Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of "Greats"

Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of "Greats" William Shuter Eastern Michigan University [T] he two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. —Wilde, De Profundis WALTER PATER went up to Queen's College in 1858 and took his B.A. in 1862. In 1864 he was elected a fellow of Brasenose College, where he spent the rest of his life. Oscar Wilde went up to Magdalen College in 1874, taking his B.A. in 1878 after receiving a rare double first in the Final Schools. He then left Oxford for London determined to become a celebrity . Alfred Douglas went up to Magdalen in 1889 and left Oxford in 1893 without taking a degree and apparently without any definite plans. In a sense all three were Oxford men pursuing the same course of study, that remarkably ambitious school of Literae Humaniores or "Greats" designed not only to introduce young men to certain designated works of philosophy and history by the principal Greek and Roman authors but to train them to think critically about philosophic and ethical questions and to relate historically earlier to historically later stages of thought. As the instances of Pater, Wilde, and Douglas demonstrate, however, some young men were more receptive and retentive than others of its mental impress. I Pater was a don, a fact we often recall for the most part as an afterthought, supposing that Pater himself regarded it as a distraction. Probably no anecdote about the academic Pater has been more frequently repeated than the story of his inability to remember any of the scholarship examinations he had read except that of a candidate with the evocative name Sanctuary.1 In fact, however, the evidence indicates that Pater conscientiously performed the functions of a don, preparing young men for Moderations and the Final School in Greats, delivering college or catechetical lectures as well as university lectures 250 SHUTER : IMPACT OF "GREATS" and meeting with undergraduates in tutorials to review their essays.2 Moreover, it proves more difficult to divorce Pater the man of letters from Pater the don when we recognize the extent to which his published writings reflect, or have their origin in, the intellectual culture of which Greats was the centerpiece and the formal embodiment. In June of 1872 the list of "Special Subjects" in Greek History on which Greats candidates could elect to be examined included "Greek Art, with Pausanias I, V, VI."3 Pausanias, a second-century traveler and student of history, was the author of Description of Greece, a work that has since proven indispensable to historians and archaeologists for its careful descriptions of the religious sites he visited and the works of art he observed. In Michaelmas term of 1878 Pater offered a set of University lectures on the "History of Greek Art, with Books I, V, VI of Pausanias."4 Lewis Richard Farnell, who heard Pater's lectures, recalled that they dealt mainly with the "'Chest of Kupselos' and the Aeginetan Marbles." 5 They evidently formed the basis of the two essays that Pater published in the Fortnightly Review in 1880: "The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture" and "The Marbles of Aegina." But Pater's imagination was also stimulated by the venerable religious traditions preserved in Pausanias's book. An acknowledged initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries, Pausanias paid particular attention to the sanctuaries of Demeter, scrupulously recording the stories of the goddess he was told by the custodians. He was thus an important source for later writers on this subject, including Pater, who delivered his lecture "Demeter and Persephone" at the Birmingham and Midland Institute on 29 November 1875 and published it in a more complete form in the Fortnightly Review in January and February of 1876.6 In both the lectures on earlier Greek art and on Demeter, Pater introduced the recent findings of archaeology to confirm, explain, or supplement his literary sources: the discoveries of Schliemann at Mycenae in the first case and of Charles Newton at Cnidus in the second. Such use of archaeology was not yet a common practice at Oxford when Pater delivered his lectures on the history...