Elisa Bizzotto
The Legend of the Returning Gods in
Pater and Wilde
This article was first published in
F. Marucci and E. Sdegno (eds), Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology
from Romanticism to Modernism, Milano, Cisalpino, 2000, pp. 161-74.
‘The
Portrait of Mr W. H.’, Wilde’s tale questioning the identity of the addressee
of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine
in July 1889. A hybrid piece which is both fiction and criticism, it was highly
considered by Wilde, who had completed a revision of more than double the
length by the autumn of 1893. Yet for a series of reasons – above all the
breaking up of his publishers’ partnership and the disgrace following his
trials in the spring of 1895 – this second version was never put into print and
was lost after Wilde’s arrest. Despite various attempts to discover its
collocation by the writer himself and by some friends after his release,
nothing else was known of the expanded story until 1920, when it mysteriously
reappeared in the United States and was printed in a limited edition in the
following year. However, only in 1958 did the enlarged ‘The Portrait of Mr W.
H.’ find wider diffusion in the edition by Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland, although
up to present day the first Blackwood’s text continues to be published[1].
It
is in fact the revised story which offers many suggestions for a comparison
with Walter Pater’s work and particularly with his new genre, the imaginary
portrait, in which he blended fiction, autobiography and essay and created
tales centring on gifted but doomed heroes. As it emerged in an unsigned review
Wilde wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1887, he deeply admired the
characterisation and the formula of Pater’s tales, whose hybrid nature he seems
to have intertwined in ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ together with other themes of
Paterian origin: Hellenism, neo-Platonism, and especially the Renaissance. All
of these point to a further derived motif, that of the return of the pagan gods
to modern environments which Pater himself notoriously took from Heine’s ‘The
Gods in Exile’, a fantasy illustrating the banishment of the Greek deities from
Olympus after the advent of Christianity and their reincarnation through the centuries.
Not surprisingly, such a vision of myth as a returning presence in
Western culture proved appealing for Pater, whose conception of history was
both cyclical and evolutionary. It oscillated between Hegel’s triadic system
and Vico’s paradigmatic idea of three recurring ages which were followed –
unlike in Hegel’s progressive concept of civilisation – by a barbarian
condition [2].
Hence Pater saw history as proceeding ‘dialectically by assimilating its past
into its present, and […] often [involving] the reincarnation of figures from
the past in the intellectual and cultural life of the present’[3].
Even more interesting for him was probably Heine’s vision of myth as a key to
interpret cryptic events in the complexity and relativism of the modern world,
as is evident in Pater’s earliest allusion to ‘The Gods in Exile’ in the essay
on Pico della Mirandola (1871), a figure who significantly stood at the
crossroads of modernity. Pico is described as a reincarnated Apollo carrying
Greek tradition to Italy and thus starting a new epoch.
Fifteen
years on, in 1886, Pater exploited once again the motif of the returning gods
in the portraits ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’, in which the
idea is similarly developed in transitional ages, although the gods in exile
here are imaginary characters acting as catalysts in the passage from an old to
a new cultural tradition. If Denys inaugurates a second Dionysian golden age in
thirteenth-century France, Carl strives to awaken pre-Romantic Germany from
cultural backwardness by acting as a northern Apollo who brings the light of
southern art to his land. Both will reach their aims only in part and be
fundamentally misunderstood. Yet, as the role of Pico appears ‘great by what it
designed rather than by what it achieved’[4], their functions
will be fully accomplished only in future cultural manifestations: Denys’s in
the Renaissance, and Carl’s in the German Aufklärung from which
Romanticism will rise.
Pater’s
re-reading of the myths of Dionysus and Apollo was to prove extremely influential
for the English fin de siècle, when both gods became objects of revived
attention. In the works of several artists of the time it is possible to
discern a Dionysian-Apollonian paradigm epitomising the antithetical forces
constantly operating in the course of
history[5].
