HILARY FRASERPlato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato into a world no longer
pagan, and based upon the conception of a spiritual life" - but the Plato
who is "wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian world, represented by
that group of brilliant youths in the Lysis... finding the end of all
endeavor in the aspects of the human form, the continual stir and motion
of a comely human life." 20 Pater, a classics tutor at Brasenose College, was
intimately associated with the transformation of Oxford Hellenism that
took place in the latter half of Victoria's reign as an unforeseen consequence
of the successful attempt by Jowett and other university reformers to
establish in the study of ancient Greek culture the basis for an alternative
social and ethical value-system to that grounded in Christian theology. As
Linda Dowling has consummately demonstrated, the liberal reformers'
representation of Plato as a source of transcendental authority created a
cultural context in which male love - the "spiritual procreancy" celebrated
in Plato's Symposium and generally associated with ancient Greece - might
be experienced and justified in ideal terms. 21
Timothy d'Arch Smith has coined the term "Uranian" to describe nine-
teenth-century poetry that celebrates the spiritual love between males
discussed in Plato's Symposium. 22 This type of writing began to appear in
the 1850s and it was well established by the time Oscar Wilde went up to
Oxford in 1874. Wilde's poetry, like Swinburne's, presents a Hellenism in
conflict with Christianity. "Humanitad" (1881), for example, echoes the
idiom of both Swinburne and Pater. Here Wilde laments the passing of
ancient Greece, a time "When soul and body seemed to blend in mystic
symphonies." Such an era is superseded by the advent of "the new Calvary"
(OW 410), to which "[we] pass / With weary feet" (409-10). By compar-
ison, the final lines of his "Sonnet Written in Holy Week at Genoa" (1877)
sigh: "Ah, God! Ah, God! those dear Hellenic hours / Had drowned all
memory of Thy bitter pain, / The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers, and the
Spear" (12-13). Although the speaker's pagan adventures are here checked
by his penitential Christian feelings of pity for Christ's suffering, aroused
by the song of a "young boy-priest" (9), Hellenism emerges as a temptation
to which he has understandably surrendered and will, it is implied, return.
Such poetry indicates that by the 1880s the culture of ancient Greece
offered a coded language for the emerging discourse of homosexuality.
Dowling throws considerable light on both the evolution of Oxford
Hellenism and the cultural moment of Wilde's trial in 1895 when he made
his legendary defense of love between men as a love "such as Plato made
the very basis of his philosophy." 23 She shows how closely enmeshed
Victorian historicist methodologies and discourses are with the histories of
sexuality and with the construction of gendered poetics. But the gendered