To speak with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiments of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art.
—Walt Whitman, “Preface,” Leaves of Grass
Urning men and women, on whose book of life Nature has written her new word, sounding so strange to us, bear such storm and stress within them, such ferment and fluctuation, so much complex material, having its outlet only toward the future, that it is impossible to characterize them adequately in a few sentences.
—Otto de Joux, Die hellenische Liebe in der Gegenwart
§1. From 1859 onward, many writers on history, culture, and art in Britain and North America addressed the ways in which aesthetic sense, even a “sense of beauty,” creates and relays sexual attractions in males and females of species. The males and females in question, however, were not always members of the human species. In 1859, Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species. In it he described what he called sexual selection, an evolutionary process that according to him runs in parallel and sometimes in interaction with natural selection (his primary topic in the book) and artificial selection (a human activity that helped him understand natural selection). Darwin elaborated his model of sexual selection in The Descent of Man, published in 1871. Darwinian sexual selectionists immediately urged that “the sense of beauty,” “taste,” the “art-sense,” or the “art-impulse” could be derived from fundamental evolutionary histories in animal species, including the human species. Coupled with such naturalistic and quasi-utilitarian aesthetics as Herbert Spencer’s “Use and Beauty,” published in 1851, and such physiological explications as Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics, published in 1877, Darwinian sexual selectionism posed an enormous challenge not only to all existing concepts of ideal form, value, and morality in art as they had been stated, for example, in the Platonistic traditions of art theory, including Schopenhauer’s (see chapter 3), or by Winckelmann and Kant (see chapter 1). It also challenged any account of the emergence—even the very existence—of artistic production or aesthetic taste that does not derive art and aesthetics from the material factors of organic evolution.
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, many writers on art felt compelled to address the Darwinian model of sexuality and art and in particular to explore Darwin’s provisional account (modified between editions of The Descent of Man) of the sexual selection of the sense of beauty. Among the most salient texts we should include Edward Carpenter’s Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889) and his later Angels’ Wings (1898), Art of Creation (1904), and Drama of Love and Death (1912); Havelock Ellis’s New Spirit (1890); John Addington Symonds’s In the Key of Blue and Essays Speculative and Suggestive (both 1893); George Santayana’s Sense of Beauty and Bernhard Berenson’s Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (both 1896); and Vernon Lee’s Beauty and Ugliness (1897/1912). Like many secular intellectuals of the late Victorian period, cultural and art theorists like Symonds, Carpenter, Lee, and Santayana were impressed by the power and scope of contemporary naturalistic and evolutionary reasoning. In their opinion, it had largely (and they thought rightly) replaced the metaphysical system of Christianity, though Symonds and Santayana notionally embraced a Christian faith. It had even displaced the idealist philosophies of Kant and Hegel in which they had been trained and that they continued to employ in their criticism of art and literature. (Symonds’s treatment of the Renaissance in Italy, for example, applied Hegelian dialecticism to the history of the fine arts of the period in question [chapter 4].) In evolutionary science Symonds, Carpenter, and Berenson remained interested and innovative amateurs at best. But Lee and Santayana made contributions to psychology and philosophy, and Ellis to psychiatry and anthropology.
All of the writers I have mentioned accepted broadly naturalistic and evolutionary premisses that were indebted to Darwinism and its cognates in physiology and psychology. But many of them also had to recognize that their personal aesthetic tastes and at least some proportion of the artistic production they hoped to create and to defend in modern society had an anomalous or paradoxical status in Darwinian terms. Most important, their tastes (insofar as they claimed to understand them) would often seem to have derived from nonprocreative aesthetic attractions and interests. In extreme cases, and most notably, they devolved from what jurists, doctors, and psychologists of the second half of the nineteenth century had come to call contrary sexual feeling, psychical hermaphroditism, sexual inversion, or homosexuality. (I will consider the topography of this discourse in relation to aesthetics in more detail in chapters 7 and 8.) How could this contradiction, an apparent conflict in the very nature of sexual-aesthetic instinct, be mediated? If a homoerotic taste for beauty in one’s own sex (or at least in its figuration) is not simply a monstrosity doomed to quick extinction, can there be a “homo-sexual” or same-sex taste for beauty, form, or art that has the same natural basis as the sense of beauty shaped, according to Darwin, in the cross-sex interactions of sexual selection in sexually reproducing species? Alternatively, could the mechanisms of selection in evolution, especially in the human line, be conceived to have evolved to admit the special flourishing of homoerotic variations?
In 1763, Johann Joachim Winckelmann had asserted that his muchadmired “ability to perceive the beautiful in art,” which he claimed literally to experience physiologically as “a soaring and twitching in the skin,” had been “inborn” in him (angeborenlich).As we have seen in chapter 1, Winckelmann hoped to transmit it by example and by instruction to followers, to collectors, and to tourists encouraged to recognize his ideals in art. But he also suggested that some well-favored young men were born with the same predisposition as his own. Was their ability to perceive the beautiful in art a perversion of generative sexuality, as Richard Payne Knight had described the crossed wires of gender in the circulation of phallic images at Isernia (see chapter 2) and as certain later nineteenth-century observers described the “decadent” Winckelmannian aesthetic tastes then flourishing in the circles of Symonds and Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley (chapter 5)? Or could it be the very birth of a “new sense” in modern man, as Goethe and Hegel had proclaimed of Winckelmann’s aesthetics in 1805 and the 1820s respectively? These questions defined Victorian homoerotic aesthetics in relation to its contexts of idealist, aestheticist, empirical, and evolutionary philosophy.
§2. Darwin’s straightforward definition of the sense of beauty was shared by many late-nineteenth-century artists, art critics, and art theorists: a “sense of the beautiful,” he said, is simply the “pleasure given by certain colors, forms, and sounds.”1 Darwin’s emphasis on pleasurable physiological stimulation partly grew out of the empirical aesthetics that had been developed in Britain earlier in the nineteenth century. Dr. John Addington Symonds, Symonds’s father, had contributed to this project in his Principles of Beauty of 1857, following teachings such as David Ramsay Hay’s Natural Principles of Beauty as Developed in the Human Figure (1852) that in turn harked back to William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1752). Hay and Dr. Symonds stressed the “natural beauty,” the inherent gracefulness and sensuous appeal, of the female human body for the (implied) male observer (figure 31). Already in the early 1860s, however, the younger Symonds tried to reanimate Winckelmann’s counterbelief that it is the male body (the real object of the Winckelmannian “ability to perceive the beautiful in art”) that is naturally the most graceful and well-proportioned.2 Among others, Benedetto Croce (as I noted in the introduction) identified this notion as the cause of one of the most striking “contradictions and compromises” of Winckelmann’s formal art theory. While Winckelmann claimed on the grounds of ideal principle to prefer the beauty of the male body, he was, as Croce put it, “forced to recognize” the beauty of female bodies, as the Darwinian sense of beauty would require. To be sure, in contemporary Kantian aesthetics the sensuous charm of any beautiful objects, especially the sensuous charm of the human body (regardless of gender), should be superseded in disinterested aesthetic judgment and the construction of le beau idéal in art, that is, the beautifulness of a formally canonical and morally elevated object (see chapter 1). Given this Kantian doctrine, British empirical aesthetics after Kant had reintroduced the sensuous pleasurability of corporeal beauty and acknowleged our erotic interest in it more or less frankly. Empiricists insisted, for example, that human communities of canonical taste remain sexually dimorphic despite the “subjective universality” of aesthetic judgment in the perfected ideal of beauty in their fine arts: according to Hay and Dr. Symonds, men find women charming, pleasurable, and beautiful. And, as Darwin added in his model of sexual selection, women find men beautiful.
FIGURE 31. “Manner in which the curves [of a beautiful body] are disposed in the outline of the [female] human figure as viewed from the front and in profile.” From David Ramsay Hay, The Natural Principles of Beauty: As Developed in the Human Figure (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1852), as reproduced in John Addington Symonds, M. D. (1807–71), The Principles of Beauty (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), plate 5, figures 1, 2.
