and for the ‘‘cause.’’∞∫
It was George Ives, a friend of Wilde’s, who suggested using the chameleon as the name for the journal—an animal that, one might say, symbolizes the closet and the games involved in a double identity. Ives noted in his diary:
a n u n s p e a k a b l e v i c e
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‘‘If Bosie [Douglas] has really made Oxford homosexual, he has done something good and glorious.’’ Ives was the founder of the Order of Chaeronaea, a homosexual secret society that Wilde apparently did not join.∞Ω
Many people, well before Douglas and well before Wilde, had worked
toward the existence of a discourse on homosexuality. Wilde and Douglas drew their inspiration and their energy from these figures. We can situate one of the birthplaces of modern gay culture in the milieu of the Oxford Hellenists that included Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. The discourse of this milieu would blossom in Wilde and again in Gide. As Robert Merle saw in a book from a few decades ago (one that now may seem dated, but was quite remarkable for the moment in which it was published), there is an evident line of descent from Oxford Hellenism to Wilde and from Wilde to Gide: ‘‘Wilde is a descendent of Pater’s. Gide is a descendent of Wilde’s,’’ he wrote.≤≠
Pater and Symonds were two of the most famous intellectuals of their
time. Both liberals in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, deeply influenced by his On Liberty, their goal was to give England a push in a new direction, a new start. The regeneration they longed and worked for was to be grounded in the rediscovery of Greek thought that had been encouraged by the reorganization of the program of study at Oxford and by its declericalization.≤∞
This new opening onto Greek studies, accompanied by translations of
Plato (Benjamin Jowett’s translation of the Symposium, for example), had remarkable consequences. With it came the possibility to create a space for a new discourse. If, for certain intellectuals of the time, the Greek ideal provided a model for the spiritual regeneration of modern England, for Pater and Symonds, this ideal, together with the idea of a ‘‘spiritual procreation’’—
found in the Symposium—could not be separated from the conditions described by Plato. ‘‘Spiritual procreation’’ was not something that happened simply by way of teaching, it also happened by way of ‘‘pederastic’’ love, a relation between an older and a younger man. Thus, as Linda Dowling notes, these two authors came quite seriously to consider that Socratic love would be a means to gain for England a new strength, a new vibrancy. This love could be the avenue for a new intellectual fertilization, giving rise both to creative arts and to philosophy, mother of all forms of wisdom.≤≤
3
A Nation of Artists
If references to Plato and to ‘‘Greek Love’’ were able to become part of a discourse of legitimation, this was largely due to the fact that such references could be linked to the idea of a kind of spiritual procreation and thereby to the constitution of an intellectual and cultural elite that would reinvigorate the land. That such references were linked to an exaltation of ‘‘masculinity’’ was also important. In e√ect this praise of Greek philosophy was able to become a counterdiscourse only because it allowed those who took it up to dismiss the accusations of ‘‘e√eminacy’’ or of decadence (those very accusatory schemas psychiatry would shortly take on as its own) that were traditionally directed at anything that had to do with love between men. Linda Dowling clearly demonstrates how the category of e√eminacy, along with those of corruption and luxury, was linked in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English political and philosophical texts to the idea of the progressive downfall of the country. An author like John Brown, who, in his Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Time (1715), sets out to renew the ideal of a nation made up of warrior citizens, posits the notion of e√eminacy as the epitome of that which leads to the downfall of a society, where ‘‘private interest has begun to prevail against those things that concern the public welfare.’’∞ This particular thematic can obviously be traced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, right up to our own moment.
Yet its predominance in the nineteenth century was such that the invention of a homosexual discourse was enduringly marked by the question of masculinity and by the opposition between the masculine and the feminine.