The two gods started to be apprehended as conflicting archetypes determining
the rise of different cultural periods and representing the two sides of man,
art and civilisation, so that they gradually became central principles for any
interpretation of the development of Western thought. But since they embodied
two parts of a whole, they could also appear as somehow coincident, and then as
‘variant forms of the same god – ‘doubles’ who [alternated] a yearly existence
in sequential six month tenures’[6].
As
Richard Dellamora has suggested[7], the possibility of
a congruence between the two gods was no novelty of the fin de siècle.
Indeed it had already been pointed out by Winckelmann who, in his History of
Ancient Art (1764), noticed how in ancient Greek sculpture they exemplified
the two ideals of young male beauty – Apollo as the personification of physical
perfection and predestined future greatness, and Dionysus as an androgynous
pleasure-seeker, apparently unaware of his disruptive power – yet were
sometimes represented in similar attitudes or with similar traits. They were in
fact objects of a common cult that could make them interchangeable[8].
About one century later a similar notion emerged in Wagner’s image of the
supreme god Apollo as a two-faced divinity possessing a Dionysian element in
him: an idea epitomised in Bonaventura Genelli’s watercolour Dioniso allevato dalle Muse
apollinee from which the composer drew inspiration for The Artwork of the
Future (1849).
Although
Wagner saw a return of the spirit of ancient Greece as impossible, he
nevertheless believed that any regeneration of humanity had to pass through the
essence of the Apollonian principle[9]. After Wagner, the German scholars Friederich Gottlieb
Welcker in Griechische Göttlore (1860) and Ludwig Preller in Griechische
Mythologie (1860-1) conceived of the two gods as central to our culture and
studied the contrasting, but intimately related and finally harmonising,
principles they embodied[10]. This vision
culminated of course in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where
the basically opposite natures of Dionysus and Apollo did not prevent his
recognising several analogies between them, and where the gods were seen as the
two forces that had influenced the development of Western art as a whole.
If
it is almost certain that Pater never read Nietzsche[11],
he nevertheless came very close to his conclusions in ‘A Study of Dionysus’
(1876)[12].
There he emphasised the twofold nature of the god of the vineyards and
considered Dionysus’s darker side as exactly proper to his Doppelgänger,
the god Zagreus – a tragic figure almost completely absent from Greek art and
poetry, who dies by dismemberment at the hands of the Titans. The legend tells
that from his heart, the only part of his body which was saved, a new Zagreus,
otherwise called the Theban Dionysus, was born. His bones are instead buried by
Apollo within his own holy abode, an act definitely accounting for the common
cult of the two gods first noticed by Winckelmann.
The
importance of ‘A Study of Dionysus’ in the evolution of Pater’s thought emerges
to the full when considering how Dionysus and Apollo are exploited as the
models for much of his fiction. In his influential study on the mythological
structures underlying Pater’s works, Gerald Monsman has thus interpreted the
whole of the writer’s narrative works as constructed on a Dionysian-Apollonian
opposition finally resulting in a supremacy of the figure of Apollo, who ‘embodies
that harmony of spirit and matter which Dionysus and his Doppelgänger
lack’[13].
More recently, Richard Dellamora has instead proposed a reading of Pater’s
mythological portraits ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893) as
fictions in which the two gods actually conflate from the start[14].
Even though less evident than in Pater, this Dionysus-Apollo pattern and this
tendency to unite the two gods as a single character can also be envisaged in
Wilde’s ‘imaginary portrait’ of Mr W. H. Several details in the story seem to
be based on the models of reinterpretation of Greek mythology derived from the
German thinkers and from Pater, whereas its two heroes – Willie Hughes and his
Victorian alter-ego Cyril Graham – reveal the traits of Dionysus and Apollo
cyclically returning to earth.
