The Figure of Watteau in Walter Pater’s “Prince of Court Painters” and Michael Field’s Sight and Song

Angela Leighton has suggested that Walter Pater was “the single most important influence” on the poetry Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper published as their collaborative persona Michael Field.¹ In a way, one might even say that Bradley and Cooper initiated Michael Field’s career as poet in 1889 with the collection Long Ago as the lyric counterpart of Pater’s 1873 essay collection The Renaissance.² Much as Pater’s Winckelmann recovers the erotic aesthetic of classical Greek culture from fragments of antique sculpture, the poetry in Long Ago seeks to revive Sappho’s spirit from the extant fragments of her original lyrics. Hoping that Pater would recognize the affinities of their homoerotic lyrics with his early essays, Bradley and Cooper sent Pater a copy of Long Ago soon after its publication. On 5 July 1889 Bradley recorded the receipt of “[a]n exquisite letter from Walter Pater.”³ That correspondence from perhaps Britain’s most prominent man of letters at the time seemed to promise an important relationship for this ambitious literary couple.⁴ In Pater’s “exquisite letter” he not only praised Michael Field as “a true poet” with “calm attic wisdom,” he also offered an invitation to his Kensington home, explaining that “[i]t is natural to wish to meet those whose work interests one.”⁵

That interest appears to have all but disappeared three years later.⁶ Responding to the similar gift of Sight and Song in May 1892, Pater barely disguises his indifference to their writing. Cooper and Bradley had mailed the book to his London address, but Pater had momentarily returned to Oxford, where he apparently received the accompanying letter but not the book. This strange turn of events allowed Pater to write them politely of his “[s]incere thanks for the gift” without having to respond to the book’s preface and poems.⁷ His actual lack of interest in their poetry quickly wears through the thin layer of good manners, though. Even as he claims “to look forward to find[ing] it on [his] return [to London],” he in effect apologizes in advance for not reading the book: “I read almost no contemporary poetry: have, alas! almost no time to do so....”⁸ In his letter responding to the gift of Sight and Song, Pater does not even refer to the title correctly. Perhaps unwittingly, he again reveals his lack of attention to their writing calling the collection “Italian Pictures.”⁹

Though Pater showed little interest in Sight and Song (or in any of Michael Field’s writings after Long Ago), Cooper and Bradley prepared this second collection of poetry through a close dialogue with Pater’s works. Initially, at least, Sight and Song appears to replace the literary homage of Long Ago with a pointed attack. Though not explicitly mentioning Pater or his works, the preface to this second collection alludes to the terms, echoes the phrasing, and specifically contradicts key assertions of his 1873 preface to The Renaissance. Pater first established his place in Victorian aesthetic discourse by attacking Arnold’s notion of seeing the object as it “really is,” claiming instead that “the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”¹⁰ In the preface to Sight and Song, Michael Field challenges Pater’s focus on the perceiver of art: “The aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate.”¹¹ Rather than a process of recovering one’s own impressions, Cooper and Bradley argue for a process that refines away the viewer’s “mere subjective enjoyment” in an effort to “eliminate our idiosyncrasies.”¹²

Just how to situate Cooper and Bradley’s writings in the context of late-nineteenth-century British literature has been a recurring question in the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century recovery of their works. Both the first collection devoted to their work, Michael Field and Their World (2007), and the first book-length study of their work, ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (2007), have probed this problem; no doubt Marion Thain and Ana Vadillo’s recent edition of Michael Field’s poetry will also contribute much to this ongoing discussion.¹³ Reading Michael Field’s Sight and Song as a complex response to Pater’s aesthetics has provided an important textual site for this process and attracted a cluster of recent studies. Ana Vadillo and Jill Ehnenn have argued that the preface and poems of Sight and Song develop a significant critique of Pater’s Renaissance subjectivism.¹⁴ More recently Julia Saville and Marion Thain have followed the ways Sight and Song further develops Pater’s aesthetics even as Cooper and Bradley appear to contradict the subjectivist statements for which Pater is most remembered.¹⁵ In differing ways, Saville and Thain argue that Pater’s writings about the reception of art go beyond the reduction of aesthetics to subjective impressions, and thus both Pater and Michael Field are, in Thain’s words, “aspiring to [an objective] impersonality while recognizing that there will always be an associated tussle with subjectivity.”¹⁶ The present article seeks to extend Saville’s and Thain’s investigations of Sight and Song’s debt to Pater’s works but shift the primary intertext from Pater’s aesthetic criticism (The Renaissance in particular) to Pater’s fiction, specifically his 1885 imagined life of Anthony Watteau, “A Prince of Court Painters.”¹⁷

The preponderance of paintings from the Italian Renaissance as subjects for the poetry of Sight and Song has to a large extent justified the previous focus on Pater’s Renaissance: of the thirty-one poems in the collection twenty-eight are based on Italian paintings. Furthermore, some of the poems match Pater’s essays painter by painter (Botticelli, Giorgione, Da Vinci appear in both) and even painting by painting (Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Venus and Mars, as well as the famous description of La Gioconda).¹⁸ The three non-Italian poems in Sight and Song, however, gain in weight what they lack in number through their material and their placement. Based on well-known paintings by Watteau, the poems “L’Indifférent,” “A Fête Champêtre,” and “L’Embarquement pour Cythère” are respectively placed in the collection first, precise middle, and last, as if to provide an unavoidable frame and focal center.¹⁹ As the preface and the poems based on Italian paintings mark their distance from Pater’s 1873 Renaissance, the three remaining poems based on French Baroque paintings warily approach Pater’s imaginary portrait of Watteau, coming to inhabit a more shared, though still a contested, ground.

The effort here is to follow through the tense closeness of Pater’s “A Prince of Court Painters” and Michael Field’s Sight and Song through their differing variations on Watteau’s life and works. Throughout the article, the nineteenth-century French literary reception of Watteau’s life and paintings serves as a third point to triangulate the relationship between Pater’s story and Michael Field’s poems. Beginning with a brief overview of the figure of Watteau in French nineteenth-century literature, I argue that the established man of letters and the emerging poets similarly mingle the utopian aspirations and melancholic impotence articulated in the Goncourts’ influential presentation of Watteau’s biography and art. As the Goncourts’ prose introduces elements that bring together Pater and Michael Field, Gautier’s poem “Watteau” helps mark the distance between “A Prince of Court Painters” and Sight and Song. Pater’s short story develops two closely related Watteau figures: the painter himself and Pater’s narrator, the provincial sister of his apprentice. Like the speaker in Gautier’s poem, both figures find their desires frustrated: Watteau in his effort to discover in his adult life a beauty equivalent to that imagined in his youth; his narrator in her passion for Watteau and for his artistic freedom. Where Pater explores variations on the frustrations of desire in his Watteau figures, Cooper and Bradley’s poetic renderings of Watteau’s paintings envisage the potential fulfillment of desire. To some extent, Michael Field’s appropriations from Baudelaire’s poetry allow Sight and Song the fuller development of the latent potential of Pater’s short story. Particularly in the first two poems, the combination of sensual pleasure and l’art pour art affirms the threat of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal to Victorian morality in ways that Pater’s story seems not to dare. In complex ways, however, Pater’s short story also shares the legacy of Baudelaire’s poetry with Sight and Song. In the latter part of Michael Field’s second Watteau poem, and even more in the development of the final poem, another sort of Baudelairean legacy emerges, one that passes through rather than around “A Prince of Court Painters.” In the culminating image at the end of their Watteau poems, Cooper and Bradley present a skeptical, distanced Watteau figure that points back both to Baudealire’s Watteau poems and to Pater’s short story.