We must note, however, that homoeroticism had dropped out of British empirical aesthetics after Kant—the homoeroticism to be found both in Winckelmann’s recommended standard of taste in art, in which men must find men sensuously beautiful, and in Kant’s teleology of the emergent canonical norm, which collates individual appreciations of beautiful men in such perfect works as Polykleitos’s Doryphoros (chapter 1). Early Victorian art writers like Hay and Dr. Symonds resisted the homoerotic libertinism potentially embedded in academic idealism (often expressed in pictorial art of the period between 1790 and the 1830s and forties), except, of course, when the attractions and admirations in question found approved moral expression, as in Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam of 1849 (though even this poem commemorating the life of the writer’s dear friend raised eyebrows at the time it appeared). Symonds later remembered his father, for example, wishing that his ten-year-old son (circa 1855) would not pore dreamily over a photograph of the Praxitelean Eros. Could he not idealize some “nymph or Hebe” instead?3
In turn, homoerotic affections were not fully restored to the human sense of beauty by Darwin. Nonetheless, the empirical aesthetics adopted by Darwin might be able to explain the grace and fitness, even the ideal appeal, of both male and female bodies to both male and female viewers. If there is such an appeal empirically, whether in the gendered direction asserted by Winckelmann (male appeals to male), by Dr. Symonds (female to male), or by Darwin (male to female), then it should be possible to say why by conducting a scientific analysis of the natural origin, constitution, and perception of grace or apparent fitness—qualities that both male and female observers might admire in other people of both the same and the opposite sex, as Knight’s doctrine of Universal Attraction had already imagined in 1786 (chapter 2).
In this light, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection decisively changed the terms of existing empirical aesthetics even if he drew on it. Darwin admitted that he could not explain why particular colors, forms, or sounds might be preferred or found to be pleasurable, although the relevant physiologies of hearing, sight, touch, and taste must have been evolved in natural selection. He could say, however, that the preferences were “not quite arbitrary” insofar as he did expect that a physiological explanation could be devised for them.4 It was left to Allen and other evolutionary and physiological aestheticians after Darwin to synthesize the experimental findings of empirical aesthetics (especially its emphasis on intrinsically pleasurable and beautiful lines, shapes, or formal relations) and the theory of evolution by natural selection. In Physiological Aesthetics, published in 1877, Allen suggested that higher organisms have been selected to respond appropriately to pleasurable and painful stimuli: according to him, the judgment of taste or beauty always seeks the maximum exercise of its nervous potential with a minimum of danger and fatigue. This simple evolutionism (it appeared in a number of versions in the work of Allen and several other writers) ran parallel with traditional aesthetics for a considerable distance. But eventually the account encountered the true Darwinian problem. At some point one had to wonder how an organism could make judgments of the beautiful, however they might be explained in terms of the nervous and sensory physiology of its species, that would seem to undermine its procreative interests and its continued generativity and, at the extreme, to thwart them altogether. Insofar as such tastes and judgments were physiologically possible, they could, of course, simply be idiosyncratic responses to anomalous creations. Allen’s physiological aesthetics could be made fully consistent at a purely circumstantial level with Winckelmann’s homoerotic paean to the grace of young men so long as the physiological responses in question (such as Winckelmann’s “soaring and twitching in the skin” at the sight of an Antinous or his reallife image) were deemed to be marginal, inconsequential, or anomalous in evolutionary terms. But it was not clear how such tastes could become widespread in human natural history. How could they become stable enough to constitute social ideals or moral universals under which all judgments of taste or beauty might be coordinated—what I have called queer beauty?
§3. According to Darwin, the preferences of nonhuman animals for particular colors and forms must “be confined to the attractions of the opposite sex.” Of course, in the human species, as Darwin admitted, the sense of the beautiful has become “intimately associated with complex ideas and trains of thought.” But it had originated (and in the continuity of “inherited associations” it must remain embedded) in the sexual selection of physiological and behavioral characters established among males competing for sexual access to females and partly driven by females “choosing” the fittest and most attractive or “beautiful” males for reproductive bonding.5 For this reason, Darwin noted, there can be no universal human standard of beauty: different standards will have evolved naturally in different local “races,” the intermarrying subgroups of humankind. (Here we might compare Kant’s culturalist explication of diversity or relativity in judgments of taste and standards of beauty [see chapter 1].) By the same token, however, there would seem to be little evolutionary profit in any local standard of beauty—an “African” beauty or a “European” beauty—that cannot contribute to success in the struggle of the race to mate.
For the purposes of the present argument, I will have to set aside the many technical difficulties of Darwin’s theory: its seeming requirement that species be polygamous, though not always in one mating season or cycle of the raising of offspring; that the beautiful traits of a successful male competitor for sexual access to females be transmitted in greater measure to the male offspring; that there be visible or otherwise recognizable “formal” variation in the distribution of more beautiful and less beautiful traits among competing males in every generation, at least from the point of view of the female who chooses a male for her mate; that beautiful traits not fatally compromise other traits involved in general reproductive fitness (in itself a more modern Darwinian concept); that divergent beautiful traits not confer equal fitness and reproductive success on their competing owners. Nonspecialist commentators did not focus on these constraints and caveats.But for many nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century biologists, including committed Darwinians, they were severe: they were sufficient to relegate sexual selection to the bottom drawer of evolutionary mechanisms and to lead to wide doubt that sexual selection could really play the role Darwin had claimed for it in The Descent of Man, in which such striking features of the human species as nakedness (that is, relative nonhairiness) were said to have been sexually selected. In order to save the theory, some later evolutionary aestheticians hoped to identify an intrinsic physiological connection between sexual potency and coloration or ornament: in choosing the most beautiful male, it might be reasoned, the female also managed to find the most potent.