‘The
Portrait of Mr W. H.’ opens as a conversation between two Victorian gentlemen
on the theme of literary forgeries. Erskine tells the narrator the story of a
friend of his, Cyril Graham, who commissioned a false sixteenth-century
portrait to support his belief that the ‘fair youth’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
the famous Mr W. H. of the dedication, was the boy actor of the poet’s company,
and so the inspirer and interpreter of all the female roles in his plays. His
name – Willie Hughes – was easily deducible from the punning sonnets (CXXXV and
CXLIII) and from sonnet XX. Erskine then describes Cyril Graham as an extremely
good-looking and capricious boy who had an incredible appeal for ‘everybody who
was worth fascinating’, while resulting as insignificant to ‘philistines and
college tutors, and young men reading for the church’[15].
An orphan guarded by an unconcerned grandfather, Cyril only cared for poetry
and acting and was always cast for female roles in the university dramatic
company. His androgynous charm stood out in his interpretation of Rosalind in As
You Like It, a part that seemed modelled on him and that he brought to a
degree of absolute perfection[16]. Forbidden to go
on the stage again by his grandfather, Cyril’s unstable personality suffered
another strong blow when Erskine discovered that the portrait of Willie Hughes
was false and decided to take his life in order to prove the legitimacy of his
theory. His only legacy was the baffling portrait he left to his friend.
The
story has an immediate fascination for the narrator, who feels completely
converted to Cyril’s ideas on Willie Hughes, and declares that he will devote
all his energies to sustain and divulge them. Yet, after months of strong
enthusiasm, he can get no objective proof of the existence of the young actor
and finally senses the inconsistency of the theory. Surprisingly, it is now the
sceptical Erskine to profess his conversion to the Willie Hughes thesis and to
dedicate himself to it, until his long research proves equally unfruitful, and
he also resolves to take his life to show the validity of Cyril’s
interpretation. But when the narrator runs to him, he finds out that Erskine’s
death was simply caused by long-term consumption, so that it appears as another
variation on the forgery theme. The narrator’s last thoughts, giving the tale
an open ending, unexpectedly reveal that he has not completely dismissed the
idea of the existence of Willie Hughes and that he likes his friends to believe
that the portrait he has inherited is authentic.
As
the summary clarifies, most of the appeal of ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ lies in
the construction of Willie Hughes and Cyril Graham on a series of analogies
which suggest that Cyril is to be interpreted as Willie’s double, or better as
his nineteenth-century reincarnation. Both very young and handsome, Willie and
Cyril possess such natural talents for the stage that they are seen as the
ideal interpreters of the female parts in Shakespeare. If Willie is the ‘boy-actor
for whom [Shakespeare] created Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia
and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself’,[17] Cyril appears to
Erskine as ‘the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen. It would be impossible
to describe…the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole thing […]
Even now when I read the play I can’t help thinking of Cyril; the part might
have been written for him’[18]. Their fascination
therefore lies in their ambiguous, androgynous natures, in which the myth of
Hermaphroditus seems to come to life. The youth famous for the perfection of
his ‘woman’s face’ and seen by the narrator of Wilde’s story as possessing ‘a
beauty that seemed to combine the charm of both sexes, and to have wedded […]
the face of Adonis and the loveliness of Helen’[19] has a Doppelgänger
in Cyril, whose ‘face, with its dreamy, wistful eyes and its delicate scarlet
lips, was the face of a girl’[20]. Erskine moreover describes his friend as ‘effeminate…[and]
languid…the most splendid creature I ever saw […] nothing could exceed the
grace of his movements, the charm of his manner’[21]. Another feature
the boys have in common is their childish, fanciful and egocentric
personalities – whereas Willie emerges from some sonnets as a slave to ‘his
susceptibility to praise, his inordinate love of admiration’[22],
Cyril is ‘very foolish, and very heartless’[23], ‘often wilful and
petulant […] dreadfully insincere […] due […] to his inordinate desire to
please’[24].