The Watteau Literary Reception

Even if Cooper and Bradley did not intend to directly engage Pater’s “A Prince of Court Painters” in Sight and Song, their three Watteau poems immanently confront Pater’s short story within the highly developed cultural context of the nineteenth-century reception of Watteau.²⁰ From about 1830 on, Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Gérard de Nerval, Paul Verlaine, and Charles Baudelaire among others develop what one might call “Watteau literature” through their art criticism, fiction, and poetry. Edmund and Jules de Goncourt’s chapter on Watteau in their 1860 L’Art du dix-huitième siècle not only codifies the growing significance of Watteau for French letters, but shapes the image of Watteau in the latter part of the nineteenth century in France as well. By the end of the century, Watteau literature with the aid of the Goncourts has spread to British literature (including works by Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Swinburne, as well as Walter Pater and Michael Field) and German literature (including works by Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal).²¹ As Louisa A. Jones points out in her study of the French Watteau reception, the Goncourts’ influential presentation of Watteau and his paintings brings together the most prominent themes of Watteau literature.²² Two contrasting images coalesce in the Goncourt brothers’ chapter on Watteau: Watteau as the painter of a highly idealized social world, and Watteau as an asocial melancholic distancing himself from that world. The figure of Watteau as the dreamer of an idealized social realm appears primarily in his role as the creator of the fête galante genre of eighteenth-century French painting. Watteau’s fêtes galantes depict social gatherings usually of elegant young men and women in varying stages of courting, most often in outdoor settings such as garden parties or elaborate picnics.²³ The juxtaposition of a highly stylized social milieu with natural settings became particularly important for what the Goncourt brothers refer to as “the elegance of supernatural life” in the fêtes galantes.²⁴ In a manner characteristic of utopian ideas from Thomas More to Charles Fourier, Watteau’s paintings come to represent for the nineteenth century the utopian blending of nature and society.

Watteau’s fêtes galantes, however, at times also include a contrasting image that undercuts their tone of lighthearted festivity and their perceived utopian aspirations: a darkly dressed man, either with his back turned on the group or sneering at them from a distance. For the nineteenth-century reception of Watteau, this man apart from the crowd becomes an image of Watteau himself, a melancholic stroller in the midst of gaiety, the asocial artist depicting himself within his portrayal of the social realm at its height.²⁵ For the Goncourts the melancholy depicted in this figure becomes the key to Watteau’s life and paintings: “The man impregnates his art; and it is an art that we are made to look upon as the pastime and the distraction of a mind that suffers, as we might look, after its death, upon the playthings of an ailing child.”²⁶ Writing on the Goncourts’ and Pater’s conception of Watteau, Symons puts this even more bluntly: “[Watteau] is himself that melancholy spectator of pleasures in which he does not share, whom he has placed in the corner of so many of his pictures.”²⁷ In a related series of paintings, the figure the nineteenth century anointed “Watteau” takes center stage, often as an actor from the commedia dell’arte, either alone or surrounded by other comedians. He wears the traditional costume of Mezzetin or Pier rot (also known as Gilles), further developing the staged sense of the fêtes galantes. At times the Goncourts incorporate this heightened artificiality into the utopian imagery of nature merging with art. The stage transforms into a park, “a bucolic theatre with a green drop-curtain and flowers for footlights.”²⁸ Beneath the artificial gaiety, though, as Norman Bryson has pointed out, the Watteau reception envisages the melancholy comedian gazing out of the painting uncomfortable in his ill-fitting costume, communicating as if in direct address, drawing the painting’s viewer into the role of an implied audience, into the realm of the painting itself, even as the actor gazes out of that liminal space.²⁹

“A Prince of Court Painters”

Fittingly Proust briefly inserts the Watteau solitaire in his éloge to the late-nineteenth-century world of fading aristocratic graces À la recherche du temps perdu. In his signature dark attire, he moves across a drawing room “with cheeks colored red as if from a page of Watteau’s sketchbook ... pursuing his ecstatic dream like a madman.”³⁰ In “A Prince of Court Painters,” two such figures pursue their ecstatic dreams: the famous painter whose life is told and the little-known woman who tells it. As Lesley Higgins has pointed out Pater’s story explores “two equally important subject positions ... Watteau, the professional painter, and Marie-Marguerite Pater [the sister of Watteau’s apprentice Jean-Baptiste Pater], whose fragmented journal entries constitute the narrative.”³¹ As Watteau becomes the painter of the beau monde through his fêtes galantes, Marie-Marguerite becomes the portraitist of Watteau through her journal. Furthermore, both painter and writer become frustrated with the distance between their dreams and the subjects of their art. Watteau and Marie-Marguerite differ, though, in both their objects of desire and their degrees of bitterness.

In his study of Pater’s writings on French literature, John Conlon observes that “[o]ne of Pater’s objectives as a public critic was the propagation of knowledge about French thought and culture.”³² In “A Prince of Court Painters” Pater carries that objective from his criticism into his fiction. Already in the story’s opening tableau, Pater offers a tribute to the Goncourts’ image of the painter and his work. In the first entry to her journal, the narrator describes the discovery of young Anthony sketching at an autumn fair in the town square: “We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our windows. And just where the crowd was busiest young Anthony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hôtel de Ville.”³³ Young Watteau’s sketch of the fair already hints at his later treatment of refined social intercourse in the fêtes galantes, as well as the depiction of stock characters from the commedia dell’arte. The narrator describes Watteau

sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace—a marvelous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one’s own window—which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side.³⁴

What the Goncourts and other nineteenth-century art critics and poets found as the special quality of Watteau’s paintings, Pater’s narrator identifies here as “a kind of grace.” Throughout the story he associates this aesthetic refinement with “lightness” and “purity,” something the painter contributes to this world paradoxically through omission, through a process of refinement that renders visible “what makes life really valuable.”³⁵ Watteau’s idiosyncratic refinement of reality allows him to paint an aesthetic truth, the truth of grace, and as the Goncourts point out “[t]he grace of Watteau is grace itself.”³⁶

