Geoff’s Reviews > Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s > Status Update

Heartbreaking.

I find it a very interesting selection of books; Pater's definitive study of art for art's sake, Flaubert's strangest and most oneiric work, and Swinburne, aesthete and sensualist extraordinaire. Almost a summation of influences for Wilde and his times.

Pater was Wilde's tutor at Oxford and perhaps the foremost promoter of Aestheticism (Pater and Ruskin were sort of the alpha and omega of Wilde's Oxford experience) - there is a bit of him in Lord Henry Wotton. The Renaissance was actually denounced from the pulpit.

Wilde famously said of Swinburne, when he was asked who should be nominated Poet Laureate, that Swinburne was already that. (Swinburne rather shamefully dissociated himself from Wilde, even after Wilde defended him to Edmond de Goncourt.)

Wonderful! That shows how little I actually know about Wilde...

Geoff wrote: "Wonderful! That shows how little I actually know about Wilde..."

I love him to bits and pieces, heh.

- I don't remember exactly what the St Anthony connection is now and need more coffee to look it up - but - Wilde loved St Sebastian (to the extent of taking Sebastian Monmouth as his nom de exile) and they both wrote about Salome - Wilde loved Flaubert's Herodias and Salammbo, and wrote "I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St Antoine without signing my name at the end of it." He also intended to translate it. And the Saints meant a great deal to Wilde - so here was Catholicism, French literature and Orientalism (see Wilde's poem "The Sphinx") all rolled into one.

So you could say the reported three books symbolize his youthful degradation/exaltation in Aestheticism (Pater), the love of the beautiful youth who outstripped him and rejected him (Swinburne - Wile said Atalanta and Cenci were the two great eighteenth-century plays in English), and the aesthetic master who represented a literary ideal Wilde strove for all his life. Not a bad summing-up.

I don't remember if Ellmann says there were actually more books around - I think there were. I actually have (and READ, for once!) a book on Wilde's libraries, but I'd have to go back and look it up. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53...

Reading you expatiate on Wilde and Pater and Swinburne and Flaubert is making my day today! Thank you Moira! The Edmund Wilson comment came from his essay on Christian Gauss, professor of French and Italian literature and later dean of Princeton. One of Wilson's primary influences. Gauss hung out with the aging Wilde, and would tell vignettes about long conversations between the two, stacking up saucer after saucer at some desultory cafe. He talks of Gauss as a connection between the late 19th century aestheticism represented by Wilde and Anglo-Saxon modernism.

Aw thanks!

The Edmund Wilson comment came from his essay on Christian Gauss, professor of French and Italian literature and later dean of Princeton. One of Wilson's primary influences. Gauss hung out with the aging Wilde, and would tell vignettes about long conversations between the two, stacking up saucer after saucer at some desultory cafe. He talks of Gauss as a connection between the late 19th century aestheticism represented by Wilde and Anglo-Saxon modernism.

See I didn't know any of that -- that's fascinating. I knew of Gauss because Wilson and Fitzgerald et al went to Princeton, but that's it.