It was by accepting this point of departure, by creating a response to it, that a means to speak about love between men came into being. This discourse was born and laid claim to legitimacy either by showing that love between men was authentically masculine, that is, that it corresponded to a collective
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∞∏∞
ideal worthy of a community of warriors, or by showing that rather than leading to decadence, such a love contributed to the intellectual and artistic creativity of elite groups. One book was particularly important here: Die Dorier ( The Dorians), a study by the German Hellenist, K. O. Müller. This book placed Athenian pederasty in a lineage that included Cretan and Spartan initiation rites; that is to say, it linked pederasty to the prehistoric military heritage of the ‘‘Dorian race.’’≤ Müller’s book enabled certain subsequent writers to reverse the discourse concerning the decadence and e√eminacy of love between men. By tracing the military origins of pederasty, a claim could be made that it was socially ‘‘healthy.’’ The accusations of e√eminacy, vice, sin, and so on that were usually attached to relations between men could be set aside. By establishing the virility and martial qualities of masculine loves, Müller enabled (once his book was translated into English in 1830) a positive and even militant way of speaking about what was not yet called homosexuality (a word that would be made up later). To give just a single indication of the importance of Müller’s book in the emergence of a homosexual culture, we might simply recall that it is the source of the non-Christian first name that Wilde would give to the protagonist of his only novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I will not here enter into the debate as to whether or not the circumscrip-tion of Greek homosexuality to ‘‘pederasty’’—to the relation of an older man with a younger one—is historically exact. Specialists disagree about the matter, and it seems quite possible that the representation we receive from the texts left to us does not correspond to real practices—or to the whole extent of real practices. It seems more likely that the image we have, rather than being a true picture of daily life in a given society, is the product of acts of literary adjustments, ideological justification, or philosophical representation. John Boswell argues this.≥ He goes so far as to speak of a ‘‘cultural myth’’ that was dominant during antiquity and that has been taken for practical reality by the historians and commentators of today.∂
Unlike Boswell, Bernard Sergent, following in the path of K. O. Müller, attempted to show how pederasty as an initiation rite was one of the characteristic traits of the Indo-European as well as of the Greek world. He wanted to show how the Greek world could have inherited a more archaic initiatory tradition, one Indo-European in origin. We might note, however, that in his preface to Sergent’s volume on the Greek world, Georges Dumézil, while insisting, as we have already noted, on the di√erences between ancient pederasty and contemporary homosexuality, was unable to avoid a discreet
∞∏≤
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f expression of reticence in the face of an attempt to mark too clearly the specificity, and therefore the di√erence, of practices from one cultural era or one historical period: ‘‘Are the relations between men, is the love of young men best grasped in a comparative Indo-European context? In the ancient Indo-European world, such relations existed elsewhere than in Greece, but are the forms su≈ciently typical or su≈ciently ‘improbable’ to justify speaking of a common heritage? As André Gide once said, about more elementary kinds of play: ‘These things reinvent themselves.’ ’’∑
Many coded referenc
es to Greek love can be found in the book that John Addington Symonds published in 1873, Studies of the Greek Poets. A pertinent example can be found in a note, when he describes the gap that exists between ourselves and the Greeks as ‘‘due to something outside us rather than within,’’ that is, due principally to the influence of the Judeo-Christian culture to which we are subjected in our childhood, and that represses individual aspirations.∏ Symonds also mentions in that note people for whom Greece is ‘‘a lost fatherland,’’ people who ‘‘[spend] the nights in golden dreams and the days in common duties.’’ In order that the best of what ancient Greece has to teach us not be forgotten, Symonds asks if it might not be possible to resurrect this tradition by struggling to approach its free-spirited state, by endeavoring to be ‘‘natural.’’ He also praises the poet Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass, published in the United States in 1855, was (as we shall see) fated to have a considerable influence on the formation of a gay literary tradition. Whitman, Symonds writes, is ‘‘more truly Greek than any other man of modern times’’ because he is ‘‘hopeful and fearless, accepting the world as he finds it, recognizing the value of each human impulse.’’
These remarks are certainly somewhat veiled, but clear enough for any attentive reader. One result of them was that Symonds would be obliged to give up any hope of being named to the chair of poetry for which he had applied at Oxford. Walter Pater, we might add, was also a candidate and would also be obliged to withdraw his name.
In the same year that Symonds expresses himself in this coded way in his study of the Greek poets, he evokes ‘‘Greek Love’’ directly in another work: A Problem in Greek Ethics. This small volume he did not, of course, attempt to publish. It would be ten years before he would have it printed, and then only in ten copies, destined for a small circle of confidants. From the beginning
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of this book, Symonds insists on the necessary distinction between two types of love, one noble and one vulgar, or one spiritual and one carnal. The Greeks valorized the former as the source of courage and greatness of soul, whereas ‘‘they never publicly approved the other.’’ This distinction existed throughout their history, says Symonds, hastening to add that in reality
‘‘boy-love in its grossest form was tolerated in historic Hellas with an indulgence which it never found in any Christian country, while heroic comradeship remained an ideal hard to realise.’’ Still he insists on the fact that such a distinction is omnipresent in ‘‘the language of philosophers, historians, poets and orators.’’ With the Dorians themselves, things were a bit di√erent, Symonds explains; for them masculine friendship and carnal love could be perfectly integrated because that friendship was cemented in wartime situations. After the warlike conditions that gave it nobility and meaning had disappeared, carnal love turned into pure ‘‘luxury.’’ At that moment a clear dissociation occurred between pure, noble love and the ‘‘base’’ practices of
‘‘vice’’ (5–6).
Pederasty, as the reference to the Dorians is intended to remind us, has a martial origin for Symonds, and it has never fully lost the ‘‘virile character’’
that was part of its earliest history. The Greek world simply idealized—and also codified—this noble institution that it inherited from its ancestors.
Further, Symonds comments that ‘‘it was just this e√ort to elevate paiderastia according to the aesthetic standard of Greek ethics which constituted its distinctive quality in Hellas.’’ Therefore, ‘‘we are obliged . . . to separate this, the true Hellenic manifestation of the paiderastic passion, from the e√eminacies, brutalities and gross sensualities which can be noticed alike in imperfectly civilized and in luxuriously corrupt communities’’ (18–19). Here we see to what an extent the legitimation of homosexuality by way of the rediscovery of the ‘‘virility’’ of antiquity was complicit both with a vehement rea≈rmation of all the values of that homophobic discourse that criticized passivity, corruption, and e√eminacy and also with the idea that sexuality degraded the purity of some ideal.
