IT WAS DURING Michaelmas term of 1874 that Wilde first opened Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of art essays penned by the Oxford Classics don Walter Pater in 1873. Wilde’s beautiful first edition of the book had an unusual green cloth binding and was printed in generously spaced type on ‘mock-ribbed’ paper, which gives a pleasant tingling sensation as you move your fingers over it.
The volume contains essays on philosophers, poets and artists of the Renaissance such as Leonardo, Botticelli and Michelangelo. Pater’s relationship to the past is personal and passionate. Through years spent adoring and, as it were, living with the artworks and writings of the period, he absorbed its spirit. This enabled him to divine, by instinct, much about the Renaissance that was inaccessible to more scrupulous scholars.
Pater enters into a work of art imaginatively, elucidating, in a series of baroque prose poems, the impression it makes on him, and defining its special character. He calls this the ‘true truth’ about an artwork, next to which the facts concerning its production and history are insignificant. After gazing long and lovingly at the mysterious face of the Mona Lisa, set against the dreamy green landscape of water and stone, he writes, as if in a trance, ‘The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which “the ends of the world are come”, and the eyelids are a little weary . . . She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave . . . and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes . . .’1
Wilde hailed this passage as the quintessential piece of ‘creative criticism’. Its unashamed subjectivity and its ornate, impressionistic style were, to him, causes for celebration. Pater had deepened the mystery of the painting by enriching it with a new interpretation, and his criticism could itself stand as an independent work of art. ‘Who . . . cares,’ he wrote, ‘whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of the Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of?’2
When Pater contemplates a work of art from a more objective viewpoint he focuses, almost exclusively, on its stylistic attributes, rather than on its ‘meaning’ or ‘message’. A work’s style should, he argues, so perfectly embody the artist’s ‘ideas’ and ‘intentions’ as to be indistinguishable from them. All arts thus aspire to the condition of music, because in music form and content are inseparable.
Pater suggests that art does not appeal primarily to the intellect, but rather to that instinct for form, beauty and harmony which might be called the aesthetic sense. Those endowed with this sense engage with art in an imaginative, emotional, and even physical fashion. In the conclusion to the Renaissance Pater describes the ‘aesthetic’ experience as overwhelming. Art affords us the opportunity of ecstasy, he says, coming to us without an intellectual programme or a moral purpose and ‘proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to [our] moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’. It offers the possibility of heightened pleasure, placing us ‘at the focus where the greatest number of [life’s] vital forces unite in their purest energy’. The aim of existence is the enjoyment and multipli cation of such intense experiences. ‘To burn always,’ as Pater put it, ‘with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in life.’3
Pater’s conclusion signalled his allegiance to the Aesthetic movement, a loose affiliation of artists, intellectuals and critics of various cultures, linked by their adherence to several key doctrines regarding art. They believed that the style of an artwork is more important than its content, and that formal beauty is paramount. They also held that the creation of beauty is the common aim of all the arts, and that art is entirely separate from the ‘real’ world.
The origins of Aestheticism lay in the writings of Kant, who defined art as ‘purposive ness without purpose’, and as something entirely separate from the spheres of morality and action. His ideas were refined and elaborated in the mid-nineteenth century by French authors such as Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. In the celebrated preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier declared that all art is quite useless.
Swinburne introduced English readers to these French theories. Art’s business, he declared, ‘is not to do good on [moral] grounds, but to do good on her own . . . Art for Art’s sake first of all.’4 ‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau [nothing is true except the beautiful],’ he argued. ‘La beauté est parfaite [Beauty is perfect].’5 Swinburne, along with Rossetti, attempted to realise the aesthetic ideal in poetry that aimed at formal perfection and offered the reader little in the way of a message or a moral.
Wilde had been introduced to Kant’s aesthetics at Trinity by Mahaffy, whose own position on literature and art seems to have been partly derived from the German philosopher: ‘he took,’ Wilde commented with approval, ‘the deliberately artistic standpoint towards everything.’6
Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin was probably among the French novels Wilde devoured in his youth, and he knew the writings of Rossetti and Swinburne practically by heart. He was famous at Trinity for being their ardent disciple, and for echoing their Aesthetic views. His association with the movement was also indicated by his devotion to the works of Symonds, another ‘aesthete’,7 as well as by his extravagant aesthetic attire, which included a pair of ‘Umbrian’ trousers that excited much laughter in the quads. Wilde was fashioning the aesthete’s persona he would perfect at Oxford, where he dressed flamboyantly, ostentatiously littered his room with beautiful objects, and coined the celebrated phrase: ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’8
Wilde had therefore been thoroughly prepared for the Renaissance by his earlier reading. Before he came across Pater, as he put it later, he had already gone ‘more than half-way’ to meeting him.9 Yet if the don offered him little that was original in theoretical terms, his book was probably the most intellectually stimulating and stylistically seductive expression of the Aesthetic creed that Wilde had ever read.
The Renaissance caused a scandal on its publication in 1873. The Bishop of Oxford attacked, from the pulpit, the ‘neo-pagan’ character of the book’s Hedonistic conclusion. Others were outraged by the sympathy the author expressed for a period of history that was a byword in Victorian England for every conceivable form of vice.*
Pater was so distressed by the vituperative criticism that he dropped his ‘conclusion’ from the second edition, on the grounds that ‘it might possibly mislead some of the young men into whose hands it might fall’.11 This was an accurate estimation of his book’s potential influence as it became the bible of an entire generation of aesthetes. Fledgling writers, such as W.B. Yeats, discovered in it an alluring epicurean creed and a daring approach to art, as well as a masterly literary style they could copy.
