors. Wilde himself uses this rhetorical strategy in De Profundis, as he interprets the events of his life as a parable of the fall of aestheticism by the hand of Philistinism, represented by Douglas and his father.16 But there is a more literal truth in the use of this imagery of embodiment, as the trials shifted the intellectual debate on aestheticism onto the actual body of Wilde, with its uncontrolled desires and transgressive sexual practices. Wilde’s body was subjected first to public scrutiny in the courtroom and in the national press, and then to physical humiliation in Reading Gaol. As Cooper foresaw in her dream, Wilde’s brutal punishment would become a spectre for the writers of his generation. On learning of his sentence, Katharine Bradley produced an arresting image of identification with Wilde’s body in gaol: ‘I wake in the cell, & wander what the gruel will be like, & touch the prison-clothes & feel for my long hair – &




think what a fool I was when I was out on bail at Torquay – not to bathe, & get out of my depth, accidentally & drown in the big, cleansing sea.’17 Imaginatively inhabiting Wilde’s body, Bradley forces herself on a journey of physical degradation that is much worse than death. For her, the cell in Reading Gaol is the opposite of Greece: the Nemesis of the ideals of cultivation, right to pleasure, individual freedom, and cultural and social reform that aestheticism had campaigned for. Bradley was right in fearing that ‘in the face of this Oscar business’, writers and artists would have to become much more guarded in their public challenges to conventions and morality – especially sexual morality. While she was determined to stay loyal to the principles of aestheticism by ‘loving the light, & the early ages of man, & perfumes & colours, & the earthiness of earth as I have always done’, she also gloomily predicted that ‘the next ten years at least will be hard times’ and that ‘every blessed old pagan must be dumb.’18 In a more public response to the repressive climate that followed the trials, Lee rejects the identification of genius and degeneracy proposed by Nordau. In an article titled ‘Deterioration of Soul’ she attacks Nordau’s book-burning attitude and argues that revolutionary tendencies, mysticism, decadence, and depravity are in fact part of each individual. Everyone, in Lee’s account, is ‘liable to becoming if not degenerate, then at least undesirable’.19 Lee claims that imperfection (a term that she prefers to degeneration) runs horizontally all the way across humanity, in different degrees. In other words, she deconstructs the very foundations of Nordau’s theory by presenting degeneration as normative, as it were, showing it to be part of a rational and sane definition of humanity. By the same token, ‘the average man, the dull and decent Philistine’ is for Lee ‘equally in danger of becoming [ . . .] a centre of moral and intellectual deterioration’ (930); indeed most perniciously so, as the faults and weaknesses of the dominant middle classes, often sanctioned by the law, are invisible to all but small dissident minorities. Turning on its head Nordau’s branding of the weak marginal type, she invests these dissident minorities with moral authority and clarity of vision. Lee wants to break the successful repressive alliance of Philistinism and degenerative pseudo-science that had taken strong root after the Wilde scandal. Her essay is a plea for freedom of expression, tolerance, and inclusiveness: ‘Most dangers are not the same to all individuals, but bigotry and fanaticism are dangers to every individual; and to the community, they are greater dangers than morbid peculiarities of a less spreading kind. The worst kind of spiritual degeneracy is surely that which is gregarious, and which, for that reason, is unsuspecting of its own existence’ (943). Lee defends nonconformity and antinomianism from an enlightened




humanistic and secular point of view. The duty of the critic is to keep questioning what societies construct as normative, and not to censor or wage phobic wars on minorities. A guarded plea for sexual tolerance can be read between the lines.20 By this time Lee had already publicly renounced aestheticism in her ‘Valedictory’ essay, but her critique of Nordau is entirely rooted in critical practices that had been promoted by aesthetic writings such as Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ and Wilde’s Intentions, texts which inhabit Lee’s essay like ghostly presences. Despite these impassioned private and public protests, however, the Wilde trials did push aestheticism into what Pater would call its ‘underground life’. After 1895 terms like aestheticism and aesthetic criticism, so meaningful to the literary culture of the past decades, had lost their currency. Appropriated by satirists since the 1870s and now used by hostile critics to connote immorality and corruption, they were no longer of use to writers in defining their work or in challenging the values and expectations of their contemporaries. By the turn of the century Pater and Symonds were dead. Wilde silenced and broken by gaol. Lee had publicly terminated her conflicting relationship with aestheticism. Only Bradley and Cooper continued to identify with it into the new century – at least until their conversion to Catholicism in 1907, after which date even Bradley would speak of the ‘damnable aestheticism’ of the 1880s.21 In the early decades of the twentieth century aestheticism already seemed Victorian and forgettable. The underground life of aesthetic writing is the subject of Lee’s essay ‘Dionysus on the Euganean Hills’ (1921), which is dedicated to the memory of Pater. Here Lee tells of having witnessed the reappearance of Dionysus in a remote Italian village and of how this uncanny experience conjured in her the ghost of Pater, who is written into the tale as a type of exiled god. Lee writes almost 30 years after Pater’s death. His influence at this time, for her, takes shape as a spectral haunting of certain places and ideas, like the gothic cathedral at Auxerre, the outmoded genre of the gods-in-exile story, and the very myth of Dionysus, mediated into the new century through Nietzsche’s writings. The ghostly apparition brings back the memory of ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’, which Lee handles with intimacy and fondness, and of a past that now, after the Great War, seems to her ‘irrecoverably precious’.22 In this story Lee pays homage to Pater and urges the readers of the new century not to forget aestheticism during its modernist exile. Lee reflects on how literary cultures change through time, and how aestheticism, once the vehicle for modernity and innovation, had now become a signifier of the old.




[I]t is strange – as strange, in fact, as any legend or myth, and, perhaps, as worth pointing out – how a very few years, less than a lifetime (for Mr. Pater was my kind personal friend even while he was writing that story) will change the colours and shapes wherein we embody our imaginative emotion; as many Pasts coming to be created in our mind as there are successive literary generations to recreate them each to its liking. (347) Ancient Greece had been the aesthetes’ favourite past, the imaginative landscape they most liked to inhabit in their works, exploring the precarious, uneasy relationship between tradition and experiment, the classical and the modern. In 1921, Lee might well be the first writer to see aestheticism as a past ready to be re-inhabited. A melancholy note colours the narrative as Lee, now 65, remembers her youth and her dead friend, and the optimism of the aesthetic authors seems to her naïve after the tragic events of the war. ‘Dionysus on the Euganean Hills’ is a story about ageing. Watching myths and literary generations become old, Lee contemplates her own old age and death. There is an uncanny feeling of death in life in Lee’s ghostly image of herself wandering alone through the deserted streets of an old Italian village, in the crepuscular autumnal light. Perhaps this is Lee’s way of confessing her own feeling of exile in the altered literary culture of the new century. The thought that history causes loss and destruction saddens Lee. But the gloom is counterbalanced by the realisation that the passage of time will keep enriching the imagination of writers and artist of following generations, free to remember and rewrite different pasts as they will. The past and the future mingle and multiply in Lee’s mind in the form of the inexhaustible interplay of reception and invention. The old story of survival, resurrection, and haunting comforts her. And besides she knows that Pater’s ghost, and perhaps her own, would one day come back to haunt certain places of the mind.




Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 4 vols (Hogarth Press, London: 1986–94), vol. 4, 38–53, p. 38. The essay was originally published in the first edition of The Common Reader (1925). For a detailed study of the cultural implications of ‘knowing Greek’ from the Renaissance to modernism see Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. Walter Pater, ‘Poems by William Morris’, Westminster Review 34 (October 1868), 300–12, p. 307. 3. Pater, The Renaissance, in The New Library Edition of the Works of Walter Pater, 10 vols (London: Macmillan, 1910), vol. 1, p. 125. Unless specified, all references to Pater will be to this edition and will be made by volume and page number in the body of the text. 4. Pater, ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, in Appreciations (London and New York: Macmillan, 1889), 213–27. The essay is not included in the Library Edition. 5. Vernon Lee, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice (The Lesson of a Bas-Relief)’, in Belcaro: Essays on Sundry Æsthetical Questions (London: W. Satchell & Co., 1881), pp. 61 and 62. 6. Cf. Humphry Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 152. 7. For a full account see Joseph Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival: Neo-Classical Attitudes in British Architecture 1760–1870 (London: John Murray, 1972). 8. See especially William St. Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’ to Hellas (1822), in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols (London: Julian Editions & New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–30), vol. 3, p. 8. 10. For a sourcebook of English Romantic Hellenism see Timothy Webb, English Romantic Hellenism 1700–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press & New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982); for criticism see Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Buxton, The Grecian Taste: Literature in the Age of Neoclassicism 1740–1820 (London: Macmillan, 1978); David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Harry Levin, The Broken Column: A Study in Romantic Hellenism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931); Elizabeth Longford, Byron’s Greece (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975); T. J. B. Spencer, Fair Greece Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954); and Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 11. Ayumi Mizukoshi, Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 80–1. 166




12. Thomas Arnold, ‘Rugby School’, Quarterly Journal of Education 7 (1834), 234–49, p. 240. 13. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), respectively pp. 15 and 17. 14. Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 10–11. For a different view see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) and Dignity and Decadence (London: Fontana, 1991). Jenkyns draws attention to the Victorians’ anti-classicism manifested in the widespread taste for the gothic. 15. Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Societies in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 29. See also Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? 16. See M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959); and Christopher Stray, Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture, Community (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999). On the erosion of classical authority in the late century see Stray, Classics Transformed, pp. 83–113. 17. Quoted in Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 81. 18. Isobel Hurst provides a thorough discussion of the gender politics of Victorian classicism and classical studies in Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 19. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Press, 1987). 20. Turner, Greek Heritage, p. 448. 21. Respectively, Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 11; and James Bowen, ‘Education, Ideology and the Ruling Class: Hellenism and English Public Schools in the Nineteenth Century’, in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, ed. G. W. Clarke (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 161–80, p. 162. 22. I borrow the concepts of cultural capital and social distinction (and their interconnection) from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and Melbourne: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). 23. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Revival of Learning (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1877), p. 112. 24. John Grote, ‘Old Studies and New’, in Cambridge Essays: 1856 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1856), 74–114. 25. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 146. 26. See Crook, Greek Revival, p. 10. 27. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (London: [privately printed], 1901). For modern studies of homosexuality in ancient Greece see Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978); Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (London: Penguin, 1992); and John Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007). 28. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 6 vols (London: University Press & Philadelphia: Davis, 1897–1911), vol. 1, pp. 17–18.



