Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

Literatures in English

Mgr. Eva Valentová

The Graeco-Roman God Pan and Decadence

Dissertation

Supervisor: doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, Ph.D.

2018

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..

Eva Valentová

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, Ph.D., for his kind help and invaluable insights, which made the work on this project intellectually stimulating.

I would also like to thank Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D. for his encouragement and patient guidance in my publishing efforts. He has helped me to become a better writer.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 4

2. The Phenomenon of Decadence ...... 7

3. The Betwixt-and-Between God Pan ...... 40

4. The Awful God Pan: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan ...... 52

5. The Liberating Pan: E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend” 80

6. Pan as a Spirit of Nature and Psychopomp: Forrest Reid’s The Garden God and “Pan’s

Pupil” ...... 110

7. Pan as an Androgynous God of Ecstasy in Victor Benjamin Neuburg’s Poem “The

Triumph of Pan” ...... 140

8. The Betwixt-and-Between: Peter Pan as a Trickster Figure ...... 163

9. Conclusion ...... 194

Bibliography ...... 199

Abstract ...... 208

Anotace ...... 211

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1. Introduction

The motif of the Graeco-Roman god Pan experienced a remarkable upsurge of interest in the nineteenth century, not only in children’s literature (Perrot 155), but also of the literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in general. Indeed, Patricia Merivale notes an “astonishing resurgence of interest in the Pan motif” between 1890 and 1926 (vii).

What is more, Patricia Merivale also points out that it was an exclusively Anglo-American phenomenon: “Even before Nietzsche, the Germans, for instance, seem to have preferred the weightier figure of Dionysus (the Bacchic nightmare of Mann’s Death in Venice is the logical outcome of this preference); there is no clear equivalent to the Anglo-American Pan cult”

(222). The present thesis analyses the use of this motif in selected works from fin de siècle and Edwardian period and explores its relationship to Decadence.

The phenomenon of Decadence is already a well-researched subject although the existing research has not yielded any clear definition yet due to the highly contradictory nature of the phenomenon. Some of the major studies covering this topic include Matei

Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,

Postmodernism (1987); David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995);

Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999) by Liz Constable et al.;

Charles Bernheimer’s Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature,

Philosophy and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (2002); and Kirsten MacLeod’s

Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle (2006).

These and other studies of Decadence are used in the theoretical part of the thesis, which is a metastudy of Decadence. In other words, it aims to present a relatively coherent picture of the phenomenon. The works mentioned above are all general studies of Decadence, which

(except for MacLeod who focuses on British Decadence) often give a lot of space to French literature where the movement originated. Moreover, they leave out the study of the god Pan,

4 which was a motif especially prevalent in Anglo-American literature. And yet there is a major study of the god Pan and that is Patricia Merivale’s book Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (1969), a literary history of the Pan motif, where she traces the appearance of Pan in literary works beginning with classic Greek literature and ending with the fiction of the early twentieth century. However, since it covers such a vast range of literature, the book has rather the character of an overview.

In the present study, I take a different approach. I have restricted the analysis to five authors from the period of the turn of the century and conducted in-depth studies of their works dealing with Pan. The analytical part starts with the study of Arthur Machen (1863-

1947) as he was the most influential author dealing with the Pan motif due to his famous novella The Great God Pan (1894), which has become a classic of the horror genre.

Correspondingly, Merivale addresses the novella in the chapter on the “Sinister Pan.”

However, my analysis problematises this classification by considering Machen’s original idea behind writing the story. The Great God Pan is the most typically Decadent of the analysed works. The analysis continues with E. M. Forster’s (1879-1970) short stories “The Story of a

Panic” (1904) and “The Curate’s Friend” (1907) from the collection The Celestial Omnibus

(1911), featuring Pan and a faun respectively. Compared to Machen, Forster was more politically engaged, and his short stories represent a challenge to the heteronormative bourgeois conventions. In his political views, the liberal and atheistic Forster was a complete opposite of the more orthodox Machen. After this follows the chapter on Forrest Reid (1875-

1947), Forster’s close friend. The analysis focuses on his novel The Garden God (1905), a lyrical story about a Platonic love between two boys, one of whom is an incarnation of Pan, and the short story “Pan’s Pupil” (1905) about an encounter of a boy with the goat-god.

Reid’s intensely lyrical prose belongs to the tradition of Uranian writing. The subject of the next chapter is Victor Benjamin Neuburg’s (1883-1940) poem “The Triumph of Pan” (1910).

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Neuburg was not a very well-known poet, having been largely overshadowed by Aleister

Crowley, with whom he was closely associated. In the poem, Pan, who is referred to as the hermaphrodite, challenges the boundaries concerning gender and sexuality. The analysis concludes with J. M. Barrie’s (1860-1937) novel Peter and Wendy (1911), which is chronologically the last work, but whose origins stand at the beginning as the play Peter Pan was first staged in 1904. Here, I explore the link between the iconic hero of children’s literature with the archetypal trickster figure.

The reason I have chosen these five writers is that their works are representative of different aspects of the god Pan. These are indicated in the headings of the individual chapters. It needs to be said that the headings do not capture all the aspects of Pan that are expressed in those works, but rather those that are foregrounded. Pan is closely connected to

Nature in all of them, which goes against the traditional understanding of Decadence as an aesthetic of artifice. In most of the works analysed here, Paganism and Christianity are juxtaposed, particularly in Neuburg, Reid and Forster, who all rejected their Judeo-Christian background (Neuburg came from a Jewish family). Machen, on the other hand, was an orthodox Anglo-Catholic. What is central to Forster’s, Neuburg’s and Reid’s works is homoeroticism with which the Pan motif is closely associated. Last but not least, in all these works, Pan is a transgressive and liminal figure, a characteristic that is epitomised by his half- god/half-goat nature.