The Renaissance struck Wilde with the power of a revelation, becoming for him ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty’. More than twenty years after the event, he recalled the autumn day on which he had read the volume.12 Such, indeed, was Wilde’s love for Pater’s book that, in later life, he claimed never to travel anywhere without it. ‘It is possible,’ he mused, ‘that I may exaggerate about [it]. 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.’13
Wilde found Pater’s exhortation to seek ‘not the fruit of experience, but experience itself’ irresistible. He went out into the world with these words engraved on his heart, and so he lived, resolutely determined to ‘eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world’. It would, indeed, be hard to think of anyone who more assiduously followed Pater’s injunction to burn always with a ‘hard, gemlike flame’. The don became perhaps the greatest single influence on Wilde’s writings. He expounded Pater’s ideas on art in his lectures and critical writings, which themselves consciously imitate the don’s brand of impressionistic aesthetic criticism. As a prose stylist, Wilde’s debt to his Oxford master was enormous.
Years after leaving Oxford Wilde referred to the Renaissance as ‘that book which has had such a strange influence over my life’.14 Interestingly, his words echo the description of the unnamed ‘poisonous’ French novel that famously corrupts Dorian Gray. ‘It was,’ Wilde wrote, ‘the strangest book that [Dorian] had ever read . . . [he] could not free himself from [its] influence.’15 Its potent effect on Wilde’s protagonist is also evoked in words that may be a coded reference to Pater: ‘The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning . . . Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.’16
It is tempting to hear in Dorian’s experience a reverberation of Wilde’s first encounter with the Renaissance. Was Wilde, like Dorian, filled with the desire to drain the cup of life to the dregs? Did he dis cover in it ‘the story of his own life, written before he had lived it’?17
Having been seduced by the book, Wilde was eager to meet its author. In 1877 he sent Pater his review of an exhibition of paintings at London’s Grosvenor Gallery. It contains two flattering references to the don, and several imitations of his impressionistic criticism. There were also a number of comments that were certain to appeal to Pater’s artistic and sexual taste. Wilde describes a painting of a ‘boyish beauty’ who is, he says, a type common ‘in the Greek islands, where boys can still be found as beautiful as the Charmides of Plato’.18 Pater responded by praising the maturity of Wilde’s style and his ‘quite exceptionally cultivated tastes’ in a letter Wilde proudly showed off to his friends.19
Soon afterwards the pair met. ‘When I first had the privilege of meeting Mr Walter Pater,’ Wilde recalled, ‘he said to me, smiling, “Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.”’20 As Wilde broadly followed this advice, it may stand as a vivid emblem of the don’s influence over him.*
Their relationship seemed destined to realise the Platonic paiderastic ideal which fascinated both of them, with the older man tutoring the younger in the ways of intellectual refinement and literary excellence. Yet the man Wilde addressed as ‘the great master’ was actually rather timid and tongue-tied and so hardly suited to the role of Socrates. When the pair were together, Wilde doubtless did most of the talking. He later gave an account of a conversation with the Oxford don, where the Platonic roles of older and younger man are inverted. ‘We were seated together on a bench under some trees at Oxford, watching the students bathing in the river . . . I really talked as if inspired . . . when I paused, Pater – the stiff, quiet, silent Pater – suddenly slipped from his seat and knelt down by me and kissed my hand. He got up with a white strained face. “I had to”, he muttered, glancing about him fearfully, “I had to – once . . .”’23 The anecdote sounds too good to be true, and it is hard to imagine the diffident Pater making such an effusive gesture. Yet even if it is Wilde’s invention, it conveys something of his attitude to the don.
With the passing of time, the disciple became disenchanted with the master. To Wilde’s disappointment Pater seemed reluctant to realise his own Hedonistic theories: ‘he lived,’ Wilde said, after the don’s death, ‘to disprove everything that he has written.’24 How ironic that Wilde should have been so altered by the work of a man who kept life at a safe distance.*
* One particular ‘vice’ Pater hinted at proved to be especially shocking. Like Symonds, Pater was a homosexual ‘Oxford Hellenist’ and, in his book, he often alludes obliquely to homosexual love. In his pen portrait of the eighteenth-century German classicist Johann Winckelmann, he explicitly endorses all-male passion.10
* Another emblem of Pater’s influence on Wilde is the copy of Gustave Flaubert’s Trois contes [Three Tales], which the don lent to his disciple in November 1877. The volume contains a story called ‘Herodias’, which imaginatively recreates the events leading up to the death of John the Baptist; it would be one of the most important sources for Wilde’s play Salomé. It is fitting then that Wilde would send Pater an inscribed copy of the original French-language version of his drama.21 The influence was not, however, all one way – during his time at Magdalen Wilde also lent Pater a number of his books.22
* Wilde’s relationship with Pater and his writings has often been contrasted with his relationship to the art critic and Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, John Ruskin (1819–1900). Wilde religiously attended Ruskin’s lectures and enjoyed many ‘walks and talks’ with the professor which he would remember as ‘the dearest memories of my Oxford days.25 Yet significant differences emerged in their attitude to art. While Ruskin embraced the term ‘aesthetic’ in its broadest sense, he never equated it with amorality in art, nor did he wish to separate art from society and politics. ‘The keystone to his aesthetic system’ was, as Wilde put it, ‘ethical always’.26 Wilde acknowledged the influence of the man he addressed reverently as a ‘poet’, ‘priest’ and ‘prophet’, but ultimately rejected his brand of Aestheticism as too moral and didactic: ‘He would judge of a picture,’ Wilde said, ‘by the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses; but . . . the rule of art is not the rule of morals.’27