All these problems might have suggested ways to explain the evolution of characters that do not directly promote reproduction, such as the mutual “altruism” sometimes displayed by collateral relatives toward one another. But it was not fully seized at the time; indeed, it was only explored fully by population biologists and then by sociobiologists in the twentieth century (under such conceptual headings as group selection, parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and genetic fitness). Still, as we will see, homoeroticist aesthetics reasoned its way toward conceiving altruism as evolutionary progress in the human species: the natural basis of human art and ethics should be loving investment in one’s fellow man in the struggle to advance the community, the race, or the species rather than sexual competition with him. I have come across only a handful of later nineteenth-century writings on generation and sexuality (as distinct from writings on political economy, especially on socialism) that provisionally explored this line of thought in a systematic way.6 As I will suggest later in this chapter, however, a number of writers, including Symonds and Carpenter, seem to have grasped it intuitively and depended on it in their more explicit reasoning about sex reform. Of course, the inverse argument was sometimes made, and in a sense Symonds’s or Carpenter’s task was simply to reverse its usual conclusion: supposedly nature finds ways, including homosexual inclinations of sexual drive, to discourage procreation by people who supposedly have not yet achieved healthy sexual maturity or who have passed through the age of maximum fertility. (This was the argument, for example, of Schopenhauer in his so-called addendum on homosexuality to the section on the “Metaphysics of Sexual Love” in the third [1858] edition of The World as Will and Representation.) Needless to say, this quasi-Darwinian and often degenerationist or protoeugenicist account required that people engaged in homosexual activity had to be defined as relatively weak and morbid—comparatively unfit for the contests specifically of sexual selection (see chapter 5).7
For my purposes, more important than intertwined technical problems in the model of sexual selection was a general sense that Darwin had not sufficiently distinguished sexual selection as a well-defined evolutionary mechanism apart from the other mechanisms of selection. On the one hand, competition between males for access to females, one strand of Darwinian sexual selection, seems to be a form of natural selection, the general struggle for existence, which always includes the struggle with members of one’s own species and one’s own sex. In a review of The Descent of Man in the Academy, Alfred Russel Wallace (codiscoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection) argued that many of the traits Darwin would attribute to sexual selection could instead be better assigned to natural selection, for example, as the evolutionary development of camouflage (or mimicry of environment) against predation.8 According to Darwin, the flamingo’s wings or peacock’s tail were sexually selected characters. If so, they were, of course, apposite motifs for the china service or the wallpaper in the mild implied eroticism of a Bohemian aestheticist salon. But the American painter Abbott Thayer illustrated how such characters might really be Wallace-like ways of blending entirely out of sight, hardly what such partisans as Wilde wanted in aesthetic decor.9 In a similar way, Allen observed that the blending of “artistical” ornament with its environment of house and furnishings created a far more moderated and harmonious effect than the striking flamboyance of aestheticist (and often specifically Wildean) dress and decor parodied by philistines. Allen’s evolutionary physiology defended fashionable aestheticism by casting it simply as a naturally suitable sense of beauty—moderate and comforting—rather than as a sexually selected specialization, an artificial fantasy like Wilde’s boutonnière (a green carnation) or a bizarre mechanism of generation like the orchids featured in the “Breviary of Decadence,” Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (see chapter 5)—both entraining overtones of polygamy and adultery, male competitive dandyism, and female aesthetic precocity, not to speak, of course, of unnatural instincts. Allen’s essay in the Darwinian explanation of aestheticist habits in decor was titled “Mr Cimabue Brown on the Defensive”: his typical Aesthete, Cimabue, is still an unornamental, unflashy “Brown.”10
On the other hand, female choice, the most controversial component of the theory of sexual selection, seems to resemble artificial selection.11 The female of the species seems to play the part of the orchid cultivator or the horse or dog breeder who selects those traits of plants or animals that she finds most beautiful. Indeed, in the Quarterly Review, St. George Mivart argued that many of the traits in human life that Darwin would attribute to sexual selection should be assigned to artificial selection instead—to our ability, that is, to create transcendent moral ideals (rather than self-interested actions in sexual competition) according to a uniquely human sense of universal values. Mivart acutely identified a perturbation in Darwin’s theory: natural sexual selection in the animal kingdom somehow becomes artificial sexual selection among humankind. And this artificial selection ideally has an altogether different source and guide than the physiology of the sexual instinct: as soul or conscience, it must be instilled in man by God.12
It is not clear whether artists and art writers read Mivart’s essay. But its direction of argument suited conventional aesthetics: it was the riposte of deism and idealism to Darwinian aesthetics. Of course, the notion of an artificial or cultural selection of the sense of beauty in humankind entrained its own problems. After Darwin, one had to ask whether aesthetic appreciation really derives from a God-given sense of transcendent values. Might it not simply be the cunning of fashion mongers, like flower growers or dog breeders, that has manipulated the sexes into adopting odd and even morbid conformations for the sake of passing pleasures lacking in generative value? Obviously this suspicion must arise with special reference to fashions that seem to be the least natural—those indicating, for example, that the host cannot procreate, reproduces himself or herself in a highly cultivated process of grafting, or embodies a hybrid or intermediate sexuality. In strict evolutionist terms, it is true that one could constitute a homosexual sense of beauty in artificial selection of the character, when manifested; breeders might have known this (or seen it) all along.13 But this form of life would probably come at a very high cost—the cost, perhaps, of denying not only general natural fitness to this aesthetic but also specifically sexual success. The descriptions of the protagonists’s aesthetic tastes in Teleny, a pornographic novel written in the circle of Wilde, and Huysmans’s À Rebours partly turned on this matter. We know that Brillancourt in Teleny and Des Esseintes in À Rebours are perverts, possibly inverts, precisely because they admired and collected artificial, inbred or bred-out beauties as well as healthy ephebic males (in the case of the perverted Brillancourt) or weak, vulnerable, or damaged people of both sexes (in the case of the degenerate Des Esseintes).
§4. The sense of beauty, Santayana wrote in 1896, should be analyzed psychologically as “pleasure objectified,” and, as he added, it “borrows its warmth from the sexual passion.”14 In human sexual selection, in other words, and if we follow the direction that he seemed to imply, the supposed beauty of the female—the body and person of a woman taken by a man to be beautiful—objectifies the male’s pleasure in sexual choice, in imagining that the woman in question will yield sexually to him. Put the other way around, the feeling, the erethism, that accompanies the sexual choice (and presumably guides the subject in making the right or the best choice of objects) is aesthetic pleasure. But Santayana’s example of the process was not, in fact, a case of a male subject feeling sexual-aesthetic pleasure in his choice of a female sexual object. Instead he quoted from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets admiring—as it were choosing—the poet’s male favorite, “Mr. W. H.” Alternately “Mr. W. H.” could be said, of course, to have chosen Shakespeare—the act confirmed or acknowledged by the sonnet. Regardless, human history plainly includes traditions of homoerotic idealism in the sexual choice that is experienced as aesthetic pleasure, such as the pederastically constituted Greek art that Winckelmann and Kant had accepted as providing sure natural and social standards of beauty. Why?
The direction of an answer lies not only in Santayana’s recognition that a subject can take aesthetic pleasure, borrowing its warmth from the sexual passion, in people of the same sex. Because this pleasure (what some German writers had by then described as gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe or “same-sex love”) must be explained, it cannot be the explanation of its evolutionary emergence. It also lies in the phenomenon that Santayana allowed his reader to believe that he meant to address, despite the Shakespearean allusion, and that most of them probably understood him to be addressing: although actually referring to Shakespeare’s love for the mysterious “Mr. W. H.,” Santayana appeared to address the privileged or socially normative case of human sexual selection in which men choose women, that is, in which their sense of (female) beauty objectifies the pleasure of their (hetero)sexual victory, at least in fantasy. But that phenomenon, though heterosexual, is just as anomalous in natural history as homoerotic choice. In evolution in species other than the human, remember, it is supposedly the female who chooses the male—not the other way around. Within the general model of sexual selection promulgated by Darwin and his closest followers in the final third of the nineteenth century, the bigenderedness of the aesthetics of mating supposedly to be found in the human species is unusual, perhaps unique.
Admittedly Darwin’s meaning was sometimes opaque and his logic somewhat difficult to follow. Indeed he was literally trying to have things both ways. On the one hand, when he addressed the organization of generation in the human species, he subtly modified his usual talk about female choice of the most attractive, impressive, or ornamental males. Instead he referred to women stimulated by the beauty and display of men. If we take this phrasing at face value, the site and agency of the choice in question had shifted at least partway from the female, erstwhile an active judge of the aesthetic (and therefore the sexual) qualities of her prospective mate, to the male as an active creator-performer of his aesthetic (and sexual) qualities to a passively aroused female—virtually as if he had chosen to stimulate her in order that she proceed to choose him. On the other hand (pushing this logic to its natural outcome), in an often overlooked passage in The Descent of Man Darwin stated that males in the human species have acquired the “power of [sexual] selection” in addition to females.15 In the evolution of humankind, then, Darwin took the very mechanism of sexual selection to be different from the process that he had identified elsewhere in nature, where male beauty evolves simply because of female attraction to it.
Perhaps Darwin wanted to calibrate his account of sexual selection in the human species with the main trend of British empirical aesthetics, which we might consider to be the taken-for-granted of his own informal aesthetics; in the aesthetics of Hay or Dr. Symonds, as already noted in §2, the sense of beauty and its cultural productions in art and fashion were clearly defined as male heterosexual erethisms. Moreover, and needless to say, many critics had been finding it hard to swallow Darwin’s notions about the “female choice” of male beauty, whether applied to human beings or not. Darwin’s qualifications regarding human evolution could be taken to appease, if not to ratify, widespread prejudices about the supposed irrelevance of females in the evolutionary progress of mankind or in any evolutionary development whatsoever. Finally, he probably wanted to accommodate the putative facts of human ethnology, in which men are known to admire and to pursue the beauty of women and indeed actively to devise and enforce the canonical aesthetic standards of female beauty. In other words, Darwin’s model of sexual selection in the human species took it to be as it were more diversely heterosexual than usual in nature, where the aesthetic attraction between the sexes is, as it were, monoheterosexual: in the birds and nonhuman mammals, only one sex (almost always the female) attends to the beauty of the other and chooses. By contrast, in the human species the aesthetic-selective organization of generation is biheterosexual. (This should be distinguished from an intrinsic human bisexuality. That notion would seem to require a nonnaturalistic Platonistic mythology of primordial androgyny or a Freudian metaphysics of polymorphous perversity in infantile sexuality, essentially ungendered even though the infant has an anatomical sex. But it was a short step from the recognition that in the human species both sexes are attracted to one another to the notion that each sex is attracted to both sexes.) For each human sex, to be sure, only one kind of sexual selection and its accompanying sense of beauty inclines toward mating and procreation: the heterosexual or cross-sex kind. But all kinds of sexual attraction, procreative or not, might be taken to contribute to the generativity of the human species precisely because of the bigendered heterosexuality involved in human reproduction. This opened the door for a novel rhetorical mediation (if not a final conceptual resolution) of the problem of homosexual attraction.