Since the thesis deals with literary history, the principal methods I have used are close reading and contextual analysis, taking into account how the works had been shaped by the authors’ lives, examining their relation to literary Decadence, as well as situating them within a broader sociocultural context of the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Britain. The biographical aspect of the analyses is particularly important in the case of Machen and Reid, whose works were to a considerable extent autobiographical. My ambition in writing the present thesis is

6 not to provide another comprehensive account of Decadence. Instead, in the words of Liz

Constable, my aim is to “offer local response” (290).

2. The Phenomenon of Decadence

Decadence is a highly complex phenomenon, which does not have a clear definition.

Commentators have long struggled to restrict the scope of the phenomenon and identify its key features, but the effort to accommodate Decadent works, which were characterised by great variety and often contradictory qualities, into a unified and coherent characterisation of

Decadence was not an easy task, often leading to frustration. Moreover, what did not make the task any easier is the fact that many writers associated with Decadence refused the label.

Decadence came into existence as a pejorative term. One of the critics who originated this negative view of Decadence, while being the first to introduce the concept of Decadence as a literary style, was “the antiromantic and conservative French critic Désiré Nisard” (1806-

1888) (Calinescu 157-8), who criticised what he saw as excessive emphasis on detail, resulting in the disruption of the whole, “the work disintegrating into a multitude of overwrought fragments” (158). This idea can be traced back to Théophile “Gautier’s metaphor of decomposition, in which a disintegrating language is likened to a decaying body” (Weir 88-89). It is also the basis of Paul Bourget’s famous characterisation of the

Decadent style in his essay “Baudelaire and the Decadent Movement” (1881), where he gave it a more positive inflection than Nisard did. This description was made available to the

English readership through Havelock Ellis’s translation in his essay “A Note on Paul

Bourget” (1889): “The style of Decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and in which the phrase is decomposed to give place to the independence of the word” (qtd. in Dowling 132). Beside evoking the theme

7 of organic decay by comparing “the composition of the text to the decomposition of the body” (Weir 31), this description expresses the typically Decadent emphasis on individualism, resulting in a subversion of hierarchy and in anarchy which, according to

Bourget, characterises decadent societies, as opposed to “organic societies,” in which the parts are subordinated to the whole (Calinescu 170). Bourget thus argued that the Decadent style reflected the developments in modern society: “[H]e establishes an analogy between the social evolution toward individualism and the ‘individualistic’ manifestations of artistic language” (Calinescu 170). This tendency towards individualism is, then, at the core of

Bourget’s understanding of Decadence, both as a style and as a stage in the development of societies. Matei Calinescu agrees with Bourget, arguing that this is what Decadence shares with Modernism: “A style of decadence is simply a style favorable to the unrestricted manifestation of aesthetic individualism, a style that has done away with traditional authoritarian requirements such as unity, hierarchy, objectivity, etc. Decadence thus understood and modernity coincide in their rejection of the tyranny of tradition” (171).

Bourget’s description was then rewritten by Friedrich Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed ultimate expert on Decadence: “I am in questions of décadence the highest instance that now exists on earth” (qtd. in Bernheimer 7):

What is the characteristic of all literary décadence? It is that the life no longer resides in the whole. The word gets the upper hand and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence stretches too far and obscures the meaning of the page, the page acquires life at the expense of the whole―the whole is no longer a whole. But that is the simile for every style of decadence: always anarchy of the atoms, disgregation of will, in the language of morality, “liberty of the individual,”―widened to a political theory, “equal rights for all.” (Nietzsche 25)

Nietzsche stressed the unhealthy aspect of what he referred to as décadance. In his view, “life that dwells in the whole is good; the decadent impulse that fragments, atomizes, and disorganizes the whole is bad” (Bernheimer 11). Charles Bernheimer explains the logic behind this claim: “For the total organism to function properly, the lesser organisms have to

8 subordinate their energies to the good of the whole, just as the cells have to subordinate theirs to the benefit of the lesser organisms. If this hierarchical order fails, anarchy and decadence ensue as individual life thrives at the expense of the whole (10). However, by reversing the original order of the words in Bourget’s definition and opting for more vigorous verbs,

Nietzsche makes the process appear more active and energetic, which, ironically, contradicts the idea of a disease. What is more, when discussing Nietzsche’s writing on Decadence,

Bernheimer aims to demonstrate the invigorating effect the phenomenon of Decadence had on him, “its stimulating force as an intellectual agent provocateur” (8).

Decadence is not the only term denoting a cultural movement whose origins are derogatory. Others include, for example, baroque and modernism. In the case of Decadence, however, the pejorative origins seem to have stuck, which transpires from the negative attitude of the movement’s critics, people who devoted their time and energy to studying

Decadence. One of the first (and probably most famous) works to do this was Max Nordau’s

Degeneration (1892), diagnosing the writers associated with Aestheticism, Naturalism,

Decadence, and Impressionism with insanity and predispositions to criminal behaviour

(Marshall 5). Ironically, his text betrays many of the features he criticised in his subject.

