John Pater

 

Hard Gemlike Flame

Homosexual Desire in the Life and Work of Walter Pater

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Introduction by Winston Leyland

Walter Horatio Pater (1830–1894), English critic and essayist, celebrated for the fastidious delicacy of his style, was born in London. Educated at Queen's College, Oxford, he settled in Oxford and tutored private pupils. In 1864 he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose College. Pater then began to write for the reviews, and his essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, and Michelangelo, with others of the same kind, were collected in 1873 in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (later called simply Studies in the Renaissance or just The Renaissance). The volume had a Conclusion which promulgated a sort of aesthetic gospel. The Conclusion reads (in part):

“The service of philosophy, of speculative culture towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic, life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus here the greatest numger of vital rorces unit in their purest energy?
          “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. . . .
          “Well, we are all condamne´s, as Victor Hugo says, we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve – less hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among 'the children of this world,' in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrows of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion – that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the hghest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”

The publication of this volume made Pater the center of a small group in Oxford. He had relations with the Pre-Raphaelites, of whom he was to some extent the heir, and he began to insinuate something of their spirit into his academic world. by the time his book Marius the Epicurean appeared in 1885 Pater had a following of disciples. Marius is his most substantial work. It is a romance of ideas in which Pater's ideal of an aesthetic and religious life is elaborately set forth.

Pater's life was almost all spent in Oxford, and he died there in 1894. He wrote with difficulty, correcting and recorrecting with infinite care. There is a reserve and reticence about his writing, maintained also in his personal life. The primary influence on his mind was his classical study, colored by a highly individual kind of Christianity, pursued largely as a source of refined artistic sensations. Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and the aesthetes of the 1890s were among his followers.
                                                                — Winston Leland

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Homosexual Desire in the Life and Work of Walter Pater

In a remarkable anecdote, Frank Harris records that during a visit to see Walter Pater at Brasenose College, Oxford, Pater “seemed at times half to realize his own deficiency: 'Had I so-and-so's courage and hardihood,' he cried once, 'I'd have —.' Suddenly the mood changed, the light in his eyes died out, the head dropped forward again, and with a half-smile he added, 'I might have been a criminal – heh, heh,' and he moved with little careful steps acros the room to his chair, and sat down.”

Could Walter Pater – one of the most influential art critics in English history – have been a criminal? His more conventional contemporaries regarded his aesthetic vision as the product of an immoral imagination, and in this respect he was certainly a criminal in the field of art. One wonders about his life as well, though, of course, like Jean Genet, Pater would have been a saintly criminal, an archetypal high priest – dressed in robes of saffron, with purple grapes pressing against his pale temples – officiating at a sacred ritual of, say, castration. He would no doubt have admired the delicate crescent blade wielded by the transgender priests of Cybele, the Phrygian goddess of frenzy and voluptuous langour. An orgiastic dream may well lie beneath the hard surface of Pater's gemline flame.

If we look at Pater outside the context of the schoolbooks – look at him squarely in the eyes as a man, a poet, an aesthete, a treasurer of things foreign to English soil, rather than as the “father” of a school of thought – we cannot, in all honesty, be quite certain that his sensibility would have blanched at perusing the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. And we must bear in mind that in one of his Greek Studies, Pater appreciates, however coyly, not only the Divine Marquis, but also Gilles de Rais, that notorious ravisher of boys.

It is, in fact, quite probable that Walter Pater was in reality a criminal in Victorian England: i.e., a practicing homosexual.

Mark Pattison, in his diary for May 5, 1878, records that he went “to Pater's to tea, where [I saw] Oscar Browning, who was more like Socrates than ever. He conversed in one corner with 4 feminine looking youths 'paw-dandling' there in one fivesome, while the Miss Paters & I sat looking on in another corner – Presently Walter Pater, who, I had been told, was 'upstairs' appeared, attended by 2 more youths of similar appearances.” Query: Was the threesome upstairs also “paw-dandling”?

Surely we know what the fivesome in the corner was contemplating, for Oscar Browning three years earlier had been dismissed from his mastership at Eton under grave suspicions of pederasty. Concerning this dismissal, Pater had written to Browning in October 1875, that he was “very glad to hear, not for your own sake only, but on public grounds, that you had decided not to leave Eton without a struggle.” Struggle he did, but dismissed he was nevertheless – only to become a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. The visit that Pattison described had occurred in the tenth year of the close friendship between Pater and Browning – to whom Pater had been introduced in 1868 by John Burnell Payne. It was Payne, a close friend of the homosexual artist Simeon Solomon, who drew some fine charcoal portraits of both Pater and Solomon.

Walter Pater is not known to have had more than a passing acquaintance with any women except for his sisters Hester and Clara (with whom he lived all his life) and Violet Paget, lesbian poetess (alias “Vernon Lee”). Most of Pater's friends were young and handsome men and boys, many of whom, like himself, died bachelors, and many of whom were practicing homosexuals. The closest friend of his adolescence was J. R. McQueen. Unfortunately, we know little about the specific nature of their friendship other than the fact that it was “very close,” for the numerous letters that Walter wrote to Mark from 1858 to 1862 were suppressed by the Misses Paters when Thomas Wright was preparing the first biography in 1907. Wright was allowed to examine some of the letters, but was forbidden to quote directly or to paraphrase too closely their contents. But the half-words that remain in his biography suggest an intimacy that it would have been impolite to have delved into in 1907. The letters have since been destroyed.

The closest friend of Pater's adult life was Charles Lancelot Shadwell (born in 1840, one year before Pater), who became Pater's private pupil at Christ Church College in 1863. In 1874 Pater published Diaphaneite, which was modeled upon Shadwell's rare spirit, a portrait of an ethereal youth. In the summer of 1865, Pater and Shadwell, master and pupil, together toured Italy – Ravenna, Pisa, Florence – without the company of Clara and Hester. Shadwell spent nearly his entire life studiously engaged in painstaking research into the history of Christ College, Oxford, of which he was a fellow and later became Provost. He is the “C.L.S.” to whom Pater dedicated his Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873. Shadwell died in 1919, a bachelor.

Rupert Croft-Cooke, in his book Feasting with Panthers, tells of two close male friendships which Pater had in the later part of his life:

“In 1877, when Pater was a year or two short of forty, that dangerous age at which Wilde met Alfred Douglas, Pater met a man twelve years younger than he named Richard Jackson. Jackson believed himself a poet; he was also rich. He became devoted to Pater in a sentimental if not a passionate way and this devotion lasted for many years. Wright [Pater's early biographer] believed that he was the original of Marius and in old age Jackson seemed to have claimed this quite seriously. If it is true it is shocking to know what the writings of Mariuis would have been like, for this is a quatrain which Jackson wrote at Pater's request as a song for his birthday –
          Your darling soul I say is inflamed with love for me;
          Your very eyes do move I cry with sympathy:
          Your darling feet and hands are blessings ruled by love,
          As forth was sent from out the Ark a turtle dove.
'I am glad to write about you,' he added, 'for owing to you my life has been enriched, its minstrelsy swelled . . .'
          “Jackson introduced his young friends to Pater . . . [One of these] was Walter Blackburn Harte whom Pater first saw as an acolyte wearing a scarlet cassock in the chapel of St. Austin's. He seems to have been irresistible to all who met him, having literary ambitions and a cockney sense of humour. Pater said he had 'a darling personality' and asked him down to Oxford, but most of Harte's time was spent at Jackson's Camberwell home, for he found Pater's dull dreary rooms at Oxford 'a great disappointment. . . .' A portrait shows a beautiful youth with curling lips, deep expressive eyes and a fine profile.”

Harte later emigrated to America and became in the 1890s a successful journalist.

Another important figure in Pater's life was Charles Algernon Swinburne, with whom Pater became friendly in 1858. Swinburne is notorious for his desires to be whipped by prostitutes, but his biographers insist he hired only female prostitutes for such purposes. On one occasion, however, Swinburne asked Simeon Solomon to draw for him a set of pictures showing schoolmasters flogging boys. [When I investigated this in 1974, they were unpublished and locked up in the British Museum; the Trustees of the Museum would allow only Solomon's descendants to view them – but since Solomon doesn't have any descendants, one supposes they would be locked up forever.] At least two poems in Swinburne's Whippingham Papers lovingly describe the flogging of boys, “Arthur's Floggings” and “A Boy's First Flogging”. Pater, Swinburne, and Solomon were members of the Old Mortality Club, a society for budding literarti and a haven for homosexuals.

In 1861 Swinburne became acquainted with Lord Houghton, whose own collected poems contain passages not entirely heteroerotic. Swinburne borrowed from this gentleman's extensive library of erotica the complete works of the Marquis de Sade. Simeon Solomon, who at the time was residing as a guest at Fryston, Lord Houghton's country house in Yorkshire, was there introduced by Swinburne to Oscar Browning. Simeon and Oscar struck up a match, and together toured Italy in the summers of 1867, 1868, and 1869 – without the company of Swinburne.