To be specific, if both males and females in the human species, as Darwin asserted, have “acquired the power of [sexual] selection,” selecting what they take to be beautiful in the opposite sex, then it is possible that both cross-gender and same-sex identifications of the beautiful must occur in order for these opposite-sex judgments of sexual selection to proceed. One needs to be able to understand how other people both in one’s own sex and in the opposite sex both embody and appreciate the beautiful both in one’s own sex and in the opposite sex to make any sexually specific selection of the beautiful, at least insofar as this awareness must be conceived not simply as a pure judgment of taste (as in conventional aesthetics) but also as sexual selection, a biological wager about one’s own and the potential partner’s fitness in relation to competitors of both genders (in a nascent evolutionary aesthetics).
In other words, as Kant had argued, one needs to possess the faculty of the sensus communis and to participate in its full sociability in order to make aesthetic judgments—judgments that in their subjective universality ensure that one is a universal subject. To this view Darwinism could add, in theory, that the sensus communis is the sense of a species that makes aesthetic choices not only about nonhuman objects in nature but also about itself as an object, in all cases striving to be both the ideal judge of itself and others as well as their ideal object. In turn, we can see how Winckelmann’s model of the cycles of Nachahmung in Greek culture (chapter 1) might be rewritten as a Darwinian model of Greek homo-sexual selection. In cultivating the beauty of men, certain males, along with the females of the species, take full part in shaping the generativity and proliferation of the group, because men constituted as a result of this admiration—the evolutionary products of this culture—should be maximally suited to prevail in the struggle to mate: their cultural ideality symbolizes their natural fitness. (Exactly the same holds, symmetrically, for women.) This ideal is canonical for both sexes, the troublesome point that official Kantianism had struggled to accommodate (chapter 1). Indeed, it is evolutionarily created by both sexes—by the human sensus communis. In representational terms, it would be tempting to suppose that this canonical ideal should have an androgynous morphology, and indeed such a being was widely imaged in literary and visual culture between Kant and Darwin. The crucial point is not, however, that the ideal looks bi- or perhaps nongendered, but that it is erethically approved—sensuously admired—by both genders equally, whatever its morphology; nonandrogynous representations of human form could certainly qualify. We can get to this result without the notion of homosexuality as a special nonprocreative function. As already noted, we can get to it simply by recognizing that human generation, including procreation, proceeds in the fittest possible way when both sexes fully participate in all judgments of human beauty. (Of course, throughout we must make the Darwinian assumption that the sense of beauty is, indeed, determined in natural and sexual selection [§2].) In this light, the same-sex appreciations of the beautiful that the cross-gender or biheterosexual functions of human generation seem to involve (or at least permit without penalty and with specifiable biological and social benefit) could be seen as progressive adaptations of the species. And in this light we can see how Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) and many similar pseudoevolutionary psychopathologies of sexual decadence and social degeneration (chapter 5)—decadence and degeneration often imagined to have specifically homosexual cause—could be countered, point for point, by a naturalistic homoerotic aestheticism. Any fully robust naturalistic aestheticism, in fact, could not but admit homoerotic attractions, whether or not it explained them in terms of instinctual homosexuality.
§5. Consider the prolific intellectual labors of Symonds, which were more systematic and philosophical than they have often been described. In essays on the philosophy of evolution and the application of evolutionary principles to art and literature, written in the later 1880s and early 1890s, Symonds often adopted an evolutionism in familiar developmentalist terms rather than specifically Darwinian ones. He addressed himself, for example, to the supposed life-history of styles, a project not reserved for Darwinian art historians even though Darwinian art writers tried their hand at it, including Allen in Evolution in Italian Art (1908) and especially Yrjö Hirn in his Origins of Art (1900).16 More important, Symonds’s essays on style and other contributions to criticism echoed his creative revisions of Hegel’s progressivist history of mind and culture. He had partly worked them out, as we have seen, in histories of classical Greek poetry and art and of Renaissance Italian culture published in the 1870s before he had any obvious engagement with Darwinism. Symonds conceived the Hegelian evolution of Spirit, its becoming-Absolute, essentially to require homoerotic self-consciousness—to require, in fact, the same kind of cross-gender and same-sex identifications, attractions, and admirations (Symonds sometimes explicitly characterized them as general “altruism”) that sexually selected judgments of the beautiful might seem to allow, though Symonds did not connect the dots at the time. When this theory rose to the surface, as it did in Symonds’s chapter on “The Genius of Greek Art” in Studies of the Greek Poets (1873) or in his remarks on homoerotically attractive beauty in the art of Ghiberti and Donatello or Signorelli and Michelangelo in Renaissance in Italy (1877), Symonds was reviled by some critics for the incorrectness of his aesthetic and ethical judgment. But his judgments of taste were intended to echo the canons of judgment that he attributed to Renaissance artists, and they were well defended in his neo-Hegelian scheme of progress in human history—a scheme that was not directly challenged by his critics or even properly noted by them (see chapter 4).
In principle, Symonds’s neo-Hegelian framework could be translated into more naturalistic terms. But in the 1870 and 1880s that was exceedingly hard to do. Certainly it is difficult to extract a coherent formula from Symonds’s inconclusive projects. In my view, an animating proposition, however, did guide him. All aesthetic instincts and all artistic creations, whatever their specifically sexual origin, can be spiritually “idealized” and might therefore contribute to human improvement, not least in broadening all kinds of human franchise that erstwhile have been limited, unnaturalistically, by parochial norms and canons of moral and social life. In turn this “democracy,” as it were natural and ideal, might advance human generativity by perfecting its appreciative breadth and social generality in the inevitable struggles of natural and sexual selection, constituting what we would now call “diversity” in both biological and sociocultural terms. In the end, and to stick with the terms that Symonds would have explicitly recognized, the absolutification of aesthetic consciousness and the survival of the fittest must be identical.17
Of course, it was not surprising that Symonds could not wholly shake off the notion that some instincts, including homosexual arousal or libido, simply cannot be conceived as natural, and therefore remain outside the pale of all possible horizons of idealization, whether characterized as noetic progress toward Hegel’s Absolute Mind or as improved standing in Darwin’s struggle for existence, the quiet war in the fields and forests. (As we have seen in chapter 4, to get his dialectical argument off the ground, Symonds tautologically had to attribute an instinctive natural goodness to certain homoerotically inclined artists and to see other artists as base or degenerate.) But his broadest point seemed to be that the homoerotic component of all spiritual progress in human culture, widening and deepening “man’s love for man,” was eminently natural. A Darwinian as much as a Hegelian should be happy to see such love unfold and flourish in the world. This perspective could not warrant all forms of human homosexual interaction. But it was enough for Symonds to conclude that homoerotic attractions are not always utterly unnatural.