Like the Goncourts, Pater finds that grace interwoven with the melancholy nature of the painter, reflected already in the “infinitely clever tragic actors” who lend a new depth to “trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine.” Pater, however, does more than provide a fictional résumé of the Goncourts’ chapter. Neither the Goncourts nor the contemporary biography they include as a supplement provides psychological insights into the formation of Watteau’s aesthetic sensibility and melancholy. Unlike M. le Comte de Caylus, author of the Goncourts’ biographical appendix, Pater’s narrator has known the artist from youth, allowing her to explain through his childhood character and habits both Watteau’s fascination with the grace of artifice and his frustration with its merely artificial nature. Pater had already explored the childhood formation of an aesthetic sensibility in his 1878 “The Child in the House,” the first published of his imaginary portraits. In both stories Pater investigates the ways the material interior of the childhood house contributes to the psychological interior of the developing aesthetic sensibility. Like Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space, Pater is particularly interested in the way subjectivity, one’s sense of oneself and one’s freedom and fulfillment as an individual, becomes interlaced with interiority, the notion of an inner self and its association with physical interiors such as rooms and houses.³⁷ “A Prince of Court Painters” continues the investigation of subjectivity and interiority Pater initiated in “The Child in the House,” but with important differences. Where the protagonist of Pater’s earlier story, Florian Deleal, finds in the childhood interior aesthetic and sensuous fulfillment, Pater’s Watteau finds the roots of a consistently deferred promise.

In “The Child in the House” the adult Florian vividly reconstructs the childhood formation of his aesthetic self. Like Wordsworth, Florian finds in his childhood a rich sensuous appreciation of his surroundings. Pater, however, transposes the Wordsworthian narrative from nature to house, exterior to interior, explicitly identifying the finely tuned perceptive faculty of this child with his early experience of the material structure of his first house and its protective qualities as an interior. Florian’s first home is a place where “the quiet of the child’s soul [is] one with the quiet of its home,” a place “‘inclosed’ and ‘sealed.’”³⁸ As Pater turns to Watteau’s life in “A Prince of Court Painters,” Florian’s passive aesthetic impressions become the painter’s active aesthetic production. Watteau’s aesthetic sensibility, however, is still characterized by its relationship to interiors. Where Florian describes how the wainscoting on the walls of his childhood house formed an essential part of his identity, the narrator of “A Prince of Court Painters” tells how Watteau actively sought to “reclothe the walls of this or that house he was employed in, with this fairy arrangement.”³⁹ Pater here echoes the French Watteau reception in describing the supernatural “fairy arrangement” that characterizes Watteau’s art as a utopian melding of the natural and the social. Pater similarly describes Watteau’s fêtes galantes as a sort of drawing room where the trees become elegant gentlemen, juxtaposing the beauty of nature with the refinement of the beau monde. In this outdoor interior, the painter reveals “the cool shade of the stately, broad-foliaged trees each of which is a great courtier.”⁴⁰ The implied progression from “reclothing walls” in his imagination as a child to depicting exteriors as interiors in the fêtes galantes culminates when Pater’s Watteau actually repaints the walls of a room in the Valenciennes Paters’ house, four murals representing the four seasons, each on one of the room’s four walls, enclosing the annual cycle of nature within the physical interior. Watteau not only paints the walls, but sends the narrator’s family “from Paris arm-chairs of a new pattern he has devised, suitably covered, and a painted clavecin,” in effect remaking the entire interior.⁴¹ Pater thus interweaves in this aesthetic interior Watteau’s grace of refinement, nature’s beauty, and the promise of Florian’s childhood interior.

As a psychological study, “The Child in the House” remains focused on the nature of Florian’s development as an individual. “A Prince of Court Painters” continues this psychological study in its attention to Watteau’s formation as a painter but adds a historical dimension, considering the relationship of Watteau’s new genre of painting to emerging forms of material interiority and other forms of art: “A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people’s rooms must needs be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with the painting; or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one particular kind of apartment.”⁴² Alongside a new form of painting appropriate for this new habitus appears a new form of music, the aptly titled “chamber music.” Pater deliberately draws attention to the consonance of Watteau’s fêtes galantes, chamber music, and this “particular kind of apartment.” The new genre of music, like the new genre of painting, seems “designed exclusively to suit” these emerging material structures.⁴³ Furthermore, Watteau’s painting is, Marie-Marguerite claims, “itself like a piece of ‘chamber music,’ methinks, part answering to part; while no too trenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of white and pale red and little golden touches.”⁴⁴ Pater clearly recalls here the “enclosed” and “sealed” house of Florian’s childhood, a protective interior where “no too trenchant note” can threaten “the delicate harmony” of the child’s aesthetic formation. In this way the blending of Florian’s Bildung and his material building becomes amplified in “A Prince of Court Painters” to the continuity of new aesthetic forms—and the realm of the aesthetic itself—with emerging material forms.

It might seem forced to extend Pater’s quiet meditations on these concomitant interiors to the utopian goals of the broader historical and political movements of Enlightenment Europe. Yet Pater’s narrator herself makes just this leap as she considers the relation of Watteau’s art to the Zeitgeist. Rather than reading Watteau’s new genre as an affirmation of new forms of social freedom, however, she finds within it a critique: “People talk of a new era now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a novel sort of social freedom in which men’s natural goodness of heart will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of life—yes! perhaps of infinite littleness also.”⁴⁵ For the Enlightenment, the growth of subjectivity embedded in new art forms and new material structures promised the blossoming of a new “sort of social freedom.” Instead of a harbinger of this new world, Watteau remains for Marie-Marguerite a personage “of that old time—that serious old time which is passing away, the impress of which he carries in his physiognomy—he dignifies, by what in him is neither more nor less than a profound melancholy.”⁴⁶

Rather than extending the promise of Florian’s individual formation to the anticipation of a liberating social transformation, Pater conceives the Watteau solitaire in the dim glow of the subject’s afterlife. Retrospectively, in the wary late-nineteenth-century sensibility that hovers over the story, history’s turn towards “an infinite littleness” away from the Enlightenment’s goals has already been foreseen. In the ancien régime of “A Prince of Court Painters,” beneath the narrator’s unyielding gaze, the words “fraternity, liberty, humanity” have been emptied out in advance. The emerging forms of interiority—individual, social, and aesthetic—that held those goals, however, persist. Post-Enlightenment subjectivity retains the promising forms after the promise’s betrayal. The critical force of that strange afterlife emerges from the divergence of Pater’s portrayals of the French-Flemish painter’s childhood from that of Florian. Where the aging Florian is drawn back to the memory of his first home, the young Anthony is already thrust forward by the barrenness of his parents’ house. Watteau’s “natural fineness” causes him thus “to escape when he can from that blank stone house, with so little interest.”⁴⁷ Though the emptiness rather than the plenitude of the childhood house occurs in “A Prince of Court Painters,” the interior remains the privileged site of aesthetics, the autonomous realm where the autonomous subject’s finer self seeks its locus amenus. That beloved site, however, becomes increasingly less available for the Paterian subject. As philosophy for Novalis is transcendental homelessness, aesthetics for Pater becomes a longing for an unavailable enclosure. Pater’s Florian confronts this divided self only at the end of the story in his brief return to the empty house when “the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead.”⁴⁸ For Pater’s Watteau, though, the blank stone house consistently haunts the interiors that his “natural fineness” seeks out and paints. Consequently his life and paintings are shaped by a constant movement the narrator characterizes as “restless and disquieting.”⁴⁹ When he does gain entry into the highly refined world of Paris, becoming famous for his depictions of it, Watteau only finds an increasing sense of displeasure in the grand monde he portrays. The distance of the world he seeks from the world he inhabits, already perceived in his childhood, only intensifies: “He, so fastidious and cold, and who has never ‘ventured the representation of passion,’ does but amuse the gay world; and is aware of that, though certainly unamused himself all the while.”⁵⁰ Rather than a fulfillment beyond, or even a refuge from, the rough and barren interior of his childhood, the staged grace of Parisian court life only provides another limiting world, one which can please others, but which offers him little pleasure. Thus in Watteau’s fêtes galantes the broader social forms of interiority echo not the security of Florian’s childhood home, but the hollowness of young Anthony’s parents’ house. Rather than emerging forms of a liberating interiority, “of a novel form of social freedom,” the adult painter discovers a realm of “infinite littleness.”