Notes 167

29. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 99. 30. Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, ‘The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature’, Contemporary Review 29 (March 1877), 552–66, pp. 557 and 562. 31. W. F. Barry (anon.), ‘Neo-paganism’, Quarterly Review 344 (April 1891), 273–304. 32. Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 33. See, amongst others, James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995); Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 34. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (London and New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 43. 35. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).

1


1. Before ‘Winckelmann’, Pater had published his essay on Coleridge, exactly one year earlier, in the January issue of the Westminster Review, in 1866. Richard Dellamora has also noted the ‘depth of affinity’ between Winckelmann and Pater; Dellamora, ‘The Androgynous Body in Pater’s “Winckelmann”’, Browning Institute Studies 11 (1983), 51–68, p. 51. See also Kenneth Clark, ‘Introduction’ to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London and Glasgow: Fontana/ Collins, 1961), p. 13; and Donald L. Hill, ed., The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 412. 2. For a full account of the blackmailing episode, in which Pater’s relationship with the undergraduate William Money Hardinge was disclosed to Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, see Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William Money Hardinge’, in Pater in the 1990s, eds Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1991), 1–20. 3. See Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, pp. 95–8. 4. On Pater’s use of the figure of the relic, see Kevin Ohi’s evocative analysis in Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 36–7. 5. William F. Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6. Francis X. Roellinger, in his comparative study of the two pieces, interprets these correspondences as a proof of the fact that Pater might have had Winckelmann in mind when he wrote ‘Diaphaneitè’. This hypothesis is



168 Notes

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

intriguing, as it suggests that Winckelmann could be the unmentioned subject of the very earliest of Pater’s writings. See Roellinger, ‘Intimations of Winckelmann in Pater’s ‘Diaphaneitè’, English Language Notes 2:4 (1965), 277–82, p. 279. For an account of the reception of Winckelmann in Europe see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 256–7. For Winckelmann’s influence on German letters and aesthetics see E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Beacon Hill and Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature from Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); and H. B. Nisbet, ed., German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For his influence on the British Museum see Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum: 1800–1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992). Winckelmann, Thoughts on the Imitation. The quotation refers to its English translation by the painter Henri Fuseli, published in 1765, in which the essay is included in a collection entitled Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: with Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art. This has been reprinted in a facsimile edition as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, tr. Henri Fusseli (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 30. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, tr. H. F. Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), p. 333. It is worth noticing that this famous analysis is also the product of a misattribution: the Apollo is now believed to be either a Hellenistic or a Roman copy of a Greek original. Jeff Morrison, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Belvedere: Submerged Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century Writing on Art’, German Life and Letters 52:2 (April 1999), 123–35, p. 124. Ferris, Silent Urns, p. 24. ‘[M]y figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty.’ Winckelmann, History, p. 334. Alice A. Kuznair, ed., Outing Goethe and His Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 12. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 165. See Morrison, ‘The Discreet Charm’, p. 131. Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder, CO & Oxford: Westview, 1996), esp. p. 22. See for instance Dellamora, Masculine Desire, pp. 102–16, and ‘The Androgynous Body’, p. 65; Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, pp. 95–8; Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, pp. 238–53. Cf. Havelock Ellis’s observation about the connection between the study of antiquity and sexual inversion, quoted in my Introduction above. The entire aphorism goes ‘To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be mediaeval one should have no body: To be modern one should have no soul ’. See Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of a Mind in the Making, eds Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (New York and Oxford: Oxford University



Notes 169

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

Press, 1989), pp. 140–1. The question of Pater’s influence on Wilde’s writings in treated fully in Chapter 4. W. H. Mallock, The New Republic: Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House (Old Woking [Surrey]: Leicester University Press, 1975), p. 278. For the episode of the poem, see Mallock, New Republic, pp. 271–2. For the identification of Robert Leslie with W. M. Hardinge see John Jucas’s ‘Introduction’ to The New Republic, p. 17. Edmund Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, in Critical Kit-Kats (London: Heinemann, 1896), 239–71, p. 258. For an extended analysis of The New Republic in the context of Oxford Hellenism, see Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, pp. 104–12. Marc-André Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualité: Etude sur Différentes Manifestations de l’Instinct Sexuel (Lyon: A. Storck & Paris: Masson et C.ie, 1896), p. 91; Edward Carpenter, Homogenic Love, and its Place in a Free Society (Manchester: Labour Press, 1894), p. 10; and Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, p. 17. On Wilde’s legacy on the evolution of twentieth-century gay identities see Bristow, Effeminate England; and Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London and New York: Cassell, 1994). David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 202–22; Dellamora, Masculine Desire, pp. 102–16. Matthew Arnold, ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’, in The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), vol. 3, 212–31, p. 230. Turner, Greek Heritage, p. 74. See also DeLaura, who argues that the addition of the primitive and Dionysian elements makes Pater’s view of Greece ‘considerably more complex than Arnold’s, rather better informed, and more historically authentic’; Hebrew and Hellene, p. 177. Cf. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, pp. 169–70. ‘Demeter and Persephone’ was delivered at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1875 and then published in the Fortnightly Review in January and February 1876. ‘A Study of Dionysus’ was printed in the same journal in December 1876. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Complete Works, vol. 5, p. 165. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 175. The Bacchae is the subject of Pater’s other essay on Dionysus, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, written in 1878 and printed in Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1889. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene, p. 247. Cf. Steven Connor, ‘Myth and Meta-myth in Max Müller and Walter Pater’, in The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 199–222. Connor discusses this meta-mythical quality of Pater’s essays, whereby his writings on myth reproduce similar mythological structures to the ones that they attempt to analyse. See also Maureen F. Moran, ‘Pater’s Mythic Fiction: Gods in a Gilded Age’, in Pater in the 1990s, eds Brake and Small, 169–88; and Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 237. For an analysis of Pater’s imaginary portraits see John S. Harrison, ‘Pater, Heine, and the Old Gods of Greece’, PMLA 39 (September 1924), 655–86;



170 Notes

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

and Gerald Monsman, Pater’s Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); Dellamora gives a psychosexual interpretation of the stories in Masculine Desire, pp. 180–92. Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 34. See also Robert M. Seiler, ed., The Book Beautiful: Walter Pater and the House of Macmillan (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 84–9. Laurel Brake, Walter Pater (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), pp. 38–9. Tyrwhitt, ‘The Greek Spirit’. On the two titles see Pater’s letters to Macmillan dated 1 October 1878 and 18 November 1878. Pater, Letters, pp. 32 and 33–4 respectively. Pater wrote to Alexander Macmillan: ‘I find more and more, as I revise the proofs of my essays, so many inadequacies that I feel compelled, very reluctantly, to give up the publication of them for the present. [ . . .] I think it would be a mistake to publish the essays in their present form; some day they may take a better and more complete form.’ Pater, Letters, p. 34. Lee to her mother, 20 July 1881. In the same letter Lee also notices ‘how wholly unlike Pater is to the Mr. Rose of Mallock’. Vernon Lee’s Letters, ed. Irene Cooper Willis (Privately Printed, 1937), p. 80. ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’, Houghton Library, bMS Eng 1150 (6). The first folio bears the inscription, in Pater’s hand: ‘(might be part of an introd. n to essays on Gk. art)’. This and all the other citations from the Pater manuscripts are reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. For the dating of this piece see Sharon Bassett et al., ‘Dating the Pater Manuscripts at the Houghton Library’, The Pater Newsletter 25 (Fall 1990), 2–8, p. 3. In the ‘Preface’ to Greek Studies, Shadwell suggests that this manuscript should have served as an introduction to a collection of essays on Greek sculpture, including ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, ‘The Marbles of Ægina’, and ‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen’ (VII: 3). These essays, however, appear to have been written later than the ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’. Whatever the case, the manuscript is a testimony of Pater’s intention to put together a volume that would push Greek scholarship beyond Winckelmann’s Hellenic ideal. I treat the question of mythography and Romanticism in Pater more fully in ‘Outward Nature and the Moods of Men: Pater’s Romantic Mythology’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, eds Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 107–18. ‘Romanticism’ appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in November 1876. See Schiller, ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (‘Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 1795). The theme of Greek harmony, derived from Winckelmann, is also the subject of his famous poem ‘The Gods of Greece’ (‘Die Götter Griechenlands’, 1788). The quotation from Goethe should read: ‘Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen/ Resolut zu leben.’ Pater follows Carlyle’s misquotation in the essay on Schiller (1831). See Hill, ed., The Renaissance, pp. 439–40. John Addington Symonds, respectively, Studies of the Greek Poets (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1873), p. 422; and Sketches in Italy and Greece (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1874), p. 282.



Notes 171

51. Vernon Lee, Belcaro, p. 233. Dellamora notes that Goethe had already been used as a model of aestheticism by George Henry Lewes as early as 1843. Masculine Desire, p. 106. 52. Cf. Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetes’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131–51. Shrimpton traces the polar opposition in Victorian culture between the aesthetes, who ‘are happy to separate art from religion’, and the ‘Philistines, or Puritans, [who] are happy to separate religion and the conduct of life from art’ (p. 148). 53. ‘The Aesthetic Life’, Houghton Library, bMS Eng 1150 (7), fol. 9R. 54. For the most famous instance of this, see Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and De Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 55. Cf. Thaïs E. Morgan, ‘Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater’, Victorian Studies 36:3 (Spring 1993), 315–32. Morgan identifies a ‘minoritizing discourse about art and artists’ in the works of Pater and Swinburne, in which ‘male beauty and male-male desire are validated and preferred over the heterosexual norm as the cultural ideal’ (p. 316). 56. Linda Dowling argues that Pater’s insistence on sensual perception in the ‘Conclusion’ should be read in the context of Diotima’s theory of eros in Plato’s Symposium, where the apprehension of physical beauty is the first step in the individual’s progress to virtue and knowledge. Dowling connects the aisthesis of Pater’s advocacy of sensation with the ‘frank and shameless aisthesis of falling “in love with the beauty of one individual body”’ described in the Symposium. The homoeroticism of the ‘Conclusion’ for Dowling is generated by this intertextuality. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. 98. 57. : Heraclitus says, ‘All things are in motion and nothing rests’ (I: 233). In a suggestive essay, Lene Østermark-Johansen puts the ‘Conclusion’ in the context of a revived interest in Heraclitus that reached England through nineteenth-century German philosophy, notably Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. ØstermarkJohansen, ‘On the Motion of Great Waters: Walter Pater, Leonardo and Heraclitus’, in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, eds John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen (Aldershot and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2005), 87–103, p. 89. 58. Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World, p. 4. Cf. also Charles Martindale, Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 178; and Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction, esp. pp. 9 and 54. 59. Martindale, Latin Poetry, p. 30. Much of the previous discussion in this paragraph is indebted to Martindale. See especially his claim that ‘art for art’s sake becomes a way of reading and responding to works of art more than it is a way of making them’ (p. 50). 60. From a note appended to the third edition of The Renaissance, now the standard text, in which Pater decided to reprint the ‘Conclusion’. Pater, I: 233. 61. Anon., ‘Modern Cyrenaicism’, Examiner (12 April 1873), 381–2, reprinted in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, R. M. Seiler (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), 73–8, pp. 75–7.



