The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Lionel Johnson drank, and kept himself locked in his nocturnal rooms, to escape those very demons who led Baron Corvo to the darkened calle of Venice in pursuit, not merely of the Whole, but of young gondoliers. The grandson of a baronet (General Sir Henry Johnson) and the son of an infantry officer, Captain William Johnson, the boy went to Winchester, and on to New College, Oxford. It was there that the insomnia began, and a doctor recommended alcohol as a palliative. And it was at Oxford that he fell under the influence of Walter Pater (1839–94), who had been a fellow of Brasenose since 1864.

  Yeats tells us that ‘if Rossetti was a subconscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy’14 – and this philosophy, in a few words, was l’art pour l’art. When he came to compile The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, Yeats began it with a passage of Pater’s prose, which he divided into broken lines as if it were verse.

  She is older than the rocks among which she sits:

  Like the Vampire,

  She has been dead many times,

  And learned the secrets of the grave …15

  Many who heard these words read aloud would not instantly, from the word-picture they create, form a picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda in their minds. But for the generation who were young in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), from which the Mona Lisa passage is taken, and his historical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885, set in the period of Marcus Aurelius) were revolutionary. They were the beginnings of the modern. They helped a whole generation to lose their faith in Bentham and Mill and Utilitarianism and to embrace the notion that Imagination fashions the world. As the more scornful and disapproving critics of Pater would insist, this would also suggest that morality, if adopted at all, was something we can make up as we go along. No wonder it appealed so strongly to the young. He saw religion as purely aesthetic, and aestheticism was his religion. No wonder those disciples who feared the consequences of this in their own lives, such as Lionel Johnson or the slightly older Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), embraced the disciplines of a religious life. For those who drank Pater undiluted it could be heady stuff. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) when he first met Yeats described Pater’s Renaissance as ‘My golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’16

  If Pater was the godfather of the Nineties, then undoubtedly its most precocious child and greatest visual genius was Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), and The Yellow Book, the artistic quarterly which he helped to found with his friend Henry Harland, its Scripture. When he took a bundle of drawings to Burne-Jones’s studio in Fulham, the older artist told Beardsley, then aged eighteen, ‘Nature has given you every gift which is necessary to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’17 Whistler, whose relations with Beardsley were much edgier, made a generous admission in 1896 when he saw Beardsley’s brilliantly clever illustrations to Pope’s Rape of the Lock – ‘Aubrey, I have made a very great mistake – you are a very great artist’ – a tribute which reduced the consumptive (and not always sober) genius to tears.

  Art historians can spot the influences on Beardsley’s work – some William Morris here, some Japanese prints there. Beardsley’s drawings, however, do not merely illustrate, they define their age, as with his design for a prospectus of The Yellow Book, showing an expensively dressed, semi-oriental courtesan perusing a brightly lit bookstall late at night while from within the shop the elderly pierrot gazes at her furiously, quizzically. Half the square is black; the whitened spaces, of books, shop window, lantern, seem shockingly bright. She is an emblem of new womanhood, and of erotic power. The candour with which Beardsley evokes erotic feeling in both sexes made his designs ‘shocking’ to his contemporaries: and it was partly on this shock value that his reputation rested. After he lost interest in The Yellow Book he started a new periodical called The Savoy, the prospectus for which depicted John Bull, emblem of bluff Englishry, with a notable erection. His illustrations for Lysistrata, with their fleshy-calved, full-breasted women whose pubic hair peeps from behind silks and feathers, capture the erotic power of the work they illustrate, and deliberately cock a snook at the suburbs.

  But Beardsley is a much greater artist than these naughtinesses might imply. It is hard to think of any British artist who had a more certain sense of composition. Every small square and oblong is an innovation, an experiment in how to arrange black and white shapes. The draughtsmanship is impeccable. And, as is the case with all great art, no one who has imbibed these drawings is quite the same person as before. After Beardsley, no ‘modern art’ – not Picasso, not the Dadaists nor the Surrealists of the twentieth century – is a surprise. He has been there before. But he has also seen into the tired old soul of his age. The illustration of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire – Messalina Returning front the Bath is an astonishing piece of work. A woman (or can we dispense with the indefinite article?) angry and sexually dissatisfied stomps upstairs after an unsatisfying quest for pleasure, her taut nipples bare, her hair loose over her shoulders. Her placing to the left of the picture, while the carefully drawn balustrades are all that occupy the right, is a good example of Beardsley’s impeccable sense of space. But it is much, much more than a piece of book-illustration. When he was dying of consumption, the poor young man, who had converted from Anglo-Catholic to Roman Catholic piety, wrote to his publisher Smithers, ‘Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings … By all that is holy all obscene drawings. In my death agony.’18 One is grateful to Smithers, publisher to the Decadents, for ignoring this prayer. Perhaps in any case he realized, as we must do, for example, if we walk into an Arts and Crafts Nineties church such as Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, in Chelsea, that the religion of those times was more than a touch decadent, and the decadence of Beardsley’s drawings more than a little religious.