As Pater points out the vacuity of courtly life immanent in Watteau’s grace, he simultaneously develops its counter image, though. The hollowed-out interior revealing the failure of Watteau’s aesthetic ideal to correspond to reality also delineates the space for a potential rescue of that failure. Pater gestures toward that potential in a passage that brings together the French reception of Watteau, the painter’s childhood, the imagery of enclosure, and the promise of the aesthetic. As the narrator describes the delicacy of Watteau’s paintings, she explains that

these light things will possess for him always a kind of representative or borrowed worth, as characterizing that impossible or forbidden world which the mason’s boy saw through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden. Those trifling and petty graces, the insignia to him of that nobler world of aspiration and idea, even now that he is aware ... of their true littleness, bring back to him, by the power of association, all the old magical exhilaration of his dream—the dream of a better world than the real one.⁵¹

Pater’s image of the young Watteau peering “through the closed gateways of the enchanted garden” recalls Gautier’s 1838 poem “Watteau” in which the speaker, wandering alone in the countryside outside Paris, finds himself mesmerized by a beautiful garden “in the style of Watteau.”⁵² As Pater’s young Watteau peers through “closed gateways,” Gautier’s speaker gazes through “the bars [le grille]” of a locked gate. When the speaker finally leaves, he finds himself both “sad and enraptured [triste et ravie]” having been “so close to his life’s dream” only to discover his happiness “locked away inside there [enfermé là].”⁵³ Gautier’s poem subverts the closeness of interior and self Pater articulated in “The Child in the House.” Rather than the concomitant structures of enclosing room, interior self, and enclosed dream, each protected by and protecting the others, Gautier envisions an aesthetic interior that locks out the beholder. Like Gautier’s “Watteau,” Pater’s “A Prince of Court Painters” finds frustration rather than comfort in the interior. In his melancholy gaze on the idealized world of the fête galante, Pater’s Watteau takes on the role of the darkly dressed man in the corner, frowning at the festivities as a mere imitation of an actual holiday. Venturing further into that world, he only finds the imitated happiness all the more blocked off from his own experience, as the narrator puts it, “on the loan of a fallacious grace.”⁵⁴ For Pater’s Watteau, though, the wealth represented in the refinement of his paintings, in spite of the corresponding poverty of empirical reality, still amounts to a sort of promissory note. Even in “their true littleness” these “trifling and petty graces” reconceived in Watteau’s paintings recover “all the magical exhilaration of his dream” of a better world. In a delicate balance, Pater rejects the aesthetic image as bankrupt and at the same time recovers from within it a promising semblance. The “insignia” within Watteau’s art becomes a sort of Proustian repository for potential happiness.

That promise for Watteau, though, does not extend to Marie-Marguerite, the story’s other protagonist. The famous painter and the sister of his lesser-known apprentice are doubled throughout the story, but the painter’s portraitist both mirrors and challenges Watteau’s aesthetics of interiority. In one sense, Pater recasts Watteau’s frowning worldly man as a withdrawn provincial woman. Young Watteau first appears “hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hôtel de Ville” sketching “a wonderful stir of sound and colour”; Marie-Marguerite similarly appears throughout the story hidden away in the “sleepy place” of Valenciennes, sketching the “sound and colour” of Watteau’s career.⁵⁵ As a sort of chamber music, the hushed tones of her journal entries are continuous with Watteau’s paintings of interiors. In fact, his painting of the four seasons on the walls of a room in her family’s house renders it initially a favorite place for her, one she dubs “the Watteau chamber.”⁵⁶

The painter and the narrator also share a frustration with interiors, but where Watteau finds himself locked out of a longed-for interior, Marie-Marguerite finds herself trapped within a barren interior. As John Conlon has pointed out “the central symbol” of Marie-Marguerite’s character is “Bede’s likeness of human life to the flight of a bird in and out of the mead hall.”⁵⁷ Pater’s narrator, however, transposes Bede’s image of the briefness of mortal life to an image of the limitations of her own life. After seeing “a small bird which had flown into the church but could find no way out,” she imagines it “re-tracing its issueless circle till it expires.”⁵⁸ The refuge of art, the promise of painting in particular as an emerging form of subjectivity, also becomes an image of a stifling interior for the narrator. When her brother Jean-Baptiste is rejected by Watteau, Marie-Marguerite initially finds some comfort in still having a relationship with Watteau’s work through her brother. As Jean-Baptiste retains a connection to his master by completing Watteau’s unfinished paintings and imitating his style, Marie-Marguerite at a second remove initially finds some link to the painter by sitting in the Watteau chamber with Jean-Baptiste as he works. She finally admits, however, the fundamental difference between herself and her brother only augments her claustrophobic despair: “As for me, I suffocate this summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where Jean-Baptiste is at work so contentedly.”⁵⁹ As Lesley Higgins observes both “[l]iterally and figuratively, she is trapped within the house, while Jean-Baptiste productively inhabits the House Beautiful.”⁶⁰

Not only does the form of the narrator’s frustration differ from Watteau’s, but the source of it as well. Where the painter longs for an aesthetic perfection, a form of grace that he finds lacking in this world, Marie-Marguerite longs to have and to be Watteau. In recasting Watteau’s man in the corner as this woman in Valenciennes, Pater thus also contrasts Watteau’s longing for an ideal beyond this world with the more immediate desires for literary expression and physical pleasure.⁶¹ Pater accentuates this distinction between his double subjects at the end of the story, in Watteau’s apparent turn to religion and Marie-Marguerite’s bitter dismissal of it. Marie-Marguerite notes how at the end of Watteau’s life his aesthetic search seems to find a resolution as it becomes a religious one, discovering a “tranquillity at last, a tranquillity in which he is much occupied with matters of religion.”⁶² Like the fascination of Pater’s Marius with Christianity, though, Watteau’s tentative move toward religion remains tinged with the aesthetic concerns that carried him there. The painter’s preoccupation with “matters of religion” leads him to continue his work of aesthetic refinement by literally reshaping the material form of religion. Watteau thus dies “at work upon a crucifix for the good curé of Nogent, liking little the very crude one he possessed.”⁶³ Rather than mark a shift to religious resignation, the refashioned crucifix for Watteau becomes an aesthetic promise. Like the insignia of aesthetic refinement in his paintings, the crucifix serves as a potential receptacle for the “magical exhilaration of his dream ... of a better world than the real one.”⁶⁴