Indeed, Bernheimer notes Nordau’s “inability to maintain a position outside of degeneration’s reach” (160), listing the following characteristics that Nordau’s writing shares with the

“degenerates” he studies: “hysterical, egotistic, unbalanced, emotional, pessimistic, imitative”

(161). This engenders the idea that Decadence is somehow contagious. Another example of a derogatory account of Decadence is W. B. Yeats’ The Trembling of the Veil (1922), in which the writers associated with Decadence are described as “The Tragic Generation,” giving rise to the stereotype of “men doomed to early death, disgrace and an aesthetic of exhaustion and dissatisfaction” (Marshall 2). MacLeod debunks this myth in her Fictions of British

Decadence (2006), noting the damage it had caused to the image of Decadence: Yeats

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“produced the most enduring of the characterizations of the movement because his mythologization provided an explanatory narrative for a whole generation of artists as well as for the emergence of Modernism” (MacLeod 6). His account was necessarily simplistic because he excluded those authors who did not fit his stereotype of a “tragic generation,” such as, for instance, the hard-working Arthur Machen (1863-1947), who lived to the ripe old age of eighty-four, and Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947), both “living long and productive lives” (17). As MacLeod points out: “It is no coincidence that they are largely absent from histories of Decadence, which too often insist on a correspondence between Decadent literary practice and a Decadent lifestyle leading to a tragic end” (149). Indeed, Marion Thain describes Yeats’s characterisation of the movement as a “caricature,” which “did lasting damage to its critical reception, and hid the extent to which this poetry is concerned with rising to the challenges of modernity” (225). Other negative accounts of Decadence include

Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties (1913), who, in his narrow focus on a particular group of writers (Marshall 3), made the same mistake as Yeats; John Reed’s Decadent Style

(1954), who characterises Decadence “as the illegitimate offspring of Naturalism and aestheticism” (Denisoff 32); A. E. Carter’s Idea of Decadence in French Literature: 1830-

1900 (1958), who, although doing “much to further study of the field, begins his work by dismissing most decadent writing as ‘morbid’ and ‘a pretentious mummy’ (viii), valuable as a document, but merely ‘amusing’ or ‘unreadable’ in and of itself (143)” (Constable et al.,

Introduction 4); and Richard Gilman, who, in his Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet

(1979), denies Decadence a fully-fledged existence: “For ‘decadence’ . . . is an epithet, neither more nor less, and this should alert us at least to the possibility that there is nothing to which it actually and legitimately applies” (qtd. in Hanson 1).1 An interesting case is Arthur

Symons, who in his essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893) first strongly

1 Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 158. 10 advocated the movement, being “among the first openly to champion the movement in

England” (Constable et al., Introduction 4), only to reject it in favour of Symbolism. Indeed, in his later work The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), he describes Decadents as

“lesser men” and the whole movement as “a straying aside from the main road of literature”

(Symons 7), with Symbolism representing the return to the right path (7). Many French critics shared Symons’s view, regarding Decadence as a mere “transitional period of preparation for the symbolist movement in poetry” (Weir 8).

Constable et al. aptly described this hostile attitude to Decadence—especially prevalent among the early critics—as “Nordau sprawl” (Introduction 2). They point out that negative criticism of Decadence is often governed by the “logic of the ‘other’” (7): “Critics tend to treat decadence, in this regard, as the weak other of some ‘strong’ literary movement, distinguishing the (good) Aesthetes from the (bad) decadents, the (transcendent) Symbolists from the (materialistic) decadents, or the (original) Romantics from the (imitative) decadents who merely parrot or plagiarize their imagery and doctrines” (7-8). Moreover, Decadence was also presented “a dangerous national ‘other,’ a threat emanating from beyond the borders” (10). In England, specifically, it was condemned as “a ‘French disease’ (like syphilis),” and its foreignness was emphasised by the French spelling: “décadance” (10).

Interestingly, many of the critics studying Decadence found it necessary to distance themselves from the subject of their study as if it was something contagious. A salient example is Karl Beckson, who “dedicates his important anthology of British decadent writing to his wife and sons, who, he asserts, ‘are neither Aesthetes nor Decadents’” (Constable et al.,

Introduction 5). One of the reasons for this negative attitude is the frustration many of the critics felt with the inability to define a movement so ridden with paradoxes. In this respect,

Kirsten MacLeod’s summary of the “contradictory ways” in which Decadence has been described is noteworthy:

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[Decadence has been defined] as aristocratic, as working class, and as middle class; as high art and as popular art; as effeminate and as hyper-masculine and misogynistic; as cultured and as degenerate; as derivative and as innovative; as a moribund literature and as a literature of youth and renewal; as primitive and as over-civilized; as reactionary and as radical; as a continuation of Romanticism and as a revolt against Romanticism; as a feminist lesbian aesthetic and as a masculine misogynistic aesthetic; as introspective and as socially engaged; as fascist and as socialist, and so on. (18-19)

On the whole, then, Decadence had been relegated to the margins of literature, being seen as imitative of and inferior to other supposedly superior movements, such as Romanticism, which preceded it, and Modernism, which followed.

The study of Decadence is further complicated by the fact that many writers refused to be associated with it: “Some of the writers who typified the decadent style, such as Paul

Verlaine and Huysmans, resisted the label, especially when they recognized the vulgarity of their imitators” (Hanson 2). In Britain, Oscar Wilde’s trials provided a political motivation for renouncing the movement:

The attacks against Decadence reached a boiling point in early 1895 when the arrest, trial, and prosecution of Oscar Wilde for acts of gross indecency gave counter- Decadents the ammunition they needed to bring down the movement. The press linked Wilde’s crimes with his art and used his status as the most high-profile of the Decadents to indict the whole movement. As a consequence, many of those associated with Decadence tried to disassociate themselves from the movement. (MacLeod 6)

MacLeod justifies their decision by pointing out that “it was a matter of career survival to do so” (16). Decadence was then by no means a unified movement. In England, even the journals closely connected to Decadence, such as The Yellow Book, did not print exclusively

Decadent writing (Constable et al., Introduction 29). And this was reflected in criticism:

“Decadence was used loosely by critics to describe everything from Naturalism and

Impressionism to Realism and New Woman fiction” (MacLeod 6). Even the word

“movement” is, thus, a problematic expression, since the writers were not organised in any way. That being said, there were, however, some events that helped to crystallise Decadence as a literary style, namely the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against 12