172 Notes

62. W. J. Stillman, Unsigned Review, Nation xvii (9 October 1873), 243–4. In Seiler, Walter Pater, 81–5, p. 85. 63. Margaret Oliphant, Unsigned Review, Blackwood’s Magazine cxiv (November 1873), 604–9. In Seiler, Walter Pater, 85–91, p. 90. 64. The neglect of Pater among modernist writers has been the subject of several critical investigations. Harold Bloom has influentially suggested that this lack should be understood in terms of Oedipal repression. Bloom, ‘The Crystal Man’, in Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: New American Library, 1974). Bloom’s approach has been followed by, among others, Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); and Frank Moliterno, The Dialectics of Sense and Spirit in Pater and Joyce (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1998). For other approaches see F. C. McGrath, The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1986); and Lesley Higgins, ‘No Time for Pater: The Silenced Other of Masculinist Modernism’, in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, eds Brake, Higgins, and Williams, 37–54. For a more recent negative critique of Pater’s classical scholarship see Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, esp. pp. 253–61. 65. Letter to John Blackwood, 5 November 1873. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (London: Oxford University Press, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), vol. 5, p. 455. Quoted in Hill, ed., The Renaissance, p. 446. 66. Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, p. 258. 67. Gosse, ‘Walter Pater’, p. 258.

2

Vernon Lee and the Aesthetics of Doubt

1. Lee, ‘Ruskinism’, in Belcaro, 197–229, p. 207. 2. The Chiaramonti Niobid in the Vatican represents one of Niobe’s daughters; the Dying Boy of the Munich Glyptothek is reputed to be one of Niobe’s sons; the famous Niobe Group of the Uffizi is the closest we have to a fully preserved group. These statues, which depict the same theme but date from different periods and were not part of a single original group, are the objects of ongoing reconstructions and debate among archaeologists and art historians. For recent scholarship on the Uffizi Group see Richard Brilliant, ‘Marmi Classici, Storie Tragiche’ in Commentaries on Roman Art: Selected Studies (London: Pindar Press, 1994), 121–47; also see the detailed Wilfred A. Geominy, Die Florentiner Niobiden, 2 vols (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 1984). For an example of nineteenth-century scholarship on the Niobe myth in art and literature, with which Lee might well have been acquainted, see K. B. Stark, Niobe und die Niobiden (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1863). 3. On the passage from classical art, via Hegel, to late-Victorian aestheticism, see also Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 159. 4. Cf. Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’: ‘we see the hairy, tawny bodies at play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum’ (p. 42). On the museum as ‘mortuary’



Notes 173

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

see the evocative Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 3–10. See Colby, Vernon Lee, p. 6; and Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 3 and 6. Women could at this point take part in a university education but were by and large not admitted to degrees – a process that took place slowly over the next few decades. London was the first British university to admit women to its degrees in 1878, but by then they had already been regular attendants at lectures for several years both in London and other urban universities such as Bristol and Birmingham. In Cambridge, Girton College was founded in 1869 and Newnham in 1871. In Oxford, Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall were the first female ‘halls’ to open in 1879. See Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995); Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (London and Toronto: George G. Harrap and Co., 1960); and Hurst, Victorian Women Writers, esp. pp. 94–9. Dyhouse, No Distinction, p. 23. On Lee’s conflicting identity within the male intellectual milieu, see Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, ‘Introduction’ to Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, eds Maxwell and Pulham (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–20, esp. pp. 6–9; and Stefano Evangelista, ‘Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism’, in ibid., 91–111, in which some of the material in this chapter has appeared in an earlier form. Hilary Fraser, ‘Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the Spaces In-Between’, in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 114–33, esp. p. 118. Anon., ‘The Philistine Turns’, Belgravia 49 (December 1882), 155–67, resp. pp. 157, 155, and 166. Lee’s letter to her mother, 18 July 1881. Lee, Letters, p. 78. Pater to Lee, 26 March [1882]. Pater, Letters, p. 42. Lee, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediæval in the Renaissance, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884). Cf. Colby, Vernon Lee, p. 63; and Laurel Brake, ‘Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle’, in Vernon Lee, eds Maxwell and Pulham, 40–57, p. 44. Symonds to Lee, 28 March 1882. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, eds Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, 3 vols (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967–69), vol. 2, p. 740. Symonds to Mary Robinson, 3 May 1883. Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 813–14. Cf. Zorn, Vernon Lee, p. 12. Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, resp. pp. 898 and 906. Lee’s letter to Mrs Jenkin, 18 December 1878. Lee, Letters, p. 59. On the ‘tensions and contradictions’ of the term ‘female aesthete’ see Linda Hughes, ‘A Female Aesthete at the Helm: Sylvia’s Journal and “Graham R. Tomson,” 1893–1894’, Victorian Periodicals Review 29:2 (1996), 173–92, pp. 173–4; quoted in Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 4.



174 Notes

20. Berenson accused Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson of basing their essays ‘Beauty and Ugliness’ (Contemporary Review, 1897) on ideas that he had expressed to them in private. Symonds’s accusations were privately formulated in letters to the American educator T. S. Perry: writing on 15 July 1883 he claimed that Lee had ‘pitchfork[ed]’ the topic of the Carmina Burana from him and, on 30 July 1884, he declared himself ‘sore at her bagging the metaphor of her book [Euphorion] from me, & for wholesale reproductions of my opinions’. Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, resp. pp. 833 and 935. For an analysis of the Berenson case, see Alison Brown, ‘Vernon Lee and the Renaissance: From Burckhardt to Berenson’, in Victorian and Edwardian Responses, eds Law and ØstermarkJohansen, 185–209. For the use of quotation for the creation of aesthetic networks, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting’, in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 36–58. 21. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Kathy Alexis Psomiades and Talia Schaffer, eds, Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999). 22. Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990); Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986). 23. In the early 1880s, Lee had formed a strong emotional attachment to Robinson, to whom she dedicated Belcaro. Robinson dedicated both her collection of poems, The Crowned Hippolytus (1881), and her historical study, The End of the Middle Ages (1889), to Symonds, her ‘Friend’ and ‘dear Master’. For an incisive analysis of Robinson’s complex intellectual debt to Symonds, see Yopie Prins, ‘“Lady’s Greek” (With the Accents): A Metrical Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34:2 (2006), 591–618. For Symonds’s sexual attraction to Robinson, see Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1964), p. 223. In this context Grosskurth also notes that Havelock Ellis proposed to use Lee and Robinson as a ‘possible case-history for the section on Lesbianism in Sexual Inversion’. The two women became estranged after Robinson’s sudden engagement to James Darmesteter in 1887, which Lee opposed on overtly eugenicist grounds. 24. Anne Brown can be identified with Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, and Walter Hamlin, the male protagonist, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Hamlin’s first name and his description as ‘gemlike’ in the opening of the novel suggest that Lee might have wanted to give him some elements of Pater. Hamlin’s predatory heterosexuality should discourage readers from taking this association too far. For a detailed identification of the characters in Miss Brown see Leonee Ormond, ‘Vernon Lee as a Critic of Aestheticism in Miss Brown’, Colby Library Quarterly 9:3 (1970), 131–54. 25. See Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 164. 26. Zorn, Vernon Lee, p. 126. 27. Lee, Miss Brown, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1884), vol. 1, p. 176.



Notes 175

28. Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 171 ff.; see also Psomiades, ‘“Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace”: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21–41. For another reading of Miss Brown as a lesbian novel see Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778– 1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 154–7. 29. Cf. Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, I: 190; and Lee, Miss Brown, II: 308. 30. See Chapter 1 above. 31. For a comparative analysis of the treatment of the Renaissance in Lee, Pater, and Symonds, see Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992), esp. pp. 225–56. 32. Lee, Juvenilia: Being a Second Series of Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), vol. 1, p. 8. 33. Pater, ‘Vernon Lee’s “Juvenilia”’, Pall Mall Gazette 5 (August 1887), p. 5. See also Mario Praz, who talks of an ‘insistent negation of the possession of beauty’ in Lee’s writings and identifies in them a ‘Calvinist stoicism revived through the contact with the socialist currents of the fin de siècle.’ He adds that ‘Vernon Lee is an aesthete who is ashamed of her leisure.’ Praz, ‘Vernon Lee’, Il Patto col Serpente (Milan: Mondadori, 1972), 270–85, resp. pp. 283 and 284, my translation. See also Vineta Colby’s influential ‘The Puritan Aesthete: Vernon Lee’, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, and London: University of London Press, 1970), 235–304. 34. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 165. 35. Cf. Arnold, ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’: ‘That is where the sentiment of a religion of sorrow has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a religion of pleasure; in its power to be a general, popular, religious sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship’ (pp. 229–30). 36. Tyrwhitt talks of ‘the peculiar subjectiveness or egotism of the new aesthetic style’ and argues that Hellenism means ‘the total denial of any moral restraint on any human impulses’. Tyrwhitt, ‘The Greek Spirit’, resp. pp. 555 and 558. 37. A. Mary F. Robinson, The Crowned Hippolytus, Translated from Euripides with New Poems (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1881). For Robinson’s Hellenism and her experiments with gender see Prins, ‘“Lady’s Greek” (With the Accents)’. 38. See Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 72. 39. See Stephen L. Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archaeologist (London: Duckworth, 2004), pp. 41–5. 40. Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong, p. 42. 41. Jane E. Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. vi. 42. Harrison, Introductory Studies, resp. pp. v and vi. 43. Jane E. Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature (London: Rivingtons, 1882), p. 88. 44. On the influence of Harrison and the myth and ritual school on modernist writing see, for example, M. C. Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998); Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines



176 Notes

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); J. B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). On the repressed influence of Lee and aestheticism on the modernists see Dennis Denisoff, ‘The Forest Beyond the Frame: Picturing Women’s Desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf’, in Women and British Aestheticism, eds Psomiades and Schaffer, 251–69. Lee to Sellers, 20 October 1886. Lee’s letters to Sellers are kept in the Eugénie Sellers Strong Papers, Girton College, Cambridge, GCPP Strong 3/22. Quoted with permission. For a full account see Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 87–94. Beard’s reconstruction of the Lee–Harrison–Sellers triangle is captivating, although her focus on the two professional classicists tends to sacrifice the complexities of Lee’s intellectual and erotic involvement (the ‘queen of the Parisian Left Bank’, p. 88; ‘the most famous lesbian in town’, p. 94). Lee’s letter to her mother, 11 July 1887. Lee, Letters, p. 256. Lee, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1895), p. ix. Sellers to Lee, 18 March 1912. Somerville College, Oxford, Vernon Lee Papers. Quoted with permission. Lee’s postcards to her mother written in November 1891. Lee, Letters, pp. 342–3. Lee to Sellers, undated letter, probably in or around 1890, Girton College, Cambridge, GCPP Strong 3/22. Lee to Sellers, 23 January 1893, ibid. Lee to Sellers, 8 October 1893, ibid. Lee to Sellers, 6 March 1895 (and not 1894 as dated in the archive), ibid. In her recent book on Lee, Patricia Pulham offers a different, engaging reading of the role of the child in Lee’s writings based on Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory of the ‘transitional object’. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Lee, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (London: Heinemann, 1890), p. ix. Cf. Catherine Maxwell, ‘Vernon Lee and Eugene Lee-Hamilton’, in Vernon Lee, eds Maxwell and Pulham, 21–39, pp. 31–2. Angela Leighton, ‘Ghosts, Aestheticism, and “Vernon Lee”’, Victorian Literature and Culture 28:1 (2000), 1–14, p. 2. On the continuities between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and Lee’s Hauntings see Catherine Maxwell, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”: Vernon Lee’s Portraits’, Word and Image 13:3 (1997), 253–69. Pater explicitly discusses Heine’s essay in his chapter on Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance, I: 30–3. Harrison discusses the relationship between Pater and Heine in his ‘Pater, Heine, and the Old Gods of Greece’. For Lee’s mention of Mérimée, see her letter to her brother dated 31 August 1893, Lee, Letters, p. 363. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Art and Literature, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1985), 336–76, p. 358. Freud also notes the linguistic correspondence between ideas of the ‘uncanny’ and ‘haunting’; ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 364. On Pater’s use of the figure of the revenant see Ohi, Innocence and Rapture, p. 39 ff.



Notes 177

63. Symonds, Italian Byways (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1883), p. 16. 64. On Lee’s use of the trope of the femme fatale in Hauntings, see Maxwell, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”’. 65. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, p. 68. Cf. Pater, ‘Winckelmann’, I: 192. 66. Waldstein, Essays on the Art of Pheidias (Cambridge: University Press, 1885), resp. pp. 68 and 405. 67. Cf. Pulham, who notices the connection between paganism, the supernatural, and lesbian identity. Art and the Transitional Object, pp. 65–6. 68. On the persistent textual connection between lesbianism and spectrality, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 69. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1875), pp. 23–4. Pater quotes this anecdote approvingly in his review of the book in The Academy 169 (31 July 1875), 105–6. 70. Lee had already detected more than 10 years earlier that this sentence contained a nudge to the contemporary homoerotically oriented readership. In a review of Symonds’s Shakespeare’s Predecessors in English Drama (1884) she provocatively remarks on Symonds’s tendency to see amour de l’impossible as ‘the universal constituent’ of Marlowe’s characters, adding somewhat tartly that ‘[t]o some readers it may seem that a certain predilection for that same amour de l’impossible (manifested especially in his finest sonnets) on the part of Mr. Symonds himself may have made him particularly and excessively keen to its existence in Marlowe’. Lee, The Academy xxv (8 March 1884), 159–60. I treat this topic more fully in Chapter 4, in my analysis of Wilde.

3

‘Two Dear Greek Women’:The Aesthetic Ecstasy of Michael Field

1. ‘To Apollo – the Conqueror’, Uncertain Rain: Sundry Spells of Michael Field, ed. Ivor Treby (Bury St Edmunds: De Blackland, 2002), pp. 58–9. 2. Cf. Treby, Uncertain Rain, p. 59. 3. Bradley to Browning, 23 November 1884. Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), p. 6. To Browning these words must have recalled Elizabeth Barrett’s first mention of her plan for Aurora Leigh as ‘meeting face to face & without mask the humanity of the age, & speaking the truth as I conceive of it, out plainly’. Letter to Robert Browning, 27 February 1845, The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846, ed. Elvan Kintner, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 31. I am grateful to Catherine Maxwell for this reference. 4. Michael Field, Works and Days, p. 202. 5. Yopie Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Dellamora, 43–81, p. 46. 6. ‘What / secret correspondences whilst at home one is digging up potatoes!!! O Bliss! O Freedom. Liberté, égalité, fraternité.’ Bradley to her cousin Frances Brooks, undated. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Mss. Eng. Lett. e 143, fols 93R–94V. On the role of women’s clubs in the formation of female authorial identities in this period see Linda Hughes, ‘A Club of their Own: The



178 Notes

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

“Literary Ladies,” New Women Writers, and Fin-de-Siècle Authorship’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 233–60. Anon., Review of Bellerophôn, Guardian (19 October 1881), 1498–9. Letter to Robert Girdlestone, a mutual acquaintance of Symonds and Bradley and Cooper, 30 June 1881. Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 675–6. Symonds to Cooper, 10 July 1881. Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 683–4. Symonds to Bradley and Cooper, 8 July 1884. Bodleian Library, Misc. Eng. Lett. e 32, fols 29R–30V. This letter is not included in Schueller and Peters’s edition of Symonds’s correspondence. Bradley to Symonds, 14 August [1884]. Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Lett. d 408, fols 132R–6R. On the influence of Pater’s Dionysus on Callirrhoë, see Prins, ‘Greek Maenads’. Pater had already written his own essay on the Bacchae, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, at this point. This essay, though, was only published in 1889, which makes it very unlikely that Bradley and Cooper could have been familiar with it. A. Mary F. Robinson, Review of Callirrhoë; Fair Rosamund, Academy (7 June 1884), 395–6. On this see Ruth Vanita’s chapter ‘Ecstasy in Victorian Aestheticism’, in Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 62–82. Bradley to Cooper, undated. Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Lett. d 402. The extracts quoted come from fols 25R, 29V, and 30V. For these see Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Lett. c 419. Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Prins, Victorian Sappho, pp. 99–100; cf. also pp. 61–4. Symonds, Greek Poets, p. 128. Jane E. Harrison, ‘The Pictures of Sappho’, Woman’s World 1:6 (May 1888), 274–8. Wharton’s translation of this fragment is ‘This will I now sing deftly to please my girl-friends’, in Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (London: David Stott, 1885), p. 70. See especially Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); and Chris White, ‘“Poets and Lovers Evermore”: Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field’, Textual Practice 4:2 (1990), 197–212, and ‘Flesh and Roses: Michael Field’s Metaphors of Pleasure and Desire’, Women’s Writing 3:1 (1996), 47–62. Prins, Victorian Sappho, pp. 102–4. Cf. White, ‘Flesh and Roses’. Marion Thain, ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 55. Thain’s chapter on Long Ago provides a nuanced reading of the complex eroticism of these poems. Michael Field, Works and Days, p. 20. J. M. Gray, ‘Michael Field’s “Long Ago”’, Scottish Leader (27 June 1889). Michael Field to Pater, 11 June 1889. Pater, Letters, p. 96.



Notes 179

29. Pater to Michael Field, 4 July 1889. Pater, Letters, p. 98. 30. Resp. Pater to Michael Field, 8 August 1890; and Bradley to John Miller Gray on 23 [?] August 1890. Both in Pater, Letters, p. 113 and f.n. 31. Michael Field, Works and Days, p. 137. The passage Bradley alludes to is in ‘Style’. She records her surprise at the fact that Wilde could remember (almost) precisely where it occurred: ‘“Yes,” he said, “it is in Appreciations, in the essay on Style, page 7 – left-hand side, – at the bottom” – and in all this memory the one tiny error was that the page is page 8’. 32. Cooper to John Miller Gray, December 1889. British Library, Add. Mss. 45853, fols 271R–273V. 33. See a draft letter from Bradley to Pater in which she praises Plato and Platonism for recreating the present of the classical age. Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Lett. d 120, fols 9R–10R. 34. Michael Field, Works and Days, p. 135. 35. The manuscripts of For that Moment Only survive in the Bodleian Library, Ms. Engl. Misc. d 976. 36. As an example of strong Paterian influence in Michael Field’s aesthetic prose, see the essay ‘Mid-Age’, Contemporary Review (September 1889), 431–2. 37. Among nineteenth-century critics, Richard Le Gallienne identified the Paterian intertextuality in his review ‘Pictures Done into Verse’, Daily Chronicle (7 June 1892); for more recent criticism see Julia F. Saville, ‘The Poetic Imagining of Michael Field’, in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), 178–206; Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. pp. 187–95; and Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, esp. p. 132. 38. Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses by Michael Field (London and New York: George Bell and Sons, 1893). 39. Joseph Bristow, ‘Michael Field’s Lyrical Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough’, in Michael Field and Their World, eds Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2007), 49–62, esp. pp. 54–5. In this article, Bristow also gives an account of the complicated publication history of the collection, which immediately went into a substantially revised second edition (1893) and then into a further revised American edition (1898). For another account of this publication history, see Thain, ‘Michael Field’, pp. 121–6. For the purposes of this study I have chosen to base my readings on the first edition. 40. Prins, ‘Greek Maenads’. 41. The association of Dionysian cult and Persian poetry is evident in the quotation from Omar Khayyám from which the title is taken: ‘A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and thou / Beside me Singing in the Wilderness.’ The practice of enriching the myths of Dionysus with Oriental elements can be traced back to antiquity. 42. D. G. Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 133 and 136. 43. See Thain, who claims that, like Long Ago, Underneath the Bough is set ‘within a context of ancient erotic lyricism’. ‘Michael Field’, p. 90. 44. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Autumn of the Body’, Essays and Introductions (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), p. 191.