This philosophy originally derived, as noted, from Symonds’s liberalist Hegelian reflections. But it prepared him to canonize the poetry of Walt Whitman, which he had admired since he first read it in the mid-1860s, and to affiliate himself with partisans of so-called adhesiveness (Whitman’s word) and comradeship (Carpenter’s). And it prepared him to admire the work of certain contemporary artists. Eight or ten years after completing his volume on the fine arts for Renaissance in Italy, that is, in the mid-1880s, Symonds made preparations for a revised edition, though in the end it did not appear. As he asserted in a new paragraph for the introduction, a new social and ethical basis for art had arisen in his own time: in the poetry of Whitman (above all) one encountered a vision of “democratic art.” (Needless to say, the Italian Renaissance, the “age of the despots,” had nothing to do with democracy; genuine democratic art had to be a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon.) In it, Symonds projected, one could hope to find a naturalism that properly balanced the ethical claims of both realism and idealization: “The subjects rendered to the chisel and the pencil will be human life and nature, no longer viewed through the intervening mediums of myth and fable, but seized in their reality, and raised to poetry by the intensity of the artistic vision.” Of course, the traditional sources of this idealization in pagan myth and Christian theology were “now well nigh exhausted.” But Symonds imagined that modern science would be most thoroughly consistent with an art that was not only sufficiently sensuous and “natural” but also properly ideal or “spiritual.”
Man as he is; Nature as man knows her; these must be the sources of the inspiration of art’s future. And of the sensuous medium which art requires for its free play, a sensuousness penetrated throughout by spirituality, there is in this new democratic stuff of art no lack. Whether the signs of this possible development of figurative art are even now apparent, I leave it to the students of Frederick Walker and [George] Mason, of Walt Whitman, and of the French naturalistic school, to determine.18
By the “French naturalistic school,” Symonds usually meant the novelists Victor Hugo and Émile Zola and their epigones as well as the drawing and painting of Jean-François Millet (see figure 32). In Britain, and in addition to the painters Walker and Mason, Symonds admired Simeon Solomon, Edward Clifford, and Henry Scott Tuke. Unfortunately, however, it was not easy for an honest critic to find aesthetic balance in the homoerotic creations of the last-named painters. While Solomon’s art was far too sensual, Clifford’s was too sanitary. And Tuke often produced paintings that were unnaturalistic; the figures were artificially posed despite their plein air context, and the pictures were highly repetitive from one to the next in their composition and narration. None of the three artists was really capable of the full synthesis of sensuousness and spirituality that had already been achieved by many Renaissance masters.19 No one of them would now be regarded, of course, as a vanguard artist, and even at the time none had emerged as a leader in the renovation of British art. Despite his hopes for modern British painting and poetry, then, Symonds was forced to recognize that the “new spirit” in art had appeared many centuries ago, and indeed that the very work of art in modern culture (that is, in relaying modern Spirit) had perhaps long been done. For that very reason, one probably had to pin his hopes for ethical progress and social change on the new sciences of the human mind—on physiological and philosophical psychology and such professions as sexology and psychopathology.20
Beginning in the early 1880s, then, Symonds tried to work out the sexual ethics that might warrant the cultural possibility of a “spiritual,” “altruistic,” or “democratic” aesthetics in art. The “problem in Greek ethics,” the subject of a privately printed monograph on ancient pederasty in 1873, had been the way in which Greek and Roman social, iconographic, and philosophical traditions often distinguished an altruistic and socially sanctioned pederasty (oriented toward the transmission and improvement of ideals) from a disfavored homosexual sensuality. Well before Michel Foucault (chapter 9), Symonds emphasized the highly ascetic nature of Greek homoerotic sexuality—its official ethics of temperance and self-restraint and its aesthetics of reserving the pleasures of sex between men for one or two erotic zones of the body, even denying them altogether in favor of a more “spiritual” coupling.21 Printed nearly twenty years later, after Symonds had absorbed Darwinian thought as well as contemporary psychological and psychopathological research, A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) reformulated the original “Greek” problem as a conflict between two nineteenth-century models of contrary sexual feeling. Both were seemingly founded, with equal plausibility, in a neo-Darwinian natural and moral history.22 In one of these models, as we have already seen, homosexuality was degenerate or doomed to die out. In the other model, however, one tried—in several arenas Symonds tried mightly—to state the diametrically opposite point: variation enhances nature.
Indeed, nature—the world, the macrocosm—might be conceived as the sum and unity of all natural variations, each of which belongs to the whole. As Edward Carpenter put it in “The Human Body in Its Relation to Art,” published in Angels’ Wings in 1898, “the sense of beauty… seems to be some strange intimation or perception of the unity of all beings. It is the perception through the senses of universal relations in an object; of the soul (or whole) by which alone after all the object exists—and which is sometimes seen, as it were a halo, around it.”23
And as he added in “The Individual Impression,” an essay in the same volume:
All the individual achievements in Art in all periods and places—every note of which is truly a result of individual experience—all rooting back and down into the common underlying bases of Humanity, are really organic with each other, and together (and together only) constitute the complete expression. It only needs perhaps for our consciousness to slip through the thin veil of the momentary and ephemeral, in order to perceive this other world of union with our fellows, and our nearness and at-home-ness in every part of it.24
Human self-consciousness in art and science relays an “instinct of Nature’s unity.” But Nature herself is “individual to her very finger-tips.”25
Carpenter fancied himself to be an observant, practical naturalist, and the basis of his aesthetics was pure Darwin: “the Sexual lies at the root of Beauty and the Art-sense—and it cannot and must not be ignored.”26 All of his examples were clear cases of sexual selection: the elks “hooting to each other across the forests”; the neatly decorated lawn of Amblyornis inornata, “spread for its amours”; the “gorgeous” tail of the Argus pheasant that Darwin had said had evolved, tiny increment by tiny increment over hundreds of generations, in the female bird’s selection of a form initiated as a single variant feather in the male.27 In these and other beauties, Carpenter observed, a “great need of union surges up through the animal world.” Thus, he believed, in “giving utterance to the sense of Beauty on the plane of intelligence.… [Art] is only expressing again in another form what Sex has said since the beginning of the world.”28
It is not surprising, then, that Carpenter defined his aesthetic and political program for modern art as the “redemption of [sex] into its true relation to Art.”29 In critical studies published in Angels’ Wings and elsewhere, he found this renaissance in his own time in the painting and graphic art of Millet (figure 32), the poetry of Whitman, and Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerken. In part, he asked that Art simply “face all the facts of life and Nature,” including a “free sane acceptation of nakedness and grossness,” what he called a “thorough acknowledgment of the Body.”30 Looking at British painting in the later 1880s and nineties, however, Carpenter, like Symonds, had to admit that the “vacant blamelessness” and “rather feeble decorative tendency” of Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the leading painters of the day, was far too “anemic” to do the job he had in mind.31 The ornamental tendency of these artists struck Carpenter as artificial. Its unconvincing selection of beauty was less than truly sexual; it intimated an erotic basis for the image, but it did not really display it with the “free sane acceptance” that might secure it as natural human sexuality.
FIGURE 32. Jean-François Millet (1814–75), The Sower (1851). Lithograph on dark cream Asian paper, 19.5 × 16.2 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of Frederick Keppel, 1906. Photograph copyright 2009, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
FIGURE 33. Constantin Meunier (1831–1905), The Stevedore (1890). Bronze, h. 48.9 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Courtesy Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
Carpenter was well aware of the homosexual overtones of certain works of contemporary academic and aesthetic painting. But his naturalism called not for the camouflaged suggestions of androgynous or mildly homoerotic sensuality preferred by Burne-Jones. Instead, Carpenter valued the more compelling corporeality to be seen in contemporary French and American figurations of the human body. In particular he praised the unification of a “noble Impressionism with a broad Realism” in the painting of Édouard Manet and the sculpture of Constantin Meunier (figure 33). These artists did not visibly promote any particular beauty, appealing to any particular kind of sexual attraction. Rather, Carpenter thought, they rendered the empirical qualities of objects, and relayed sympathies toward the world, in ways that grasped a “common life,” the “brotherhood” of men and of things—that attained representative representation in the sense explored in chapter 3. Manet’s or Meunier’s art must have been generated, he thought, in a deep sense of the “great comradeship of Nature.”32 In their painting and sculpture it was as if the Darwinian struggle for existence had been converted to a Whitmanian cosmic fellow feeling (and, of course, vice versa insofar as both artists were realists as well as idealists in Carpenter’s sense). We have already seen a similar transference staged in Symonds’s criticism. At the height of human art, panerotic self-consciousness will redeem and idealize the original sexual selections of the species. But this is not to transcend or escape nature. It is to become most fully natural.
