by Bart Schultz
illation between the other-worldly and the this-worldly. Symonds’s arc
carried him from a youthful infatuation with Plato to a mature worship of
Walt Whitman, whose healthy naturalness made him “more truly Greek”
than any other modern. Of course, the figure of Goethe was always there
smiling in the background, as another towering genius breathing life into
ancient perfectionism.
Indeed, the Platonic revival that Mill and the seminal Apostles had
advanced, and that Jowett had brought into effective academic realization,
would reach a new level of knowing self-awareness with the figures of
Pater and Symonds, both of whom made it unmistakably clear that Plato
meant what he said about eros. Swinburne had also, in his earlier years,
been a fine flower of the eroticized Oxford Hellenism, but he was in due
course to suffer a serious attack of homosocial panic and repudiate his
earlier attachments, even coining the expression “Whitmania” to describe
all that was wrong with his old friends from the Old Mortality. But in the
bloom of the s and s, Oxford was the Arcadia that would inspire
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such breakthrough works as Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance
() and Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (first series ) and
The Renaissance in Italy (first volume ). What Pater and Symonds
found in the Italian Renaissance was, of course, the rebirth of paganism
and a renewed appreciation for Plato, just the things that they found in
Goethe and in Goethe’s inspirer, the seminal art historian Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, in whom Goethe found the ideal of “wholeness, unity with
one’s self, intellectual integrity.”
Of course, the Goethean ideal could forgive Winckelmann much
hypocrisy for the sake of his aesthetic growth. What matter if, as Richard
Dellamora puts it, “a diplomatic conversion to Catholicism enabled him
to move to Rome, where alone his life’s work could be done”? And what
matter if this paganism were true to its source, and celebratory of male love?
As Dellamora notes, quoting G. S. Rousseau, the “villa of Winckelmann’s
Roman patron, Cardinal Albani, ‘was an unrivaled nervecenter for com-
bined antiquarian and homosocial activity.’ ” For Goethe, as for Pater,
this was also part of the dream, the realization of their passion for male
love, albeit in a double life. Hypocrisy wore a double face, religious and
sexual, but this was simply the price of admission to a truly liberating
spiritual growth.
Like Goethe and Winckelmann, Pater and Symonds would find that
the route to ancient perfectionism went through Renaissance Italy, and the
route to Renaissance Italy went through modern Italy. Such a curious para-
dox, that while Sidgwick and Green were adoring the Germany shaped by
Goethe and Winckelmann, Symonds and Pater were following the example
of Goethe and Winckelmann and fleeing south, to the source of art and love.
As Goethe confessed: “Only in Rome have I found myself, only here have
I become happy and wise in the intimate harmony of my being.” Such
predilections also carried a certain risk in terms of one’s academic career,
particularly when the battle lines were being drawn with such erudite
clarity. As David DeLaura has argued, Pater’s “Winckelmann” was
so centrally a response to Arnold’s ‘Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment’
that . . . the very structure of his argument parallels Arnold’s. By rejecting the uniqueness and value of the medieval religion of sorrow, by qualifying Arnold’s
views on the alleged superficiality of Greek popular religion, and finally by propos-
ing a version of Arnold’s Hellenic solution in a larger historical perspective, Pater
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consciously sets out to re-adjust the relations among the major factors in Arnold’s
own complex equation.
Pater was fairly emphatic on how the Greek “immersion in the sensuous
was, religiously, at least, indifferent.” Unlike Christian asceticism, “Greek
sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the conscience: it is shameless
and childlike.” Winckelmann is free of that “intoxication” that comes
from artistic interests resulting from a “conscious disavowal of a spiritual
world,” and “he fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with
no sense of shame or loss. That is to deal with the sensuous side of art in
the pagan manner.” The lesson, for moderns, is that it is not “the fruit
of experience, but experience itself” that is the end. What is demanded
of us is that we “be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting
new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of
Hegel, or of our own.” Philosophy must be subordinated to this: “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.” Of this wisdom,
“the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake,
has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but
the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those
moments’ sake.”
Pater suffered for his forthright defense of the lower Goethean vision.