180 Notes

45. Margot K. Louis, ‘Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies 47:3 (Spring 2005), 329–61. 46. British Library, Add. Mss. 46780, fol. 122V. 47. See British Library, Add. Mss. 46782, fols 50V–51R. 48. Bodleain Library, Ms. Eng. Misc. d 976. ‘An Agony’ is fols 9–12, ‘A Mænad’ is 13–17. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, tr. and ed. Duncan Large (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 81. 50. Pater should of course be seen as launching a similar attack from England. 51. British Library, Add. Mss. 46784. The quotations come from 5V and 24R. For Berenson as ‘new Bacchus’ see Add. Mss. 46780, fol. 122R. 52. See Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. Misc. d 333, fols 90R–V. This notebook is wrongly dated 1882–86 in the Bodleian catalogue. The reference to Pater’s Greek Studies shows that it must be post-1895. 53. The question of whether Pater (who read German) had come across Nietzsche remains unresolved. Research into Nietzsche’s reception in England seems to exclude this option. See, for instance, Mark Boulby, ‘Nietzsche and the Finis Latinorum’, in Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, eds James C. O’Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellner, and Robert M. Helm (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 214–33; Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972); and David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1970). 54. Gerald Monsman sees here a ‘superiority’ of Pater’s model to Nietzsche’s, Pater creating around Dionysus not merely an ideological pattern, but a truly mythic one. Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 19.

4


1. October 1881. The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 80. 2. These are allegedly Wilde’s words as reported by Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, 2 vols (New York: 3 Washington Square, 1916), vol. 1, pp. 29–30. 3. See, for instance, his reviews ‘Mr. Mahaffy’s new Book’, Pall Mall Gazette (9 November 1887); ‘Venus or Victory’, Pall Mall Gazette (24 February 1888); ‘Mr. Morris’s Odyssey’, Pall Mall Gazette (26 April 1887); and his review of Godwin’s production of ‘Helena in Troas’, Dramatic Review (22 May 1886). All in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross, 15 vols (London: Routledge, 1933), vol. 13. For an account of Sir William Wilde’s work on Celtic archaeology and its influence on Wilde’s future interest in classical archaeology, see Iain Ross, The New Hellenism: Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (2008). 4. Letter to Douglas, [?] January 1893. Wilde, Letters, p. 326. 5. The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 1895 (London: The Stationery Office, 2001), p. 36. 6. Wilde, De Profundis: ‘Epistola in Carcere et Vinculis’, ed. Ian Small (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 42–5.



Notes 181

7. Unsigned Review, Athenaeum (23 July 1881), 103–4. Reprinted in Karl Beckson, Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 33. 8. See Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, and Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar (London: Abacus, 1994), pp. 43–63. 9. Cf. De Profundis, p. 99: ‘the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when Society sent me to prison’. 10. Wilde, Letters, p. 36. 11. J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (London: Macmillan, 1874), resp. ‘Preface’ and p. 1. 12. On this, see also Julia Prewitt Brown, who persuasively argues that Wilde’s knowledge of Greek culture must be seen as the foundation of his aesthetic politics. Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997). 13. See Smith and Helfand, eds, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks. In addition to these, this chapter draws on a number of unpublished notebooks: British Library Add 81748, and Clark Library W6721 M3 N9111 [Notes on the Ethics of Aristotle, Exercise Book Used at University], W6721 M3 N9112 [Notebook on Philosophy], and especially W6721 M3 N9113 [Philosophy Notebook]. 14. See Smith and Helfand, Oxford Notebooks, and the useful Horst Schroeder, ‘Wilde’s Commonplace Book and Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets’, Notes and Queries 40:1 (1993), 53–4. Perhaps partly because they did not identify several of Wilde’s numerous references to Symonds, Smith and Helfand are reluctant to ascribe an important formative role to Symonds and Pater, preferring to treat them as a vehicle for Wilde’s apprehension of Hegelian humanism. 15. Symonds, Greek Poets, p. 423. 16. See Tyrwhitt, ‘The Greek Spirit’. 17. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets. Second Series (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1876), p. 376. 18. For an account of the scandals see, respectively, George Rousseau, ‘“You Have Made me Tear the Veil from Those Most Secret Feelings”: John Adddington Symonds Amidst the Children’, in Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, ed. George Rousseau (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 173–99; and Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection’. For a comparative reading of the two scandals see my ‘Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater’, also in Children and Sexuality, ed. Rousseau, 206–30. 19. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, pp. 159–63. 20. For Wilde’s mention of choir boys as objects of homoerotic interest see Wilde, Letters, p. 23; for Douglas’s involvement in a scandal at Oxford, see De Profundis, p. 48. Wilde would also have been well-acquainted with Mahaffy’s frank treatment of Greek paiderastia in Social Life in Greece (see pp. 305–13), referred to by Symonds. 21. ‘Princess Nausicaa: Essay and Review of J. A. Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets’, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA 3574, fol. 45R. 22. Wilde, ‘Princess Nausicaa’, fol. 32R. 23. See also Horst Schroeder, ‘EPΩΣ TΩN A ΔYNATΩN – L’Amour de l’impossible: A Graeco-French Collocation in “The Critic as Artist”’, Notes and Queries 40:1 (1993), 52–3. Schroeder identifies the source of Symonds’s use of the phrase in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.



182 Notes

24. ‘Hellenism’ was published in 1979 by Tragara Press in a limited edition that collates the extant manuscript fragments in the British Library and the Clark Memorial Library. 25. Information in this paragraph comes from Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 21–3, 30, and 66–7. 26. See Wilde, Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. xxi–xxii. The essay has been generally known as ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’, a title chosen by Ross in the first Collected Edition of 1908. Here I have adopted the title ‘Historical Criticism’, following Guy’s decision in the recent complete edition of Wilde’s works. 27. Cf. British Library, Add 81748, fol. 46R. See Smith and Helfand on the relevance of the notebooks for ‘Historical Criticism’. 28. Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, eds E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: Allen & New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903–12), vol. 19, p. 343. 29. Wilde, Criticism, pp. 96–7. Wilde had previously used this myth, and the expression ‘the cry of Marsyas’ to distinguish between good and bad poetry in a review article on modern female poets in Woman’s World, December 1888. See Collected Works, vol. 13, p. 348. 30. Ruskin, Queen of the Air, p. 418. 31. Symonds, Memoirs, p. 74; and Pater, ‘Apollo in Picardy’. 32. Lawrence Danson persuasively argues that Wilde adopts the definition of critic as artist in the essays in order to make a clean point of departure from his previous career of critic as (anonymous) journalist. Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 139. 33. See Wilde, ‘Ben Jonson’ (20 September 1886), ‘Mr. Symonds’ History of the Renaissance’ (10 November 1886), and ‘Mr. Mahaffy’s new Book’ (9 November 1887); all in Collected Works, vol. 13, resp. pp. 84–9, 105–10, and 209–15. 34. Pater to Wilde, 14 July 1877. Pater, Letters, p. 25. 35. Wilde, ‘Mr. Pater’s Last Volume’, Speaker (22 March 1890); in Collected Works, vol. 13, 538–45, pp. 538–9. 36. See Pater, Letters, p. 163; and Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. xlii–xliii. 37. Resp., Unsigned Review, Pall Mall Gazette (12 May 1891); Richard Le Gallienne, Signed Review, Academy (4 July 1891); and Unsigned Review, Athenaeum (6 June 1891); all from Beckson, Oscar Wilde, resp. pp. 91, 98, and 93. 38. Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde’, Bookman (November 1891), I: 59–60. 39. Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), p. 91. 40. Danson, Wilde’s Intentions, p. 141. 41. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, tr. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press & London: Heinemann, 1962). For Wilde’s notes on Aristotle, see esp. ‘Philosophy Notebook’ and ‘Notes on the Ethics of Aristotle’, both in the Clark Memorial Library. 42. Wilde, ‘Mr. Pater’s Imaginary Portraits’, Pall Mall Gazette (11 June 1887), in Collected Works, vol. 13, pp. 172–5.



Notes 183

43. On Wilde’s updating of Plato, see Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (Norfolk, CT: New Direction, 1947), esp. pp. 91–4. 44. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, p. 31. 45. Smith and Helfand, Oxford Notebooks, pp. 146–7. 46. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality. I explore the question of Wilde’s Platonism more fully in ‘“Lovers and Philosophers at once”: Aesthetic Platonism in the Victorian Fin de Siècle’, Yearbook of English Studies 36:2 (2006), 230–44. 47. Sigmund Freud, ‘Preface to the Fourth Edition’ of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in On Sexuality (London and New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 43. 48. As Linda Dowling argues, Wilde draws from well-established textual practices of Oxford Hellenism by making Dorian’s very name a coded reference to K. O. Müller’s Dorians, a historical study that contains a frank account of Greek pederasty, thereby discreetly disclosing its homoerotic content to a minority readership familiar with Greek studies. Like Linda Dowling, I think that a reading of the novel must start from the ‘submerged body of Hellenic implication’ within it. Cf. Hellenism and Homosexuality, pp. 124–5. 49. Cf. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, p. 69. 50. ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ originally appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in July 1889. Here I use Wilde’s revised version in The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 152–220, p. 187. 51. Trials of Oscar Wilde, pp. 148–9. 52. See also Bristow, Dorian Gray, pp. 360–1. All the quotations from Pater in these paragraphs are to ‘A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde’, cited above.

