Waiting for the Barbarians (25 page)

Mahaffy and Jowett weren’t the only Hellenists advocating a profoundly engaged approach to the classics during the latter half of the nineteenth century. During Wilde’s time at Oxford the literary critic and poet John Addington Symonds was publishing his two-volume
Studies of the Greek Poets
(1873, 1876). While their earnestness and dogged effort at comprehensiveness may have been exhaustingly typical of mid-Victorian criticism, these volumes were particularly celebrated (or derided) for their unusually passionate, personal, and florid style: a style that hinted at a more than purely academic degree of investment in the subject, and suggested, once again, that the Greeks could have more than a “dry as dust” meaning for the present day. Symonds, like Mahaffy, urged his readers to visit the Mediterranean sites in order to be able to feel the still-living connection to ancient civilizations. (He compared Aristophanes to Mozart, and Aeschylus to Walt Whitman and Shakespeare.) In 1874 Symonds published a three-volume collection of travel pieces,
Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece
.

One secret reason for Symonds’s engagement is by now well known. Like certain others of the “Oxford Hellenists” of the mid-nineteenth century—including Walter Pater, another figure whose work Wilde would admire extravagantly—Symonds was a secret homosexual
who sought, through readings of the Greek classics, to find both expression for and justification of his own sexual nature. Indeed, Symonds later wrote in his memoirs that he had virtually discovered his sexuality through a reading of Plato’s
Phaedrus
and
Symposium
: the night he read their “panegyric of paiderastic love” was “one of the most important of my life.” In time, he would go on to write explicitly about Greek homosexuality in
A Problem in Greek Ethics
, a text that was circulated privately for ten years before its eventual publication, in 1883, and is now seen as a foundational document of modern homosexual studies. (His
A Problem in Modern Ethics
, published in 1891, suggests reforms for the antihomosexual laws that would, in time, doom Wilde.)

However flowery his style and whatever lip service he paid to conventional condemnation of “paiderastia,” there were those who were able to read between the lines of Symonds’s work—especially the lines of the final chapter of the second volume of
Studies of the Greek Poets
, with its controversial defense of Greek rather than Judeo-Christian morals, which he dismissed as “theistic fancies liable to change.” (Phyllis Grosskurth’s 1964 biography of Symonds retells an amusing anecdote about a “shocked compositor” who, after setting the type of Symonds’s book, wrote an outraged letter to the author.) The critic and sometime watercolorist Richard St. John Tyrwhitt fulminated against Symonds’s book in a lengthy article that appeared in
The Contemporary Review
, warning that
Studies of the Greek Poets
advocated “the total denial of any moral restraint on any human impulses.” As a result of the controversy surrounding the second volume of his study, Symonds reluctantly withdrew his candidacy for the Poetry Chair at Oxford.

Small wonder that Wilde’s friend Frank Harris later recalled that Symonds’s
Studies of the Greek Poets
was “perpetually” to be seen in Wilde’s hands. (His copy of the second volume of that work is
dated May 1876, which is to say immediately after its publication: as the author of
Built of Books
observes, Wilde must have been hanging around the bookshop waiting for it to appear.) And all the more interesting, too, that when, during the summer holiday of 1876, the ambitious undergraduate turned his hand to reviewing Symonds’s latest volume—the text now published as
The Women of Homer
—the chapter to which he directed his critical attention was not the scandalous final one, with its implicit defense of male homosexuality. Instead, Wilde wrote about a chapter in which Symonds treated a subject that was all too clearly a delicate one for the author, an unhappily married homosexual, as well as to his eager young reader, another secret homosexual who would marry one day: women.

The Women of Homer
now takes its place as the earliest of several youthful classical writings that amply display a precocious intellectual and critical aplomb. A disjointed mass of notes and paragraphs that Wilde produced in about 1877 was edited a century later into a misleadingly finished-looking “essay” called “Hellenism.” However unoriginal this account of Spartan culture often is, it sometimes betrays a shrewd and crisply unsentimental appreciation of the Greeks and their qualities—such shrewdness and lack of sentimentality being the very qualities that mark the “Greek” facets of Wilde’s own work. Not the least interesting of its assertions is that the Greek city-states’ “selfish feeling of exclusive patriotism, this worship of the
[
polis
, city-state] as opposed to the
[
patria
, homeland]”—the quality with which the nineteenth-century admirers of Rome typically reproached the squabbling Greeks—was, in fact, the key to the Greek cultural achievement. It was this “selfishness” that, as Wilde saw it, saved the Greeks “from the mediocre sameness of
thought and feeling which seems always to exist in the cities of great empires.”