In the early 1860s Solomon had been friends with the homosexual artist Edward Poynter, and had specially designed for him a series of homoerotic allegorical drawings. One of the better ones is a pen and ink drawing of “Love Talking to Boys,” dated 1865, showing several lovely lads embracing while Eros (rather disconcertingly portrayed as Cupid in an Edwardian silk waiscoat with wings) encourages them. Most of the drawings have been lost – or locked up.

In 1865, the date of “Love Talking to Boys,” Swinburne went up to Oxford and introduced his friend Pater to his friend Solomon. Solomon then and there drew a very good portrait of Pater, gave it to him, and decided to stay the night, and the next night, and the next. For the next several years he would return frequently to share Pater's rooms “upstairs” at Brasenose, and then at London. As a measure of what solomon's company may have been like: in 1866 he and Swinburne visited Dante Gabriel Rosetti in Cheyne Walk, and for a time disturbed Rosetti's work by chasing each other naked up and down the staircase.

Simeon Solomon (1841–1905) is often regarded as the central tragic hero-victim of the Age of Decadence. At the age of eighteen he had already exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy. This, however, was the neight of his career, and his fall was slow and painful. In a letter dated August 20, 1917, Edmund Gosse (who incidentally was a repressed if not practicing homosexual; he contributed the essay on Pater for the Dictionary of National Biography as well as the biography of the homosexual Renaissance poet Richard Barnfield) reminisced to Robert Ross (one-time lover of Oscar Wilde) that Solomon “sometime during 1870” was threatened with legal proceedings for certain unspecified sexual activities, and that he had been forced to fly to Italy. Gosse's recollection is probably a bit faulty, for this likely refers to Solomon and Browning's hurried departure for Italy in 1869. In 1870 there was another scandal, and William Cory, Oscar Browning's former master, was forced to resign from Eton – for the same reasons as his pupil.

In 1873 Solomon was arrested for “indecently molesting” a man named Roberts in a public urinal north of Oxford Street. He was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment in Clerkenwell House of Correction, but the sentence was suspended and he was placed under the supervision of the police. In a letter dated June 6, 1873, Swinburne wrote to the Welsh squire George Powell that “I saw and spoke with a great friend of Simeon, Pater of Brasenose. Do you – I do not – know any detail of the matter at first hand? Pater, I imagine, did.” In Gosse's recollection to Ross, Swinburne had dashed off to Oxford “to discuss Solomon with his [i.e. Solomon's] friend Walter Pater.” We don't quite know what the discussions were, but in any event Pater was certainly informed of the facts (if he didn't know them before), and he nevertheless remained friends with Solomon for several more years, even welcoming him “upstairs.” There is no hint in his correspondence or elsewhere that he was startled by Solmon's behavior. There is only a discreet silence.

Over the period of the next twenty-five years, Solomon got into more trouble because of sexual escapades, was imprisoned, and was incarcerated in an insane asylum by his concerned relatives. They relented and tried to arrange for him to escape, but he knew the doors had been unlocked for this purpose. So he went and locked them rather than play their game. He wasn't insane, and upon his official release he became a professional vagabond and hack artist. He sold Swinburne's erotic correspondence with him in order to make money. Every so often he returned home to get a new set of clothing, which he promptly sold and returned to his rags. For most of the remainder of his life he literally lived in the gutter, became a drunken pavment artist in Brompton Road and Bayswater, and sold matches and shoe laces in Mile End Road.

Pater's masterwork, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, was published in March 1873, several months after the scandal of Solomon's arrest. A number of people quietly murmured that there was an affinity between the hedonism advocated by Pater in his “Conclusion” to the study, and the pleasure-seeking of his “degenerate friend.” Pater was seriously distressed by the imputation that the “Conclusion” would subvert the moral fibre of the young men who read it, and he responded by suppressing it in the 1877 edition, and in the 1888 edition he stated that the “Conclusion” was omitted because “it might possibly mislead some of those into whose hands it might fall.” Privately, he told a friend in 1890 that he had suppressed this essay because “there were things in it, which some people, pious souls! thought profane, yes! profane!”

Mark André Raffalovich records that the art critic Sidney Colvin warned Raffalovich “to avoid making the acquaintance of men such as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds.” Symonds was generally recognized by his contemporaries as a homosexual – and this warning implies that Pater was similarly recognized. Raffalovich, himself homosexual (his lover, poet John Gray, is said to have been the original model for Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray), ignored Colvin's advice and became friends not only with Symonds and Pater, but with Oscar Wilde and Simeon Solomon as well.

Pater may well have been regarded by his contemporaries as a dangerous influence upon young men in the same way that Socrates was so regarded. In W. H. Mallock's The New Republic (1877) Pater is satirized as “Mr. Rose,” who plays a role similar to that of the pederastic Pausanius in Plato's Symposium. The most damaging part of Mallock's satire was not his portrayal of Pater/Rose as a languid espouser of Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism, but his portrayal of Pater/Rose as a passionate apologist for boy-love. Mr. Rose delivers a eulogy, for example, upon “life as a chamber, which we decorate as we would decorate the chamber of the woman or the youth [emphasis mine] that we love, tinting the walls of it in symphoies of subdued colour.” Mr. Rose refers in passing to “the boyhood of Bathyllus” (the boyfriend of Anacreon), to “Narcissus, that soft boy,” to “lean Aquinas in his cell,” and to “a boy of eighteen whose education I may myself claim to have had some share in direccting.” Indeed. Mr. Rose rises to sublime eloquence when it comes to a defense of “passionate friendship” in a passage quoted almost verbatim from Pater's own essay on the friendships of the homosexual art critic Winckelmann: “Think of the immortal dramas which history sets before us; of the keener and profounder passions which it reveals to us, of nobler mould than ours – Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, our English Edward [sc. King Edward II] and the fair Piers Gaveston, or, above all, those two [i.e. Socrates and Phaedrus, in Plato's Phaedrus] by the agnus castus and the plane-tree where Ilyssus flowed.”

All these pairs of men and youths are mentioned in Pater's own essays, and Mallock correctly recognized them as homosexual pairs. Mallock's work was one of the most popular books of the day, and part of its popularity lay in people's recognition therein of the pederastic Mr. Pater. It seems more than likely that at least a hint of this suspicion lay behind a general ill-will towards Pater. His “decent” contemporaries simply refused to grant him his just rewards. In 1874, the year following Solomon's arrest, Pater was passed over for the Junior Proctorship, a post which should normally have been his by right of seniority. In 1876 he was forced to withdraw his candidacy for Professorship of Poetry, because of the “immorality” of Studies in the History of the Renaissance and for other reasons still unclear. In 1877 he was satirized by Mallock and almost physically shrank away in pain and hurt. In 1885 he was defeated in his candidacy for Professorship of Fine Arts, even though he was by now regarded by many as the foremost critic of fine art in his time. In fact, Pater met everywhere with a series of rebuffs and frustrations to such an extent that in the late 1870s he had noticeably developed, in the view of Laurence Evans, editor of his letters, “a guarded, evasive manner, a style or strategy of polite accommodation, a strategy of studied blandness.”

Pater's blandness is really the perfectly composed lassitude of a fallen maenad. Nearly all of his criticism and fiction moves with the ritual frenzy of a Dionysian ceremony at whose center is the death of a beautiful boy. It is a theme with a “dark message” that doesn't quite fit into the Gay Liberation (or even humanistic) scheme of things; but it nevertheless happens to be the central image of what might almost be called the homosexual aesthetics. The theme is found not only in Pater's Marius the Epicurean, and in ancient literature such as the Greek Anthology, but in a great deal of modern homosexual literature as well, with variations: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Tennessee Williams' Desire and the Black Masseur and Suddenly Last Summer, James Baldwin's Another Country and Giovanni's Room, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Jean Genet's Funeral Rites, even Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Sunny Him), and Yukio Michima's Forbidden Colors – in which there is a passage referring explicitly to Walter Pater – not to mention a host of homosexual poems on the dying Adonis or Narcissus or St. Sebastian in 1970s gay periodicals such as Manroot and Gay Sunshine.