Afterword: The End of Aestheticism – A Dream, Three Trials, Two Ghosts 1. Letter from Bradley to Berenson, Good Friday 1895. Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Lett. d 408. 2. The episode is recorded in their joint diary. British Library, Add. Mss. 46783, 57V–58R. 3. For a lucid account of the impact of the Wilde trials on literary Decadence see Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 138–44. 4. Harry Quilter, ‘The Gospel of Intensity’, Contemporary Review (June 1895), 761–82, p. 763. 5. Resp. Quilter, ‘Gospel of Intensity’, p. 763; and anon., Chronicle (6 April 1895). 6. Anon., Chronicle (6 April 1895). 7. Dowling, Vulgarization of Art, p. 99. 8. Anon., ‘“New” Art at the Old Bailey’, The Speaker (13 April 1895), 403–4, p. 404. 9. Quilter, ‘Gospel of Intensity’, p. 761. 10. Anon., Daily Telegraph, 6 April 1895. 11. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Magazine 157 (June 1895), 833–45, p. 834. 12. Anon., ‘“New” Art at the Old Bailey’, p. 403. 13. Janet E. Hogarth, ‘Literary Degenerates’, Fortnightly Review 63 (1895), 586–92, p. 588.



184 Notes

Notes 185 Anon., Daily Telegraph (6 April 1895). Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, pp. 835 and 840. Wilde, De Profundis, esp. p. 129 ff. and p. 136. Bradley to Mary Costelloe, [?] 1895. Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Lett. d 408. Bradley to Berenson, Good Friday 1895. Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Lett. d 408. Vernon Lee, ‘Deterioration of Soul’, Fortnightly Review 65 (June 1896), 928–43, p. 940. 20. For a suggestive reading of this essay, and especially on the issue of sexual tolerance, see Dellamora, ‘Productive Decadence: “The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought”: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde’, New Literary History 35:4 (2004) 529–46. 21. Letter from Bradley to John Gray. National Library of Scotland, Dep. 372. Quoted in Thain, ‘Michael Filed’, p. 199. 22. Lee, ‘Dionysus on the Euganean Hills: W. H. Pater In Memoriam’, Contemporary Review 669 (September 1921), 346–53, p. 346.



14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Manuscript sources Field, Michael [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper] – Correspondence, notes, and manuscripts, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Ms. Eng. lett. d 120, Ms. Eng. lett. d 402, Ms. Eng. lett. d 408, Misc. Eng. lett. e 32, Ms. Eng. lett. e 143, Ms. Eng. misc. d 333, Ms. Eng. misc. d 976. – Correspondence, British Library, Add. Mss. 45853. – Journals, British Library, Add. Mss. 46780, 46782, 46784. Lee, Vernon – Vernon Lee Papers, Somerville College archives, Oxford. – Strong Papers, Girton College archive, Cambridge, GCPP 3/22. Pater, Walter – ‘The Aesthetic Life’, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Eng 1150 (7). – ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Eng 1150 (6). Wilde, Oscar – ‘Princess Nausicaa: Essay and Review of J. A. Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets’, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA3574. – ‘Notes on the Ethics of Aristotle, Exercise Book Used at University’, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, W6721 M3 N9111. – ‘Notebook on Philosophy’, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, W6721 M3 N9112. – ‘Philosophy Notebook’, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, W6721 M3 N9113. – ‘Notebook’, British Library, Add. Mss. 81748.

Primary sources Anon. ‘“New” Art at the Old Bailey’. The Speaker (13 April 1895): 403–4. Anon. ‘The Philistine Turns’. Belgravia 49 (December 1882): 155–67. Anon. Review of Michael Field’s Bellerophôn. Guardian (19 October 1881): 1498–9. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Tr. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press & London: Heinemann, 1962. Arnold, Matthew. The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold (11 vols). Ed. R. H. Super. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77. Arnold, Thomas. ‘Rugby School’. Quarterly Journal of Education 7 (1834): 234–49. Barry, W. F. (anon.). ‘Neo-paganism’. Quarterly Review 344 (April 1891): 273–304. Browning, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–1846 (2 vols). Ed. Elvan Kintner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Carpenter, Edward. Homogenic Love, and its Place in a Free Society. Manchester: Labour Press, 1894.

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Index

Aeschylus, 116 aesthetic criticism, 19, 21, 25, 29, 52, 53–4, 55–6, 62, 66–7, 81, 138, 148, 150 aestheticism as counter-cultural movement, 11, 42, 138 critiques of, 17, 51–3, 68–75, 82, 85–8, 91–2, 159–64 definitions of, 2–3, 127, 146–7, 156 parodies of, 17, 53, 68–9, 72, 127–8 sexual politics of, 3, 17–19, 49–50, 67–8, 69–72, 85, 87, 111, 116, 120, 132, 134–6, 158–63 aesthetic life, 48–51, 88, 106, 133, 147, 154, 156 ‘The Aesthetic Life’, 48–9 ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, see Pater, Walter Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 76 Altertumswissenschaft, 7, 15, 19 amour de l’impossible, 91, 105, 136, 153, 178 Anacreon, 105 ancient philosophy, see Greek philosophy Angelico, Fra, 32 Aphrodite, 81, 84, 87, 108, 109–10 Apollo, 21, 22, 37–8, 57, 93–5, 114, 122, 123, 126, 139–43, 154 Apollo Belvedere, 28, 28–31, 56, 59, 60, 94, 152, 154, 167 ‘To Apollo – the Conqueror’, see Field, Michael ‘Apollo in Picardy’, see Pater, Walter Appreciations, see Pater, Walter archaeology, 6, 7, 59, 62, 76–80, 85–8, 126, 129, 173 Aristophanes, 105, 132 Aristotle, 129, 137, 146, 148–9 Arnold, Matthew, 11, 65, 67, 134, 159 Culture and Anarchy, 19, 37–8, 74

‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, 145, 146 Lee on, 74–7 ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’, 36–8, 75 Pater on, 19, 29, 36–42 Symonds on, 131 Wilde on, 21, 127, 140, 143, 144–7 see also Hebraism; Hellenism; sweetness and light Arnold, Thomas, 9 art for art’s sake, 5, 20, 37, 47, 53, 56, 58, 66, 74, 78, 91, 106, 114, 127, 135, 140, 141 Artemis, 57 Athens, 41, 129 Bacchus, Bacchic, see Dionysus Bakhtin, Mikhail, 150 ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 143 Balzac, Honoré de, 45 Barrett, Elizabeth, 10 Baudelaire, Charles, 17, 103, 106, 140 Beard, Mary, 79 ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, 1, 6 Belcaro, see Lee, Vernon Bellerophôn, see Field, Michael Belvedere Antinous, 30, 57, 59 Belvedere Torso, 30, 57 Berenson, Bernhard, 67, 79, 113, 123, 158, 175 Bernal, Martin, 10 Bildung, 47, 146 Bloom, Harold, 173 body female, 86–7, 102 male, 27, 30–1, 34–5, 85–6, 131 Boscagli, Maurizia, 33 Bradley, Katharine, see Field, Michael Brake, Laurel, 42 Bristow, Joseph, 114, 144 196



Note: in this index, references to illustrations are printed in bold.

British Museum, 8, 29, 45, 76, 79, 80, 173 Brontë, Emily, 45 Browning, Robert, 20, 96, 103, 111, 114, 119, 150 Burne-Jones, Edward, 76, 140 Byron, George Gordon, 8 Byzantium, 6 Callirhoë, see Field, Michael Cambridge, 10, 63, 76, 80, 96, 97, 105, 174 Capitoline Venus, 100, 100–1 Carpenter, Edward, 35 Charmides, 131, 142, 150 ‘The Child in the House’, 25, 26 ‘The Child in the Vatican’, see Lee, Vernon Christ, 40, 123, 142 Christianity, 6, 74–5, 142 critiques of, 8, 12, 24, 32, 47, 84, 102, 110, 119, 122–3, 132, 136 defence of, 11, 13, 160 and paganism, 36–42, 82–4, 134, 142 chthonic, 19, 36, 117–20 classical education, 10, 12–13, 17, 52 see also education; female education classicism, 4, 5, 7, 20, 24, 44, 45, 73, 76, 78, 90, 97, 99, 111, 114, 123, 140 classicism, spectral, 81–8, 120 see also supernatural ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, see Pater, Walter Connor, Steven, 170 Cooper, Edith, see Field, Michael ‘Cowslip-Gathering’, 115–17 ‘The Critic as Artist’, 136, 144–8 Crystal Palace, 14 Culture and Anarchy, see Arnold, Matthew Danson, Lawrence, 147, 183 Dante, 142 Darwinism, 12, 51–2, 138, 140 Decadence, 105, 108, 117, 160, 161 ‘The Decay of Lying’, 139–40, 141 Dedicated, 115 DeLaura, David, 36, 40, 170 Dellamora, Richard, 36, 134, 168, 172, 185

Demeter, 21, 37–41, 44, 48, 49, 114, 142 ‘Demeter and Persephone’, see Pater, Walter Denisoff, Dennis, 17 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, see Pater, Walter De Profundis, see Wilde, Oscar ‘Deterioration of Soul’, 163–4 ‘Diaphaneitè’, see Pater, Walter Dilettanti, society of, 7–8, 14 ‘Dionea’, see Lee, Vernon Dionysus, 21–2, 37–42, 44, 48, 49, 82, 99, 114–24, 142–3, 164–5 ‘Dionysus on the Euganean Hills’, 164–5 Dionysus and Other Studies, 42–5 Douglas, Alfred, 126, 135, 161 Dowling, Linda, 18, 24, 145, 150, 159, 172, 184 education, 1, 9–10, 17, 62–3, 96 see also classical education; female education ekphrasis, 29, 30, 77, 86, 95, 113, 131, 154–5 Elgin Marbles, 8 Eliot, George, 10, 52, 63 Eliot, T. S., 78 Ellis, Havelock, 16–17, 35, 175 Euphorion, see Lee, Vernon Euripides, 39–40, 76, 97, 99, 115, 126, 137 female education, 10, 63, 76, 97, 174 see also classical education; education Field, Michael (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), 2, 3, 11, 18–19, 20–1, 36, 93–124, 126, 127, 141 ‘To Apollo – the Conqueror’, 93–6, 99, 108 Bellerophôn, 96, 97, 98 Callirrhoë, 96, 98–100, 114 ‘Cowslip-Gathering’, 115–17 Dedicated, 115 ‘Hymn to Thanatos’, 118 ‘It was deep April, and the morn’, 115 Long Ago, 20, 102–11, 116 Pater on, 112



