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The Androgynous Body in Pater's “Winckelmann”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard Dellamora
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Extract

The “deeply felt” quality of Walter Pater's essay on Winckelmann indicates the depth of affinity between these two men. Young Pater shared Winckelmann's religious scepticism, his intense commitment to rationality, and his absorption in the study of art. As well, both shared an erotic temperament and wrote especially for young men. Winckelmann had shown that an explicit homoeroticism might play a key role in cultural interpretation. His writing helped Pater in his effort to counter the Matthew Arnold of “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.” Already in March 1864, when Arnold delivered this lecture at Oxford, he was reacting against the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. At least such a reaction explains his harsh treatment of Heine as a latter-day pagan. Although only a year earlier Arnold had delivered a sympathetic and well-informed lecture on Heine, he now put him in the position of aesthete and ignored important elements of his thought. Walter Pater may well have been one of Arnold's auditors at this time (DeLaura, p. 203). If so, the occasion was prophetic because Heine's position as characterized by Arnold resembles that which Pater would take in 1867 in his second published essay, “Winckelmann” (DeLaura, p. 201). Pater realized as much, hence took steps to subvert the position that Arnold took in his lecture. He supplemented Arnold's view of Greek culture in the time of Sophocles with Winckelmann's playful and sensuous ideal of androgynous beauty in the succeeding age of Praxiteles. Pater reinterpreted Arnold's ideal of the imaginative reason in an erotic light. Arnold's negative treatment of Heine extended to the “peace” between “body and soul” that Heine had prophesied (p. 227). Pater corrected this bias in Arnold and argued instead the importance of the body as a crux of value in a contemporary ideal of culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 11 , Spring 1983 , pp. 51 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

1. Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Hill, Donald L. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 412Google Scholar – hereafter cited as Hill.

2. Hill quotes Kenneth Clark, who has observed the affinities, including the erotic (p. 412). See also Monsman, Gerald, Walter Pater (Boston: Twayne, 1977), p. 48Google Scholar. Also Peters, Robert, “The Cult of the Returned Apollo: Walter Pater's Renaissance and Imaginary Portraits,” The Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies, 2 (11 1981), 56–59Google Scholar; Stein, Richard L., “The Private Themes of Pater's Renaissance,” in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Crews, Frederick (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1970), pp. 203–18.Google Scholar

3. DeLaura, David J., Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 174Google Scholar – hereafter cited as DeLaura. See Sussman, Herbert's valuable “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Their Circle: The Formation of the Victorian Avant-Garde,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 57 (Spring, 1980), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

4. For Pater versus Arnold on the place of the body in culture, see DeLaura, , p. 243Google Scholar. The first use of the phrase “imaginative reason” that DeLaura has found is in order to distinguish between promiscuity and chaste love. DeLaura quotes Julius Charles Hare: “If Italian, then, is ‘the language of love’ … it must be of sensual voluptuous unstable transient love, not of loyalty and chaste constancy, not of that love in which the imaginative reason consecrates and gives permanence to the animal passion of the moment. These feelings receive their consistency from the intellect” (DeLaura, David J., “Imaginative Reason: Yet Again,” Prose Studies, 2, No. 3 [1979], 189Google Scholar – the italics are DeLaura's). For For an extended discussion of the term, see DeLaura, , “Arnold's Imaginative Reason: The Oxford Sources and the Tradition,” Prose Studies, 1, No. 1 (1977), 7–18Google Scholar. See also DeLaura's, “Imaginative Reason: A Further Note,” Prose Studies, 2, No. 2 (1979), 103–06Google Scholar. And DeLaura, , pp. 64–70Google Scholar; Culler, A. Dwight, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 42, 282–83.Google Scholar

5. References to Arnold are to Arnold, Matthew, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. Super, R. H. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962).Google Scholar

6. Pater, Walter, “Coleridge,” Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (London, 1910; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1967), p. 66Google Scholar – hereafter cited as A. This is a revised version of “Coleridge's Writings.”

7. Honour, Hugh, Neo-classicism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 31–32, 46Google Scholar; Filler, Martin, “History Reinvented: Adam and His Heirs,” Art in America, 70 (Summer, 1982), 92Google Scholar. M. Kay Flavell discusses Winckelmann's modernity in the context of the eighteenth century. She is especially good on the Apollo Belvedere. See her “Winckelmann and the German Enlightenment: On the Recovery and Uses of the Past,” Modern Language Review, 74 (1979), 79–96Google Scholar. Also useful are Irwin, David, ed., Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London: Phaidon, 1972)Google Scholar; and Haskell, Francis and Penny, Nicholas, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 99–107et passimGoogle Scholar. Winckelmann's androgynous norm influenced Shelley. See Brown, Nathaniel, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 19–23 but also 5–18, 117–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Winckelmann's influence in the nineteenth century is incalculably diffusive. Consider, for instance, the description of Marnoo, “the Polynesian Apollo,” in chap. 18 of Herman Melville's Typee (see Irwin, , p. 52Google Scholar). (Annette Niemtzow drew my attention to the passage and to androgyny in Melville's novel in a paper that she gave as a fellow panelist in the session “Sexuality and the Nineteenth-century Male Writer” at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles in 12, 1982.Google Scholar

8. Honour, , p. 59Google Scholar. Vasari, Giorgio, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Bull, George (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 84, 90.Google Scholar

9. For some speculative suggestions as to why scuplture in particular should prompt an aesthetic based on the relation between the viewer and the work of art, see Martin, F. David, “Sculpture, Painting, and the Human Body,” Bucknell Review, 24 (Fall, 1978), 153–69.Google Scholar

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11. Heller, pErich, The Poet's Self and the Poem: Essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke and Thomas Mann (London: Athlone Press, 1976), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

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13. Praz, , p. 48Google Scholar. See also Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, History of Ancient Art, trans. Lodge, G. Henry (New York: Ungar, 1968), 1, 220Google Scholar. Unless otherwise cited, references to Winckelmann are to this work.

14. Quoted by Praz, , p. 49Google Scholar. In Winckelmann, , 1, 202.Google Scholar

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16. On these two phases of Greek sculpture, see Clark, Kenneth, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 36–41Google Scholar – hereafter cited as Clark.

17. On these aspects of imagery of breathing, see Bloom, Harold, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 296–302.Google Scholar

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19. For instance, he writes to Friedrich Reinholdt von Berg: “Our friendship came from heaven, not from human motions of the heart” (Praz quotes the letter at length, pp. 42–44).Google Scholar

20. Praz suggests the relation with Arcangeli was physical (p. 63); Leppmann suggests that it was not (p. 11).

21. Had his readers checked on Pater, they would have found the references to Hegel to be frustrating. See Inman, Billie Andrew, Walter Pater's Reading: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References 1858–1873 (New York: Garland, 1981), pp. 132–37, 140–42.Google Scholar

22. Hill, , p. 263Google Scholar; Inman, , pp. 136–37.Google Scholar

23. Besides the Symposium, Phaedrus also focuses on male love. I discuss it in a forthcoming essay on Marius the Epicurean. Both Phaedrus and Lysis are relevant to “Winckelmann.”

24. Theocritus, , The Poems, trans. Rist, Anna (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 132Google Scholar. See Rist's, discussion of the poem, pp. 132–35.Google Scholar

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26. Later Arnold remarks, “what a fulness of delight does St. Francis manage to draw from this material world itself” (p. 230). Arnold also qualifies his characterization of paganism as sensual. On both points he is correct, but his overall emphasis is as I state it in the paragraph.

27. Pater targets Catholicism partly in response to the beginning of Arnold's lecture, in which he praises Catholicism, somewhat facetiously, for “its abundance, its variety, its infinite suggestive-ness, its happy adoption, in many a delicate circumstance, of the urbane tone and temper of the man of the world” (pp. 214–15).

28. Cf. Winckelmann's description of the Torso Belvedere (11, 264–65) and see Clark's discussion of Winckelmann on the Laocoön (pp. 219–21).

29. Inman discusses Pater's openness to scientific thought (e.g., pp. 104–05). Renan is another scientific influence (Inman, , pp. 95–99et passim).Google Scholar

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31. Rivers, , pp. 294 n. 46, 228, 236Google Scholar. Pater might have found clues to Darwin's later views in the first edition of On the Origin of Species (chap. 13, sect. “Rudimentary, Atrophied, or Aborted Organs”). Darwin mentions hermaphrodeity in plants and discusses rudimentary female organs in male flowers.

32. Rivers, , p. 294.Google Scholar

33. Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Spitz, David (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 54Google Scholar. Pater read Mill (Inman, , pp. 4, 61).Google Scholar

34. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (1903; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 82Google Scholar. Emerson gives as his source the chapter “Of Brotherly Love” in Plutarch's Morals (p. 417)Google Scholar. For androgyny in Emerson, see Thurin, Erik Ingvar, Emerson as Priest of Pan: A Study in the Metaphysics of Sex (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1981), passim.Google Scholar

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36. Schiller, , pp. 38–39.Google Scholar

37. Rossetti, Gabriel, The Works, ed. Rossetti, William Michael (London, 1911; rpt. New York: Adler's Foreign Books, 1972), p. 331Google Scholar. For a more conventional account of these three terms, see Ainsworth, Maryan Wynn, “D. G. Rossetti's Dantis Amor,” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 1 (11 1980), 69–78.Google Scholar

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39. Part 3, Book 4, chap. 1.

40. He mentions Theocritus in “Winckelmann” and cites Xenophon (cf. Inman, , pp. 26, 132, 176Google Scholar). For Pindar and Catullus, see Inman, , pp. 47, 66.Google Scholar

41. Inman, , pp. 74, 87, 94, 174–76.Google Scholar

42. Inman, , pp. 133–36, 162, 165Google Scholar. Levey, Michael, The Case of Walter Pater ([London]: Thames and Hudson, 1978), pp. 76–77Google Scholar. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads appeared, with suitable fireworks, in 1866. See Stevenson, Lionel, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972; rpt. New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 217 ff.Google Scholar

43. Rivers, , pp. 27–28, 274–75Google Scholar. See d'Hangest, Germain, Walter Pater: L'Homme et l'oeuvre (Paris: Didier, 1961), 1, 349, n. 8,9; 350, n. 19; 351, n. 46; 351–52, n. 63.Google Scholar

44. DeLaura, , pp. 192–93Google Scholar. Inman, , pp. 6–7, 60, 143–44, 162–63Google Scholar. Culler, , pp. 14–17.Google Scholar

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46. Levey, , pp. 89–91.Google Scholar