  One feels the same sentiments when leaving Beardsley’s Bohemian world of Soho restaurants or the flats he shared with his sister Mabel, and turning to the country houses of the group known as the Souls.

  Arthur Balfour, the languid nephew of Lord Salisbury, who would succeed as Conservative prime minister on 12 July 1902, felt within himself a superficiality, a frivolity against which he forced himself to guard. He told his niece Blanche Dugdale in the late 1920s that in his youth he had taken his philosophic writings and musings very seriously indeed. This activity ‘was my great safeguard against the feeling of frivolity’.19 Balfour’s philosophy is not much read now, though the still popular C.S. Lewis provides what is in effect a rechauffé version of Balfour’s The Foundations of Belief in his writings, especially in Mere Christianity and Miracles. Some of the more lightweight biographical coverage of Balfour and his circle has, by reading only one famous extract from that book, formed the impression that his philosophical position was one of despondency and unbelief, an impression confirmed by his confusingly titled book A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. But what Balfour took leave to doubt was not religion but the pretensions of scientific materialism. The ‘famous passage’, almost an anthology piece, from The Foundations describes the world as seen through the eyes not of Balfour himself but those of his philosophical opponents. So powerful is the period prose, however, that one cannot but recognize that it describes the night outside the country houses where Balfour spent his days, the cold windy chaos to which the world would return if all the things he cherished about that upper-class Tory intellectual world, including its Established Church, were removed.

  A man – so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first conve
rted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligent enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish.20

  For Pater, the natural response to the dark godless universe suggested by Victorian science was to live in myth, and in art. It is in the creation of art that humanity retains its dignity.21 But for the nephew of Lord Salisbury, this was not quite enough: Balfour tried nobly to create an intellectual justification for not believing in the nihilism suggested by Darwin, not believing in a godless universe – and by implication, therefore, for accepting Church and State by Law, and by God, established. The atmosphere at Hatfield, during the lifetime of Balfour’s uncle, the great prime minister, was distinctly pious. Gladstone liked the feeling in the chapel where Lord Salisbury prayed every day, saying it was ‘hearty’ – by which he meant full of felt piety, not in the modern sense alive with the noise of tambourines. One of Balfour’s biographers describes the 3rd Marquess’s children as ‘fanatical Anglicans’.22

  Balfour, though a believer, could never be so described. His ‘set’ – nicknamed the Souls – had a different ethos altogether. They were aristocrats who deplored the philistinism of their kind. Mention has already been made of George Nathaniel Curzon’s knowledge of languages, architecture and art in East and West – demonstrated with panache when he became viceroy of India. Other ‘Souls’ included Violet, Duchess of Rutland, who described herself in one word in her Who’s Who entry as ‘artist’ – her sculpture of her nine-year-old son lying dead on his tomb at Haddon is testimony of how worthy she was of the name. Another was her lover Harry Cust, minor poet, dashingly handsome man of letters. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was the oldest member of the circle, a man of enormous accomplishments and a scurrilous pen whose diaries continue to confuse historians with their questionable gossip about upper-class life. A keen Arabist (his wife painted him in Arab costume), he also espoused Irish nationalism (and was imprisoned for a while in consequence). His great house Clouds, now famous as a fashionable clinic – he commissioned Philip Webb to build it at a cost of £80,000 – was often so full of guests that Blunt camped in an Arab tent on the lawn. While the ‘Crabbet Club’ which Blunt had founded were staying, all twenty of them at once, his wife Lady Anne (Byron’s granddaughter) asked guests to share, three to a room. It was a magnificent house – Webb’s masterpiece, built of green sandstone, with interiors chiefly white, with here and there a splash of colour provided by Morris carpets or tapestry. Undoubtedly in some of its aspects it suggested the great house in The Spoils of Poynton to Henry James – himself an ‘honorary Soul’ – with Madeline Wyndham, Blunt’s cousin by marriage, a part-model for Mrs Gereth. ‘In all the great wainscotted house there was not an inch of pasted paper.’

  Other ‘Souls’ houses included the manor house at Mells where the beautiful Frances Graham, subject of many a Burne-Jones canvas, had married the lord of the manor, John Horner. Mells was said to be the ‘plum’ pulled out by Jack Horner in the rhyme – formerly it was the summer residence of the abbots of Glastonbury. (The Horners had lived at Mells since the Reformation.) Then there was Stanway in Gloucestershire, the superb Jacobean house where Mary Wyndham became the chatelaine, marrying Hugo Charteris, Viscount Elcho, and conducting a lifelong amitié amoureuse with Balfour. Far less beautiful architecturally, but no less alive with bright conversation and clever Souls, was Taplow Court near Maidenhead, where the ethereal, sad-faced Lady Desborough presided. ‘Even breakfasts at Taplow were more lively than champagne dinners elsewhere.’