Index 197

Field – continued Sight and Song, 113 ‘Solitary Death, make me thine own’, 117–18 Symonds on, 98–9, 112 For that Moment Only, 120–1 The Tragic Mary, 112, 113 Underneath the Bough, 20, 113–20, 121 see also under Pater, Walter; Symonds, John Addington; Wilde, Oscar; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Fitzgerald, Edward, 114 Foucault, Michel, 18–19, 67 fragments, 6, 25, 38, 41, 58–9, 94, 102–4, 108, 116 Freud, Sigmund, 82–3, 118, 151, 155, 177 ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, 145, 146 Gagnier, Regenia, 150 Galatea, 31 galleries, see museums Gaston de Latour, 144 Gautier, Théophile, 17, 45 genius loci, 63–4 Gilbert and Sullivan, 53, 127 Gioconda, see Mona Lisa Gloeden, Wilhelm von, 14–15, 15 gods in exile, 21, 61, 82–8, 90, 113, 120, 152 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 8, 17, 24, 26, 45–7, 73, 74, 85, 102, 130, 142, 169, 171 Gospels, 4, 142 Gosse, Edmund, 13–14, 16, 23, 35, 53 Gray, John Miller, 111, 113 Greece, as aesthetic ideal, 2, 4, 9, 11–12, 18, 21–2, 24, 25, 30, 77–8 Greece, material evidence of, 2, 5–6, 8, 58–9, 94, 104, 108 Greece, reception of history of, 6–12 theories of, 3–4, 6, 24, 43, 59, 64, 78, 100, 147, 149 Greece, study of, 1–2, 6–7, 9–12, 16–21, 24, 30, 32, 45, 63–4, 68, 76, 96, 124, 125–6, 133, 138, 140

see also Greece, reception of Greece, visits to, 7–8, 129 Greek art, 7, 16–17, 20, 24, 25–31, 33, 58–61, 86, 130, 137, 154 Greek language, 1–2, 7, 9, 20, 95, 142 Greek life, 25, 34, 125–7, 129, 133, 138, 143, 145, 150, 152, 154 Greek literature, 16–17, 20 Greek love, see homoeroticism; homosexuality, male Greek mythology, 13, 20, 30, 31, 37– 45, 78, 82–8, 93–6, 98–9, 103, 114–24, 139–43, 152–3, 164–5 see also under individual gods’ names Greek philosophy, 20, 50–1, 96, 129, 137, 148–51 see also Aristotle; Plato Greek revival, 8, 11, 14 Greek Studies, see Pater, Walter Grote, George, 13, 136 Grote, John, 13 Guy, Josephine, 137 Hahn, Otto, 24 Hamilton, Walter, 14 Harris, Frank, 125 Harrison, Jane, 10, 12, 14, 20, 76–9, 88, 105, 126 see also under Pater, Walter; Symonds, John Addington; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Hauntings, see Lee, Vernon Hebraism, 38, 40, 74–5, 120, 131 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, Friedrich, 7, 26, 58, 60–1, 66, 68, 82, 89, 98, 127, 130, 137, 138 Heine, Heinrich, 42, 82, 84, 177 Helen of Troy, 4, 82 Hellenism, 5, 8–9, 12, 24–31, 32, 37–40, 43, 45–6, 58–9, 78, 86, 97, 105, 106, 108–10, 130, 131–2, 135–6, 154 critiques of, 11, 19, 35, 71, 73–5, 85–6, 89, 114, 139–42, 161–2 Heraclitus, 50 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 7 Herodotus, 137 ‘Historical Criticism’, 137–8, 145



198 Index

History of Ancient Art among the Greeks, see Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Homer, 9, 39, 45, 135 homoeroticism, 19, 36, 67, 138 in Lee, 70, 87, 91 in Michael Field, 94, 106–11, 115, 116–17, 120 in Pater, 30–1, 33–6, 70–2, 86, 94, 141 in Symonds, 86, 105–11, 130–3 in Wilde, 126, 151–5 in Winckelmann, 28, 30–1, 86, 94, 141 see also aestheticism, sexual politics of; amour de l’impossible; homosexuality, female; homosexuality, male; pederasty; sexology homosexuality, female in ancient Greece, 105 in modern Britain, 19, 124, 158, 175 homosexuality, male in ancient Greece, 15–16, 130–2 in modern Britain, 16–19, 116, 126, 134, 158, 161–2 homosociality, 87, 91, 97, 105–6, 109, 111 Hugo, Victor, 45 Humboldt, Alexander von, 7 Hunt, Holman, 73 Hurst, Isobel, 167 ‘Hymn to Thanatos’, 118 Ibsen, Henrik, 161 imaginary portrait, as narrative genre, 66, 89–90 Imaginary Portraits, see Pater, Walter Inman, Billie Andrew, 168 Intentions, see Wilde, Oscar ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’, 43 Italy, 6–7, 23, 62–4, 83, 100, 129, 158 ‘It was deep April, and the morn’, 115 Jenkyns, Richard, 167 Jowett, Benjamin, 98, 134, 168 Juvenilia, see Lee, Vernon Kant, Immanuel, 51, 56, 130 Keats, John, 5, 6, 8, 98, 111, 152

Khayyám, Omar, 114 Kuznair, Alice, 30 late-Romanticism, 2, 12, 45, 46, 136 Latin, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 89, 100 Lee-Hamilton, Eugene, 63, 80 Lee, Vernon, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 18–19, 20–1, 47, 55–92, 97, 98, 120, 127, 136, 144, 163–5, 175 Belcaro, 20, 55, 56, 58, 62, 63, 65–6, 87, 159 ‘The Child in the Vatican’, 55, 56–65, 80, 82, 89 ‘Deterioration of Soul’, 163 –4 ‘Dionea’, 20, 21, 81–8, 90, 152 ‘Dionysus on the Euganean Hills’, 164–5 Euphorion, 56, 65, 72, 88, 92, 175 Hauntings, 20, 56, 81–8 Juvenilia, 56, 73–5, 79, 88, 92 Miss Brown, 17, 68–72, 76, 82, 87, 88, 127, 175 Pater on, 65, 74 Renaissance Fancies and Studies, 20, 56, 79, 87, 88–92 ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’, 89–91, 152 ‘Symmetria Prisca’, 72 Symonds on, 65–8, 70, 175 ‘Valedictory’, 91–2 see also under Pater, Walter; Symonds, John Addington; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Le Gallienne, Richard, 144, 180 Leigh Hunt, James Henry, 8, 11 Leighton, Angela, 81 Leighton, Frederic, 14, 72, 76, 89 ‘Leonardo’, see Pater, Walter Lesbos, 21, 103–4, 105, 107, 108, 110 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 7, 26, 43, 58 Lodge, Henry, 24 London, 14, 76 Long Ago, see Field, Michael Louis, Margot K., 117 Louvre, 45 Macmillan, Alexander, 42, 137, 171 Mahaffy, John Pentland, 129, 133, 134, 143



Index 199

Mallock, W. H., 17, 35, 68, 71, 72 see also aestheticism, parodies of Marius the Epicurean, see Pater, Walter Marsyas, 93, 139–43, 183 Martindale, Charles, 51, 172 Maxwell, Catherine, 174, 177 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 113 medievalism, 11–12, 19, 32, 37 Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 16, 141 Mérimée, Prosper, 82, 113 Metamorphoses, see Ovid Michelangelo, 41, 153 Michelet, Jules, 136 Middle Ages, 3, 6, 11, 32, 42, 72, 88, 103, 137 Miss Brown, see Lee, Vernon modernity, 4, 12, 48–50, 61, 116, 127, 134, 147 Mona Lisa, 4, 29 Money Hardinge, William, 35, 113, 134, 168 Moore, Albert, 14, 76 Morgan, Thaïs E., 172 Morris, William, 3, 4, 5 Müller, K. O., 15, 60, 136 Müller, Max, 40 Munich Glyptothek, 57 museums, 2, 59–62, 102, 155 see also British Museum; Louvre; Vatican Museums Narcissus, 128, 152 neoclassicism, 4, 36, 123 The New Republic, see Mallock, W. H Newton, Charles, 79 new woman, 67, 111, 160 –1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 20, 121–3, 141, 146, 164, 181 see also under Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Niobe, 58, 93 Niobe group (Uffizi), 57, 57–9 Nordau, Max, 161, 163–4 ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, see Woolf, Virginia Novalis, 48 nude, see body

Odysseus, 119 Oliphant, Margaret, 52 Olympia, 129 Orpheus, 119 Østermark-Johansen, Lene, 172 Ouida, 135 Ovid, 116, 139 Oxford, 2, 10, 18–19, 24, 25, 34, 35, 40, 63, 65, 76, 97, 105, 125, 126, 127, 129–30, 134–5, 137, 138, 144, 174 Paestum, 7 paganism attacks on, 11, 13, 16, 160 and Christianity, 36–42, 83–4, 102, 134, 142 modern revival of, 32, 90, 93–6, 102, 114–16, 119–20, 123–4, 152–3, 161 and sexual emancipation, 33, 41, 84, 115–16, 120, 132 see also Christianity; Greek mythology ‘Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment’, 36–8, 75 Pater, Walter, 2, 3–6, 17, 18–19, 23–54, 68, 159 ‘The Aesthetic Life’, 48–9 ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, 5, 53, 147 ‘Apollo in Picardy’, 42, 141, 157 Appreciations, 5, 113, 143–4, 147 ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, 1, 6 ‘The Child in the House’, 25, 26 ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, 5, 20, 47–54, 62, 73, 99, 113, 119–20, 133, 143, 155, 156, 164 ‘Demeter and Persephone’, 37–41, 80, 170 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, 82, 84, 120, 123, 152 ‘Diaphaneitè’, 25, 49, 167 Dionysus and Other Studies, 42–5 Gaston de Latour, 144 Greek Studies, 37, 43, 52, 142 idea of renaissance, 31, 51–2 idea of sexlessness, 33, 70–1, 84, 108, 132