Nature, or Against the Grain) (1884) and the phenomenon of Décadisme that centred around the journal Le Décadent, founded by Anatole Baju in 1886.2 Baju foregrounded the provocative nature of Decadence, being “attracted by the notion of decadence not only as a complete antithesis of bourgeois banality but also as a new means of shocking the middle class (épater le bourgeois). The primary purpose of the Décadent was clearly to scandalize”

(Calinescu 175). À rebours and Décadisme then provided “a checklist of the decadent sensibility” (Weir 82), À rebours being “the summa of decadence, an encyclopedia of decadent tastes and idiosyncrasies in matters covering the whole range from cuisine to literature” (Calinescu 172), or, as Symons called it, “the breviary of the Decadence”3 (qtd. in

Bernheimer 71), with Des Esseintes, its protagonist, becoming a prototype of the Decadent hero, and at the same time, “a precursor of the inert, cerebral anti-hero of twentieth-century fiction” (Weir 97). Weir, however, also points out the contrast between the typically

Decadent and modernist protagonists, stressing the passivity of the former: “The decadent is merely inquisitive, but not questioning; he may be curious, but not searching; and he can only be intrigued by the human condition, never disturbed” (138), contrasting with their more active counterparts in modern novels. The Decadent hero participates, then, in what Rita

Felski calls “the cultural formation of the feminized male” (95):

Renouncing the struggle for active self-realization in the world, the aesthete is languid and passive, possessing traits usually associated with women, such as vanity, hypersensitivity, and a love of fashion and ornamentation. Spending much of his time in an interior, private space codified as feminine rather than in the public sphere of work and politics, he devotes himself to the cultivation of style and the appreciation of life as an aesthetic phenomenon. (95)

The feminine passivity also transpires from the Decadent hero’s preference for “consuming rather than producing” (96), which shows in his penchant for collecting “beautiful objects”

(95-96).

2 Actually, French criticism used to restrict Decadence to the Décadisme movement: it “applied the epithet décadent only to a small group of minor writers of the 1880s” (Calinescu 217). 3 In “J.-K Huysmans,” Fortnightly Review, March 1892. 13

Despite (or perhaps rather because of) the difficulties with clearly defining the phenomenon of Decadence, literary critics have not given up studying this subject, and more recent writings (specifically, in the 1990s, another fin de siècle) lose the negative attitude, attempting to reevaluate the movement and offering a more positive portrayal. As Christine

Ferguson succinctly puts it: “Recently, the depiction of decadence as sulky, black-clad teenager to modernism’s articulate intellectual has received scrutiny” (466). Far from being seen as a sterile and exhausted period of decline, in newer criticism, fin de siècle has been described as “moments of creative ferment . . . when theory and application alike were in productive turmoil” (Arata 169); as “a period of tremendous vitality, in which debate and controversy are central. It is a period in which the arts are used viscerally to debate contemporary concerns, and in which art itself becomes matter for controversy” (Marshall 5), and finally: “The fin de siècle, often thought of as a decadent endtime, is far better understood as the period in which the modern world as we now recognise it was being born”

(Ruddick 204).

An important work which partook in the positive reappraisal of Decadence is David

Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1996), challenging the view of the movement as an imitative, and hence inferior, successor of Romanticism, and advancing the view of Decadence as an innovative predecessor of modernity (Weir 20). Weir understands

Decadence as a concept which unifies the numerous nineteenth-century literary movements such as “naturalism, symbolism, Parnassianism, Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, décadisme, and others” which “can best be understood if they are all seen as grounded in some concept of decadence or decadentism” (xvi). He emphasises the transitional nature of the phenomenon, with Decadence providing a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, specifying that it is “less a period of transition than a dynamics of transition” (15). He complicates the understanding of the relationship between Romanticism and Decadence by

14 pointing out that it was “both a revolt against some of the programs of romanticism and a continuation of others4” (5), hence being “simultaneously innovative and imitative” (14). At the same time, elaborating on the work of Jean Pierrot and Matei Calinescu, Weir provides a compelling argument for seeing Decadence as a kind of “premodernism” (5), stressing the significance of the movement in breaking away from the norm prescribing the imitation of

Nature as the aim of art. In this “antimimetic” aspect (8), Decadence represents “an essential line of cleavage between the classical esthetic and the modern esthetic” (Pierrot qtd. in Weir

8), effecting a Nietzschean “transvaluation of the values of art” (Weir 15). This transvaluation includes the focus on the surface—language and style—instead of the subject matter, in other words, substituting poesis for mimesis (15). In British context, it was “a transition between the plot-driven three-volume Victorian novel and introspective and analytical Modernist fiction” (MacLeod ix). The principle of mimesis was famously contested by Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” (1891), in which he claimed that “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror” (933). Another aspect of the transvaluation is “dehumanization,” which Weir, referring to José Ortega y Gasset, explains as “a distortion of natural forms, an obscuring of recognizable, human elements in art, such as straightforward, realistic presentations of human situations in the novel and drama” by means of “irony, iconoclasm, aestheticism” and the like (15-16). Weir points out that Modernism, especially the genre of the novel, is indebted to Decadence in its themes while Modernist poetry is indebted to Symbolism (xvii).