In an 1879 essay called “Historical Criticism in Antiquity,” composed for the Chancellor’s Essay Prize, Wilde strikingly rejected the prevailing Victorian appreciation of the classical texts as exemplars of “serenity and balance” (thus the great Greek scholar E.R. Dodds, on what he called “the orthodox Victorian assumption”), advocating instead what today we would call the decadent strain in Greek culture—what he celebrated as “that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude” to be found in the later poets and sculptors. Mahaffy’s insistence on the living relevance of the Greeks bore fruit in this essay: Wilde goes on to observe, provocatively but shrewdly, that the late nineteenth century, like the late fifth and the fourth centuries BC (the post-Periclean era, that is), was an age of “style,” in implicit opposition to the lofty “substance” of an earlier era. To the severity and gravitas of the high classical tradition, of which Sophocles has always been the supreme representative in dramatic literature, Wilde prefers Euripides, as he does the Hellenistic sculptors and other poets and artists who “prefer music to meaning and melody to reality.” Here we detect the first stirrings of an argument about aesthetics and society, the provocative elevation of “style” over “substance,” that would find its final form in mature works such as “The Decay of Lying,” “The Truth of Masks,” and Wilde’s critical writings.

At virtually the same moment that he composed the Chancellor’s Essay, Wilde contributed to the
Athenaeum
a long, unsigned review of Sir Richard Jebb’s entries on Greek history and literature in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. The twenty-five-year-old blithely took the professor of Greek at Glasgow to task for either denigrating, or omitting altogether from his article, authors or texts that were unconcerned with “serenity and balance.” Among the authors was the
notoriously effeminate tragedian Agathon, whom Wilde celebrates as “the aesthetic poet of the Periclean age.” Among the texts was a bizarre Hellenistic poem called
Pharmaceutria
, an idyll about a love-maddened witch that, Wilde asserts, “for fiery colour and splendid concentration of passion is only equalled by the ‘Attis’ of Catullus.” The admiring reference to the Roman poem—a lengthy work about a handsome acolyte of the goddess Cybele who castrates himself in a transport of religious fervor—is itself worthy of note. Barely out of university, the young Wilde’s taste for extreme gestures, in literature as in life, was plain.

The authority and highly defined taste, the willingness to attack established scholars and to propose startlingly original interpretations that distinguish “Hellenism,” the Chancellor’s Essay, and the
Athenaeum
article of 1879 are evident in
The Women of Homer
, the review of Symonds’s book, which Wilde began when he was not quite twenty-two. It is remarkable, not least, for standing in refreshing contrast to the platitudinous moonings of Symonds himself, who is unable to see the preeminent female characters in Homer—Helen, Penelope, and the maiden Nausicaa—as anything but cartoon figures representing conventional types of femininity.

As a product of the “Aesthetic” era, Symonds is good on certain features of Helen. He gets just right the curious and striking way in which Homer’s Helen “is not touched by the passion she inspires, or by the wreck of empires ruined in her cause.” (He follows this admirably succinct formulation with an unfortunate lapse into the style that irritated so many reviewers: “always desirable and always delicate, like the sea-foam that floats upon the crests of waves.”) But while he is capable of appreciating the
Iliad
’s Helen as the abstract symbol of beauty’s sheer force in the world—his evident preoccupation—he has no feel whatever for the subtler Helen of the
Odyssey
,
of whom he states, with disastrous obtuseness, that “the character of Helen loses much of its charm and becomes more conventional.”

Here Symonds is referring to Helen’s appearance in Book 4, in which Odysseus’ young son, Telemachus, comes calling on Helen’s husband, the Spartan king Menelaus, in order to obtain news of his long-lost father. It would, in fact, be hard to find a more unforgettable and less conventional scene in all of Homer. As Helen and Menelaus regale the awestruck youngster with tales of the war, ostensibly to share memories of Odysseus with the son who never knew him, their exchange suggests, with brilliant subtlety, that this marriage is still riven with tensions long after the wayward Helen has returned home with her husband. (Helen tells a self-serving story in which she seeks to present herself as a kind of pro-Greek spy, stranded behind the Trojan lines; Menelaus pointedly replies with a reminiscence of how Helen once tried to trick the Greeks hiding within the Trojan Horse into betraying their ruse.) Symonds ignores all of this—and, bizarrely, makes nothing of the fact that Helen has drugged her guests’ wine with a kind of tranquilizer before the storytelling begins: not at all what you’d call “conventional.”

Symonds’s reading of Penelope, the long-suffering heroine of the
Odyssey
, is similarly trivializing. For him, the “central point” of Odysseus’ wife is “intense love of her home, an almost cat-like attachment to the house.” In her famously clever ruse—the nightly unraveling of the shroud she claims to be weaving for her father-in-law—he sees not an impressive canniness but only a pat “parable” about those “who in their weakness do and undo daily what they would fain never do at all.” He fails completely to appreciate the climactic ruse by means of which Penelope tricks Odysseus into revealing his identity, which among other things demonstrates that she rivals her husband in cunning, and ends by dismissing the character as “far less fascinating than Helen.” He waxes ecstatic only about Nausicaa, the
virginal princess who so memorably, and with such aplomb, rescues the shipwrecked Odysseus when he washes up on her island home—“the most perfect maiden, the purest, freshest, lightest-hearted girl of Greek romance.” In this appreciation, as in so many of his interpretations of Homer’s women, Symonds seems trapped by a mid-Victorian fantasy that says more about his own anxieties about women—about his desire, perhaps, to encase them in manageable caricatures—than it does about the literary characters in question.