In A Study of Dionysus, published posthumously and edited by Shadwell, Walter Pater leads us by careful insinuation and subtle seduction, from the sunny groves of Arcady to a dark glade in Thessaly where we may feast upon a fair youth. The raison d'être for this study is to apprehend the fullest possible meaning of a primordial fact, “That the sacred women of Dionysus [the maenads] ate, in mystical ceremony, raw flesh and drank blood, to commemorate the actual sacrifice of a fair boy deliberately torn to pieces.” Pater repeatedly glances at the edges of this rite that he dare not name too directly. He refers, for example, to “the decliate, fresh, farm-lad we may still actually see sometimes, like a graceful field-flower among the corn,” without quite acknowledging that Triptolemus, to whom this farm-lad is compared, was a corn-spirit of homosexual cannibalistic rites made more explicit much later in the Centipede Rites in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Pater refers to Neptune devouring the ivory-white shoulder of his boyfriend Pelops. He lusciously hints at “the dark and shameful secret society described by Livy, in which Dionysus' worship ended at Rome, afterwards abolished by solemn act of the Senate” – without explicity mentioning that this was a homosexual secret society. Nowhere does Pater actually come out and tell us that his favorite deity Dionysus, whom he acknowledges was “somewhat womanly” and appeals to “feminine souls,” was (and is) the most homosexual of all the gods.

Pater's praise of “virile youth” and “passionate friendship” in his studies of The Golden Youth of Lacedaemon, The Age of Athletic Prizemen, and Winckelmann is a bit guarded, but nevertheless clearly homosexual. And the content of two short stories is almost explicitly homosexual – “Denys L'Aurroix,” in which a Dionysus figure is literally torn to pieces, and “Apollo in Picardy,” in which a boy is accidentally killed by his lover just as Apollo killed Narcissus. These two stories are, in fact, quite bold when we realize that Genet and Burroughs had not yet taken up the theme.

We would never dare call Walter Pater a humorist, but whenever he approaches the sensuousness of beautiful boyhood with less indirection that usual, we can clearly see him camping it up, as in this description of an engraving of satyr-lads by Roberta: “Their puck noses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover, you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those hairy little shanks away.” It is not insignificant that Plato's “infatuated lover,” as Pater very well knew from frequent perusal of his favorite work the Phaedruis, was not a spiritual paiderast, but a pederast pure and simple. And from a perusal of John Payne Knight's Worship of the Generative Powers Pater equally knew that the thyrsus symbolized an erect penis and the pine cone atop it symbolized the glans penis. So he coyly warns us that “our fingers must beware of the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by Dionysus and his chorus, and that button of a pine-cone.” Walter Pater, in his own way, created the camp style as much as did Oscar Wilde in the Importance of Being Earnest. We need to keep this in mind as we read him, to note that there is usually a sub-narrative of homoerotic reference based upon assumptions not shared by the “decent” heterosexual reader. Pater, of course, is quite serious in his art, but he's never solemn, and the word unsaid keeps echoing between the lines.

Pater's studied blandness, his seemingly ethereal rather than earthly demenor, has put his biographers off their guard, and they quite unreasonably assume that Pater was therefore chaste, cloistered, cold, and nearly a loner. But, in fact, a peripheral biography of Pater could be expanded with quite warm-blooded speculations concerning his close friendships with Arthur William Symons, bisexual poet and critical theorist of decadence; with Francis Fortescue Urquhart, strikingly handsome bachelor don nicknamed “Sligger” because of his sleek good looks, model for Pater's short story “Emerald Uthwart,” and a man who was so thoroughly a faithful friend to many young men that he should have been homosexual; with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of Pater's private pupils, author of a number of fine ballads on boys bathing; with Thomas Humphrey Ward, whom he tutored in Plato for a month in 1867 in Sidmouth in a secluded cottage near the sea; with A. J. Butler, tutor to the son of the Khedive of Egypt and author of a translation of the homoerotic Greek Anthology that Pater recommended to Gosse because the latter “delights also in Greek things”; and others, including his long friendship with Oscar Wilde from 1877 to at least the early 1890s after Wilde's conviction of “gross indecency.” All the circumstantial evidence points to only one conclusion: that Walter Pater was a practicing homosexual, though after the scandal of 1873 he began to carefully guard his emotions. He may have even begun to recoil from himself because of the realization that such love can be crudely celebrated in public urinals as well as at symposums of British schoolmaters and their pupils.

The Walter Pater with whom most students are now familiar is the post-1873 Pater with bushy sideburns (a mask he grew to conceal his face), whose life, in the words of Mario Praz, “flowed monotonously in his neat and severe rooms at Brasenose College and then in London, with social contact disciplined by his flawless sense of ritual.” But what a cold view this is of the same rooms as visited by Swinburne in the late 1860s and early 1870s, as described by Edmund Gosse: “The poet [Swinburne] was a not infrequent visitor in this years to Pater's college rooms. To all young Oxvord, then, the name of Mr. Swinburne was an enchantment, and there used to be envious traditions of an upper window in Brasenose Lane thrown open to the summer night, and welling forth from it, a music of verse, which first outsang and then silenced the nightingales, protracting its harmonies until it disconcerted the lark himself at sunrise.” Praz's less romantic view is no doubt partically accurate (though Praz evidences the Italian distaste for British tidiness), but surely Pater's rooms could not have been so neat and so severe when he was visited by Oscar Browning and six lovely lads, or when he shared rooms with Simeon Solomon – even if Solomon and Pater did not chase each other naked up and down the stairs, to the disconcertment of Hester and Clara.

A Discursive Inquiry into the Nature of Homosexual Aesthetics

As evidence that Pater's aesthetics is homosexual, I have taken the rather extreme position that the death of a beautiful boy is “the highest work of art” from a male homosexual point of view – just as the death of a beautiful woman is the highest work of art from Edgar Allen Poe's heterosexual point of view. Poe's attitude is not so strange when one considers the bulk of heteroerotic imagery linking heterosexual love, death and rape, as in all the “rapier” puns in Restoration drama. We might, however, take the more commonsense view of what constitutes a “male homosexual aesthetics,” which is probably that such an aesthetics proceeds from a male aesthete's assumption that young men embody the norm of beauty even before death. In these terms Pater's aesthetic remains quite homosexual. In the “Age of Athletic Prizemen” he puts forth a not-quite-spoken syllogism, somewhat as follows: (A) an artist always works “within the limits of the visible, the empirical world”; (B) young men in gymnastic exercise achieve “essential mastery” over, and “a full and free realisation” of, this natural world; (C) ergo, the young male figure represents the norm of artistic achievement, and the rendering of this figure is the basic activity of true art. Pater is talking about athletic prizemen such as the youths celebrated in Pindar's equally homosexual Odes, not about young maidens who might be equally gymnastic and hence artistic. These “virginal yet virile youths” who embody a “boy's potential for manhood” illustrate one of Pater's most important aesthetic concepts: ascesis, the girding of the male loins. Ascesis is a metaphysical-aesthetic concept of a Hegelian union of the opposites of motion and stasis, or, in less paradoxical terms, the potentiality illustrated by the point of balance between the two conflicting flows of energy towards Dionysian languor and Apollonian aspiration. In the artwork inspired by youthful gymnasia we repeatedly confront this “combination of motion and rest”: the Diadumenus, for example, illustrates the athlete in repose, whle containing the suggestion that at any moment he can spring forth into motion once again. Similarly the Discobulus portrays the athlete in a perfectly suspended moment of forward and backward motion just before he throws the discus. Pater's essay began with a discussion of the athletic (and homosexual) friendship of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and now the Discobulus reminds Pater of the friendships of Perseus and Acrisius, and of Apollo and Hyacinthus, also substantively homosexual. In “Apollo in Picardy” the character Apollyon at one point strips himself naked and poses in the moonlight as the Discobulus just before he “accidentally” kills his friend Hyacinth. So life, as Wilde said, becomes art.

In Pater's study of “The Golden Youth of Lacedaemon” in Plato and Platonism, a perusal of young handsome Greek slaves, of young soldiers, of the young aristocracy, and of “the Gymnopaedia [Festival of Naked Boys] where Spartan youth danced in honour of Apollo,” leads Pater to a succinct definition of beauty is “the expression of reserved power” which supposedly is the visible form of the ethical ideal of Spartan education. Again, the essay on Wincklemann in The Renaissance – which is largely devoted to an appreciation of Wincklemann's friendships with young men (without mentioning the well-known fact that Wincklemann was homosexual and that he was murdered by a piece of rough trade), Pater notes with approval that “Greek sculpture deals almost exclusively with youth, where the moulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between growth and completion, indicated but not emphasized; where the transition from curve to curve is so delicate and elusive, that Winckelmann compares it to a quiet sea, which, although we understand it to be in motion, we nevertheless regard as an image of repose; where, therefore, the exact degree of development is so hard to apprehend.” I suspect that heterosexual male critics and artists who share Pater's aesthetic ideal as this metaphysics of “severity tempered by grace” will continue to protect themselves from its full implications by refusing to recognize that the word “youth” for Pater is always a synonym for “adolescent boys.” And usually they will not go so far as Pater, who admiringly quotes from a letter by Winckelmann maintaining that “supreme beauty is rather male than female.” To follow the syllogism to its logical conclusion would be to give credence to Jean Genet's homoerotic aesthetic ideal: a hustler powdered with mimosa.