200 Index

Imaginary Portraits, 20, 21, 25, 82, 89, 103, 144, 149, 150, 151 influence on Harrison, 76–8 influence on Lee, 20, 36, 55–62, 64, 70–1, 81–2, 84, 89–90, 164 –5 influence on Michael Field, 20, 36, 67, 97, 99, 100, 102, 111, 113–15, 117, 120–1 influence on Symonds, 132–3 influence on Wilde, 21, 36, 127, 130, 136–44, 146–8, 149–51, 154–7 ‘Introduction to Greek Studies’, 43 Lee on, 43, 65, 70–5, 84–8, 88–9, 90–2 ‘Leonardo’, 4, 41, 120 Marius the Epicurean, 25, 53, 113, 156 Michael Field on, 112–13 Plato and Platonism, 113, 157 ‘Poems by William Morris’, 3–5, 53, 61, 147 ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, 29, 56, 81, 147 The Renaissance, 4, 11, 24, 25, 32, 37, 42, 52, 56, 103, 113, 130, 134, 138, 148, 157, 159 ‘Romanticism’, 42–5 ‘The School of Giorgione’, 42, 140, 141 ‘A Study of Dionysus’, 37–41, 80, 99, 170 ‘Two Early French Stories’, 23 Wilde on, 113, 144 ‘Winckelmann’, 19, 23–5, 31–7, 40, 41, 42, 45–7, 50, 56, 60, 70–1, 73, 75, 78, 86, 130, 132, 136, 155 ‘Wordsworth’, 42–4 see also under Field, Michael; Lee, Vernon; Ruskin, John; Wilde, Oscar; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Payne Knight, Richard, 14 pederasty, 15–16, 17, 34, 87, 110, 184 Persephone, 40–1, 117 Phaedrus, see Plato Pheidias, 45, 77 philistinism, 37, 48, 74, 127, 145, 159, 162, 163

The Picture of Dorian Gray, see Wilde, Oscar Pindar, 104 Plato, 34, 71, 73, 98, 129, 131, 134, 136, 142, 149–51, 153–4, 155, 172 Phaedrus, 16, 34, 71, 151, 153 Symposium, 16, 150, 153, 172 Plato and Platonism, 113, 157 Plüschow, Wilhelm, 14 Poems (Wilde, Oscar), 127 ‘Poems by William Morris’, see Pater, Walter Poliziano, Angelo, 114, 123 Polybius, 137 Porto Venere, 83, 84 ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, see Wilde, Oscar ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations, see Romanticism Potts, Alex, 31 Praxiteles, 104 Praz, Mario, 176 ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, see Pater, Walter Pre-Raphaelitism, 19, 39, 44, 68, 76, 117, 135 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 173, 175 Prewitt Brown, Julia, 182 primitivism, 19, 36–42, 52, 78, 114 ‘Princess Nausicaa’, 135 Prins, Yopie, 97, 103, 107, 115 Psomiades, Kathy Alexis, 67, 70 public schools, 9, 63 Pugin, A. W., 11 Pulham, Patricia, 174, 178 Punch, 53, 127 see also aestheticism, parodies of puritanism, 13–14, 16, 37, 74–5, 92, 145, 160 Pygmalion, 30, 31, 69 Raffalovich, Marc-André, 35 Raphael, 89 reception, see Greece, reception of Renaissance, 3, 4, 11, 32, 51, 64, 72, 88–90, 92 Renaissance Fancies and Studies, see Lee, Vernon The Renaissance, see Pater, Walter



Index 201

Revett, Nicholas, 8 Reynolds, Margaret, 103 Ricketts, Charles, 129 Robinson, A. Mary F., 66, 68, 76, 80, 98, 99, 175 Roellinger, Francis X., 168–9 Romanticism, 3, 6, 7, 11, 24, 30, 44–5, 49, 50, 61, 73, 82, 104, 114, 127 Rome, 34, 58, 63, 64, 70, 80, 89, 104, 154 Rossetti, D. G., 67, 113, 114, 116, 117 Ruskin, John, 19, 55–6, 76, 91, 135, 139, 140, 143, 145 influence on Pater, 11 influence on Wilde, 11 Sandwich, Lord, 8 Sappho, 21, 102–11, 112, 117, 126 Sargent, Mary Newbold, 63 Schaffer, Talia, 67 Schiller, Friedrich, 7, 8, 26, 46, 61, 171 Schlegel, A. W. von, 26 ‘The School of Giorgione’, see Pater, Walter Schopenhauer, Arthur, 85 sculpture, 14, 27–31, 32, 34, 56–61, 70, 80, 85–91, 95, 100–2, 132, 154–5, 173 ‘A Seeker of Pagan Perfection’, 89–91, 152 Sellers, Eugénie, 20, 76–80 sexology, 16, 175 Shadwell, C. L., 43, 52, 171 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 8, 45, 95, 99 Shrimpton, Nicholas, 172 Shuter, William, 25 Sight and Song, 113 Simonides, 104 simplicity and grandeur, 19, 26, 36, 43, 58, 114 Small, Ian, 137 Socrates, 122, 131, 142 ‘Solitary Death, make me thine own’, 117–18 Solomon, Simeon, 39, 41, 44, 117 sparagmos, 40, 120 Stendhal, 45 Stillman, W. J., 51 Stuart, James (‘Athenian’), 8

Studies of the Greek Poets, see Symonds, John Addington ‘A Study of Dionysus’, see Pater, Walter supernatural, 81–2, 85, 87, 120, 164–5 sweetness and light, 37, 43, 75, 114, 143 see also Arnold, Matthew Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 2, 11, 20, 37, 41, 56, 67, 76, 83, 99, 103, 105, 106, 111, 114, 117, 127, 130, 144, 150, 161 Symbolism, 37, 108, 117, 127, 161 ‘Symmetria Prisca’, 72 Symonds, John Addington, 2, 4, 11–12, 15, 16–17, 18–19, 42, 47, 63, 64, 85–6, 98–9, 159, 161, 162 influence on Harrison, 78 influence on Michael Field, 20, 83–4, 103–6, 108–10 influence on Wilde, 21, 130–9, 141, 143, 145, 152, 182 Lee on, 72, 85, 88, 90, 91, 92 Memoirs, 16, 141 Studies of the Greek Poets, 17, 85–6, 98, 103–6, 130–6, 138 see also under Field, Michael; Lee, Vernon; Pater, Walter; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Symons, Arthur, 113 Symposium, see Plato Taormina, 15 Thain, Marion, 111 For that Moment Only, 120–1 Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 26 The Tragic Mary, 112, 113 Turner, Frank M., 9, 37 ‘Two Early French Stories’, 23 Tyrwhitt, Richard St. John, 17, 42, 75, 135 Underneath the Bough, see Field, Michael ‘Valedictory’, 91–2 Vatican Museums, 55–7 Venus de Medici, 100 Venus de Milos, 100 Venus, see Aphrodite Verlaine, Paul, 113, 140 Villion, François, 123



202 Index

Waldstein, Charles, 85 Wharton, Henry, 102, 103, 105 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 3, 15, 18–19, 21, 30, 63, 105, 110, 112, 124, 125–57, 128 ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 143 ‘The Critic as Artist’, 136, 144–8 ‘The Decay of Lying’, 139–40, 141 De Profundis, 126, 138, 140–3, 146, 149, 162 ‘Hellenism’, 136 ‘Historical Criticism’, 137–8, 145 Intentions, 143–5, 148, 149, 155, 156, 159, 164 Michael Field on, 158–9, 162–3 Pater on, 74, 145, 156–7 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 21, 35, 74, 125, 144, 149, 151–7, 159 Poems, 127 ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, 35, 151, 154 ‘Princess Nausicaa’, 135 trials, 17, 21, 88, 158–64 undergraduate notebooks, 35, 137, 148–9 see also under Field, Michael; Pater, Walter; Ruskin, John; Symonds, John Addington Williams, Carolyn, 50 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 7, 19, 26–31, 51, 102, 127

History of Ancient Art among the Greeks, 24, 26–31, 32, 33, 56, 132 influence on Harrison, 77–8 influence on Michael Field, 94, 102 influence on Pater, 19, 51 influence on Symonds, 103, 104, 105, 130 influence on Wilde, 21, 127, 140–2, 146, 154–5 Lee on, 20, 56–62, 73–4, 85–8, 88–9, 91 Nietzsche on, 122, 123 Pater on, 23–6, 31–46 Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 26 Wilde on, 153 see also Pater, Walter Woolf, Virginia, 1–2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 78, 102 ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, 1–2, 6, 60 ‘Wordsworth’, see Pater, Walter Wordsworth, William, 44 Works and Days, 118–19 Yeats, W. B., 117 Zorn, Christa, 69



Index 203

British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece

Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece

Hellenism In Ancient India (1920)

Warfare in Ancient Greece

Living in Ancient Greece

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Women Poets in Ancient Greece and Rome

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

Women Poets In Ancient Greece And Rome

Word and Image in Ancient Greece

Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Psalms and Hebrews: Studies in Reception

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East

Writing and Cognition, Volume 4: Research and Applications (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing)

Everyday Life In Ancient Greece

Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece

The Hunt in Ancient Greece

Olive cultivation in ancient Greece

The Seer in Ancient Greece

Everyday Life In Ancient Greece

British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece

Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece

Hellenism In Ancient India (1920)

Warfare in Ancient Greece

Living in Ancient Greece

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Women Poets in Ancient Greece and Rome

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

Women Poets In Ancient Greece And Rome

Word and Image in Ancient Greece

Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Psalms and Hebrews: Studies in Reception

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East

Writing and Cognition, Volume 4: Research and Applications (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing)

Everyday Life In Ancient Greece

Kinship Myth in Ancient Greece

The Hunt in Ancient Greece

Olive cultivation in ancient Greece

The Seer in Ancient Greece

Everyday Life In Ancient Greece

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