Although he was a Fellow of Brasenose College, Jowett consistently passed
him over in his bid for the post of proctor, which position ultimately
went to one John Wordsworth – a grandnephew of the great poet – who
had candidly told Pater of his concern about Studies in the History of the
Renaissance:
After a perusal of the book I cannot disguise from myself that the concluding
pages adequately sum up the philosophy of the whole; and that that philosophy is
an assertion, that no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain, that the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment and that
probably or certainly the soul dissolves at death into elements which are destined
never to reunite.
Such views, Wordsworth avowed, had to be opposed openly. Furthermore,
when Pater stood for the professorship of poetry, in , Jowett ended
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up opposing him, and the victorious c
andidate turned out to be J. C.
Shairp, who was elected with the support of Arnold, who had held the
professorship from to .
This episode in academic politics was a significant turning point in the
history of Oxford Hellenism. It was not merely the defeat of Pater’s pa-
ganism at the hands of old Arnoldian Hellenism, cleansed of sensuality.
For Jowett had also been forced into opposing another of his old students,
one he tended to favor over Pater – namely, Symonds. And Symonds had
been urged to stand by, among others, Henry Sidgwick, who, along with
Green, openly supported his candidacy. As Symonds wrote to Clough’s
widow, in January of : “I think the chief new thing to be told about
myself is that I am thinking of standing for the Poetry Professorship at
Oxford. A great many people have urged me to do this, & Henry Sidgwick
says he thinks it is very important for my literary reputation.” By con-
trast, Jowett “sententiously pronounces that to get it would confer no
honour.” Given the seriousness with which these figures regarded edu-
cation and the business of professorships, it is intriguing in the extreme to
contemplate the meaning of Sidgwick’s and Green’s support for the aca-
demic legitimation of Symonds’s brand of paganism, which in so many
respects – not all – overlapped with Pater’s. All the more so given the
visibility of the issues that the year witnessed. As Linda Dowling has
observed, by this point Pater’s orientation was an open secret – he was
“Mr. Rose”
I rather look upon life as a chamber,’ says Mr. Rose in W. H. Mallock’s New Republic (), his voice like a lonely flute, ‘which we decorate as we would decorate the
chamber of the woman or the youth that we love’ (). Mr. Rose’s utterance marks
the moment when the sexual ambivalence within Oxford Hellenism, so plausibly
depicted by Pater as the very engine of past and future cultural regeneration, is
thrust into a scandalous visibility upon the national stage.
Beyond this, however, there was the infamous attack on the new pa-
ganism issuing from Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, who, as Dowling notes,
would also go on to “assault the pretensions of Balliol Hellenism by
glorifying forthright, fox-hunting, aristocratic passmen in Hugh Heron,
Christ Church.” Tyrwhitt, the rector of St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford, had
been fairly scandalized by Symonds’s Studies in the Greek Poets, in which
Symonds had been openly lyrical about classical Greek life, including male
love. This was another pathbreaking work in aestheticism and Oxford
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Hellenism, with Symonds urging, among other things, that
When we speak of the Greeks as an aesthetic nation, this is what we mean. Guided
by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their
, delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity.
This tact is the ultimate criterion in all matters of art – a truth which we recognize in our use of the word aesthetic, though we too often attempt to import the
alien elements of metaphysical dogmatism and moral prejudice into the sphere
of beauty. This tact was also for the Greeks the ultimate criterion of ethics. . . . A man in perfect health of mind and body, enjoying the balance of mental, moral,
and physical qualities which health implies, carried within himself the norm and
measure of propriety. Those were the days when ‘love was an unerring light, and
joy its own security.’