For Marie-Marguerite, however, the transcendence embedded in the image of Watteau at his death only brings out her bitterness all the more. Explaining his newfound tranquility as an effect of “bodily exhaustion perhaps,” the closet materialist Marie-Marguerite interprets the religious preoccupation of his final days as another symptom of the futility of his search.⁶⁵ Rather than a Proustian potential, the narrator finds in Watteau’s aesthetic-religious concerns at his death but another instance of the illness that has dominated his life: “He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.”⁶⁶ With the final negation of “not at all,” Marie-Marguerite reaffirms the rigorous self-denial that has characterized her thoughts and actions throughout the story. Pater’s “A Prince of Court Painters” remains then precariously poised between Watteau’s tentative affirmation of the potential for an aesthetically refined ideal and Marie-Marguerite’s bitter resignation at the impossibility of material fulfillment. As variations on the French reception of Watteau, Pater poses these alternatives as distinct forms of an emerging interiority: either Watteau’s insignia protected in the autonomy of art just beyond his reach in Gautier’s enchanted garden or Marie-Marguerite’s claustrophobic entrapment in the disenchanted church. In their three Watteau poems, Cooper and Bradley will incorporate elements of both Pater’s Watteau and his portraitist in their own Watteau figures. As Michael Field explores the potentials of the fête galante, however, the aesthetic promise of Watteau’s insignia will become merged with, rather than contrasted to, the repressed material longings of Marie-Marguerite.

Sight and Song

In Charles Ricketts’s brief notes on Cooper and Bradley he includes a telling image of the latter as “a close and caustic observer of people with a touch of the mimic.”⁶⁷ One of the objects of her mimicry was “Pater displaying hesitation.”⁶⁸ However similar the aesthetic sensibilities of Walter Pater and Michael Field, Bradley evidently found amusement, and perhaps frustration, in Pater’s well-known propensity for hesitation in his conversation and in his writings. Where Pater moved timidly back and forth, questioning and re-questioning, Michael Field charged forward with confidence. In their frequency of publication alone this is evident: Pater did not publish another book until twelve years after the mixed reviews of The Renaissance; Cooper and Bradley, in spite of the growing indifference of critics, published book after book.⁶⁹ On at least one occasion Pater’s hesitation to republish potentially controversial material irritated Bradley. In response to hearing that Pater “had struck out the Essay on Aesthetic Poetry from Appreciations” for the 1890 second edition because it “gave offence to some pious person,” Bradley fumed that the writer of The Renaissance had become “hopelessly prudish.”⁷⁰ Not surprisingly, then, Pater and Michael Field differ sharply in their treatments of Watteau’s paintings. In their first two Watteau poems, Cooper and Bradley with their confidence in exploring images of an autonomous sphere for women loving women develop the fête galante as a quasi-utopian realm, where same-sex desire remains protected, however tentatively, from social disapprobation. Pater’s much more guarded representations of homoeroticism, often repressed in their very conception, develop instead the melancholic onlooker as the bitter perceiver of that realm’s unfulfilled promise.

Between Michael Field’s confidence and Pater’s reticence in their Watteau writing, Baudelaire’s influence plays an essential but complex role. In France in 1857, Baudelaire was prosecuted for publication of Les Fleurs du Mal; soon after in England, he was condemned, in the words of one influential critic, as “the godfather of the fleshly school of poetry.”⁷¹ As Patricia Clements has shown, Pater was careful throughout his writings not to overtly align himself with this “fleshly school” of French poetry in general and with Baudelaire’s writings in particular.⁷² In “A Prince of Court Painters” he avoids mentioning the sensuality of Watteau’s nude paintings. For instance, even though he places the painting of “The Four Seasons” at the center of Watteau’s relationship with the Valenciennes Paters, the narrator neglects to mention that each season is allegorically represented as a nude woman.⁷³ In contrast, Michael Field’s three Watteau poems culminate in a probing study of the erotic undercurrents in Watteau’s famous depiction of the departure of young couples to the island of love, “L’Embarquement pour Cythère.” Since Baudelaire also based his well-known poem “Un Voyage à Cythère” in Les Fleurs du Mal on the same painting, ending Sight and Song with a poem based on this painting clearly signaled Michael Field’s alliance with Baudelaire’s challenge to Victorian morality.

Pater had good reason, though, to avoid explicit reference to the fleshly school of poetry and its association with French painting. As Lesley Higgins has pointed out, Baudelaire’s trial was but the first of “six trials and several acts of censorship endured by others between the years 1857 and 1890,” causing Pater to exercise “an understandable—even a sensible—‘caution’ or reticence.”⁷⁴ Furthermore, in reference to Bradley’s critique of Pater’s “prudishness,” Laurel Brake has suggested that Bradley “did not feel as vulnerable as Pater” because she was “not in employment ... was wealthy and, as a lesbian was not recognized by, and was thus not in contravention of the law.”⁷⁵ For these reasons, Michael Field may have been much better placed to explore Watteau’s fête galante as an aesthetic realm of sensual desire. In spite of Pater’s well-justified restraint, though, Baudelaire remains a great force in Pater’s prose, as Patricia Clements has shown, one “carefully and cunningly hidden.”⁷⁶ Though in a way quite distinct from Michael Field’s development of the fête galante, Pater’s Watteau writing also preserves a closely related aspect of Baudelaire’s writing, one particularly strong in the French poet’s twist on the reception of Watteau.

An influential champion of Watteau, Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal not only ranked Watteau among the greatest of painters, he also equated the cause of art itself with Watteau in his Salon de 1846, identifying the typical philistine as “un ennemi de Watteau ... des beaux arts et des belles-lettres.”⁷⁷ Baudelaire, however, was also suspicious of the tendency in the nineteenth-century Watteau reception (present in works by the Goncourts and Gautier among others) to reduce the figure of Watteau to an idealized dreamer divorced from material reality. In contrast to the otherworldly sweetness with which other French writers imbued Watteau’s Pierrot, Baudelaire presented the clown in an unflinching image of horror. In his prose poem “Le Vieux Saltimbanque,” the sad beauty of the commedia dell’arte character becomes the ugly material condition of an aged comedian who barely survives in a filthy back stall of the circus.⁷⁸ Rather than suffering from metaphysical longing as the Watteau figure does in the Goncourts’ prose and in Gautier’s poetry, Baudelaire’s clown suffers from economic displacement. He has lost his place not in the fairy kingdom associated with Pierrot but in the marketplace of the entertainment industry. Where Michael Field’s Watteau poems initially seek to reclaim the utopian possibilities of the fête galante, Baudelaire’s Watteau poems, like Pater’s Watteau (and even more like his narrator), maintain the wary distance of the man in black from an overly praised fête galante.⁷⁹ Through the arc that subtends Michael Field’s three Watteau poems, however, Cooper and Bradley also recover the critique of an inauthentic gaiety by the darkly dressed figure in the corner. As Sight and Song moves toward and through its final poem, in a series of intricate legerdemains, Michael Field also realizes the Baudelairean moment of “A Prince of Court Painters.”