Carpenter’s doctrine of form was a serviceable interpretation of Whitman’s poetic catalogs of all the diverse beauties that make up the “facts of life and Nature,” including unusual, variant, grafted, hybrid, intermediate, and even nongenerative and monstrous forms—the phenomena that Carpenter addressed in many wide-ranging studies of the “intermediate people” and the “third sex.” As a viable evolutionary anthropology, however, Carpenter’s aesthetics depended on the central idea that in the sense of beauty human consciousness enters into sympathetic union with fellow creatures, human or not, even with inanimate things. And this mysticism, although typical among Whitmanites in Britain, did not recommend itself to naturalistic psychology unless it could be understood empirically. How does the sense of beauty, rooted in the frisson of a particular sexual attraction, actually move from self to others and from human objects to things in the world, and back again, in the identifications and recursions—including homoerotic and other unusual, intermediate, or specialized attractions—imagined by Symonds and Carpenter?
§6. Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) pursued this question with great energy and intelligence. Aside from her books on Renaissance and eighteenth-century cultural history, her supernatural tales and novels of manners (including a satire of aestheticism, Miss Brown), and her criticism, her contributions to aesthetic psychology art ranged from precocious essays on “Taine’s Philosophy of Art” and “Comparative Aesthetics,” published in the late 1870s when she was in her early twenties, to Art and Man (1924), The Handling of Words (1927), and Music and Its Lovers (1932), published when she was in her sixties and seventies. The main drift of her earlier work, especially the essays in Belcaro (studies of “sundry aesthetical questions,” published in 1881), stressed that an observer’s response to a work of art, his or her ability to understand its formal organization and effects, depends on a background of interests, associations, feelings, and memories. As she noted in “Cherubino,” an essay in Belcaro on the performance of opera, one might sing an operatic part perfectly at the strictly musical level, that is, hitting all the notes and using the most correct phrasing. But this skill would be to no avail, she believed, if the singers (as well as the composer, librettist, and conductor) did not fully appreciate the character portrayed and the moral of the story. The affective dimensions of art and our emotional relation to its represented subjects, such as the character of Cherubino, are just as important, or more important, than the technical and formal perfection of the work or its performance.
In the 1890s Lee collaborated with her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson (“Kit”), a trained painter as well as an accomplished athlete, in a series of artistic and psychological experiments. Lee and Kit published “Beauty and Ugliness” in the Contemporary Review in 1897 and submitted and discussed a questionnaire on the “role of the motor element in visualaesthetic perception” at the Fourth Congress of Psychology in the same year. Over the next decade they pursued complementary studies of what would come to be called “empathy” in European and British psychology, “a hypothesis,” Lee claimed, “which may be compared to that of natural selection in its originality and far-reaching importance.”33 In the early 1890s Lee had been having conversations with a young American art historian, Berenson, about corporeal and tactile identifications in the appreciation and criticism of art. She fell out with him when he accused her of stealing his doctrine of “tactile values,” stated in Florentine Painters in 1896, which she reviewed for Mind. Berenson had argued that in admiring and even in attributing a work of art, we identify—we literally see—the muscular rhythms, the ways of handling and making, characteristic of a particular artist, whether habitual or not and whether or not passed on to other artists. (In fact, this notion was as deeply indebted to the connoisseurship of Giovanni Morelli and to Santayana’s concept of objectified pleasure as it was to Lee’s work on empathy.)34 And, unlike Berenson’s art criticism, Lee’s technical articles, published in three languages between 1897 and 1910, engaged the concept of Einfühlung at its sources in the so-called James-Lange theory of the emotions, Karl Groos’s studies of play (or the pleasurable manipulation of objects for its own sake), and Theodor Lipps’s experiments in the perception of form and space. All this was summarized in her short popular book, The Beautiful, published in 1913, and reprinted and updated in the massive volume Beauty and Ugliness of 1912. In Art and Man of 1924, she published Kit’s writings and drawings bearing on the topic; these dated from the first years of their friendship in the 1890s. Finally, between 1901 and 1904 Lee kept remarkable “Gallery Diaries,” as she called the memoranda that documented her corporeal experiences in face-to-face interaction with sculptures and paintings in galleries in Florence and Rome. She used this introspective record to supplement and often to criticize the laboratory experiments of the academic psychologists.
According to the theory of emotion promoted by Carl Lange and William James, we should not say that our sadness makes us cry. Rather, we should say that our tears make us sad.35 And, according to the general concept of Einfühlung, we say that a column, an oak tree, or a mountain “rises up,” and seemingly expresses height, spread, or grandeur, because it is we who lift ourselves in seeing it. The physiological and perceptual responsiveness that organizes emotion and empathy understood in this way ultimately derives from the structure of the nervous system and the evolution of the species in adaptation to its environment. (The organism has been evolved in some way, usually described quite vaguely by theorists of empathy, to respond appropriately in the actions and sensations of its own body to the real properties of the objects it encounters in its world.) In taking pleasure in an artwork, in judging it to be beautiful, or in performing it perfectly, then, one responds naturally as a well-adapted body, moving and flexing himself or herself in motor-muscular and visual-kinaesthetic modalities as a human being is naturally selected to move and flex. The artwork is said to “express” its sensuous meaning for us and to give us sensory pleasure because in it we enact our corporeal fitness.36
Lee had launched these inquiries by examining, for example, the archaeologist Emanuel Löwy’s idea that Classical Greek sculpture developed from dreiansichtig or three-sided views (deployed in the styles of the sixth and early fifth century BC) to Vielansichtigkeit, a sculptural many-sidedness or all-roundness in which all views of the figure should be intelligible and pleasurable (especially visible in the works of the early fourth-century sculptor Lysippos). This art-historical proposal required one to ask empirically whether the represented gestures of sculpted figures could be naturally (that is, pleasurably) imitated by the observer all round the object, as Löwy’s interpretation of Lysippan statuary seemed to require, or conversely whether sculptures, including Lysippan Vielansichtigkeit, usually settle into a subset of views or converge on a dominant image to which the observer’s imitating body can best conform. In working out an approach to this question, Lee credited Kit with the recognition that the observer of the statue does not conduct an “inner imitation” of the represented gestures, as Karl Groos and other empathy theorists would have to suppose. The observer responds not to a real human bodily motion but to a sculpted figure, and therefore his or her empathy must include the organization of the matter of the representation itself, its formal “balance,” not simply the thing denoted. (The “balance” includes the configuration of visual, spatial, and mechanical relations between various things represented, for example, the way in which a sculpted foot seems to “press into” the “ground” of a pedestal.)37 This discovery did not fully dispose of Löwy’s problem: an empathetic perception of masses or shapes might or might not be attained by an observer orienting himself or herself to the work at each and every one of its aspects. But it did transpose the psychological question from the iconography of a work of art to its form, a transposition Lee believed that Berenson had failed fully to make in spite of what we would now call his formalism.38
FIGURE 34. John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Miss Anstruther-Thomson, probably 1889. Charcoal on paper, 34.4 × 23.5 cm. Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin; Presented by Annabel Blackburne, 1942. Courtesy Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane.