Pater's work beautifully captures the two primary motifs of the male homosexual imagination: (A) the aesthetically-static (monistic) image of the beautiful boy, whether he be caught in suspended motion on the playing field, or dying, as Adonis or Hyacinthus, upon an altar-like mound of grass near a pool; and (B) the aesthetically-dynamic (dialectic) complex of a pair of friends/lovers or enemies/wrestlers, the mythological topos of Hercules and Hylas, Harmondius and Aristogeiton, Castor and Pollux, Apollo and Marsyas/Dionysus, and so on. Such pairs are found in abundance throughout Pater's works, and it is well to remember that most gymnastic games were celebrated in honor of Hercules the Wrestler. Pater appreciates the love-story of Amis et Amile as an early foreshadowing of the Renaissance spirit. It's a story of a man and his friend who dies – as is the central story of Marius the Epicurian – as are the stories of “Apollo in Picardy” and “Denys L'Auxerrois” and others. This duality is simply a clearer depiction of the “motion in reserve” aesthetic: one of the young men is usually an Apollonian type, tending towards ascesis and intellectual energia, while the other is usually a Dionysian type, tending towards emotional torpor or languor (e.g. of a fallen Maenad).

Pater's aesthetic method develops around the poles of this duality. The “hard, gemlike flame” is the one side of this coin of the Dioscuri, while “flux” is the other: both in conjunction make up Pater's ideal mandala – a concentrated Apollonian center, and a diffuse Dionysian circumference – whose accompanying “impressions” are respectively static “awe” and frantic “frenzy,” or, in other words, a dead boy-god being devoired by maenads. It is difficult to conceive of a proper use of Pater's critical vocabulary within a heterosexual (i.e. male–female) context instead of a homoerotic or situationally homosexual (i.e. male–male) context. Among his favorite terms, “strength” is a masculine concept; “sweetness” is a faminine concept, admittedly, but it nearly always occurs in the phrase “strength and sweetness,” which gives the impression of a softened strength and male adolescence; “ascesis” is used in the sense of “girding the boy's loins”; the “virtue” of a work of art, meaning its essential idea or quality, etymologically means “that which is most essential about a man” (vir); “virtue” also refers to “the Golden mean” of the male deity Apollo and his male worshippers; “motion in reserve” is the aesthetic ideal illustrated by male athletes; even “charm” is a quality possessed by young satyrs rather than nymphs; “love” indeed is spoken of in terms of “friendship”, never in terms of heterosexual marriage or courtship; an aesthetic “impression” is an enthusiasm transmitted by art to a male critic in the same way that beauty is perceived by “Plato's infatuated lover”; “flux” might be regarded as a fairly neutral critical term, or even slightly more feminine than masculine, but it derives from the fact of Ampelos, Dionysus' boyfriend, being metamorphosed into the flow of wine in the vine; “energia,” like “ascesis,” is a masculine term; “grace” everywhere appears to be a quality possessed by the perfectcly composed lassitude of a man's hand and wrist; “enthusiasm” is a term derived from the giving-up of oneself to the transporting dreams of the frankly androgynous god Dionysus; the “vitality” of a work of art seems to be synonymous with its virility; “purity” seems to be synonymous with boyish rathuer than girlish virignity; “spiritual form,” borrowed by William Blake, is Pater's most asexual critical term, but even this seems to derive from a boy's potential for manhood; terms like “growth” and “generation” and “germination” are used by Pater to suggest not birth and female fecundation, but the educating of boys and their maturing into manhood. When Pater uses the words “profoundly amorous” or “wanton,” he is speaking not of Venus, but of Dionysus. The women who are aesthetically appreciated by Pater are neither maidens nor nymphs, but (A) vampires, such as the Mona Lisa, who has “the mouth of the eternal vampire”; (B) maenads, whose occuipation is the devouring of boys; and (c) the awe-inspiring Virgin as in the Pieta, who personifies grief for a dead god.

To summarize: (A) an investigation into Pater's biography tends to increasingly suggest homosexual possibilities rather than heterosexual ones; (B) on nearly every page of his critical writings we can discern, with a minimum of research, a veiled allusion to homosexual phenomena; (C) in virtually all of his writings a male homosexual reader will sense a kindred spirit, because of the presence of beautiful boys and suchlike; and (D) the metaphysical critical concepts that are employed seem to be more homosexual than heterosexual. Pater's aesthetic ideology is forever moving towards the homosexual ambiguity of “a beautiful strangeness.”

---

Copyright © 2017, 1993, 1974 Rictor Norton. All rights reserved. Reproduction for sale or profit prohibited. This essay may not be republished or redistributed without the permission of the author.

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The Informer : An Ironic Tale

The Informer:

An Ironic Tale

Mr. X came to me, preceded by a letter of introduction from a good friend of mine in Paris, specifically to see my collection of Chinese bronzes and porcelain.

My friend in Paris is a collector, too. He collects neither porcelain, nor bronzes, nor pictures, nor medals, nor stamps, nor anything that could be profitably dispersed under an auctioneer's hammer. He would reject, with genuine surprise, the name of A Collector. Nevertheless, that's what he is by temperament. He collects acquaintances. It is delicate work. He brings to it the patience, the passion, the determination of a true collector of curiosities. His collection does not contain any royal personages. I don't think he considers them sufficiently rare and interesting; but, with that exception, he has met with and talked to everyone worth knowing on any conceivable ground. He observes them, listens to them, penetrates them, measures them, and puts the memory away in the galleries of his mind. He has schemed, plotted, and travelled all over Europe in order to add to his collection of distinguished personal acquaintances.

As he is wealthy, well connected, and unprejudiced, his collection is pretty complete, including objects (or should I say subjects?) whose value is unappreciated by the vulgar, and often unknown to popular fame. Of those specimens my friend is naturally the most proud.

He wrote to me of X: "He is the greatest rebel (révolté) of modern times. The world knows him as a revolutionary writer whose savage irony has laid bare the rottenness of the most respectable institutions. He has scalped every venerated head, and has mangled at the stake of his wit every received opinion and every recognized principle of conduct and policy. Who does not remember his flaming red revolutionary pamphlets? Their sudden swarmings used to overwhelm the powers of every Continental police like a plague of crimson gadflies. But this extreme writer has been also the active inspirer of secret societies, the mysterious unknown Number One of desperate conspiracies suspected and unsuspected, matured or baffled. And the world at large has never had an inkling of that fact! This accounts for him going about amongst us to this day, a veteran of many subterranean campaigns, standing aside now, safe within his reputation of merely the greatest destructive publicist that ever lived."

Thus wrote my friend, adding that Mr. X was an enlightened connoisseur of bronzes and china, and asking me to show him my collection.

X turned up in due course. My treasures are disposed in three large rooms without carpets and curtains. There is no other furniture than the étagères and the glass cases whose contents shall be worth a fortune to my heirs. I allow no fires to be lighted, for fear of accidents, and a fire-proof door separates them from the rest of the house.

It was a bitter cold day. We kept on our overcoats and hats. Middle-sized and spare, his eyes alert in a long, Roman-nosed countenance, X walked on his neat little feet, with short steps, and looked at my collection intelligently. I hope I looked at him intelligently, too. A snow-white moustache and imperial made his nut-brown complexion appear darker than it really was. In his fur coat and shiny tall hat that terrible man looked fashionable. I believe he belonged to a noble family, and could have called himself Vicomte X de la Z if he chose. We talked nothing but bronzes and porcelain. He was remarkably appreciative. We parted on cordial terms.

Where he was staying I don't know. I imagine he must have been a lonely man. Anarchists, I suppose, have no families--not, at any rate, as we understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law, and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist. But, indeed, I don't understand anarchists. Does a man of that--of that--persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, quite alone and going to bed, for instance? Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the chambardement général as the French slang has it, of the general blow-up, always present to his mind? And if so how can he? I am sure that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or eat or perform any of the routine acts of daily life. I would want no wife, no children; I could have no friends, it seems to me; and as to collecting bronzes or china, that, I should say, would be quite out of the question. But I don't know. All I know is that Mr. X took his meals in a very good restaurant which I frequented also.

With his head uncovered, the silver top-knot of his brushed-up hair completed the character of his physiognomy, all bony ridges and sunken hollows, clothed in a perfect impassiveness of expression. His meagre brown hands emerging from large white cuffs came and went breaking bread, pouring wine, and so on, with quiet mechanical precision. His head and body above the tablecloth had a rigid immobility. This firebrand, this great agitator, exhibited the least possible amount of warmth and animation. His voice was rasping, cold, and monotonous in a low key. He could not be called a talkative personality; but with his detached calm manner he appeared as ready to keep the conversation going as to drop it at any moment.

