British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (review)

Stefano Evangelista’s first book is an elegant, intelligent, short, but significant contribution to the growing bibliography not just on the aestheticism of the final decades of the nineteenth century but also on the Victorian engagement with antiquity. Each of the four central chapters, framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, examines a familiar icon of the movement—Walter Pater, first and foremost, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde—but each also develops a fresh argument, not least by the focus on aestheticism’s profound and complex fantasy of Hellenism. Hellenism, in this context at least, inevitably privileges desire and gender, and the volume is particularly good when it intertwines the self-positioning of Lee and Field through their involvements with Pater and male models of classicizing, sexualized aesthetics.

The opening chapter on Pater establishes the frame for the other analyses. Evangelista describes Pater’s aestheticism as “a late-Romantic culture that looks to the Greek past in order to create a new artistic norm for its time” (45). This is explored through Pater’s treatment of the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the high priest of Romantic Philhellenism. Against Winckelmann’s famous lauding of the ideal of noble simplicity and calm, Pater “values Greece precisely for its epistemological complexity and its refusal to be fixed into a stable historical identity or single meaning” (36), although Pater is as capable as Winckelmann of talking of “a gracious Hellenic ideal” as a foundation of true art, which sounds rather less slippery and open than Evangelista’s description of Pater as a hero of postmodern glissement. Most importantly, however, Evangelista brings to the fore the multiple layering of Pater’s antiquity: passed through Winckelmann, in dialogue with Matthew Arnold, struggling with his reviewers, the proclaimed purity and simplicity of the Greek is a muddy and ideologically overladen ideal.

Multiple voicing is central to Evangelista’s analysis of Lee and Field also. Lee, friend and colleague of Pater, later develops an anti-aesthetic pose, critical of both the aesthetics and gender politics of her mentor. Aestheticism was quickly open to parody—from W. H. Mallock’s The New Republic (1877–79) through to the well-known Punch cartoons of Wilde—but Lee’s sharpness was from within the movement. Writing self-consciously as a woman, through and against the male homoerotic discourse of philhellenic aestheticism, and in dialogue with Pater and J. A. Symonds, Lee’s voice is enmeshed in “a tangle of professional hostility and sexual jealousy” (68), as the double voice of parody is further doubled in Lee’s pursuit of the position of “female aesthetic,” as a woman writing under a male name.

Evangelista’s discussion of Wilde also takes a detour though Pater, described as “an anxious reader” of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) (157), but perhaps more tellingly reinstates the importance of Symonds for Wilde’s intellectual formation. Symonds indeed emerges as an influence in each chapter (he read and commented on the works of Lee and Field for the authors). Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (1873–80) was an influential book, though now for predictable reasons he is better known for his privately printed A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and for his tortured memoirs. Wilde carefully and extensively annotated his copy of Greek Poets, which in contrast with the growing professionalization of classical scholarship through a rigorous philological approach, is an emotionally fraught plea for a return to pleasure in ancient poetry and modern society. It is a book whose images of Greek sensuality fired the imagination of many a solitary reader. Reemphasizing the “Greek life” of Oscar Wilde is a strong element of Evangelista’s agenda here.

The subtitle of the book, Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile, adds a third crucial term to Evangelista’s account. “Gods in Exile” might sound like a rather overheated self-description of the alienated aesthetes in society but refers here...