The Platonic Eros of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: "Love's Reflected Image" in the 1890s

The Platonic Eros of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde: "Love's Reflected Image" in the 1890s Gerald monsman University of Arizona IN WALTER PATER'S Gaston de Latour (1888-1894) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-1891), allusions to treacherous sophistries, poisonous books, and art's fateful influence proliferate, owing in large part to each author's awareness of the other's work in progress. Both authors define the influence of beauty and love in terms of Plato's Phaedrus—that is, according to the innate inclinations of the beholder, not art's intrinsic morality as such. But notwithstanding that Pater and Wilde both agree that art is the Platonic mirror of the beholder and that the transcendental vision of the mind (or lack thereof) determines art's influence, their postures toward the practical effects of an erotic aesthetic diverge radically. Although subsumed within broader questions of sexual politics and Hellenism at Oxford, this essay focuses on the Paterian background to Wilde's 1890 novel, on the distinction that Pater drew between his Platonic aestheticism and the more bodily and decadent aestheticism that was being associated with Wilde.1 When Pater in 1873 had charged the aesthetic critic to specify the effect of a song, picture, or book on the beholder—"How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?"2—he was initiating a new Victorian chapter in the history of the very ancient idea of "the beautiful." By teasing out this Platonic theory of "influence" in the echoes and parallels between Pater and Wilde, I hope to examine their intellectual relationship more closely than do the usual, sometimes cursory, criticalbiographical accounts. Stuart Mason, Richard Ellmann, and others have documented the storm of controversy that arose with the publication of Dorian Gray in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine (20 June 1890).3 No less than Lord Hen26 MONSMAN : PATER & WILDE ry's "poisonous book"4 that seduced Dorian, Wilde's narrative itself was censured as a decadent novel. A personally offensive and malicious attack on Wilde by Samuel Henry Jeyes, the first of several nasty newspaper notices, appeared in the St James Gazette within days of the appearance of Dorian Gray. In his reply to the editorial, Wilde defended himself against Jeyes's "pseudo-ethical criticism in dealing with artistic work."5 Then the following April, Wilde distilled his rebuttals to these newspaper attacks into a gnomic preface for his book edition of Dorian (expanded by six chapters), with several of his newspaper mots repeated verbatim. Wilde's consistent position was that aesthetic and moral values are independent: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."6 At his trials, Wilde was asked if the critical tempest caused him to modify the new book edition. "'No,' he replied. 'Additions were made. In one case it was pointed out to me—not in a newspaper or anything of that sort, but by the only critic of the century whose opinion I set high, Mr. Walter Pater—that a certain passage was liable to misconstruction, and I made an addition.'"7 Donald Lawler several times remarks that Pater "was privy to Wilde's first manuscript revisions and had been asked to make suggestions for improvement."8 Wilde had begun his novel sometime late in 1889 and finished revising it in April or May of 1890; and he had visited Pater at Oxford on or about 15 February 1890. On that occasion Wilde also called on Lionel Johnson, who reported that Wilde had "laughed at Pater: and consumed all my cigarettes."9 If Pater did read the manuscript of Dorian Gray, this would have been the occasion , Wilde perhaps finding risible Pater's alarm at the corrupting influence of Dorian on his companions. But Pater had good reason to fear that his ideals also—not just the aesthetic antinomianism of Dorian, Lord Henry, and his decadent book—would come under attack by what the Gazette's editor called Jeyes's "warfare" against "Yellow-Bookism, Walter-Paterism, aestheticism."10 Wilde once described Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as "that...