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31:3 Book Reviews essay on the play, the moral centre. The question can be posed as to whether Ellmann now believes his earlier reading where Oscar (played by Herod) remains unable to decide whether to shack up with Ruskin (played by Iokanaan, previously playing in a piece by Flaubert) or the sinuous Pater (played by Salome). There are also minor irritations: two sets of notes (some at the foot of the relevant page) and a bibliography that has been thinned out to the vanishing point. The positive qualities predominate. As a consequence of the unification imposed by the image of Wilde as tragic hero, the book has a majestic flow, is continuously vivid and compellingly readable. It synthesises much new and relevant material. Splendidly apposite quotations from Wilde's notebooks (the Maurice Rollinat jottings are specially telling) suggest the breadth of the subject's culture, insight and wit. The numerous forgotten memoirs are exhumed and aptly deployed. We learn that Wilde was dashingly a Freemason in his twenties and that in 1894 there was a dress rehearsal for the passion play of the following year. Ross centrally, Wilde opportunistically, were involved in the seduction of several schoolboys but the fathers, though, furious, did not control so long a purse as that of the scarlet Marquis. The episode is not altogether creditable to Wilde. The play was revised and improved the following year. In that production, all but one of the "adenoidal Ganymedes" were "renters" or as we should now say "rent boys," adroit at lengthening intercrural no less than rectal spasms. Only the miserable Edward Shelley was a non-pro and his letters to John Lane about Elkin Mathews (Lane seems to have asked him to spy on Mathews) just anterior to the fracture of the partnership, reveal that Shelley was already as nutty as a fruit cake: whether Wilde pushed him over the edge is another matter. This is, one hardly needs to say it, by far the best biography of Wilde, and will continue to be so for many years to come. It can hardly by superseded, it can only be embellished. Ian Fletcher Arizona State University PATER REMEMBERED Robert M. Seiler, ed. Walter Pater: A Life Remembered. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1987. $24.95 For serious younger students of Pater, this book is a great boon. It places in their hands a wealth of standard reminiscences and less well-known writings on Pater that older students have been seeking out and collecting for years, from essays by Pater's younger contemporaries, such as William Sharp, Mary Arnold Ward, Humphry Ward, George Moore, Arthur Symons, Richard LeGallienne, Edmund Gosse, Lionel Johnson, Mary Duclaux, and George Saintsbury, to entries from A. C. Benson's Manuscript Diaries at Magdalene College, Cambridge, to which atten312 31:3 Book Reviews tion was first called by Laurel Brake in "Judas and the Widow, Thomas Wright and A. C. Benson as Biographers of Walter Pater: the Widow," presented first as a paper at the Pater Conference at Brasenose College in the summer of 1980. It includes excerpts from the Journal of S. R. Brooke on the Old Mortality Society researched by Gerald Monsman; G. J. Glass's comments on "Parson Pater" of the Enfield Grammar School, Ingram Bywater's comments on Pater at the Queen's College in a letter to Dr. H. Diels, excerpts from Vernon Lee's Letters, student remembrances of Pater as teacher and Brasenose presence, written by D. S. MacColl and "an Undergraduate," all used effectively by Sir Michael Levey in The Case of Walter Pater, 1978; and excerpts from letters of Henry James brought forth by Adeline R. Tintner in "Pater in The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl, Including Some Unpublished Henry James Letters," 1982. In fact, within the covers of this book the student has most of the texts upon which biographical writing on Pater has been based. The older student of Pater who has read all the biographical works that have previously appeared will find little in Walter Pater: A Life Remembered that is new. However, many of these Paterians will not have read the entries from Falconer Madan's Private...

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