And his conversation was by no means commonplace. To me, I own, there was some excitement in talking quietly across a dinner-table with a man whose venomous pen-stabs had sapped the vitality of at least one monarchy. That much was a matter of public knowledge. But I knew more. I knew of him--from my friend--as a certainty what the guardians of social order in Europe had at most only suspected, or dimly guessed at.

He had had what I may call his underground life. And as I sat, evening after evening, facing him at dinner, a curiosity in that direction would naturally arise in my mind. I am a quiet and peaceable product of civilization, and know no passion other than the passion for collecting things which are rare, and must remain exquisite even if approaching to the monstrous. Some Chinese bronzes are monstrously precious. And here (out of my friend's collection), here I had before me a kind of rare monster. It is true that this monster was polished and in a sense even exquisite. His beautiful unruffled manner was that. But then he was not of bronze. He was not even Chinese, which would have enabled one to contemplate him calmly across the gulf of racial difference. He was alive and European; he had the manner of good society, wore a coat and hat like mine, and had pretty near the same taste in cooking. It was too frightful to think of.

One evening he remarked, casually, in the course of conversation, "There's no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror and violence."

You can imagine the effect of such a phrase out of such a man's mouth upon a person like myself, whose whole scheme of life had been based upon a suave and delicate discrimination of social and artistic values. Just imagine! Upon me, to whom all sorts and forms of violence appeared as unreal as the giants, ogres, and seven-headed hydras whose activities affect, fantastically, the course of legends and fairy-tales!

I seemed suddenly to hear above the festive bustle and clatter of the brilliant restaurant the mutter of a hungry and seditious multitude.

I suppose I am impressionable and imaginative. I had a disturbing vision of darkness, full of lean jaws and wild eyes, amongst the hundred electric lights of the place. But somehow this vision made me angry, too. The sight of that man, so calm, breaking bits of white bread, exasperated me. And I had the audacity to ask him how it was that the starving proletariat of Europe to whom he had been preaching revolt and violence had not been made indignant by his openly luxurious life. "At all this," I said, pointedly, with a glance round the room and at the bottle of champagne we generally shared between us at dinner.

He remained unmoved.

"Do I feed on their toil and their heart's blood? Am I a speculator or a capitalist? Did I steal my fortune from a starving people? No! They know this very well. And they envy me nothing. The miserable mass of the people is generous to its leaders. What I have acquired has come to me through my writings; not from the millions of pamphlets distributed gratis to the hungry and the oppressed, but from the hundreds of thousands of copies sold to the well-fed bourgeoisie. You know that my writings were at one time the rage, the fashion--the thing to read with wonder and horror, to turn your eyes up at my pathos . . . or else, to laugh in ecstasies at my wit."

"Yes," I admitted. "I remember, of course; and I confess frankly that I could never understand that infatuation."

"Don't you know yet," he said, "that an idle and selfish class loves to see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance, to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. Even in England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made. The demagogue carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding one's own vanity--the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of the day after to-morrow. Just as good and otherwise harmless people will join you in ecstasies over your collection without having the slightest notion in what its marvellousness really consists."

I hung my head. It was a crushing illustration of the sad truth he advanced. The world is full of such people. And that instance of the French aristocracy before the Revolution was extremely telling, too. I could not traverse his statement, though its cynicism--always a distasteful trait--took off much of its value to my mind. However, I admit I was impressed. I felt the need to say something which would not be in the nature of assent and yet would not invite discussion.

"You don't mean to say," I observed, airily, "that extreme revolutionists have ever been actively assisted by the infatuation of such people?"

"I did not mean exactly that by what I said just now. I generalized. But since you ask me, I may tell you that such help has been given to revolutionary activities, more or less consciously, in various countries. And even in this country."

"Impossible!" I protested with firmness. "We don't play with fire to that extent."

"And yet you can better afford it than others, perhaps. But let me observe that most women, if not always ready to play with fire, are generally eager to play with a loose spark or so."

"Is this a joke?" I asked, smiling.

"If it is, I am not aware of it," he said, woodenly. "I was thinking of an instance. Oh! mild enough in a way. . ."

I became all expectation at this. I had tried many times to approach him on his underground side, so to speak. The very word had been pronounced between us. But he had always met me with his impenetrable calm.

"And at the same time," Mr. X continued, "it will give you a notion of the difficulties that may arise in what you are pleased to call underground work. It is sometimes difficult to deal with them. Of course there is no hierarchy amongst the affiliated. No rigid system."

My surprise was great, but short-lived. Clearly, amongst extreme anarchists there could be no hierarchy; nothing in the nature of a law of precedence. The idea of anarchy ruling among anarchists was comforting, too. It could not possibly make for efficiency.

Mr. X startled me by asking, abruptly, "You know Hermione Street?"

I nodded doubtful assent. Hermione Street has been, within the last three years, improved out of any man's knowledge. The name exists still, but not one brick or stone of the old Hermione Street is left now. It was the old street he meant, for he said:

"There was a row of two-storied brick houses on the left, with their backs against the wing of a great public building--you remember. Would it surprise you very much to hear that one of these houses was for a time the centre of anarchist propaganda and of what you would call underground action?"

"Not at all," I declared. Hermione Street had never been particularly respectable, as I remembered it.

"The house was the property of a distinguished government official," he added, sipping his champagne.

"Oh, indeed!" I said, this time not believing a word of it.

"Of course he was not living there," Mr. X continued. "But from ten till four he sat next door to it, the dear man, in his well-appointed private room in the wing of the public building I've mentioned. To be strictly accurate, I must explain that the house in Hermione Street did not really belong to him. It belonged to his grown-up children--a daughter and a son. The girl, a fine figure, was by no means vulgarly pretty. To more personal charm than mere youth could account for, she added the seductive appearance of enthusiasm, of independence, of courageous thought. I suppose she put on these appearances as she put on her picturesque dresses and for the same reason: to assert her individuality at any cost. You know, women would go to any length almost for such a purpose. She went to a great length. She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions--the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social class to which she belonged herself. All this sat on her striking personality as well as her slightly original costumes. Very slightly original; just enough to mark a protest against the philistinism of the overfed taskmasters of the poor. Just enough, and no more. It would not have done to go too far in that direction--you understand. But she was of age, and nothing stood in the way of her offering her house to the revolutionary workers."

"You don't mean it!" I cried.

"I assure you," he affirmed, "that she made that very practical gesture. How else could they have got hold of it? The cause is not rich. And, moreover, there would have been difficulties with any ordinary house-agent, who would have wanted references and so on. The group she came in contact with while exploring the poor quarters of the town (you know the gesture of charity and personal service which was so fashionable some years ago) accepted with gratitude. The first advantage was that Hermione Street is, as you know, well away from the suspect part of the town, specially watched by the police.

"The ground floor consisted of a little Italian restaurant, of the fly-blown sort. There was no difficulty in buying the proprietor out. A woman and a man belonging to the group took it on. The man had been a cook. The comrades could get their meals there, unnoticed amongst the other customers. This was another advantage. The first floor was occupied by a shabby Variety Artists' Agency--an agency for performers in inferior music-halls, you know. A fellow called Bomm, I remember. He was not disturbed. It was rather favourable than otherwise to have a lot of foreign-looking people, jugglers, acrobats, singers of both sexes, and so on, going in and out all day long. The police paid no attention to new faces, you see. The top floor happened, most conveniently, to stand empty then."

X interrupted himself to attack impassively, with measured movements, a bombe glacée which the waiter had just set down on the table. He swallowed carefully a few spoonfuls of the iced sweet, and asked me, "Did you ever hear of Stone's Dried Soup?"

"Hear of what?"

"It was," X pursued, evenly, "a comestible article once rather prominently advertised in the dailies, but which never, somehow, gained the favour of the public. The enterprise fizzled out, as you say here. Parcels of their stock could be picked up at auctions at considerably less than a penny a pound. The group bought some of it, and an agency for Stone's Dried Soup was started on the top floor. A perfectly respectable business. The stuff, a yellow powder of extremely unappetizing aspect, was put up in large square tins, of which six went to a case. If anybody ever came to give an order, it was, of course, executed. But the advantage of the powder was this, that things could be concealed in it very conveniently. Now and then a special case got put on a van and sent off to be exported abroad under the very nose of the policeman on duty at the corner. You understand?"

"I think I do," I said, with an expressive nod at the remnants of the bombe melting slowly in the dish.

