DURING HIS TIME in the city he regarded as the English home of Hellenism, Wilde often staged Greek symposia with his friends.1 In his rooms, in the evenings, he would pour out ‘a flood of paradoxes’ and defend ‘untenable’ intellectual positions. ‘The talk,’ according to one of his companions, ‘was quite unrestrained, and ranged over a vast variety of topics. Wilde said not a few foolish and extravagant things . . . We listened and applauded and protested against some of his preposterous theories.’2 It is a scene that might have come straight out of the pages of Plato, and probably did.
As an undergraduate, and perhaps also at Portora, Wilde read Plato’s dialogues in the original. The philosopher’s style is fairly colloquial and would have been easy for Wilde to read, even as a schoolboy, with the help of commentaries and translations. Of these, Benjamin Jowett’s 1875 English translation of the dialogues was probably the most dear to Wilde; his copy has survived.3 He purchased the handsome five-volume edition and wrote his name (‘Oscar F. O’F.W. Wilde’) in pencil on the verso of the half-title page of Volume I. It is likely that he bought it soon after its publication date because, from late 1876 onwards, he tended to write only his first and last names in his books.
The Dialogues of Plato became one of Wilde’s golden books. He marked and annotated most of the dialogues, and many of Jowett’s introductions.4 In doing so he read far beyond the confines of his Greats course, for which only five of the dialogues were prescribed texts.5 In his undergraduate notebooks he copied out numerous phrases from the volumes, sometimes using them as the starting point for his own speculations. Wilde consulted them when he came to write his mature works, in which he frequently draws on Plato for inspiration or a quotation.6
In the dialogues a series of conversations between the fifth-century bc Athenian philosopher Socrates – Plato’s real-life intellectual master – and a number of listeners are imaginatively reconstructed. Wor shipped by his disciples as a godlike genius, Socrates was dismissed by his detractors as a pretentious gadfly. His eccentric life was cut short when an Athenian court sentenced him to death after finding him guilty of propounding sophistic theories that had ‘corrupted’ the city’s youth.
The dialogues expertly stage disputations between Socrates and one or more of his intellectual adversaries. Typically, the participants argue from differing viewpoints about the definition of an abstract concept such as Justice, Courage or Love. While Socrates’ opponents generally represent commonly held opinion, he argues from the perspective of one who seeks philosophical clarity. The philosopher unsettles his interlocutor by a strategy known as ‘Socratic irony’ which consists of bombarding them with a series of bewildering questions.
The dialogues generally begin with a confession on Socrates’ part that he knows absolutely nothing about the subject under review. They end with his adversary’s acknowledgement that, given the blunt tools of thought and language available to humanity, no one can ever know anything about it. The confusion his opponents experienced would, Socrates hoped, prompt them to reflect further after the conversation’s conclusion; ultimately, he wanted them to be born again, as sensitive intellectual beings. Socrates does not teach any scientific or factual knowledge; instead, his interlocutors learn how to think.
Readers of Plato’s dialogues undergo the same experience of initiation and enlightenment as Socrates’ adversaries. The annotations in Wilde’s copy of the Dialogues reveal that he was inspired by Socrates’ method as well as by many of his celebrated ideas. He has marked the philosopher’s famous characterisation of the poet as ‘a light and winged and holy thing’ who is dumb ‘until he has been inspired and is out of his senses’;7 there is also a line next to the famous passage in Book III of the Republic where Socrates denounces poets as liars who corrupt the young. Later Wilde eloquently countered these criticisms in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’, philosophic dialogues that are themselves modelled on Plato.*
Many nineteenth-century authors, such as William Mallock and Thomas Love Peacock, looked to Plato as an exemplar and as an inspiration for the dialogues they wrote. None of them came quite as close as Wilde to equalling him. One of Wilde’s friends even believed that ‘Plato might have been proud to sign’ certain pages of Wilde’s dialogues. In their eloquent and witty expression of a brilliant mind at play, Wilde had, he maintained, quite surpassed his master.9
Wilde mimicked Plato in his life as well as in his art. In later years he continued his Oxford custom of staging ‘thoroughly Greek’ evenings with his friends where they would savour the ‘sweet sin of phrases’ and drink ‘many a sun to rest with wine and words’.10 Naturally, Wilde assumed the star role of Socrates, while his friends variously served as appreciative audience, and intellectual foil. Wilde relished the ‘intellectual friction’ generated by impassioned debate – a phrase so redolent of Socrates.11 Like the Athenian philosopher, he delighted in overwhelming his antagonists. During their dinner table discussions, the young French novelist André Gide could only stare distractedly into his plate as Wilde systematically dismantled the moral principles instilled in him by his religious upbringing. ‘In his company,’ Gide confessed, ‘I lost the habit of thinking.’ ‘Since Wilde,’ he told a friend, ‘I only exist a little.’12 But Gide was not really obliterated by Wilde’s oracular onslaught – with time he would, as the Socratic Wilde no doubt hoped, be born again as a pagan and a homosexual.