They also share tragic deaths: Cyril – as already described – by his own hand,
and Willie – as will be soon shown – supposedly by the hands of an enraged
crowd. Finally, the two youths attract older, cultivated men who are fascinated
by their mystery, beauty and talent. This is particularly evident in Willie’s
case, since he, as Shakespeare’s inspirer and the personification of his ideal
of beauty, incarnates the muse of the greatest art. In his bond with the
writer, besides, the core of the Renaissance spirit becomes manifested.
Originating
in a rediscovery of Greek philosophy, Renaissance society (described in the
story as ‘essentially male’[25]) was inspired by
Hellenism, and in particular by Platonism, in elevating friendship between men ‘to
the high dignity of the antique ideal’[26]. Such a tie became
‘a vital factor in the new culture, and a mode of self-conscious intellectual
development’[27],
according to ‘a kind of mystic transference of the expression of the physical
sphere to a sphere that was spiritual, that was removed from gross bodily
appetite, and in which the soul was Lord’[28]. Famous male
companionships of the period based on the principles expressed in Plato’s
dialogues are held up as examples. Among these, Wilde highlights the friendship
between Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, who perceived in his pupil ‘the
realisation of the Greek ideal’[29], and compares it to Winckelmann’s affection
for a Roman youth, whose features initiated the critic ‘into the secrets of
Greek art [...] the mysteries of its beauty and the meaning of its form’[30].
If an apology of homosexuality is the underlying reason in heightening
such relations to a paradigmatic degree[31], the references to
Pico and Winckelmann show that Wilde exploited motifs derived from Pater to
advance his point. For both writers, ideal beauty found its incarnation in an
ephebe-like boy disclosing the essence of the Hellenic tradition to a
personality uncommonly responsive to formal perfection. This is always an older
man with artistic or scholarly inclinations, who considers that supreme harmony
always lies in a male body[32], and endows the
youth he cherishes with the traits of a pagan divinity[33].
But
Willie Hughes and, to a lesser degree, Cyril Graham not only possess the
perfect features of Dionysus and Apollo according to Winckelmann’s canons: they
may also be seen as gods in exile trying to revive the spirit of the classical
ages. Willie’s role as a second Pico, and then as a cultural catalyst starting
the awakening of culture in English Renaissance, has partly been underlined in
the description of his friendship with Shakespeare. Other elements indicate
that his characterisation could have been originally inspired by the figures of
Denys and Carl, and that he too personifies one of the different guises in
which the gods Dionysus and Apollo have been manifested through the centuries.
Like those of the reincarnated gods, Willie’s origins and life are shrouded by
a veil that renders them obscure and makes the returning Apollo-Dionysus
attractive at first, but soon suspicious and finally hateful. Willie then
possesses a Dionysian-Apollonian beauty untouched by time, as though he had ‘the
secret of perpetual youth’[34], since ‘years [pass] over, and the bloom of
his boyhood [seems] to be still with him’[35] (see also Wilde’s
reference to sonnet CIV, ‘To me fair friend you never can be old’). Moreover, the
allusions to Willie’s unchangeable features call to mind another archetype,
that of Faust, which Wilde was extensively exploiting in those same years in The
Picture of Dorian Gray. Actually, the myth of Faust appears closely
connected with the motif of the returning gods, since Heine himself hinted at
the sometimes diabolical nature of his banned deities, who allied themselves
with the Devil after being ousted from Olympus by Christ. Such a theme was
likewise developed in Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’, whose protagonist is a
mysterious creature, half divine and half diabolical, as his very name Apollyon
(a fallen angel in the Scriptures) suggests[36]. What however
mostly fosters the suspicion of a Faustian component in Willie Hughes is the
narrator’s conviction that the boy was the inspirer of Marlowe’s
Mephistopheles, since he believes that Willie played in the company of
Shakespeare’s rival for a short time[37].
