period’s homophilic writers. John Addington Symonds wrote to Wilde
praising the latter’s ‘Keatsian openness at all pores to beauty’, and after his
own death in Rome, was memorialised in the covertly homophile journal
The Artistwith an anonymous verse:
Let each lay here in this grave a rose
And breathe a prayer for England’s dead,
Keats and Shelley and Symonds, sleeping
Here in the ancient city’s keeping,
Servants true of the Lord Eroˆs.^18
Wilde himself famously admired Keats as a ‘Priest of Beauty, slain
before his time’ and compared him to the martyred St Sebastian with the
requisite curly hair and red lips.^19 Being a martyr to one’s feeling for
Beauty, however, is not quite the same as Keatsianly dissolving the
borders of self, and Najarian’s formula needs some refining when placed
into the situation in which Owen himself was writing, adopted as a
prote ́ge ́of Robbie Ross and the survivors of the Wilde circle at Half-
Moon Street. For in that context, the word ‘pity’ implies some notion of
pain, since it had gained this sense strongly for Wilde while he had been
in prison. In Andre ́Gide’s memoir of Wilde (published in English in
1905 , and in French before that), Wilde is reported as saying: ‘Do you
know, dear, that it’s pity that kept me from killing myself?... What kept
me from doing so was looking at the others, seeing that they were as
unhappy as I, and having pity.’^20
This could be taken in two different ways. Does it mean that Wilde
simply stopped worrying about his own sorrows so much because he felt
himself part of a common unhappiness? Or does Wilde realise that if he
could pity them, then why could he not pity himself rather than hurt
himself? Wildean pity is both, a fellow-feeling and a feeling for oneself in
the face of suffering, and depends on the difference between the two,
rather than a dissolution of borders. When another prisoner was pun-
ished, Wilde continued, ‘as pity had entered my heart, I was afraid only
for him; indeed, I was happy to suffer because of him... you don’t know
how sweet that can seem...tofeel that we were suffering for each other’.
Companionship in suffering is combined with a certain soulful sweetness,
and such interested ‘pity’ also has an impact on Wilde’s views about art.
In the same passage, he repudiates a novelist he had formerly admired:
‘Flaubert didn’t want any pity in his work, and that’s why it seems small
and closed; pity is the side on which a work is open, by which it appears
infinite.’^21
194 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism