Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T17:08:52.519Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

PATER'S MOUTH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Matthew Kaiser
Matthew Kaiser*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

At New College, Oxford, Lionel Johnson had a reputation for sleeping past noon. On Monday, April 15, 1889, the sun was high overhead when he boasted in a letter to his friend Campbell Dodgson of his intimacy with the elusive Walter Pater, at whose London house he had spent the weekend: “I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater and fell in love with Pater” (Roseliep 148). That all of these friendly activities – lunching, dining, smoking, taking Communion, and perhaps even falling in love – entail opening one's mouth, or at least loosening one's lips, suggests a connection, in Johnson's eyes, between Pater's well-documented powers to charm his audience and the oral susceptibility of that audience. Getting to know the true Pater, Johnson implies, is an oral affair. His conversations with Pater, their meals, his very sense of Pater, linger on his lips. Teachers open our eyes. But Pater opens Johnson's mouth. One is tempted to dismiss the letter to Dodgson, who, like Johnson, was same-sex oriented, as youthful homoerotic banter: a campy projection of Johnson's own ambivalent and mercurial appetites. A year later, after all, in a letter to his friend Arthur Galton, Johnson recounts a “mid-day” visit he received at Oxford – whilst “lying half asleep in bed” – from Oscar Wilde, who “laughed at Pater” and “consumed all my cigarettes” (Holland and Hart-Davis 423). “I am in love with him,” Johnson declares.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 47 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Collini, Stefan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beerbohm, Max. “Diminuendo” [originally titled “Be It Cosiness”]. Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose. Ed. Beckson, Karl. Rev. ed. Chicago: Academy, 1981. 66–73.Google Scholar
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste; Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Trans. Fisher, M. F. K.. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1949.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. Boulton, James T.. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. Strachey, James. New York: Basic Books, 1975.Google Scholar
Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Holland, Merlin, and Hart-Davis, Rupert, eds. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Matthew. “Marius at Oxford: Paterian Pedagogy and the Ethics of Seduction.” Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Ed. Brake, Laurel, Higgins, Lesley, and Williams, Carolyn. Greensboro: ELT, 2002. 189–201.Google Scholar
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Mintz, Sidney W.Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Morgan, Thaïs E. “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater.” Sexualities in Victorian Britain. Ed. Miller, Andrew H. and Adams, James Eli. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Kaufmann, Walter. New York: Vintage, 1974.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Kaufmann, Walter. New York: Vintage, 1967.Google Scholar
Page, Frederick, and Jump, John, eds. Byron: Complete Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Appreciations, With an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan, 1927.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Gaston de Latour. Portland: Thomas B. Mosher, 1907.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Greek Studies: A Series of Essays. London: Macmillan, 1911.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Imaginary Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1887.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas. London: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays. Ed. Shadwell, Charles L.. London: Macmillan, 1898.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures. New York: Macmillan, 1901.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Phillips, Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Roseliep, Raymond, ed. “Some Letters of Lionel Johnson.” Diss. University of Notre Dame, 1953.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, John D.Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature. London: Anthem, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice, Volume II: The Sea Stories. New York: Cosimo, 2007.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Peter Bell the Third. The Complete Poems of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: The Modern Library, 1983. 374–93.Google Scholar
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon. Ed. Haynes, Kenneth. London: Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
“Taste.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.Google Scholar
Wallen, Jeffrey. “Physiology, Mesmerism, and Walter Pater's ‘Susceptibilities to Influence’.” Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Ed. Brake, Laurel, Higgins, Lesley, and Williams, Carolyn. Greensboro: ELT, 2002. 73–89.Google Scholar
Williams, Carolyn. Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.Google Scholar