"Exactly. But the cases were useful in another way, too. In the basement, or in the cellar at the back, rather, two printing-presses were established. A lot of revolutionary literature of the most inflammatory kind was got away from the house in Stone's Dried Soup cases. The brother of our anarchist young lady found some occupation there. He wrote articles, helped to set up type and pull off the sheets, and generally assisted the man in charge, a very able young fellow called Sevrin.

"The guiding spirit of that group was a fanatic of social revolution. He is dead now. He was an engraver and etcher of genius. You must have seen his work. It is much sought after by certain amateurs now. He began by being revolutionary in his art, and ended by becoming a revolutionist, after his wife and child had died in want and misery. He used to say that the bourgeoisie, the smug, overfed lot, had killed them. That was his real belief. He still worked at his art and led a double life. He was tall, gaunt, and swarthy, with a long, brown beard and deep-set eyes. You must have seen him. His name was Horne."

At this I was really startled. Of course years ago I used to meet Horne about. He looked like a powerful, rough gipsy, in an old top hat, with a red muffler round his throat and buttoned up in a long, shabby overcoat. He talked of his art with exaltation, and gave one the impression of being strung up to the verge of insanity. A small group of connoisseurs appreciated his work. Who would have thought that this man . . . Amazing! And yet it was not, after all, so difficult to believe.

"As you see," X went on, "this group was in a position to pursue its work of propaganda, and the other kind of work, too, under very advantageous conditions. They were all resolute, experienced men of a superior stamp. And yet we became struck at length by the fact that plans prepared in Hermione Street almost invariably failed."

"Who were 'we'?" I asked, pointedly.

"Some of us in Brussels--at the centre," he said, hastily. "Whatever vigorous action originated in Hermione Street seemed doomed to failure. Something always happened to baffle the best planned manifestations in every part of Europe. It was a time of general activity. You must not imagine that all our failures are of a loud sort, with arrests and trials. That is not so. Often the police work quietly, almost secretly, defeating our combinations by clever counter-plotting. No arrests, no noise, no alarming of the public mind and inflaming the passions. It is a wise procedure. But at that time the police were too uniformly successful from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. It was annoying and began to look dangerous. At last we came to the conclusion that there must be some untrustworthy elements amongst the London groups. And I came over to see what could be done quietly.

"My first step was to call upon our young Lady Amateur of anarchism at her private house. She received me in a flattering way. I judged that she knew nothing of the chemical and other operations going on at the top of the house in Hermione Street. The printing of anarchist literature was the only 'activity' she seemed to be aware of there. She was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm, and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious conclusions. I could see she was enjoying herself hugely, with all the gestures and grimaces of deadly earnestness. They suited her big-eyed, broad-browed face and the good carriage of her shapely head, crowned by a magnificent lot of brown hair done in an unusual and becoming style. Her brother was in the room, too, a serious youth, with arched eyebrows and wearing a red necktie, who struck me as being absolutely in the dark about everything in the world, including himself. By and by a tall young man came in. He was clean-shaved with a strong bluish jaw and something of the air of a taciturn actor or of a fanatical priest: the type with thick black eyebrows--you know. But he was very presentable indeed. He shook hands at once vigorously with each of us. The young lady came up to me and murmured sweetly, 'Comrade Sevrin.'

"I had never seen him before. He had little to say to us, but sat down by the side of the girl, and they fell at once into earnest conversation. She leaned forward in her deep armchair, and took her nicely rounded chin in her beautiful white hand. He looked attentively into her eyes. It was the attitude of love-making, serious, intense, as if on the brink of the grave. I suppose she felt it necessary to round and complete her assumption of advanced ideas, of revolutionary lawlessness, by making believe to be in love with an anarchist. And this one, I repeat, was extremely presentable, notwithstanding his fanatical black-browed aspect. After a few stolen glances in their direction, I had no doubt that he was in earnest. As to the lady, her gestures were unapproachable, better than the very thing itself in the blended suggestion of dignity, sweetness, condescension, fascination, surrender, and reserve. She interpreted her conception of what that precise sort of love-making should be with consummate art. And so far, she, too, no doubt, was in earnest. Gestures--but so perfect!

"After I had been left alone with our Lady Amateur I informed her guardedly of the object of my visit. I hinted at our suspicions. I wanted to hear what she would have to say, and half expected some perhaps unconscious revelation. All she said was, 'That's serious,' looking delightfully concerned and grave. But there was a sparkle in her eyes which meant plainly, 'How exciting!' After all, she knew little of anything except of words. Still, she undertook to put me in communication with Horne, who was not easy to find unless in Hermione Street, where I did not wish to show myself just then.

"I met Horne. This was another kind of a fanatic altogether. I exposed to him the conclusion we in Brussels had arrived at, and pointed out the significant series of failures. To this he answered with irrelevant exaltation:

"'I have something in hand that shall strike terror into the heart of these gorged brutes.'

"And then I learned that, by excavating in one of the cellars of the house, he and some companions had made their way into the vaults under the great public building I have mentioned before. The blowing up of a whole wing was a certainty as soon as the materials were ready.

"I was not so appalled at the stupidity of that move as I might have been had not the usefulness of our centre in Hermione Street become already very problematical. In fact, in my opinion it was much more of a police trap by this time than anything else.

"What was necessary now was to discover what, or rather who, was wrong, and I managed at last to get that idea into Horne's head. He glared, perplexed, his nostrils working as if he were sniffing treachery in the air.

"And here comes a piece of work which will no doubt strike you as a sort of theatrical expedient. And yet what else could have been done? The problem was to find out the untrustworthy member of the group. But no suspicion could be fastened on one more than another. To set a watch upon them all was not very practicable. Besides, that proceeding often fails. In any case, it takes time, and the danger was pressing. I felt certain that the premises in Hermione Street would be ultimately raided, though the police had evidently such confidence in the informer that the house, for the time being, was not even watched. Horne was positive on that point. Under the circumstances it was an unfavourable symptom. Something had to be done quickly.

"I decided to organize a raid myself upon the group. Do you understand? A raid of other trusty comrades personating the police. A conspiracy within a conspiracy. You see the object of it, of course. When apparently about to be arrested I hoped the informer would betray himself in some way or other; either by some unguarded act or simply by his unconcerned demeanour, for instance. Of course there was the risk of complete failure and the no lesser risk of some fatal accident in the course of resistance, perhaps, or in the efforts at escape. For, as you will easily see, the Hermione Street group had to be actually and completely taken unawares, as I was sure they would be by the real police before very long. The informer was amongst them, and Horne alone could be let into the secret of my plan.

"I will not enter into the detail of my preparations. It was not very easy to arrange, but it was done very well, with a really convincing effect. The sham police invaded the restaurant, whose shutters were immediately put up. The surprise was perfect. Most of the Hermione Street party were found in the second cellar, enlarging the hole communicating with the vaults of the great public building. At the first alarm, several comrades bolted through impulsively into the aforesaid vault, where, of course, had this been a genuine raid, they would have been hopelessly trapped. We did not bother about them for the moment. They were harmless enough. The top floor caused considerable anxiety to Horne and myself There, surrounded by tins of Stone's Dried Soup, a comrade, nick-named the Professor (he was an ex-science student) was engaged in perfecting some new detonators. He was an abstracted, self-confident, sallow little man, armed with large round spectacles, and we were afraid that under a mistaken impression he would blow himself up and wreck the house about our ears. I rushed upstairs and found him already at the door, on the alert, listening, as he said, to 'suspicious noises down below.' Before I had quite finished explaining to him what was going on he shrugged his shoulders disdainfully and turned away to his balances and test-tubes. His was the true spirit of an extreme revolutionist. Explosives were his faith, his hope, his weapon, and his shield. He perished a couple of years afterwards in a secret laboratory through the premature explosion of one of his improved detonators.

"Hurrying down again, I found an impressive scene in the gloom of the big cellar. The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger to the part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his bogus subordinates for the removal of his prisoners. Evidently nothing enlightening had happened so far. Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of stoicism well in keeping with the situation. I detected in the shadows one of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and swallowing a small piece of paper. Some compromising scrap, I suppose; perhaps just a note of a few names and addresses. He was a true and faithful 'companion.' But the fund of secret malice which lurks at the bottom of our sympathies caused me to feel amused at that perfectly uncalled-for performance.

"In every other respect the risky experiment, the theatrical coup, if you like to call it so, seemed to have failed. The deception could not be kept up much longer; the explanation would bring about a very embarrassing and even grave situation. The man who had eaten the paper would be furious. The fellows who had bolted away would be angry, too.

"To add to my vexation, the door communicating with the other cellar, where the printing-presses were, flew open, and our young lady revolutionist appeared, a black silhouette in a close-fitting dress and a large hat, with the blaze of gas flaring in there at her back. Over her shoulder I perceived the arched eyebrows and the red necktie of her brother.