L’Indifférent

The literature based on Watteau’s painting L’Indifférent (Fig. 1) has become almost a subgenre of Watteau literature, including a short, delicate French poem by R. M. Rilke, a posthumously published short story by Marcel Proust, a prose poem by Paul Claudel, and more recently a series of meditations in Philippe Sollers’s postmodern novel La Fête à Vénise (1991).⁸⁰ Behind these literary renderings of Watteau’s portrait of the “indifferent one” remains the nineteenth-century image of the far from indifferent painter, unsatisfied with the world as he found it. Rilke’s poem most directly evokes the suppressed longing of the Watteau solitaire. Explicitly continuing the tradition of Gautier, Verlaine and the Goncourts, Rilke’s speaker describes himself as “triste et ravie,” smiling at a woman from afar.⁸¹ Though in more distant variations, Claudel and Sollers also sustain the nineteenth-century literary exploration of the courtier’s lack of indifference, his desire hidden beneath the pose of a distant, refined uncaring.⁸² The feigned indifference masking longing in these twentieth-century literary responses to the painting preserves the central element of the French nineteenth-century Watteau reception, and its continuation by Pater. Michael Field, however, takes the courtier’s indifference literally, accepting his turn away from the world as a genuine expression of autonomy. In Cooper and Bradley’s poem all he cares for is his dancing:

  He dances on a toe   As light as Mercury’s: Sweet herald, give thy message! No, He dances on; the world is his, The sunshine and his wingy hat;   His eyes are round   Beneath the brim: To merely dance where he is found   Is fate to him   And he was born for that.⁸³

Though not inspired by a fête galante painting, Michael Field’s “L’Indifférent” emphasizes the delicacy and grace associated with the genre. As Ana Vadillo has pointed out, the poem with its delicate hushed quality and short, simple lines becomes itself a sort of dance embodying the aesthetic realm it represents.⁸⁴ His toe “[a]s light as Mercury’s” and his “wingy hat” transpose the dancer’s grace to a mythological level, alluding to Mercury’s hermeneutic function as the winged messenger of the gods. This dancer’s aesthetic lightness, though, bears no didactic

Fig. 1.

Watteau, L’Indifférent

Permission to reprint Réunion des Musées Nationaux Art Resource, New York

weight. The viewer’s command “Sweet herald, give thy message” results only in a curt “No.” Here aesthetic indifference assumes the form of a childhood indifference to anything but the self-enclosed world of the dance, as if the delivery of the message would somehow destroy art’s autonomy. Art for Pater’s Watteau also found its value by establishing its distance from the given world: through a “tact of omission” Watteau’s painting similarly made possible a lighter, more delicate form. Pater, however, following the French Watteau tradition, found a dissatisfaction beneath the grace, a melancholy within the beauty. The apparent indifference of Pater’s Watteau disguises his constant efforts to realize an image from childhood; Marie-Marguerite’s outward lack of concern for her own feelings hides her physical desire and her artistic ambitions. In Cooper and Bradley’s “L’Indifférent,” however, no melancholic gaze emerges from the dream of an autonomous realm to consider or engage the exterior world. Michael Field’s first Watteau solitaire neither has a message for our world nor seeks his completion in it. All he needs he has: “To merely dance where he is found / Is fate to him / And he was born for that.”⁸⁵

In its exploration of the self-absorbed physical world of a child, Michael Field’s “L’Indifférent” appears to share more with “The Child in the House” than with Pater’s later double portrait of Watteau and Marie-Marguerite. Florian’s sensual delight in the house, however, is still mediated by the distance of Florian’s memory and Pater’s larger project of understanding the adult self through an examination of the child’s formation. For Pater, Florian’s childhood experience only becomes articulated through the consciousness of the remembering adult narrator. In contrast, the dance of Michael Field’s “L’Indifférent” resists the mediation of a speaker observing from outside the experience. This more immanent sense of childhood pleasure lends the poem a tone of immediate festivity lacking in “The Child in the House” and in “A Prince of Court Painters.” Where Pater follows the Goncourts in rendering the fête galante through the gaze of the melancholic nonparticipant, Cooper and Bradley offer a view from within the fête, appropriating the distance associated with the Watteau solitaire as a distance from the voice beyond it. The autonomy developed by Michael Field here is not the autonomy of the painter perched on the edge of the fair in the Grande Place, but the autonomy of the festival itself from the outside world.

“A Fête Champêtre”

The volume’s opening poem implicitly redefines the Watteau solitaire as a synecdoche for a world of refined social pleasures; the next two Watteau poems explicitly appropriate that self-enclosure as the social enclosure of Watteau’s fêtes galantes. “A Fête Champêtre” and “L’Embarquement pour Cythère” are both based on paintings of the type Watteau became famous for—large tableaux portraying groups of well-dressed men and women focused on the delicacies of courting (Fig. 2). The opening of Michael Field’s “A Fête Champêtre” emphasizes the harmony of the refined social intercourse and the natural setting often commented on in Watteau’s fêtes galantes:

A lovely, animated group That picnic on a marble seat, Where flaky boughs of beeches droop, Where gowns in woodland sunlight glance, Where shines each coy, lit countenance; While sweetness rules the air ...⁸⁶

The courtly clothing and manners, the “gowns” and the facial expressions, blend seamlessly with the “flaky boughs” and the “sunlight glance,” establishing an aesthetic where art and nature merge. As in “L’Indifférent” we find a highly refined, self-enclosed realm, but rather than the dance of a lone boylike courtier, here the ritualized dancelike movements come through a group’s interactions. The Goncourts had pointed out that the genius of Watteau’s paintings appears in “the fascination of women in repose.”⁸⁷ Cooper and Bradley also focus on Watteau’s image of women in repose, but rather than the central figure’s attraction for a man, they emphasize her central place in the social group and another woman’s attraction for her: “They group themselves around their queen, / This lady in the yellow dress.”⁸⁸

Gita Rajan has suggested that through the repressed desire of Marie-Marguerite for Watteau, Pater may have also appropriated the Watteau tradition as a screen for his own homoerotic desire.⁸⁹ Rather than narrate the bitterness of repressed desire, Cooper and Bradley in “A Fête Champêtre” point toward its possible fulfillment. They also more explicitly reject the heterosexual narrative and replace it with their image of same-sex love.⁹⁰ The queen’s power established by her position at the center of the group is reinforced by Michael Field’s interpretation of her face turned toward the male lute player: “But the reared face proclaims Beware! / To him who twangs his viol less / To speak his

Fig. 2.