Despite the antimimetic character of the Decadent style, imitation is a central aspect of Decadent writing, but not an imitation of Nature. Decadence has been repeatedly characterised as an exhausted aesthetic of imitation, meaning an imitation of other literary

4 What Decadence borrowed from Romanticism is the preoccupation with the exotic and unfamiliar (Weir 42). 15 styles. Matthew Potolsky denounces this derogatory characterisation as “a long-standing critical commonplace” (235), and challenges this negative view. Although he affirms that imitation is indeed “a pivotal concern of Decadent writing, perhaps its founding problematic”

(236), he refutes the idea that this is in any way due to a lack of originality. First of all, referring to Walter Pater (1839-1894), Potolsky points out that imitation is present in all literary and cultural movements, not just Decadence: “All cultural development, for Pater, is achieved not by invention ex nihilo, but by imitation and reincorporation, by ‘a reawakening of the forces of earlier work’ (Wallen 17). No aspect of culture is truly original” (237). In

Plato and Platonism (1893), Pater compares cultural change to “a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before” (8) (qtd. in Potolsky 237). Subsequently,

Potolsky draws attention to the creative potential of imitation, explaining how it can lead to something original; it is “also a practice of resignification, a repetition with a difference. It necessarily alters the ‘original’ meaning of that model; or, to put it another way, it renders the model a model, ‘creates’ is as an original” (237). Imitation is, then, not necessarily the opposite of original. Potolsky further asserts that imitation permeates all aspects of Decadent texts: “Imitation―in the varied forms of allusion, citation, parody, translation, and tribute―is the very stuff of decadent writing, its basic narrative and structural principle” (236). It does not just inform the structure of the text, it also constitutes typically Decadent themes, such as the frequent motif of “a student’s imitation of the teacher,” the most famous example of which is probably Dorian Gray (236). Finally, it also appears on the level of style in the form of ekphrasis, “the extended description of paintings and sculpture, as well as the many retellings of the Narcissus and Pygmalion stories―explicitly foregrounds the unstable relationship between copy and original, art and life” (236).

What many critics see as the core of Decadence and what, at the same time, lies behind its resistance to a clear definition is its paradoxical nature. In fact, Weir considers

16 these two aspects of Decadence to be “the most important elements of its meaning” (2). What he sees as contributing to “a core idea of Decadence” is “the paradoxical parallelism of degeneration and refinement” (48), originating with the Goncourt brothers who considered nervous hypersensitivity “as a form of superiority” (Stephan qtd. in Weir 48). This kind of mental disorder facilitated “stylistic innovation” (Weir 48), which the Goncourts introduced.

The question of how innovative the movement was is also at the root of another paradox:

Decadence “is usually regarded as an excess of convention, unoriginal imitation of earlier forms of literary expression” but also “a quality of resistance to aesthetic norms, an opposition to literary convention” (Weir 119).

Another critic who sees paradox as a device central to Decadence is Thain, who challenges the traditional view of Decadence as an inferior movement, pointing out that the previous critics had failed to see the power and usefulness of paradox as “a means of overcoming impossible divisions,” which characterised fin de siècle (226). She identifies four kinds of paradox associated with Decadence. The first kind is a temporal paradox, illustrated by Pater’s metaphor of a “hard, gemlike flame” from his famous “Conclusion” to The

Renaissance (1873). The paradox consists in “the desire to celebrate the flux and transitory nature of life by ‘stilling the moment and preserving it’” (Thain 226). Capturing these evanescent moments—which are symbolised by “the flickering flame” (226)—in poetry necessarily makes them static, suggested in the words “hard” and “gemlike,” and, thus, it possibly spoils their uniqueness: “[T]he poets sought to preserve moments which were so beautiful and powerful because of their transitory nature, and so their very attempt to take the moment out of time would in some sense destroy it” (227).

The second paradox concerns morality and is based on what Symons saw as a defining feature of Decadence: a search for “intense sensory experience” (Thain 227), in other words a hedonistic, carpe diem philosophy with the aim of coming to terms with

17 mortality, an “attempt to transcend flux through ‘wine and woman and song’ (as Ernest

Dowson put it in ‘Villanelle of the Poet’s Road’ (1899))” (227), which, however, took no heed of morality. What made their art immoral by common standards were the places where they found beauty, such as the Paris gutter (227), and the methods they used for intensifying their experience, such as the use of drugs and transgressive sexual behaviour (227). Decadent artists were then liberating experience and the art that came from it from moral imperatives

(228). This hedonistic aspect of Decadence is probably what most approaches the image of the phenomenon in popular imagination. However, there was a difference between the situation in Britain and France. Whereas French Decadents considered art to be “entirely divorced from morality” (229), British Decadents advanced a new morality “based on aesthetic values” (229), thus inverting the traditional view advocated by Matthew Arnold, who asserted that morality was “such a crucial part of artistic value” (Thain 228). Symons captured this problem in his preface to the second edition of Silhouettes (1896): “[A] work of art can be judged from only two standpoints: the standpoint from which its art is measured entirely by its morality, and the standpoint from which its morality is measured entirely by its art” (qtd. in Thain 225). Arnold represents the former approach and British Decadents the latter, giving rise to the paradox between art and morality.

The third paradox emerged between aesthetics and economics. This paradox is connected with the principle of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake, on which Aestheticism and Decadence was based. It proclaimed the independence of poetry from such matters as morality, science, economics, and politics, implying that one is unable to truly see the beauty of a text or object without disregarding its pragmatic aspect, its use and purpose. In his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Gautier maintained: “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it is useless” (qtd. in Weir 34). The importance of this principle transpires from Ellis

Hanson’s definition of Decadence: “I define decadence as a late-romantic movement in art

18 and literature that raised the aesthetic dictum of ‘art for art’s sake’ to the status of a cult, especially in the final decades of the nineteenth century” (2). Although the Aesthetes and

Decadents attempted to divorce art from its economic aspect and refused to pander to the tastes of the masses, they aimed to make books into perfect aesthetic objects. This meant that not only the content mattered, but also the cover and binding, corresponding to the typically