Symonds indicates that his topic in his text is to be this noble love. The vulgar love is a sort of ‘‘vice’’ that ‘‘does not vary to any great extent, whether we observe it in Athens or in Rome, in Florence of the sixteenth or in Paris of the nineteenth century’’ (7); whereas he insists that the noble form of masculine love developed by the Greeks has almost no equivalent in history.
Before launching fully into his study, he intends to define the ‘‘nature of this love.’’ The definition must be linked to ‘‘its origin and essence,’’ which are
∞∏∂
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‘‘military’’: ‘‘Fire and valour, rather than tenderness or tears, were the external outcome of this passion; nor had Malachia, e√eminacy, a place in its vocabulary’’ (8). While it may have been purely virile, this passion was nonetheless intense and absorbing, and Symonds cites as an example a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus to show that ‘‘it would be di≈cult to find more intense expressions of a√ection in modern literature.’’
Symonds’s entire analysis, based on his erudite and sharp reading of the texts in question, is a moving e√ort not only to celebrate what he considers to be the nobility and the purity of the culture of ‘‘masculine friendship’’
found in Greek antiquity, but also to reflect some light from that earlier moment onto himself and his own epoch. In the chapter that he devotes to the Dorian origins of pederasty (for Symonds only ever considers ‘‘Greek love’’ as a relation in which a di√erence in age is a determining feature), he of course cites the work of K. O. Müller, and writes:
The Dorians gave the earliest and most marked encouragement to
Greek love. Nowhere else, indeed, except among the Dorians, who
were an essentially military race, living like an army of occupation in the countries they had seized, herding together in barracks and at
public messes, and submitting to martial drill and discipline, do we
meet with paiderastia developed as an institution. In Crete and Lac-
edaemon it became a potent instrument of education. . . . It would
appear that the lover was called Inspirer, at Sparta, while the youth he loved was named Hearer. These local phrases su≈ciently indicate the
relation which subsisted between the pair. The lover taught, the hearer learned; and so from man to man was handed down the tradition of
heroism. (13)
Symonds then turns to pederasty in Athens and shows how it was gov-
erned by strict rules and by an at least equally severe code of honor. He admits that it may well have split itself into two distinct currents: one noble, the other vulgar. But he insists throughout his study that in Athens it remained ‘‘closely associated with liberty, manly sports, severe studies, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, self-control, and deeds of daring’’ (44). Symonds devotes much space to the gymnasiums, to the ‘‘ palaestra’’: spaces in which the relations between lover and beloved were developed. ‘‘The Greeks were conscious that gymnastic exercises tended to encourage and confirm the habit of paiderastia,’’ he writes (40). In this regard, he cites a phrase from Plato’s Laws which indicates ‘‘the cities which have most to do with gymnastics’’ as
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the places with a predilection for pederasty (40). He makes no attempt to hide his happiness about the fact that he is able to link this form of love to youth, virility, and physical health.π
It would only be in 1891, twenty years after his text in praise of Greek love, that Symonds would publish his second monograph, A Problem in Modern Ethics, in which he o√ers an overview and a radical critique of the medical and psychiatric literature on homosexuality. In the later work the reference to Greek antiquity that had previously served to legitimate ‘‘masculine fri
endships’’ would become a veritable instrument of war against the medicalization of discourse on homosexuality.
In the years between these two volumes, from 1875 to 1886, Symonds
would publish a total of seven books dealing with the Italian Renaissance, including notably a biography of Michelangelo. He made no secret of the fact that he found the energy for this mammoth project in the passion he felt for this historical period. It was ‘‘one of the most lawless periods of modern history,’’ one in which people praised the beauty of men and of nature. Yet while this immersion in the past ‘‘stimulated’’ his imagination, it also ‘‘irritated’’ it, for it awoke in him ‘‘cravings which cannot be satisfied by simple pleasures.’’ His nervous exhaustion was not alleviated simply by the comple-tion of the books he wrote.∫ This work, which was part of an e√ort to forget the di≈culties—the distress—Symonds experienced in living out his homosexuality, in fact reminded him of those di≈culties: the gap was so great between the reality of his own existence and the lives of the men from the past of whom he dreamed; the di√erence was so marked between the splen-dor of that bygone era and the only too real torments of his own soul and his own body.
Symonds was quite literally fascinated by the Renaissance and by what he imagined to be the sexual freedom of that time. During a trip to Florence, he discovered and translated the letters between Michelangelo and his greatest love, Tommaso Cavallieri. In a letter to one of his friends, Symonds expresses the deep emotion he felt upon reading, four and a half centuries after they were written, these ‘‘passionate letters and verses, indited by aged genius and youthful beauty.’’Ω In 1878 he published a translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets and sent a copy to Oscar Wilde.
Wilde, in writing The Portrait of Mr. W. H. , which is devoted to the young man who some claimed to be ‘‘the very source of Shakespeare’s inspiration,’’
will often make reference to all that he learned from Symonds about the Renaissance and about Platonism and Neo-Platonism. ‘‘It is only when we
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 24