Watteau, Réunion en plein air

Permission to reprint Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Art Resource, New York

joy, / Than her soon-flattered choiceness to annoy.”⁹¹ Her sternness to the musician in the poem is balanced by the devotion of a young woman, “a damsel,” who sits “[b]eside her knee” speaking “on love’s varying theme.”⁹² Here the plenitude of the indifferent one’s dance becomes the social intercourse of these women; the resistance to the intruding voice of “L’Indifférent” becomes the warning to the male musician.

The literal Watteau solitaire, however, reappears just as its metamorphosis into the fête galante becomes complete. The sneering of the man in black at this fête galante is set up by a carefully gauged limiting of the queen’s power. “A Fête Champêtre” initially reinforces the powerful position of the “lady in the yellow dress” through its description of the group, her central place in it, and most explicitly, through her warning to the musician and the corresponding attention the young woman gives her. But the poem’s general movement from the right side of the painting to the left calls into question the primacy of her position in this broader view, and leads to the lone man in black. First the speaker’s focus shifts from the young woman discoursing on love to consider a basket of “artless roses” unnoticed by the young woman.⁹³ Though the damsel’s attention focuses, as the group’s does, on the woman in her bright yellow dress, this “queen” is not at the center of the painting itself, but center right. Subtly, but provokingly, the “blanched roses” occupy the center of the painting, introducing the theme of love’s decay. This in turn leads to the corresponding focal point on the left side of the painting—the lone male turned away from the group: “Withdrawn and tart, / One gallant stands in reverie apart.”⁹⁴

Even as Cooper and Bradley construct the image of an objective utopian realm, they also further develop the personage who questions that world.⁹⁵ The solitary figure who dominates the last five stanzas of this nine-stanza poem exhibits the key characteristics of the nineteenth-century Watteau reception.⁹⁶ Like Pater’s Watteau he remains “in reverie apart,” turning his back on the refined social gathering. “Withdrawn and tart,” he continues the Goncourts’ image of the misanthropic artist they characterized as “listless, indifferent, morose, consumed by languor [rongé d’ennui], and weary.”⁹⁷ In some ways, the dreamy turning away of Michael Field’s man in black still points back to the Goncourts, Gautier, and Verlaine. Cooper and Bradley, however, also associate their Watteau solitaire with the stone Venus in the painting, sounding the tones of Baudelaire’s closely related but often opposed variation on Watteau themes. Continuing the movement from right to left, Michael Field describe the gallant’s attention to the statue of Venus on the far left side of the painting. Like the darkly dressed Watteau figure, she also “turns / Her face from those / Who wanton in the coloured autumn’s close.”⁹⁸ His disdain for the “lovely, animated group” and their talk of love is expressed in his gaze on the stone Venus: “Ironical, he views her shape of stone / And the harsh ivy and grey mound.”⁹⁹

Much as he critiqued the romanticized image of Watteau’s Pierrot, Baudelaire attacked the idealized image of love Watteau found in the painter’s statues of Venus. These statues that appear in some of Watteau’s fêtes galantes become for Baudelaire not images of idealized love, nor even of sensual beauty, but of a cold indifference to passion. In his prose poem “Le Fou et la Vénus” Baudelaire imagines a Colombine figure from the commedia dell’arte painted by Watteau mourning his lost love. He implores a statue of the goddess of love only to find an “implacable Venus,” with a gaze as blank and pitiless as that of Yeats’s sphinx, staring off “into the distance at who knows what with her eyes of marble.”¹⁰⁰ Cooper and Bradley’s renderings of Watteau paintings lack the harsh, at times sadomasochistic, tones Baudelaire marshaled against the self-satisfied melancholy that often pervaded the nineteenth-century Watteau myth. They do, however, draw from a strength related to Baudelaire’s imagery. In “A Fête Champêtre” the implacable gaze of Baudelaire’s Venus first appears in the gallant’s “[i]ronical” view of the statue as he “sneers to think she treats her own / Enchanted couples with contempt,” then, like an icy autumn breeze, the gallant’s Baudelairean sneering chills him and the rest of the poem.¹⁰¹ He finds “[t]he coldness of mere pleasure when / Its hours are over cuts his heart.”¹⁰² The passing away of love with summer “[h]as thrilled his brain / With icy anger and censorious pain.”¹⁰³ This coldness and hardness shared by Cooper and Bradley’s Venus would seem to further distance these figures from the promise of the fête galante, as Pater’s narrator’s bitterness distinguished her from the Watteau of “A Prince of Court Painters.” In their final poem, however, they paradoxically mobilize these figures’ fuller resistance to the fête galante as a way of preserving the promise initially embedded in “L’Indifférent” and “A Fête Champêtre.”

L’Embarquement pour Cythère

On 28 August 1717, Watteau presented the painting L’Embarquement pour Cythère (Fig. 3), also known as Le Pélérinage à Cythère, to the French Academy and was received as a full member. Though without naming it, the Goncourts’ purple prose describing the essence of Watteau consistently evokes images of this large, elaborate depiction of elegantly dressed couples moving toward waiting boats in a mythological paysage filled with hovering cupids and overseen by a bust of Venus. Baudelaire had already attacked French romantic renderings of this painting in his poem “Un Voyage à Cythère.” Where the Goncourts had praised Watteau’s depiction of “desire without appetite and pleasure without desire,” Baudelaire’s speaker finds a feverish desire without pleasure, a voyage promising delights but ending in the image of his body hanging from a scaffold.¹⁰⁴ Michael Field’s “L’Embarquement pour Cythère” lacks the brutal imagery of Baudelaire’s poem, but much more than “L’Indifférent” and “A Fête Champêtre” it harnesses the force of Baudelaire’s critique for its own purposes.

In contrast to the leisurely development of Michael Field’s first two Watteau poems, an insistent building of tension dominates the third poem. The growing anxiety in a voyage that begins in anticipation of pleasure recalls the phantasmagoric journey not only of Baudelaire’s “Voyage à Cythère,” but also “Le Voyage,” the final poem of Les Fleurs du Mal. Rather than the courtier’s childlike dance or the women’s relaxed conversation, the large group of couples in “L’Embarquement” suddenly and initially inexplicably moves toward an undefined voyage. The speaker’s series of questions at the opening of the poem suggests the apparent irrationality of their departure: “Why starts this company so fair arrayed ... from the shelter of the full-leaved, summer trees? ... What vague unease / Draws them in couples to a burnished boat?”¹⁰⁵ Initially the departure is characterized as at least apparently without reason. The land they leave is seen as a protective “shelter of the full-leaved, summer trees” where their attire ought to place them. No promise of love’s pleasures is announced, only something unsettling in the speaker’s second question: “What vague unease / Draws them in couples to a burnished boat?”¹⁰⁶ The imagery of an allegorical “flock of Loves” reinforces the ambiguity the poem finds in the painting. Like the couples themselves the cupids appear to be pushed by exterior forces: “Borne upward on a spiral, amber swirl / Of incense-light.”¹⁰⁷ At the same time, though, they actively “[f]ling their own hues as raiment on the sea.”¹⁰⁸ In a gesture increasingly developed as sexual, one “[f]lings wide a flame and smoke / Diffusive to provoke / The heavens to consummation.”¹⁰⁹ This imagery suggests that the voyage may offer the consummation of the sensuous desires just under the surface of many poems in Sight and Song. The implied carnal destination becomes more explicit as the poem’s narrative follows the couples toward a sea

Fig. 3.