On the basis of this research, in the late 1890s or early 1900s Kit proposed to revise certain restorations of ancient sculpture that she thought had been mishandled by antiquarians. She wanted to reset the detached head of an Athena Lemnia, for example, so that the whole reconfigured body “seemed rightly placed and the figure looked natural.”39 (A well-known classical archaeologist, Adolf Furtwängler, had put the head on the body such that it seemed to face the wrong way, at least according to Kit’s empathetic [re]enaction of the work. Presumably, then, the fragments did not actually belong together: probably the wrong head was attached to the body.) To take another example, the two friends conducted experiments, which began partly as parlor games, dressing up as famous painted figures, such as the mysterious lady on the left side of the scene in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. In part, they hoped to clarify the much-debated iconography, and in particular the allegory, of Titian’s painting by reenacting the corporeal feeling, the “attitude,” of the depicted figures. These inquiries motivated an extended analysis of the way in which the observer (who need not actually dress up and pose like the represented characters in the picture) empathetically grasps the painting. In Art and Man Lee published a drawing by John Singer Sargent depicting Kit dressed as Titian’s lady and apparently in the act of sketching (making an image of the painting itself? figure 34). This drawing was done at the Sargents’s summer retreat at Fladbury in 1889, when Sargent also painted portraits of Kit and Lee, his guests, and when the love affair between them apparently took off.40
Lee and other theorists of Einfühlung wondered whether these corporeal self-enactions were actual and therefore visible to self and others, as Kit always and Lee initially thought, or whether they were apprehended without motor activity, somehow represented to the mind as an image of action—as Lee came to think after she had ceased to work with Kit and on confessing that often she had never really experienced the shuddering, bobbing, and weaving that Kit described as her empathetic relation to art. As Lee explained, she replaced their initial working concept of “inner imitations” of perceived objects in “muscular sensations” with a more refined account of the way in which we perceive objects in “motor images” or what Lee (then) called empathy—our sense that the object is “doing” something. In this respect, Lee was always offended aesthetically by objects that seemed to be doing too much too violently, an effect that she often called gibbering. Gibbering had to be distinguished from the merely iconographic intelligibility of the representation of sudden or violent gesture: although the Laocoön might depict the agitated expressions and ferocious struggles of the three depicted human figures, the Trojan priest and his two sons caught in the coils of the giant seasnake, “it does so,” Lee pointed out, “in a particularly elaborate pattern which forces the attention [i.e., the “motor imagination”] to dwell upon and return to the same points, thus producing a sufficiently restful aesthetic impression.”41
Still, the “Gallery Diaries” exhaustively documented Lee’s irritable corporeal condition in looking at art, if not her motor-muscular self-enaction. She painstakingly recorded her level of energy and affect (often “depressed”); her “palpitations” (as she called them), that is, her breath heaving or heart racing, often from climbing stairs to reach an exhibition; her “rhythmic obsessions” (she often felt her experience of looking to be accompanied by musical images, which she would “try out” on paintings or sculptures); and her emotional state (usually connected with emotionally charged meetings with female friends in the same place or at about the same time as the encounter with the art itself) and her sense of self and others (she found it difficult to enjoy art, that is, to self-enact herself, in a gallery full of total strangers).
As all this might suggest, Lee’s theory of empathy grounded aesthetic pleasure as much in the sexual and intersubjective excitability of her body, situated in a social environment wider than the art gallery itself, as in its natural sensory-motor responses to proximate stimulation. When she singled out the aesthetic power of particular works of art, she focused on productions that displayed a “labyrinthine” quality for her—and supposedly for others too. In our “muscular sensation” or “motor imagination” of such works, we are “drawn in,” as she liked to put it; we “constantly circle”; we enter a “maze.” Indeed, we are practically “hypnotized,” as if our sensory-motor consciousness had somehow been captured in a restricted and repetitive yet endlessly varied movement that seems to us to be held within the form or shapes of the object. (Lee was familiar with Paul Souriau’s L’esthétique du mouvement, published in 1889, especially his theory of art as quasi hypnosis; in addition, she seems to have studied the psychophysiology of Georges Espé de Metz Saint-Paul, the popular French sexologist “Dr. Laupts,” on “paraphasic,” hypnoid, and hypnagogic states of mind and feeling.)42 It is worth quoting a full entry in the “Gallery Diaries”:
April 29 [1904]. Yesterday I went into the Baptistery after taking Mlle. K—to the station. Good spirits, but unwilling, and from mere sense of duty went into Baptistery. The place interested me so little, I felt so completely the hopelessness of such attempt to be interested, that I even began to read the newspaper as a sort of excuse for resting on a bench; the unsuccess of my aesthetic attempts (at enjoyment) being positively degrading. Walking about, my eye caught that swirl pattern [figure 35]. I was immensely surprised that from a distance it took the appearance of a double trefoil. I approached; while approaching and while I stood quite still the pattern seemed to move very positively and violently; to dap up and down, swirl round and round, as I remember water does. I say I remember, because it is possible that by comparison with real water this would have been motionless—or the contrary? But the movement seemed to stay objective; I could trace no movement of my eye or attention. No work of art has ever given me such a positive sense of movement. I was not inclined to be interested, quite the reverse, and everything else seemed as dead as a door-nail.
I had been waiting at the station nearly an hour, noticing, undergoing the faces and manner and movement of the people with disagreeable vivacity. I did not notice about a tune. At the Duomo after; not very receptive.43
Elsewhere in the diaries, Lee observed Botticelli’s Primavera to have similar powers: when an observer is “made to tread [its] mazes,” its “upward and circular movements become actual almost, a sense of lifting and turning—yet not gibbering, though the thing is so fearfully acute as action.”44 But the “dapping” mosaic in the Baptistery was especially instructive because it was entirely abstract—virtually pure form. For the frontispiece in Beauty and Ugliness, Lee published Kit’s drawing of the Swirl (see figure 34), marking their collaboration and (in the text) acknowledging Kit’s original recognition of our corporeal-empathetic enaction of formal relations.45 In Art and Man Lee published an undated text by Kit, to which Lee gave the title “The Connection Between Man and Art,” which included Kit’s musings on “encrusted medieval patterns” with a drawing of another such mosaic at the Baptistery. Clearly Kit and Lee had spent a good time of time studying and drawing these floors. Lee’s Swirl, in other words, was partly a recognition of Kit’s aesthetic experience, of the natural and pleasurable movement of Kit’s responsive body for Kit herself—a body as it were now felt intensely by Lee as well. (Recall, too, that Lee entered the Baptistery and encountered the Swirl in a disgruntled mood shortly after the departure of Mlle K——.) In such empathy we identify (or, better, we try and we hope, perhaps we long, to identify) with another’s pleasurable corporeal responsiveness to the artwork.
By the same token, as Lee wrote in the diaries on January 23, 1903, in an artwork “the great artist captures us by filling us with a given movement, exclusively of all others, his, to which we willingly yield.” In just this way, she went on, such paintings as Sargent’s portraits “keep calling and alluring the ‘Eye.’” As the prime example, “think of the lady singing only in a labyrinth, so to speak, of Sargent.”
FIGURE 35. Clementina Anstruther-Thomson (1857–1921), Mosaic Floor Pattern in the Florence Baptistery, 1911. From Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1911), frontispiece.
Portrait of a Lady Singing, by Sargent. A picture gives not the value of the seen person or thing, but the summation of the person or thing seen, heard, felt, heard about. In this case this assemblage of lines… gives the value also of the lady’s singing.