Decadent focus on the surface over substance. Consequently, the books became enticing objects of consumption, which interfered with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art: “Such expensive production satisfied a double imperative: on the one hand these are designed precisely not to appeal to a mass market (in stark contrast to the penny novel), but on the other, the very commodification of the text in the fine wrappers (often silk, gilt and leather) is a recognition of, and pandering to, consumer desires” (Thain 229). In this respect, “the codeword of l’art pour l’art is the opposite of what it claims to be’” (Adorno qtd. in Thain

229). What is more, most of the Decadent writers were not financially independent and had to make a living, although they “distinguished between their art and their hack writing”

(MacLeod 46). Pointing out the disparity between the Decadent protagonists, such as George

Moore’s Dayne from The Confessions of a Young Man (1888), and their “real-life counterparts,” their progenitors, MacLeod writes: “Such fictional constructions of the audacious, risk-taking writer helped to perpetuate the image of the defiant artist unanswerable to bourgeois middle-class culture by concealing the economic realities [of the literary market] that made Decadent writers more dependent on this class than they cared to admit” (70). This paradox is not restricted to Decadent works of art; it also appears in the Decadent lifestyle, as

Felski points out: “The search for ever more arcane objects not yet trivialized by mass reproduction echoes the same cult of novelty which propels the logic of capitalist consumerism; the loftiest notion of cultural superiority still depends on the vulgar act of shopping” (99). According to Felski, then, the Aesthetes could not avoid being dependent on

19 the commodity culture against which they tried to define themselves (99).

The fourth and last paradox Thain examines is between Decadence and Catholicism, as many Decadent writers converted to Catholicism. Thain gives the examples of Joris-Karl

Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud in French literature; Oscar Wilde, Lionel

Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley, Lord Alfred Douglas, John Gray, André

Raffalovich, Frederick Rolfe, and ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) in

British Decadence (230). The same paradox was also explored by Ellis Hanson in her

Decadence and Catholicism (1997) and by David Hilliard in his article “UnEnglish and

Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality” (1982). Hanson notes that “No other literary movement can claim so many converts to Rome” (11) and emphasises the close affinity between Decadence and homosexuality:

Many of the decadents, whether they acted upon it or not, were homosexual, and their sexual desire inevitably made a difference in their writing. In fact, decadence was virtually a synonym for sodomy—and I choose that word for all its religious reverberations. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. (Hanson 23-24)

Hanson illustrates what made Catholicism for Decadents so appealing:

The Church is itself a beautiful and erotic work of art, a thing jeweled over like the tortoise that expires under the weight of its own gem-encrusted carapace in A Rebours. It is like a great museum in its solemn respect for art and its extraordinary accumulation of dead and beautiful things. The sheer excess of the Church—its archaic splendor, the weight of its history, the elaborate embroidery of its robes, the labyrinthine mysteries of its symbolism, the elephantine exquisiteness by which it performs its daily miracles—has always made it an aesthetic and fetishistic object of wonder. The decadents had much to say about the gothic and Byzantine architecture of the great cathedrals, not to mention the sumptuousness of church vestments, chalices, altars, even the symbolic grandeur of the Mass itself. (6)

Furthermore, Hanson describes Bible as “the one ‘fatal book’ that never ceased to fascinate them” (6) and notes that “In the Crucifixion [Decadents] found the suffering of a great criminal and individualist. . . . In chastity and the priesthood they found a spiritualization of

20

desire, a rebellion against nature and the instincts, and a polymorphous redistribution of

pleasure in the body” (7). Writing about the Oxford Tractarians, a movement which gave rise

to Anglo-Catholicism, Hilliard notes that “central to the Oxford Movement was a ‘sense of

awe and mystery in religion,’5 a feeling for poetry and symbolism as vehicles of religious

truth” (184), which made Catholicism appealing for Decadents. He exemplifies the aesthetic

appeal using a passage from John Francis Bloxam’s story “The Priest and the Acolyte”

(1894): “The whole aesthetic tendency of my soul was intensely attracted by the wonderful

mysteries of Christianity . . . . My delight is in the aesthetic beauty of the services, the ecstasy

of devotion, the passionate fervour that comes with long fasting and meditation” (qtd. in

Hilliard 206). Although this passage serves to explain the link between Catholicism and

homosexuality, it is equally useful in illustrating the affinity between Catholicism and

Decadence. Apart from the aesthetic appeal that Decadent writers found in the ornate

Catholicism (as opposed to the more austere Protestantism), what they also shared with this

religion was a marginal position, as well as a certain desire to shock: “Throughout the fin de

siècle, Catholicism and Decadent literature were often condemned in much the same terms”

because of “a fierce and lively tradition of puritan anti-Catholicism” that had been thriving in

England (Hanson 8). Surprisingly, then, like Decadent writers, Catholic priests showed a

penchant for provoking the (Protestant) establishment: “From the early 1900s until the second

world war, the public face of the Anglo-Catholic movement was militant and

uncompromising. Many younger clergy took delight in shocking the respectable ‘Church of

Englandism’ of the ecclesiastical establishment” (Hilliard 200-201). Moreover, what was

provocative about Catholicism is very similar to what made Decadence so controversial:

“The sheer sensuality of its ritual, whether Anglo or Roman Catholic, exposed the Church to

accusations of paganism, even hedonism, rendering it the ideal stage for the subversive

5 The Mind of the Oxford Movement, ed. Owen Chadwick (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960), p. 28.

21 gestures of the Catholic dandy” (Hanson 6). One of the targets of this subversive activity was gender. Indeed, the aestheticism of the Anglo-Catholic ritual and the (to a certain extent) feminine beauty of its vestments “acquired a certain gender-bending extravagance and exoticism within the context of Victorian puritanism. It was straight and queer, respectable and subversive, at the same time” (25). The last sentence evokes paradox again, a figure that is at the core of both Decadence and Catholicism:

The decadents found that the Church was, and had always been, as sensual as it was spiritual, as pagan as it was Christian, as textual as it was transcendent. They began with the one great conflict, the great paradox at the heart of Christianity, the always already transgressed boundary between spirit and flesh, the Word of God and the words of humankind. (18)

This paradox, arising from the dichotomy between the spirit and the body, the sacred and the profane, plays an important role in the works analysed in the present thesis, particularly in

Forster and Neuburg, who show that spirituality and sensuality are by no means contradictory. This attempt to deconstruct “the presumption that aesthetic, erotic, and religious experiences are or ought to be mutually exclusive and categorically pure” is, according to Hanson, “one of the great accomplishments of decadent writing” (18). The seemingly opposing Decadence and Anglo-Catholicism found common ground in their aesthetic tastes and in their paradoxical and provocative nature, which may have partially stemmed from their marginal positions.