Yet
it is especially the conjectures on Willie’s tragic death to suggest his link
with exiled pagan divinities. Each of these hypotheses seems to reproduce the
violent ends undergone by the returning gods when they become the scapegoats of
a whole community[38].
The sacrificial and propitiatory value which lies implicit in Willie’s death –
a veritable transition rite for the passage to a new age, and consequently an
enactment of the archetype of rebirth – not only makes him assume the traits of
a Dionysian-Apollonian deity, but also those of a second Christ who comes to
earth for the atonement of human sins, a feature he shares with Denys l’Auxerrois.
First presumed to have died during the Civil War when the actors took the king’s
side against the Puritans (the narrator conjures up ‘the dead body of Willie
Hughes [...] found by some [...] trough peasants [...] his gold hair ‘dabbled
with blood’, and his breast pierced by many wounds’)[39],
the narrator definitely believes that Willie died in Germany, where he had
arrived with other English actors after Shakespeare’s retirement from the stage
in 1611. There he had played at the courts of typical Renaissance patrons such
as the Duke of Brunswick, an amateur dramatist, and the Elector of
Brandenburgh, who was ‘so enamoured of beauty [...] [as] to have bought for his
weight in amber the young son of a travelling Greek merchant’[40], where Willie
continued to inspire the ideal of male romantic friendship he had fostered in
Elizabethan London. Most importantly, his interpretations of the characters
that had been modelled on him brought the light of Renaissance art, and
consequently the spirit of ancient Greece to Germany – a feature making Willie
appear as a predecessor of the duke Carl. Both modelled on the hyperborean
Apollo, they alone can defeat the bareness of northern countries by bringing
there the richness and completeness of southern culture. In ‘The Portrait of Mr
W. H.’ a passage manifestly plagiarising Pater’s ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’
underlines Willie’s Apollonian function in the following terms: ‘the boy-actor,
whose beauty had been so vital an element in the realism and romance of
Shakespeare’s art, had been the first to have brought to Germany the seed of
the new culture, and was in his way the precursor of the Aufklärung or
Illumination of the eighteenth century, that splendid movement which, though
begun by Lessing and Herder, and brought to its full and perfect issue by
Goethe was in no small part helped by a young actor – Friederich Schroeder – who
awoke the popular consciousness’.[41] Willie Hughes is
consequently seen as a figure to which ‘the Romantic Movement of English
literature’ – another age seeing the manifestation of the Greek spirit – ‘is
largely indebted’.[42]
But
while Willie’s role in the shaping of a new German artistic consciousness
coincides with that of Carl-Apollo, his death is definitely envisaged by the
narrator as close to that of Denys-Dionysus. Like him, or better still, like a
reincarnated Zagreus, Shakespeare’s beloved is imagined to have been slain in a
sudden popular uprising (a historical circumstance actually involving a group
of English actors at Nuremberg) and secretly buried in a vineyard by some
youths trying to learn ‘the mysteries of the new art’[43].
Young adepts are equally fascinated by Denys and by his arcane powers, towards
which, however, people react with both attraction and fear. Denys’s murder,
while he plays the leading role in a pageant, is just a consequence of the
extremely contrasting sensations he has been evoking. In his case, as in Willie’s,
life, fiction and myth are no longer distinguishable, and dramatic
representation functions either as the means to express the spectators’ most
recondite feelings, or as a transition and propitiatory rite for the god in
exile, from whose spoils newer artistic expression will grow. This explains why
Willie’s death brings the narrator to reflect on the birth of comedy and
tragedy, which he imagines to have sprung respectively from the lips of the
Sicilian vine-dresser and the sorrows of Dionysus[44].
Yet,
even if Wilde’s employment of the gods-in-exile motif appears patent, his
configuration of the journey of the deities after their banishment from Olympus
is not exactly the same as that imagined by Pater. If Pater highlights the
importance of Italian Renaissance, Wilde, though admitting its Italian
derivation, sees the spirit of Hellenism embodied in the Elizabethan age.