Watteau, L’Embarquement pour Cythère

Permission to reprint Réunion des Musées Nationaux Art Resource, New York

described as “that bed / Of splendour, that delicious variant pool.”¹¹⁰ At this point the speaker answers her own questions of where they are headed, finally declaring “I see it now!” identifying the means, and in some ways the goal, of the departure as “Venus’ rose-veiled barque.”¹¹¹

Just after the poem explicitly identifies the sea and Venus’s boat with the sensual pleasures awaiting the couples, however, it also more fully develops the reluctance to affirm the voyage. The “vague unease” sensed at the opening of the poem becomes more precisely located in the poem’s second section as the specific reluctance of the women to accompany the men. Again the speaker voices this resistance as a series of questions which themselves hold the poem back from the movement of the narrative toward the sea: “What terror holds these noble damsels back? / ... / What pressure of what ill / Turns their vague sweetness chill?”¹¹² As the subjects of the reluctance become more clearly identified, their resistance also intensifies. Rather than a mere “unease” this has become a “terror.”

In counterpoint to that growing terror, the poem momentarily signals a continuity of this voyage with the feminine gathering of “A Fête Champêtre”: the “queen” of the earlier poem reappears as the woman who accepts the voyage.¹¹³ But even as this “queen” consents to the voyage of heterosexual romance she turns back to “mark a sister’s half-abashed surrender.”¹¹⁴ Her “[a]rched, amorous eyelids” emphasize her loving relationship with her “sister” at the same time that she implicitly consents to her suitor’s desire to carry out the journey.¹¹⁵ The poem’s expression of resistance to the voyage then builds further in the ensuing bits of dialogue reported between urging men and hesitant women. As the male voices increasingly express a feverish impatience, one overtly threatens rape if denied consent, implicitly invoking Venus as the reigning, sanctioning deity of love: “Nay then, by force; it is a god’s command / And I by will bring thee to thy bliss.”¹¹⁶ The continuation of the dialogue suggests some form of physical coercion posing as rescue from the rising tide: “Love, the tide is rising Swift; / Shall we talk aboard? Your skirts are wet; / If once I lift / You in!”¹¹⁷ With this culmination of male force, the fête galante has become transformed from the delicate social intercourse of the women in “A Fête Champêtre” into the forced fulfillment of male heterosexual desire.

As the fête galante becomes overtaken by what it initially opposed, the Watteau solitaire also metamorphoses from the man in dark questioning the women’s enjoyment to the stone Venus resisting the journey pursued in her name. Even as the suitor’s call invokes “a god’s command,” the poem turns back to the voice of the reluctant woman reclaiming Venus for her own purposes. In her view the desire to remain on the island is itself an effort to remain true to Venus:

... Nay, nay, I cannot so forget   The statue in the shade, The fountain-trickle by the leafy grot,   Might not this mad embarking be delayed   An instant?¹¹⁸

Recent Watteau scholarship has argued that the painting has been mistitled, and was intended to be called “L’Embarquement de Cythère” showing the couples leaving from the enchanted island of love (de Cythère) rather than setting out for it (pour Cythère). Cooper and Bradley’s poem suggests something similar in its development of the reluctance to depart from what may be the island itself. Rather than a joyous embarcation for the isle of love, the poem narrates an anxiety-ridden forced departure from it.

In this way, the last poem in Sight and Song provides a fitting reflection of the first: as “L’Indifférent” marked an entry into the autonomous, self-enclosed and self-sufficient aesthetic, “L’Embarquement” narrates a coming out of that world. Both include invasive voices: in the first the pressing voice of the outside observer asking the indifferent one for a message; in the last the voices of the impatient suitors pressing their damsels to fulfill their desires. As the women’s gathering of “A Fête Champêtre” gives way to the active heterosexual pressures of “L’Embarquement,” the ironic distance of the gallant also becomes transformed into the ironic distance of the final Venus. The position of the melancholic man in reverie remains but becomes that of the feminine deity holding the place for the very fête galante he previously questioned. In effect, Michael Field’s Venus assumes the position of Pater’s Marie-Marguerite, a feminine onlooker in a world that denies her desires. Rather than adopting the bleakness of Marie-Marguerite, though, the stone deity appropriates a Baudelairean hardness to protect the promise of those desires. In this way, Michael Field’s stone Venus becomes a Watteau solitaire, but one who provides a refuge for an unrealized fête galante. The feminine deity as aesthetic subject harbors within herself the insignia of a better world, like the one that lingers in the paintings of Pater’s Watteau.

The stone Venus’s role as a protector of this insignia culminates in the juxtaposition of the poem’s two endings. The first ending, in the last full stanza, completes the narrative set up by the poem of the departure from the island; the second, a brief italicized epilogue, by remaining on the island reasserts the stasis first introduced by “L’Indifférent.” The first ending completes the dominant movement of the poem’s description of the painting, from right to left, from the couples on the hill to those nearest the boats, to the boats themselves. The momentum of this movement implicitly carries the description from the boats to the sea, from the moment prior to departure depicted in the poem, to the departure itself as the poem ends. The stanza begins on shore where “[t]wo rowers wait,” then “one shoves / The boat from shore.”¹¹⁹ Finally the “conclusion of the soft debate” of the previous stanza anticipates the arrival at Cythera itself, with the phallic imagery of a Cupid seizing “a staff from wanton hand” resulting in “a thousand flambeaux pour[ing] / Their plumy smoke upon the kindled breeze / That wafts these silken loiterers to submerging seas.”¹²⁰

The second ending follows chronologically after the first, but counters its direction and offers an alternative. By moving back from the shore to the hill, to a view of the place the couples have abandoned, the final lines of the poem become distanced from the poem’s apparent telos. Rather than affirm the journey, the “stone Venus by herself remains / Ironical above that wide, embrowning plain.”¹²¹ Gazing from a distance, she appropriates the power of the gallant’s position in “A Fête Champêtre.” Here, though, she uses it to hold a place left behind after the completion of the narrative he initially pointed toward. The ironic distance of the man in black from the women becomes the ironic distance of the Venus from the male-dominated journey, even as the Watteau dance of women becomes destroyed by the male suitors. As in Pater’s “A Prince of Court Painters,” the removed aesthetic observer preserves the promise of the fête galante.