Aestheticism & homosexuality
To the Editors:
Louis Auchincloss’s comparison of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde (October 1991) sparked an initial curiosity in this reader by the promise it held out of weighing and contrasting two literary figures often paired by the fact of their having almost exclusively invented and refined the aesthetic movement. However, instead of the just and balanced, not to mention illuminating, analysis I had hoped for, what I found was a heavy-handed, righteous, and extra-literary, that is to say anti-homosexual, essay.
Mr. Auchincloss begins well enough, giving Pater an appreciative and leisurely treatment. His remark that Pater “attempted to sublimate desires unacceptable to society into his art” is neither unreasonable nor offensive. When he expands this remark into a thesis that sublimation and a “monastic existence” helped Pater achieve the “most graceful and mellifluous prose of his day,” we are faced with the first warning sign that Mr. Auchincloss means to apply his moral code to purely aesthetic matters. My main point here, however, is that he handles Pater decently, discussing Marius the Epicurean and Sebastian van Storck in a thorough manner and making his observations on Pater’s private life in a discrete and limited fashion. The moment his attention turns to Oscar Wilde, Mr. Auchincloss abandons all literary pretense and indulges in the most personal and sordid attack conceivable. He dismisses Wilde’s literary accomplishment by simply enumerating it, and even here he errs since he fails to mention the brilliant epigrams, partially collected