Another critic who sees paradox as a central characteristic of Decadence is Michael

Riffaterre, who argues that paradox is what distinguishes Decadence and Romanticism, which both address very similar themes. Riffaterre notes that paradox is “a figure always present in decadent texts but generally absent in Romantic style” (66). It arises from the disparity between a theme or an object, which Riffaterre calls “the given,” and its treatment in the text, “the derivation, the form of the incongruity” that emerges after “the paradoxical transformation” (66). He identifies two types of the paradoxical transformation: “It opposes

22 either the denotations of the given to those of the derivation (for example, representing nature in terms of artifice, or vice versa), or the connotations of the given or specific value judgements founded upon them (for example, a repulsive or horrible object described in terms of beauty or in a sublime style)” (66). Another difference between Romanticism and

Decadence, in his view, lies in the treatment of “natural symbols” (72). Here Riffaterre contrasts the “direct interpretation of natural symbols” typical for Romanticism and a kind of metainterpretation that appears in Decadence, effecting a “reinterpretation of that first interpretation” (72). Decadent text are then characterised by endorsing intertextuality, instead of a direct treatment: “This reinterpretation no longer takes natural spectacles as its immediate object, but instead takes these spectacles mediated by their presentation in a preexisting text, and either reinterprets themes in their potentiality, as they float in the collective imaginary, or the literary versions, already written, of these same themes” (72).

Finally, paradox is part of Charles Bernheimer’s defining characteristic of Decadence, which deserves to be quoted at length:

It is not the referential content of the term [Decadence] that conveys its meaning so much as the dynamics of paradox and ambivalence that it sets in motion. Its meaning is the injury of the kind of meaning Gilman is looking for. Fundamental to the opening of this semantic wound is precisely the contaminating crossover that dismays Gilman, the slippage from poetic metaphor to historical fact, from aesthetic dream to real life, from a book about decadence to a decadent existence. Think of Dorian Gray slipping up to the attic to look at the picture that embodies the disintegration of his soul: the aesthetic crosses over into the real and takes on its temporality, whereas the real, by the magic of Dorian’s wish not to age, takes on the timelessness of art. Significantly, once this semantic wound is cured, and Dorian is definitively differentiated from his portrait, not only does he die but the book itself ends. This, for decadence, is the consequence of dividing the aesthetic from the real. (5-6)

The paradox and ambivalence are, then, produced by a blurring of boundaries, “the contaminating crossover”—between literature and history, art and life, as well as writing about Decadence and living Decadence. Bernheimer sees this as a good thing, which is clear from his description of Decadence as a “stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming

23 traditional conceptual molds” (qtd. in Kline and Schor xv). This is a lesson he claims to have learnt from Nietzsche: “What Nietzsche teaches me is that decadence is a stimulant that causes a restless movement between perspectives, the goal being the attainment of a position outside decadence that would enable one to judge it as such” (Bernheimer 27).

Bernheimer’s characterisation of Decadents points to an important target of Decadent critique, namely boundaries and dichotomies. This further problematises the critical treatment of Decadent texts, as Constable et al. point out: “[D]ecadent textual strategies interfere with the boundaries and borders (national, sexual, definitional, historical to name but a few) that criticism normally relies upon to make its judgments, producing what we call a ‘perennial decay’ of those boundaries and borders” (Introduction 11). In fact, this is what the authors of

Perennial Decay consider the defining characteristic of Decadent writing: “We see this

‘perennial decay’ of boundaries—the insistence on at once mobilizing and undermining boundaries and differences—as a central quality and effect of decadent writing” (21, original emphasis). They view Decadence as a phenomenon that blurs “oppositional boundaries” such as “aesthetics and politics, rhetoric and ideology, art and life” (21), or “nature and artifice”

(22), and by so doing, Decadence “highlights the conventional nature of boundaries themselves” (21). Moreover, Constable et al. suggest that, instead of trying to characterise

Decadence in terms of topics and tropes that are often employed in Decadent works, such as

“morbidity, a cult of artificiality, exoticism, or sexual nonconformism” (Introduction 2), we should focus on what Decadent texts do, in other words, what textual strategies they employ and to what effect (11). By exploring “the uses of decadence, rather than its meaning” (12, original emphasis), the critics dealing with Decadence could avoid the traps to which many of the previous critics had fallen victim, and, consequently, the criticism of Decadence can

“move beyond assumptions (often unwittingly) inherited from Nordau” (12), deviance being the most prominent one.