"The last people in the world I wanted to see then! They had gone that evening to some amateur concert for the delectation of the poor people, you know; but she had insisted on leaving early, on purpose to call in Hermione Street on the way home, under the pretext of having some work to do. Her usual task was to correct the proofs of the Italian and French editions of the Alarm Bell and the Fire-brand.". . .

"Heavens!" I murmured. I had been shown once a few copies of these publications. Nothing, in my opinion, could have been less fit for the eyes of a young lady. They were the most advanced things of the sort; advanced, I mean, beyond all bounds of reason and decency. One of them preached the dissolution of all social and domestic ties; the other advocated systematic murder. To think of a young girl calmly tracking printers' errors all along the sort of abominable sentences I remembered was intolerable to my sentiment of womanhood. Mr. X, after giving me a glance, pursued steadily.

"I think, however, that she came mostly to exercise her fascinations upon Sevrin, and to receive his homage in her queenly and condescending way. She was aware of both--her power and his homage--and enjoyed them with, I dare say, complete innocence. We have no ground in expediency or morals to quarrel with her on that account. Charm in woman and exceptional intelligence in man are a law unto themselves. Is it not so?"

I refrained from expressing my abhorrence of that licentious doctrine because of my curiosity.

"But what happened then?" I hastened to ask.

X went on crumbling slowly a small piece of bread with a careless left hand.

"What happened, in effect," he confessed, "is that she saved the situation."

"She gave you an opportunity to end your rather sinister farce," I suggested.

"Yes," he said, preserving his impassive bearing. "The farce was bound to end soon. And it ended in a very few minutes. And it ended well. Had she not come in, it might have ended badly. Her brother, of course, did not count. They had slipped into the house quietly some time before. The printing-cellar had an entrance of its own. Not finding any one there, she sat down to her proofs, expecting Sevrin to return to his work at any moment. He did not do so. She grew impatient, heard through the door the sounds of a disturbance in the other cellar and naturally came in to see what was the matter.

"Sevrin had been with us. At first he had seemed to me the most amazed of the whole raided lot. He appeared for an instant as if paralyzed with astonishment. He stood rooted to the spot. He never moved a limb. A solitary gas-jet flared near his head; all the other lights had been put out at the first alarm. And presently, from my dark corner, I observed on his shaven actor's face an expression of puzzled, vexed watchfulness. He knitted his heavy eyebrows. The corners of his mouth dropped scornfully. He was angry. Most likely he had seen through the game, and I regretted I had not taken him from the first into my complete confidence.

"But with the appearance of the girl he became obviously alarmed. It was plain. I could see it grow. The change of his expression was swift and startling. And I did not know why. The reason never occurred to me. I was merely astonished at the extreme alteration of the man's face. Of course he had not been aware of her presence in the other cellar; but that did not explain the shock her advent had given him. For a moment he seemed to have been reduced to imbecility. He opened his mouth as if to shout, or perhaps only to gasp. At any rate, it was somebody else who shouted. This somebody else was the heroic comrade whom I had detected swallowing a piece of paper. With laudable presence of mind he let out a warning yell.

"'It's the police! Back! Back! Run back, and bolt the door behind you.'

"It was an excellent hint; but instead of retreating the girl continued to advance, followed by her long-faced brother in his knickerbocker suit, in which he had been singing comic songs for the entertainment of a joyless proletariat. She advanced not as if she had failed to understand--the word 'police' has an unmistakable sound--but rather as if she could not help herself. She did not advance with the free gait and expanding presence of a distinguished amateur anarchist amongst poor, struggling professionals, but with slightly raised shoulders, and her elbows pressed close to her body, as if trying to shrink within herself. Her eyes were fixed immovably upon Sevrin. Sevrin the man, I fancy; not Sevrin the anarchist. But she advanced. And that was natural. For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures. Her face had gone completely colourless. Ghastly. Fancy having it brought home to her so brutally that she was the sort of person who must run away from the police! I believe she was pale with indignation, mostly, though there was, of course, also the concern for her intact personality, a vague dread of some sort of rudeness. And, naturally, she turned to a man, to the man on whom she had a claim of fascination and homage--the man who could not conceivably fail her at any juncture."

"But," I cried, amazed at this analysis, "if it had been serious, real, I mean--as she thought it was--what could she expect him to do for her?"

X never moved a muscle of his face.

"Goodness knows. I imagine that this charming, generous, and independent creature had never known in her life a single genuine thought; I mean a single thought detached from small human vanities, or whose source was not in some conventional perception. All I know is that after advancing a few steps she extended her hand towards the motionless Sevrin. And that at least was no gesture. It was a natural movement. As to what she expected him to do, who can tell? The impossible. But whatever she expected, it could not have come up, I am safe to say, to what he had made up his mind to do, even before that entreating hand had appealed to him so directly. It had not been necessary. From the moment he had seen her enter that cellar, he had made up his mind to sacrifice his future usefulness, to throw off the impenetrable, solidly fastened mask it had been his pride to wear--"

"What do you mean?" I interrupted, puzzled. "Was it Sevrin, then, who was--"

"He was. The most persistent, the most dangerous, the craftiest, the most systematic of informers. A genius amongst betrayers. Fortunately for us, he was unique. The man was a fanatic, I have told you. Fortunately, again, for us, he had fallen in love with the accomplished and innocent gestures of that girl. An actor in desperate earnest himself, he must have believed in the absolute value of conventional signs. As to the grossness of the trap into which he fell, the explanation must be that two sentiments of such absorbing magnitude cannot exist simultaneously in one heart. The danger of that other and unconscious comedian robbed him of his vision, of his perspicacity, of his judgment. Indeed, it did at first rob him of his self-possession. But he regained that through the necessity--as it appeared to him imperiously--to do something at once. To do what? Why, to get her out of the house as quickly as possible. He was desperately anxious to do that. I have told you he was terrified. It could not be about himself. He had been surprised and annoyed at a move quite unforeseen and premature. I may even say he had been furious. He was accustomed to arrange the last scene of his betrayals with a deep, subtle art which left his revolutionist reputation untouched. But it seems clear to me that at the same time he had resolved to make the best of it, to keep his mask resolutely on. It was only with the discovery of her being in the house that everything--the forced calm, the restraint of his fanaticism, the mask--all came off together in a kind of panic. Why panic, do you ask? The answer is very simple. He remembered--or, I dare say, he had never forgotten--the Professor alone at the top of the house, pursuing his researches, surrounded by tins upon tins of Stone's Dried Soup. There was enough in some few of them to bury us all where we stood under a heap of bricks. Sevrin, of course, was aware of that. And we must believe, also, that he knew the exact character of the man. He had gauged so many such characters! Or perhaps he only gave the Professor credit for what he himself was capable of. But, in any case, the effect was produced. And suddenly he raised his voice in authority.

"'Get the lady away at once.'

"It turned out that he was as hoarse as a crow; result, no doubt, of the intense emotion. It passed off in a moment. But these fateful words issued forth from his contracted throat in a discordant, ridiculous croak. They required no answer. The thing was done. However, the man personating the inspector judged it expedient to say roughly:

"'She shall go soon enough, together with the rest of you.'

"These were the last words belonging to the comedy part of this affair.

"Oblivious of everything and everybody, Sevrin strode towards him and seized the lapels of his coat. Under his thin bluish cheeks one could see his jaws working with passion.

"'You have men posted outside. Get the lady taken home at once. Do you hear? Now. Before you try to get hold of the man upstairs.'

"'Oh! There is a man upstairs,' scoffed the other, openly. 'Well, he shall be brought down in time to see the end of this.'

"But Sevrin, beside himself, took no heed of the tone.

"'Who's the imbecile meddler who sent you blundering here? Didn't you understand your instructions? Don't you know anything? It's incredible. Here--'

"He dropped the lapels of the coat and, plunging his hand into his breast, jerked feverishly at something under his shirt. At last he produced a small square pocket of soft leather, which must have been hanging like a scapulary from his neck by the tape whose broken ends dangled from his fist.

"'Look inside,' he spluttered, flinging it in the other's face. And instantly he turned round towards the girl. She stood just behind him, perfectly still and silent. Her set, white face gave an illusion of placidity. Only her staring eyes seemed bigger and darker.

"He spoke rapidly, with nervous assurance. I heard him distinctly promise her to make everything as clear as daylight presently. But that was all I caught. He stood close to her, never attempting to touch her even with the tip of his little finger--and she stared at him stupidly. For a moment, however, her eyelids descended slowly, pathetically, and then, with the long black eyelashes lying on her white cheeks, she looked ready to fall down in a swoon. But she never even swayed where she stood. He urged her loudly to follow him at once, and walked towards the door at the bottom of the cellar stairs without looking behind him. And, as a matter of fact, she did move after him a pace or two. But, of course, he was not allowed to reach the door. There were angry exclamations, a short, fierce scuffle. Flung away violently, he came flying backwards upon her, and fell. She threw out her arms in a gesture of dismay and stepped aside, just clear of his head, which struck the ground heavily near her shoe.