Wilde adopted Socrates’ relentless philosophic interrogation. ‘Do you know the difference between art and nature?’ he demanded of Gide. ‘Do you know why Christ did not love His mother?’ (Wilde told him it was ‘because she was a virgin’.) These questions were often the prelude to a provocative philosophic paradox or a parable – rhetorical weapons again borrowed from Socrates. ‘Tell me,’ he asked Gide on one occasion, ‘what have you done since yesterday?’ On hearing the young man’s rather bald account of his mundane activities, Wilde’s face darkened. ‘If that’s really what you’ve done,’ he said reproachfully, ‘then why repeat it? You do see that it’s not at all interesting . . . There are two worlds – the one that exists without one’s speaking about it, called the real world . . . the other is the world of art, which one must discuss, for otherwise it would cease to exist . . . listen . . . I’m going to tell you a story.’13 And so the master storyteller began.
Having bewildered his interlocutors with questions and paradoxical theories, Wilde seduced them with his tales. Gide was ravished by Wilde’s ‘little coloured’ parables, just as Socrates’ audience had been. In Plato’s Symposium, the aristocrat Alcibiades, Socrates’ disciple and lover, compares him to a ‘flute-player more wonderful than Marsyas’ because of his power of enchanting his audience: ‘When I hear him,’ he says, ‘my heart leaps up within me, and my eyes rain tears.’14 These words, which many of Wilde’s own listeners would later echo, are marked in his copy of the Dialogues.*
Wilde tried to realise, in his own life, various aspects of classical culture and literature. In his talk he attempted to out-Socrates Socrates by making poetry and paradox dance together, and in his amorous relations he endeavoured to revive the ancient institution of paiderastia (love between an older and a younger man). His fascination with that union, and with homosexual love generally, is witnessed by the readerly traces he left in his copy of the Dialogues.
Prior to his perusal of Jowett’s Plato, Wilde had encountered the subject of Greek homosexuality in the pages of Mahaffy’s Social Life in Greece. In Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets too, he had discovered fervent and thinly veiled allusions to the topic.18 Symonds was one of a handful of Oxford-educated scholars of homosexual persuasion, now known as the ‘Oxford Hellenists’, who used their commentaries on classical texts to safely explore and define their illicit passion. Wilde certainly picked up on Symonds’s ‘insinuendoes’. In his copy of Studies he marks the author’s numerous references to the relationship of the Homeric warriors Achilles and Patroklos, which is characterised as an ‘intense friendship’ and as a ‘love that passed the love of women’.19
Plato’s dialogues lay at the heart of the late nineteenth-century debate about Greek homosexuality. In the Symposium, homosexual passion is discussed frankly and with ecstatic enthusiasm at an Athenian drinking party, where the topic of love is examined by various speakers. Socrates offers an ardent and eloquent defence, describing the progression of a human soul from the love of a specific young man to the love of beauty and other abstract virtues. The philosopher ranks the passion far above its heterosexual equivalent in the spiritual hierarchy, depicting the love of women as sensual and degrading.20
The spiritual quality of homosexual love is emphasised throughout the Symposium, where it is characterised as chaste and intellectual rather than sexual – hence the modern term ‘Platonic love’. Many of Plato’s nineteenth-century readers strove to live up to Socrates’ purely spiritual ideal of passion, with varying degrees of success. Both the Symposium and the Phaedrus celebrate the paiderastic union of an older and a younger man in which wisdom and experience are exchanged for energy, ardour and beauty. Other dialogues, such as Charmides, vividly illustrate the dynamic of the relationship. Socrates tutors Charmides – a young man who captivates him by his boyish grace – in the ways of philosophic righteousness. At a time when men could be imprisoned for life for homosexual ‘offences’, these dialogues must have seemed astonishing. Here was Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, a sage held up as a paragon of wisdom and virtue, declaring that it was perfectly natural for a man to fall in love with a youth, and that such a love was the portal to philosophic under standing and spiritual enlightenment.
