The Aesthetic Era and Finding a Language for Homosexuality:
Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and George Sylvester Viereck
(1)
From Walter Pater’s essay on Johann Joachim Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1873)
Let us understand by poetry all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied literary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life. What modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naïve, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, we have high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon it blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme Dénouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?
[Pater excluded his “Conclusion” from the second edition of The Renaissance, since, he said “I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” The “Conclusion” famously ends thus:]
Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
(2)
From John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), reprinted in Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897)
Thus the tale of Achilles and Patroclus sanctioned among the Greeks a form of masculine love, which, though afterwards connected with paiderastia properly so-called, we are justified in describing as heroic, and in regarding as one of the highest products of their emotional life. It will be seen, when we come to deal with the historical manifestations of this passion, that the heroic love which took its name from Homer’s Achilles existed as an ideal rather than an actual reality. This, however, is equally the case with Christianity and chivalry. The facts of feudal history fall below the high conception which hovered like a dream above the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; nor has the spirit of the Gospel been realised, in fact, by the most Christian nations. Still we are not on that account debarred from speaking of both chivalry and Christianity as potent and effective forces.
(3)
From the original magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde. The following paragraph was removed from the book publication:
Basil Hallward to Dorian Gray:
Don’t speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say. It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really ‘grande passion‘ is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country. Well, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art. It was all wrong and foolish. It is all wrong and foolish still. Of course I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it; I did not understand it myself. One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But, as I worked at it, every flake and film of color seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that the world could know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much. Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me.
(4)
George Sylvester Viereck
"Children Of Lilith"
To François Villon
Now tell me, Villon, where is he,
Young Sporus, lord of Nero's lyre,
Who marked with languid ecstasy
The seven hills grow red with fire?
And he whose madness choked the hall
With roses and made night of day?
Rome's rulers for an interval,
Its boyish Cæsars, where are they?
Where is that city by the Nile,
Reared by an emperor's bronze distress
When the enamoured crocodile
Clawed the Bithynian's loveliness?
The argent pool whose listening trees
Heard Echo's voice die far away?
Narcissus, Hylas, Charmides,
O brother Villon, where are they?
Say where the Young Disciple roved
When the Messiah's blood was spilt?
None knows: for he whom Jesus loved
Was not the rock on which He built.
And tell me where is Gaveston,
The second Edward's dear dismay?
And Shakespeare's love, and Jonathan,
O brother Villon, where are they?
Made— for what end? —by God's great hand,
Frail enigmatic shapes, they dwell
In some phantastic borderland,
But on the hitherside of hell!
Children of Lilith, each a sprite,
Yet wrought like us of Adam's clay,
And when they haunt us in the night
What, brother Villon, shall we say?
[Viereck’s note: The division of the world into two sexes, according to modern psychology, is as arbitrary as it is misleading. Male and female elements are curiously mixed in the same individuals. Besides those in whom masculine and feminine characteristics predominate mentally and physically, there are also, to quote the noted neurologist, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, individuals who, spiritually at least, constitute, what may be termed, a "transitional sex."
If we re-read history in the light of our new-gained knowledge, we shall make startling discoveries. In "Aiander" and "Aiogyne" (see Nineveh) I have depicted the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman. Here I trace the third, transitional sex, through the alleys of time. As Villon has sung a ballad of dead ladies, I dedicate to him this ballad of dead lads.]
From Walter Pater’s essay on Johann Joachim Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1873)
Let us understand by poetry all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied literary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life. What modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naïve, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in Goethe's romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, we have high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life, regarding that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet reflecting upon it blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe and Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme Dénouement. Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at the end with those great experiences?
[Pater excluded his “Conclusion” from the second edition of The Renaissance, since, he said “I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” The “Conclusion” famously ends thus:]
Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
(2)
From John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), reprinted in Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897)
Thus the tale of Achilles and Patroclus sanctioned among the Greeks a form of masculine love, which, though afterwards connected with paiderastia properly so-called, we are justified in describing as heroic, and in regarding as one of the highest products of their emotional life. It will be seen, when we come to deal with the historical manifestations of this passion, that the heroic love which took its name from Homer’s Achilles existed as an ideal rather than an actual reality. This, however, is equally the case with Christianity and chivalry. The facts of feudal history fall below the high conception which hovered like a dream above the knights and ladies of the Middle Ages; nor has the spirit of the Gospel been realised, in fact, by the most Christian nations. Still we are not on that account debarred from speaking of both chivalry and Christianity as potent and effective forces.
(3)
From the original magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde. The following paragraph was removed from the book publication:
Basil Hallward to Dorian Gray:
Don’t speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say. It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really ‘grande passion‘ is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country. Well, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When I was away from you, you were still present in my art. It was all wrong and foolish. It is all wrong and foolish still. Of course I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it; I did not understand it myself. One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But, as I worked at it, every flake and film of color seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that the world could know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much. Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me.
(4)
George Sylvester Viereck
"Children Of Lilith"
To François Villon
Now tell me, Villon, where is he,
Young Sporus, lord of Nero's lyre,
Who marked with languid ecstasy
The seven hills grow red with fire?
And he whose madness choked the hall
With roses and made night of day?
Rome's rulers for an interval,
Its boyish Cæsars, where are they?
Where is that city by the Nile,
Reared by an emperor's bronze distress
When the enamoured crocodile
Clawed the Bithynian's loveliness?
The argent pool whose listening trees
Heard Echo's voice die far away?
Narcissus, Hylas, Charmides,
O brother Villon, where are they?
Say where the Young Disciple roved
When the Messiah's blood was spilt?
None knows: for he whom Jesus loved
Was not the rock on which He built.
And tell me where is Gaveston,
The second Edward's dear dismay?
And Shakespeare's love, and Jonathan,
O brother Villon, where are they?
Made— for what end? —by God's great hand,
Frail enigmatic shapes, they dwell
In some phantastic borderland,
But on the hitherside of hell!
Children of Lilith, each a sprite,
Yet wrought like us of Adam's clay,
And when they haunt us in the night
What, brother Villon, shall we say?
[Viereck’s note: The division of the world into two sexes, according to modern psychology, is as arbitrary as it is misleading. Male and female elements are curiously mixed in the same individuals. Besides those in whom masculine and feminine characteristics predominate mentally and physically, there are also, to quote the noted neurologist, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin, individuals who, spiritually at least, constitute, what may be termed, a "transitional sex."
If we re-read history in the light of our new-gained knowledge, we shall make startling discoveries. In "Aiander" and "Aiogyne" (see Nineveh) I have depicted the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman. Here I trace the third, transitional sex, through the alleys of time. As Villon has sung a ballad of dead ladies, I dedicate to him this ballad of dead lads.]