"He grunted with the shock. By the time he had picked himself up, slowly, dazedly, he was awake to the reality of things. The man into whose hands he had thrust the leather case had extracted therefrom a narrow strip of bluish paper. He held it up above his head, and, as after the scuffle an expectant uneasy stillness reigned once more, he threw it down disdainfully with the words, 'I think, comrades, that this proof was hardly necessary.'

"Quick as thought, the girl stooped after the fluttering slip. Holding it spread out in both hands, she looked at it; then, without raising her eyes, opened her fingers slowly and let it fall.

"I examined that curious document afterwards. It was signed by a very high personage, and stamped and countersigned by other high officials in various countries of Europe. In his trade--or shall I say, in his mission?--that sort of talisman might have been necessary, no doubt. Even to the police itself--all but the heads--he had been known only as Sevrin the noted anarchist.

"He hung his head, biting his lower lip. A change had come over him, a sort of thoughtful, absorbed calmness. Nevertheless, he panted. His sides worked visibly, and his nostrils expanded and collapsed in weird contrast with his sombre aspect of a fanatical monk in a meditative attitude, but with something, too, in his face of an actor intent upon the terrible exigencies of his part. Before him Horne declaimed, haggard and bearded, like an inspired denunciatory prophet from a wilderness. Two fanatics. They were made to understand each other. Does this surprise you? I suppose you think that such people would be foaming at the mouth and snarling at each other?"

I protested hastily that I was not surprised in the least; that I thought nothing of the kind; that anarchists in general were simply inconceivable to me mentally, morally, logically, sentimentally, and even physically. X received this declaration with his usual woodenness and went on.

"Horne had burst out mto eloquence. While pouring out scornful invective, he let tears escape from his eyes and roll down his black beard unheeded. Sevrin panted quicker and quicker. When he opened his mouth to speak, everyone hung on his words.

"'Don't be a fool, Horne,' he began. 'You know very well that I have done this for none of the reasons you are throwing at me.' And in a moment he became outwardly as steady as a rock under the other's lurid stare. 'I have been thwarting, deceiving, and betraying you--from conviction.'

"He turned his back on Horne, and addressing the girl, repeated the words: 'From conviction.'

"It's extraordinary how cold she looked. I suppose she could not think of any appropriate gesture. There can have been few precedents indeed for such a situation.

"'Clear as daylight,' he added. 'Do you understand what that means? From conviction.'

"And still she did not stir. She did not know what to do. But the luckless wretch was about to give her the opportunity for a beautiful and correct gesture.

"'I have felt in me the power to make you share this conviction,' he protested, ardently. He had forgotten himself; he made a step towards her--perhaps he stumbled. To me he seemed to be stooping low as if to touch the hem of her garment. And then the appropriate gesture came. She snatched her skirt away from his polluting contact and averted her head with an upward tilt. It was magnificently done, this gesture of conventionally unstained honour, of an unblemished high-minded amateur.

"Nothing could have been better. And he seemed to think so, too, for once more he turned away. But this time he faced no one. He was again panting frightfully, while he fumbled hurriedly in his waistcoat pocket, and then raised his hand to his lips. There was something furtive in this movement, but directly afterwards his bearing changed. His laboured breathing gave him a resemblance to a man who had just run a desperate race; but a curious air of detachment, of sudden and profound indifference, replaced the strain of the striving effort. The race was over. I did not want to see what would happen next. I was only too well aware. I tucked the young lady's arm under mine without a word, and made my way with her to the stairs.

"Her brother walked behind us. Half-way up the short flight she seemed unable to lift her feet high enough for the steps, and we had to pull and push to get her to the top. In the passage she dragged herself along, hanging on my arm, helplessly bent like an old woman. We issued into an empty street through a half-open door, staggering like besotted revellers. At the corner we stopped a four-wheeler, and the ancient driver looked round from his box with morose scorn at our efforts to get her in. Twice during the drive I felt her collapse on my shoulder in a half faint. Facing us, the youth in knickerbockers remained as mute as a fish, and, till he jumped out with the latch-key, sat more still than I would have believed it possible.

"At the door of their drawing-room she left my arm and walked in first, catching at the chairs and tables. She unpinned her hat, then, exhausted with the effort, her cloak still hanging from her shoulders, flung herself into a deep armchair, sideways, her face half buried in a cushion. The good brother appeared silently before her with a glass of water. She motioned it away. He drank it himself and walked off to a distant corner--behind the grand piano, somewhere. All was still in this room where I had seen, for the first time, Sevrin, the anti-anarchist, captivated and spellbound by the consummate and hereditary grimaces that in a certain sphere of life take the place of feelings with an excellent effect. I suppose her thoughts were busy with the same memory. Her shoulders shook violently. A pure attack of nerves. When it quieted down she affected firmness, 'What is done to a man of that sort? What will they do to him?'

"'Nothing. They can do nothing to him,' I assured her, with perfect truth. I was pretty certain he had died in less than twenty minutes from the moment his hand had gone to his lips. For if his fanatical anti-anarchism went even as far as carrying poison in his pocket, only to rob his adversaries of legitimate vengeance, I knew he would take care to provide something that would not fail him when required.

"She drew an angry breath. There were red spots on her cheeks and a feverish brilliance in her eyes.

"'Has ever any one been exposed to such a terrible experience? To think that he had held my hand! That man!' Her face twitched, she gulped down a pathetic sob. 'If I ever felt sure of anything, it was of Sevrin's high-minded motives.'

"Then she began to weep quietly, which was good for her. Then through her flood of tears, half resentful, 'What was it he said to me?--"From conviction!" It seemed a vile mockery. What could he mean by it?'

"'That, my dear young lady,' I said, gently, 'is more than I or anybody else can ever explain to you.'"

Mr. X flicked a crumb off the front of his coat.

"And that was strictly true as to her. Though Horne, for instance, understood very well; and so did I, especially after we had been to Sevrin's lodging in a dismal back street of an intensely respectable quarter. Horne was known there as a friend, and we had no difficulty in being admitted, the slatternly maid merely remarking, as she let us in, that 'Mr. Sevrin had not been home that night.' We forced open a couple of drawers in the way of duty, and found a little useful information. The most interesting part was his diary; for this man, engaged in such deadly work, had the weakness to keep a record of the most damnatory kind. There were his acts and also his thoughts laid bare to us. But the dead don't mind that. They don't mind anything.

"'From conviction.' Yes. A vague but ardent humanitarianism had urged him in his first youth into the bitterest extremity of negation and revolt. Afterwards his optimism flinched. He doubted and became lost. You have heard of converted atheists. These turn often into dangerous fanatics, but the soul remains the same. After he had got acquainted with the girl, there are to be met in that diary of his very queer politico-amorous rhapsodies. He took her sovereign grimaces with deadly seriousness. He longed to convert her. But all this cannot interest you. For the rest, I don't know if you remember--it is a good many years ago now--the journalistic sensation of the 'Hermione Street Mystery'; the finding of a man's body in the cellar of an empty house; the inquest; some arrests; many surmises--then silence--the usual end for many obscure martyrs and confessors. The fact is, he was not enough of an optimist. You must be a savage, tyrannical, pitiless, thick-and-thin optimist, like Horne, for instance, to make a good social rebel of the extreme type."

He rose from the table. A waiter hurried up with his overcoat; another held his hat in readiness.

"But what became of the young lady?" I asked.

"Do you really want to know?" he said, buttoning himself in his fur coat carefully. "I confess to the small malice of sending her Sevrin's diary. She went into retirement; then she went to Florence; then she went into retreat in a convent. I can't tell where she will go next. What does it matter? Gestures! Gestures! Mere gestures of her class."

He fitted on his glossy high hat with extreme precision, and casting a rapid glance round the room, full of well-dressed people, innocently dining, muttered between his teeth:

"And nothing else! That is why their kind is fated to perish."

I never met Mr. X again after that evening. I took to dining at my club. On my next visit to Paris I found my friend all impatience to hear of the effect produced on me by this rare item of his collection. I told him all the story, and he beamed on me with the pride of his distinguished specimen.

"Isn't X well worth knowing?" he bubbled over in great delight. "He's unique, amazing, absolutely terrific."

His enthusiasm grated upon my finer feelings. I told him curtly that the man's cynicism was simply abominable.

"Oh, abominable! abominable!" assented my friend, effusively. "And then, you know, he likes to have his little joke sometimes," he added in a confidential tone.

I fail to understand the connection of this last remark. I have been utterly unable to discover where in all this the joke comes in.