Wilde, then, ignores the role of medieval France in the cultural descent from
ancient Greece – an aspect which offers manifold narrative and critical hints
to Pater[45].
But the main distinction lies in Wilde’s suggestion that a return of Hellenism
is also perceivable in contemporary England, a return whose vehicle he portrays
in Cyril Graham.
To
clarify the writer’s estimation of the artistic achievements of his own age,
one of the lectures he delivered during his American tour in 1882, ‘The English
Renaissance of Art’, in which Wilde illustrated his idea of the subsequent
returns of the Greek spirit in European culture, can be helpful. The starting
point is the conviction that a new golden age rose in England with Romanticism,
and precisely with Keats (‘the pure and serene artist’ endowed with ‘perfect
self-control [...] [and] unerring sense of beauty’[46]),
and was then improved by the regeneration of art accomplished by the
Pre-Raphaelites. The English Renaissance of the nineteenth century, ‘a sort of
new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the
fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life,
its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking
for new subjects in poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative
enjoyments’,[47]
derived from these figures.
But
if such statements provide critical support to Wilde’s idea of the evolution of
Western art and history as a cyclical ‘triple flowering (the Greeks, the
Renaissance, and the English Renaissance)’[48] – a notion which,
like in Pater’s case, he partly derived from Hegel – the final section of the
lecture raises doubts on the receptivity of the nineteenth-century public as
compared to Athenian and Elizabethan audiences. While these earlier ages
possessed a ‘great national united energy’[49], which proved
determinant in the birth of the highest forms of drama (a genre Wilde saw as ‘the
meeting-place of art and life’[50]), Victorian
England appears overly concerned with the ‘restless modern intellectual spirit’[51]
to favouring outstanding achievements in the artistic field. With no beautiful
national life, and with the consequent unresponsiveness to the sensuous element
of art, the envisaged Renaissance of Wilde’s age is necessarily incomplete.
In
fact, a similar sceptical attitude towards the receptivity of contemporary
England definitely emerges in ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ through the analysis
of Cyril Graham’s destiny and death. Introduced in the story as a martyr for
poetry’s sake, Cyril assumes the traits of Willie Hughes’s Victorian
reincarnation, and thus the features of a god returning to disclose the secrets
of true art. But unlike Willie and unlike the exiled deities of Pater, Cyril
leaves no cultural heredity. Even ideal representatives of the public, like the
narrator and Erskine, respectively experience short-lived enthusiasm towards
him, or enact a fake suicide which parodies his own. His self-immolation is
thus wasted in an unreceptive environment.
Despite
the narrator’s final thought that ‘there is really a great deal to be said for
the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’[52],
he only refers to Cyril Graham indirectly by defining self-martyrdom as ‘a
tragic form of scepticism, an attempt to realise by the fire what one had
failed to do by faith’[53]. The narrator’s
position concerning the gods in exile is thus twofold: if he hints at Willie’s
superior nature, his belief in Cyril as accomplishing similar tasks is instead
feeble. Unlike the true gods, Cyril dies by his own hand, as though he were the
first to raise doubts about his real nature.
There
is no place for a returned Apollo-Dionysus in Wilde’s times, when the modern
spirit prevents a univocal vision of history, art and culture. For both he and
Pater, the exiled gods seem to have ceased to find their ways back among men in
the Romantic period with which the organic golden ages definitely closed.
v Elisa Bizzotto teaches English language and literature at the University
of Venice-Ca' Foscari and at the University of Trent. Her work focuses on
Walter Pater, the fin de siècle and intergenre and interart studies. She
is the author of La mano e l'anima (2001) on the imaginary portrait in the
late-Victorian age and has co-edited (with Serena Cenni) the volume Dalla stanza
accanto. Vernon Lee e Firenze Settant'anni dopo (2006). She is
currently preparing a new edition of the PRB magazine The Germ
together with Paola Spinozzi.