The dialogues fell upon John Addington Symonds with the force of a revelation. ‘They confirmed,’ he said, ‘my congenital inclination . . . and filled my mind with an impossible dream . . . I discovered the true liber amoris at last . . . It was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato.’21 The night on which he read the Phaedrus and the Symposium was, he believed, ‘one of the most important of my life’. He read on through the early hours of the morning: ‘the sun was shining, on the shrubs outside’ before he ‘shut up the book’.22 Symonds set about putting theory into practice by embarking on a passionate, though entirely spiritual, friendship with a young man.
Wilde’s first perusal of Plato may have been similarly intense. His virgin response is, alas, now beyond recovery, because the editions of the dialogues he used at Trinity and Portora have not survived. Yet the markings and annotations to his copy of Jowett’s Dialogues surely preserve an echo of that initial reaction. They strongly suggest that Wilde was one of the many young men of the period who, in Symonds’s words, were irresistibly ‘stirred, by the panegyric of paiderastic love in the Phaedrus . . . the personal grace of Charmides . . . the mingled realism and rapture of the Symposium’.23
Wilde placed two crosses beside the passage in Charmides where Socrates declares himself ‘astonished at’ the ‘beauty and stature’ of Charmides. He also put a line beside the philosopher’s fervid exclamation: ‘O rare! I caught a sight of the inwards of [Charmides’] garment, and took flame. Then I could no longer contain myself . . . I felt that I had been overcome by a wild-beast appetite.’24 The episode made an enduring impression on Wilde. ‘Don’t you remember,’ he remarked to a friend years later, ‘how the blood throbbed in [Socrates’] veins and how he grew blind with desire?’ It was, he said, ‘a scene more magical than the passionate love-lines of Sappho’.25
In Protagoras Wilde underlined the passage where the eponymous character criticises Socrates for chasing after ‘the fair Alcibiades’.26 The intensity of their passion, which was apparently unconsummated, is vividly preserved in the pages of the Symposium. Wilde marked Jowett’s elucidation of the famous idea of the ‘Platonic Eros’ in his introduction to that dialogue. In his notebooks Wilde defines this as ‘the impassioned search after truth, as well as the romantic side of that friendship so necessary for philosophy . . . from the love of the beautiful object we rise to the ideal eros; from Charmides to the form of the good’.27 Jowett’s explication is far more detached, and betrays traces of uneasiness; significantly, he makes no mention of Charmides.*
Perhaps Plato revealed to Wilde much about himself that he had not known before, and gave a name, a history and a justification to a latent passion. The philosopher certainly conditioned the way Wilde viewed that passion. The description of Basil Hallward’s love for Dorian in Dorian Gray is pure Platonism: ‘The love that he bore him – for it was really love – had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses.’30 In the extended version of Wilde’s essay-story, ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, he also characterises the relationship between Shakespeare and the actor Willie Hughes (who, he suggests, may have been the dedicatee of the Bard’s sonnets) as the epitome of Platonic love, and he ascribes the Renaissance’s fascination with intense male friendship to the influence of a Latin translation of the Symposium. That ‘wonderful dialogue’, he comments, ‘of all the Platonic dialogues perhaps the most perfect . . . began to exercise a strange influence over men, and to colour their words and thoughts and manner of living’.31
Literature thus exercises a magical influence over life. Plato does not simply reveal a dormant passion to his readers; he colours their words and thoughts concerning it and affects the way they realise it in their daily existence. In ‘Mr W.H.’ Wilde argues that literature actually creates the feelings from which it is conventionally thought to derive – the word precedes and inspires the emotion, not the other way around. Could it be then that a dead philosopher stimulated, or perhaps even engendered, Wilde’s latent attraction to other men? Was it a case of literary nurture over biological nature?