The golden rule of art is not, as Lessing thought, to avoid representations of sudden, rapid, fleeting movements, but to make the representation of what we tolerated or were agitated by when thus sudden and fleeting, satisfying and interesting when permanent.46
Apparently Lee here referred to Sargent’s portrait of Lee’s good friend Flora Priestley, possibly also a lover, which may have been painted by Sargent at Fladbury during the fateful summer of 1889. (There are, however, other paintings by Sargent portraying women singing, and the portrait of Flora has not always been accepted to show her singing.) Ten years later it was exhibited in Boston, apparently with the title Lamplight Portrait of a Lady Singing. We have to imagine, I think, that Lee and Kit as well as Sargent were present at a lamplit dinner when Flora sang. But one wonders whether Lee remembered in 1903, recalling the picture, that Flora, the “lady singing,” had actually written to her in December 1898 about the portrait shortly before its exhibition in Boston: “Really, you know,” she told Lee, “tho’ an exquisite painting [it’s] the likeness of an odious person, and I am sure I never felt like that.” (Had Lee queried her about this empirical point of empathetic identification? If so, the full correspondence has not survived.) The point is that Lee’s feeling qua empathy was her feeling in relation to Sargent’s feeling for Flora (his feeling of Flora), not necessarily Flora’s feeling as depicted by Sargent, let alone Flora’s feeling during the episode of singing painted by Sargent as she remembered it. This is certainly a maze. But it is not only the maze of the formal organization of a work of art; formally Sargent’s portrait of Flora is quite simple. It is the maze of sociability itself—of our effort to understand and represent how we and others feel, especially about one another.47
In Lee’s psychophysiological aesthetics of empathy in relation to art, the observer forges an eroticized connection with the possibility (perhaps even the proximity) of another body seen or remembered to be taking (its own) corporeal pleasure: we are pleased by the portrait of the lady (pleased by) singing. But this erotic energy seems to be wholly absorbed into the work of art, to become its intrinsic objective movement or what Kit called its tensity. It was along these lines, I think, that Lee could reconcile her highly erethic aesthetic of empathy with a more familiar notion of the formal autonomy of artistic ideals. “The more a statue makes us look at it,” she concluded, “the more it holds us by its reality, the less moral (or immoral) feelings we shall have.… It is in this way that art, … —by accustoming us to translate reality into form (instead of form into reality)—can purify and elevate the contents of our consciousness.”48
Nonetheless, empathy in Lee’s sense is directed not only at transcendent artworks but also and primally at people. One cannot empathetically grasp the artwork without corporeal awareness of one’s own body and the bodies of others. Indeed, in the full circuitry of our empathetic relation to art there might well be moments when some “very beautiful people” evoke our aesthetic response, their aspect “drawing us inwards” and into them. Lee cited three women, for example, “Princess V., Mrs. S., even Lady V,” “whose “glance mak[es] us look at them.” Such people are not simply prototypes of artworks, which need not figure them at all. (Unlike Sargent’s portrait of Flora, the Swirl was not a representation of Kit or Mlle K——.) Instead they constitute the very conditions of possibility of aesthetic pleasure taken by us in art. Not surprisingly, however, Lee characterized the beautiful people in our aesthetic circuits as being like artworks for us. Ideally they are not “going out” to us, as she put it, but, like a statue or painted portrait, simply seem to be “there,” ineluctably drawing us in. As I have noted, Lee harped on her distaste for “gibbering” depictions of people in art, whom she wanted “well inside and monumental.” In particular, she despised “the catching of [the] eye” by pictures as well as by real people. (For example, the Leonardesque Joan of Naples at the Palazzo Doria, “one of the most engaging pictures,” struck her as “monumentally built, [with] no catching of the eye here”; as she went on, the “girl in her ample red draperies [is] seated with infinite contemplative leisureliness, and eyes looking nowhere.”)49 We could speculate, then, that the aesthetic defect of gibbering art ultimately derives from the erotic solitication of eye-catching people—that is, of beautiful people, self-cultivated aesthetically, trying to catch our eye in the ordinary routines and rituals of sexual selection in order to secure our admiration, our affirmation of their beauty. For Lee there was a very fine line, at any rate, between “alluring the ‘Eye’” of the beholder, “engaging” his or her attention, imagination, and imitation, or empathy, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, trying dramatically or artificially to attract empathy. Allure is attractive and admirable. But a mere self-interested lure is aesthetically distasteful. Or so we might read Lee’s scattered remarks to suggest about this aspect of the psychology of empathy. Stated another way, ideal empathy is other directed, as it were sociable and altruistic. If it remains wholly self-involved and self-interested (what slightly later writers called narcissistic), whether at the pole of the human object of empathy or its human subject, it cannot be realized (chapters 7 and 8).
Nonetheless, empathy, though it is a pulsation of attraction and attention, subsists egocentrically. In empathy we give ourselves corporeal pleasure or “take pleasure”—and find the object’s beauty. In the selections of the sense of beauty, its judgments of taste, we must be primordially attentive and attracted to ourselves, and in so doing we adapt and enfold the world to us. In the end, then, the empathetic aesthetic experience is preeminently self-affirming and self-preserving. Lee arrived at a wide statement in an important diary entry of 1904:
The action of art makes a little walled garden of the soul of all manner of cognate things, a maze, in which the attention runs to and fro, goes round and round, something extremely complex and complete, taking all our faculties.… I have for years felt that the artistic phenomenon was circular.… But whence this need of unity, co-ordination of mood? Surely it may be a necessity of the human soul in its effort to affirm itself to itself and to subdue the outer world to its purposes. The soul, consciousness, character, is for ever threatened with disintegration by the various forces of nature; our surroundings tend to break us to bits, to wash us away. The human personality has purpose, direction, unity, co-ordination as a law of its persistence. And we persist by adapting our surroundings to ourselves quite as much as ourselves to our surroundings.… The satisfaction of our bodily needs—sleep, food, generation, are not related with this persistence of the personality; they are responses of the individual to the general need. But given that the individual—what we call the soul—has come to exist as a part of the universe, this microcosm must, under penalty of destruction, perpetually seek to put its stamp upon the macrocosm, or at least affirm its existence as opposed to the macrocosm.… Art would therefore be, from the utilitarian, evolutional point of view, a school for this unity of mood, purpose, and plan, without which consciousness would disintegrate and human life disappear.50
Or to use the succinct and poignant formula Lee penned a few days later, “It is natural that a work of art should be a Hortus inclusus.”51 Not Nature, the garden, herself—but a “walled garden of the soul,” perhaps even a virginal one. (The metaphor of the Hortus inclusus surely intended its Christian significance as the allegory of Mary’s perfect virginal generativity.) Lee pursued this theme in Art and Life (1896), Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (1907), Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life (1909), and other works—a prolific and variegated literary and critical meditation on the culturing of friendship and love. Within the walled garden, “our activity of perception consists in looking round and round, in and out and back again—and looking over and over again.” Whether heteroerotic or homoerotic in relation to some particular object that attracts us, in the end our perception is of our own persistence. But, in this context, as Kit’s practical experiments and Lee’s theoretical explorations suggested, same-sex corporeal identification, our empathetic understanding of the muscular-motor sensations and actions that are “ours” (that is, “hers”—“mine”), would seem to be one natural mode of our awareness of ourselves and other human beings, of the human microcosm.52 It is one way through the maze.
Queer beauty or homoaestheticism (as we might describe this inclination of the sense of beauty) can be seen as one of the environmental conditions of natural selection in human sexual selection precisely because the latter enfolds aesthetic cultivation of the beauty of the self and others or artificial selection. In the sociability that surrounds human generation, and regardless of the specifically cross-sex relays required for sexual reproduction, men can find women and men beautiful and women can find men and women beautiful. And both women and men strive both to enact and to empathize with this diversity. Over time this must naturally create evolutionary recursions. Both women and men should, as it were naturally, become inherently bisexual in aesthetic culture and even homosexual with respect to particular human beauties “wired into” their aesthetic circuitry in the probes, pulsations, and involutions of empathy. This evolutional change, this culture, was conceived by Symonds, Carpenter, Lee, and others as progress—as an emergent and specifically human defense against the nature that assaults us. Far from being degenerate or decadent, and as Symonds, Carpenter, Lee, and others struggled to say, same-sex empathy and the attraction that rides on it (as well as same-sex attraction and the empathy that rides on it) must inhere in the ideals that promote human persistence. The very fact that women (or men) find other women (or men) beautiful, admirable, or desirable enables them to cultivate themselves in the struggle for existence in their community or even in the species. Of course, these ideals may be recognized more in the breach than they will be realized in practice. But this very fact defines the evolutionary role and the ethical task of art as the idealization of erotic sociability that might eventually ensure that humanity will flourish rather than decline.
As Lee recognized, if we are not to be washed away by the world it is because (and perhaps only because) we can love and admire ourselves in it. If this is love of the same, so be it.