This was too much for Tyrwhitt, who, in “The Greek Spirit in Modern
Literature,” set out to quash Symonds’s run for the professorship. It was
a brilliant polemic, firmly reminding readers of how different Arnold’s
Hellenism was when it came to commonsense morality, and bringing
in some of Jowett’s more emphatically homophobic remarks about how
“there is a great gulf fixed between us and them [the ancient Greeks], which
no willingness to make allowance for the difference of ages and countries
would enable us to pass.” Indeed, however customary it may be to deride
Tyrwhitt’s views, there was a good deal of wit and intelligence in his case:
[T]hese essays are full of descriptive beauty, good scholarship, high poetic feeling, and artistic culture, as distinguished from artistic knowledge. But their drift is
polemical Agnosticism. Mr. Symonds really means, in every page, to set up the
higher side of Athenian life – its rejoicing in beauty, its bodily training, its content with nature and itself, its balanced sophrosyne, by which each man knew what every part of him was fit for, and what he himself was fit for – against the Christian faith, its self-distrust and restraint, its unrest in this world, its sense of sin, and hopes of heaven. And he sees that the faith, theism, and morality are irrevocably bound
together, and determines that they shall go together.
These pages are a rebellion against nature as she is here, in the name of nature as
described in Athens. And the word nature now brings us unavoidably on awkward
ground. Mr. Symonds is probably the most innocent of men; we certainly cannot
look upon him in any other light. He might not return the compliment, for
everybody who objects to suggestive passages of a certain character is now called
prurient by their authors, and this reproach we propose to incur. The emotions of
Socrates at sight of the beauty of young Charmides are described for him by Plato,
in the dialogue which bears the name of the latter. Socrates’ purity, and indeed
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his asceticism of life are freely and fully vindicated elsewhere by Plato, and will
never be disputed here. The expressions put in his mouth are, no doubt, typically
Hellenic. But they are not natural: and it is well known that Greek love of nature
and beauty went frequently against nature. The word is used equivocally in this
book – for the outward shows of creation, and for the inward impulses of man;
and it is assumed that because the former are generally beautiful, the latter are
invariably to be followed. Neither are good, for what is good? They are both here,
and must be taken for what they are.
Other assertions seem to be made rather, it must be said, in the spirit of the
persecutor; that is to say, in order to inflict moral outrage instead of physical. Such are the passage about a phallic ecstasy perfectly free from pruriency . . . the talk about the frank sensuality of Priapus as a right object of Greek sculpture, and the
concluding exhortation to follow Walt Whitman as far as our Hebraistic training
and imperfect nature will enable us. The critic glides over the whole subject of
Greek slavery and its utterly demoralizing consequences in a short note; and well
he may, for it destroys his w
hole argu ment. He affirms with bland confidence that
Retribution, the Eumenides, the , and the Corinthian worship of
Aphrodite were Asiatic introductions and foreign intrusions, in fact not Greek.
And we must say again, that he cannot know his historians as well as he does his
poets; or he would have remembered that unnatural practices between men were
foreign intrusions from Greece into Asia.
In this sense, then, Hellenism means, at the present day and when you come
to work it, the total denial of any moral restraint on any human impulses. And let
us now set forth our own duller notions of a quasi-Greek training, based on the
old distinction, between an original, true, or better nature of man, and an actual
or fallen nature which lusts against the other. Perhaps such an education is as yet,
and for a time, inaccessible to the poorer, or lower-artisan classes of our own days.
But so was ancient culture to Athenian slaves, who did all the hard work of the
State, and who seem to have been as un-Hellenic as colliers.
In sum, Symonds was “against nature,” understood in anything like
the Christian sense. And as for evil, Tyrwhitt can only lament the passing
of the “rougher time” of his own earlier undergraduate world at Oxford,
when vice “was less recondite, and the devil was more of a roaring lion,
and did not glide about with the polite hiss of modern days.” At least
then, before being “cultured into Hellenism,” the men “accepted Nature
for what she is; but, on the other hand, decency was considered decent
and not ‘prurient.’”
Although Symonds naturally complained of Tyrwhitt’s attack, which
he thought was “meant to be nasty,” it would be hard to deny that Tyrwhitt
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had, from an orthodox Anglican orientation, provided a pretty fair state-
ment of the real issues. Especially in the section on “The Genius of Greek
Art,” Symonds had been most eloquent on how the Greek notion of “liv-
ing according to nature” had great advantages, and even in later editions
of the Studies, such as that of , he was not actually very conciliatory