Plato certainly determined the way Wilde expressed his passion in everyday life. In characteristic fashion, he adopted a work of literature as a manual for living. In his amatory friendships with young men he sought to achieve the Platonic ideal of paiderastic love. Robert Ross, who was probably his first significant male love, was fifteen years his junior. As well as being Wilde’s physical lover, Ross was vital to his art, acting as his muse and amanuensis. Throughout his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas too, Wilde followed the Platonic model. He declared that their friendship ought to be chiefly dedicated to ‘the creation and contemplation of beautiful things’,32 and he penned letters to the young man which could, he claimed, ‘only be understood by those who have read the Symposium of Plato’.33 Douglas always maintained that theirs was a predominantly, and indeed almost exclusively, ‘Platonic’ attachment, directly inspired by their reading of the Greek philosopher.34
At one of his trials Wilde was asked to define the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ (a phrase coined by Douglas to describe homosexual love), and, by implication, his relationship with Douglas. ‘The “Love that dare not speak its name”,’ Wilde declared, ‘is . . . a great affection of an elder for a younger man . . . such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy . . . It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists . . . when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.’35 Wilde’s brave and brilliant extempore speech, itself so like a passage out of the Symposium, takes us to the heart of the matter. Plato offered Wilde far more than a convenient way of describing an inherent biological passion: he shaped, fired and may even have prompted it: Wilde’s love life imitated Plato’s art.*
* The ‘Decay’ draws heavily on Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates discusses rhetoric and the soul’s immortality with his young friend Phaedrus. In both dialogues a wise philosophical head enlightens a callow and rather dull-witted ‘straight-man’ and in each a written composition is read out and discussed. The two dialogues have also been convincingly described as spirited defences of oral literary values such as exaggeration and inaccuracy.8
* Wilde’s copy of the Dialogues indeed suggests that he may have consciously tried to pick up some rhetorical tips from his Athenian master. He marks some of Socrates’ fables,15 and sometimes uses marginal crosses to chart the development of the philosopher’s arguments.16
Wilde was also fascinated by Socrates’ characteristically paradoxical queries. He marks a question the philosopher put to the boy Lysis: ‘Suppose that I were to cover your auburn locks with white lead, would they be really white,’ Socrates asks, ‘or would they only appear to be?’17
* Jowett was always at pains to reassure his Victorian readers that Socrates had successfully mastered his physical desires and he characterised the philosopher’s speeches as ‘singular’ in their ‘combination of the most degrading passion with the desire for virtue and improvement’.28 He also said that Plato’s writings were full of extravagant ‘figures of speech’, and argued that ‘what he says about the loves of men must be transferred to the loves of women before we can attach any serious meaning to his words. Had he lived in our times, he would have made the transposition himself.’29 In reading Jowett’s translations as encomia to homosexual love, Wilde was therefore reading ‘against the grain’.
* In the late Victorian period homosexual activity was commonplace in all male educational establishments such as Oxford University and public schools. In their autobiographies Symonds and Douglas remark on its prevalence among students. Wilde’s physical interest in his own sex was, therefore, hardly exceptional for his time and for his class. It is interesting to note that while acquaintances remarked on some of the ‘feminine’ traits of Wilde’s character (effeminacy and homosexuality were sometimes associated in the period),36 it was his Irishness that excited comment in the cloisters: race, rather than any perceived sexual inclination, set Wilde apart from his peers.
So far as Wilde’s mature sexuality was concerned, what distinguished him, and men such as Symonds and Douglas, from the general run of English aristocrats who had enjoyed (and in some cases, continued to enjoy) casual all male sex, was their attempt to invent a language for their passion. They differed, too, in placing homosexual love at the centre of their lives and in championing it as a political cause.