  Though Burne-Jones was besotted with Frances Horner, Sargent was the painter who captured the essence of the Souls, as in his stupendous portrait of The Wyndham Sisters – Lady Elcho, Mrs Tennant and Mrs Adeane – of 1900. It depicts a world of immense privilege and lightheartedness, but one of dazzling talent too. Yeats, thinking of the rather comparable world of his aristocratic friends in Ireland, saw that country-house life did provide a very special opportunity for a very few clever, nice people to lead lives of the mind, and to be detached from la vie quotidienne. By so doing they did not produce works of philosophy to rival Plato or poetry to arouse envy in the shade of Alexander Pope, but it is hard to think of any way of life in any period of history which more deserves the epithet civilized. By destroying it, Yeats believed, his generation had destroyed something irrevocably good –

  O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways

  Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease

  And Childhood a delight for every sense,

  But take our greatness with our violence?23

  His Irish contemporary, Wilde, was often in, though not of, this set. Lady Desborough admired the way he would seek out the most prosaic person in the room and ‘conjure him into being a wit’.24 It is strange to think of him being the guest of Herbert Asquith – home secretary who for eight years was married to Margot Tennant, a great Soul.25 At one moment, Asquith basks in Wilde’s wit at his table. At the next, as home secretary, Asquith was ultimately responsible for prosecuting him on a criminal charge and sending him to prison.

  Oscar Wilde, as Yeats reminds us, ‘hated Bohemia’26 and was happier in the houses of the rich. ‘Olive Schreiner,’ he once said to Yeats, ‘is staying in the East End because that is the only place where people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in the West End because nothing interests me but the mask.’27

  What lay behind Wilde’s mask is anybody’s guess. (When Arthur Balfour once asked him his religion, he replied, ‘I don’t think I have any. I am an Irish Protestant.’)28 The mask itself, the persona presented to the world, was clear for all to see, which is why one takes with a pinch of salt the clever modern interpretations of the plays as metaphors for a hidden homosexual life – Bunburying being such a metaphor for example. What amazed Wilde’s contemporaries was not furtiveness – which was alien to his nature – but his exhibitionistic candour. Frank Harris, hardly the most shockable of men, was astounded to overhear him describing the physical charms of Olympic athletes in ancient Greece to a pair of extremely suspect youths.29 Curzon, who had been at Oxford with Wilde, was asked to play devil’s advocate when Wilde attended the Crabbet Club in 1891. The custom, laboriously humorous, was that one member would propose a new member and then another would speak against; so Curzon was not being gratuitously offensive, simply playing the game. Nevertheless, as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt recollected, Curzon knew all Wilde’s ‘little weaknesses and did not spare him, playing with astonishing audacity and skill upon his reputation for sodomy and his treatment of the subject in Dorian Gray. Poor Oscar sat helplessly smiling, a fat mass, in his chair … What is really memorable about it all is that, when two years later he was arraigned in a real Court of Justice, Oscar’s line of defence was precisely the same as that made in his impromptu speech that evening at the Crabbet.’30

  In the final paragraph of De Profundis, the long, overwritten letter penned by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde gave utterance to some generalizations which were so wholly of their time that we could almost imagine finding them among the mystical writings of Blavatsky, the philosophical musings of the Idealists, or in the slightly precious letters exchanged by ‘The Souls’ – ‘Time and space, succession and extension, a
re merely accidental conditions of Thought. The Imagination can transcend them, and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things, also, are in their essence what we choose to make them.’ With what is a typical inversion of common-sense meaning, Wilde then makes a remarkable prophecy – ‘What lies before me is my past. I have got to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes.’

  Leaving the Almighty out of consideration, we may say that Wilde has been remarkably successful in achieving his ambition. During his lifetime, he could be seen as a man of incomparable wit who had written some jolly plays and one masterpiece – The Importance of Being Earnest. The fairy stories, the creakingly obvious Picture of Dorian Gray, the unsuccessful lyrics, can surely only be savoured by the most enthusiastic devotees. As for his private life – he chose not to make it private. A case could be made out for the Victorians being more prudish than we are. An equally strong case could be made for their retaining what is necessary to be retained in order to lead a sane or civilized life: namely, a sense that while there are some things which one would say or do in private, they change their nature if made public. By so incomprehensibly choosing to make an exhibition of himself in court, Wilde made life measurably more uncomfortable for all the homosexuals in Britain, many of whom fled abroad after the second trial. On the day that Wilde was bound over at Great Marlborough Street Police Court, London was placarded with his name on newsstands. ‘Well,’ a friend remarked to him, ‘you have got your name before the public at last.’ ‘Yes,’ Wilde laughed. ‘Nobody can pretend now not to have heard of it.’31 He showed extraordinary courage, but the trials did not do much except create an impression in the public mind of a murky homosexual underworld in which fairly sordid things took place, often with boys who were legally minors.