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One of the important strategies used for questioning conventional dichotomies and calling a critical attention to them is inversion. And the dichotomy that is probably most frequently inverted in Decadent writing and addressed in theoretical writing about Decadence is that between nature and artifice. What is inverted is the aesthetic view of this binary, with artifice being seen as superior to Nature rather than the opposite view, which was prevalent in the preceding Romanticism. The main proponent of this view was Charles Baudelaire (1821-

1867), who challenged the view of Nature as a source of ethical as well as aesthetic values by pointing out that everything good is a product of artifice – virtue, for instance, is a product of civilisation, for people are naturally selfish and barbarous. In The Painter of Modern Life

(1863), Baudelaire writes:

I ask you to review and scrutinize whatever is natural—all the actions and desires of the purely natural man: you will find nothing but frightfulness. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, of which the human animal has learned the taste in his mother’s womb, is natural by origin. Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since at all times and in all places gods and prophets have been needed to teach it to animalized humanity. . . . Evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally; Good is always the product of some art. (32)

In this respect, Baudelaire went against the view of Nature being superior to civilisation, which was prevalent in Romanticism and which can be traced back to Rousseau, who argued that people are naturally good, but are corrupted by society. On the other hand, Baudelaire would probably agree with Freud. Consequently, “Modern society is decadent, [Baudelaire] insists, only to the extent that it has fallen away from ideals of artifice and not those associated with nature” (Constable et al. 14, Introduction, original emphasis). A salient example of the inversion of Nature and artifice in fiction is Huysmans’s À rebours, one of the founding texts of Decadence, in which Des Esseintes rebels against Nature, such as in his experiments with flowers: “This wonderful art [of creating perfect replicas of real flowers] had held him entranced for a long while, but now he was dreaming of another experiment. He wished to go one step beyond. Instead of artificial flowers imitating real flowers, natural

25 flowers should mimic the artificial ones” (135-136). Another example is his attempt to improve upon Nature by encrusting a tortoise with jewels (76). As Bernheimer notes, “A rebours is a book written against nature as the supposed source of aesthetic pleasure and ethical value” (72). In the words of Vivian from Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying”: “It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach nature her proper place” (921).

The inversion of Nature and artifice does not only affect the content of Decadent works; it also manifests itself in the realm of literary style, with aestheticism taking precedence over realism, poesis replacing mimesis: “Since Baudelaire, the aesthetics of modernity has been consistently an aesthetics of imagination, opposed to any kind of realism” (Calinescu 55).

Another prominent target of inversion was gender roles. The traditional image of masculinity was inverted by Aesthetes and Decadents adopting feminine characteristics, thereby challenging the essentialist view of gender: “Feminine traits, in being adopted by a man, are defamiliarized, placed in quotation marks, revealed as free-floating signifiers rather than natural, God-given, and immutable traits” (Felski 101). Consequently, gender could no longer be seen as a rigid dichotomy: “The feminized male deconstructs conventional oppositions between the modern, bourgeois man and the natural, domestic woman: he is male, yet does not represent masculine values of rationality, utility, and progress; feminine, yet profoundly unnatural” (101). An illustrative example of this strategy in Decadent writing is Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895), in which it is the male characters, the dandies Algernon and Jack, who display rather feminine behaviour in taking great care of their appearance (Act 2, p. 695), while the female characters are the ones who are really in charge (Act 1, p. 682).

Gender and sexuality were not prominent only in fiction. Indeed, there was a considerable upsurge of interest in these topics in nineteenth-century medical discourse. In

26 fact, it is here that the word “inversion” acquires a new meaning, referring to homosexuality, as in Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1896). It was in this period when homosexuality ceased to be viewed as an act and became a part of identity, or as Michel Foucault famously put it: “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”

(43). Felski notes that the fin de siècle is “a period usually seen as central to the formation of modern homosexual identities” (102). And Weir points out “the role played by Gautier and

Baudelaire in introducing homosexual themes into literature” (Weir 98). The term

“homosexual” was “coined by the Hungarian writer Karoly Benkert in 1869,” but it “entered the English vocabulary when [Richard von] Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopatia Sexualis was translated in the 1890s” (Showalter 171). However, there was a plethora of other terms for this condition: “Inverts, Hermaphrodites, Uranians, Urnings and Intersexes” (Kaye 62), many of them suggesting that homosexuals represent a blend of masculine and feminine character traits, and thus undermining gender boundaries (62). In fact, the idea of feminine and masculine traits as compatible halves was prominent in Neo-Platonism, specifically in the idea that some people “had been divided from birth from their ‘soul mates’” (West 147). The ideal was to find one’s missing half in a person of the opposite gender, the couple creating a perfect whole. Androgyny was then hailed as “a material realisation of a united soul” and became “a pan-European phenomenon,” capturing the attention of artists, as well as scientists

(147). In the works of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and Simeon Solomon (1840-1905), his follower, the figure of the androgyne was used as a “reference to male same-sex love”

(148). However, only “an aesthetic elite” (147) was aware of this connection. The public remained oblivious (until Solomon’s “public disgrace”), interpreting his paintings “as exemplary evocations of the Neo-Platonic idea of the perfect soul” (148). The view of homosexuality as a blend of masculine and feminine traits was advocated, among others, by

Edward Carpenter (1844-1929). In his book The Intermediate Sex (1908), he challenged the

27 view of gender as a binary opposition between men and women. Instead, he saw gender traits as a spectrum, with some individuals having more or less an equal share of both feminine and masculine traits (17). He traces the origins of the idea of “an Intermediate sex” back to Karl

Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), specifically to his notion of an “Urning,” meaning a person with “a feminine soul enclosed in a male body” and vice versa. Carpenter described this as “a doubleness of nature” (19), and the term “Urning” would correspond to the modern

“transgender.” It derives from “Uranos, heaven; his idea being that the Uranian love was of a higher order than the ordinary attachment” (20). For Ulrichs, then, same-sex love was superior to heterosexual love. Similarly, Carpenter saw the people of the intermediate sex as

“harbingers of the new age” (Rowbotham 283). Apart from Carpenter and Ulrichs, other proponents of this view of homosexuality, what Showalter calls “a model of border-crossing and liminality” (173), were Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) in Germany and John Addington

Symonds (1840-1893) in England (Showalter 173).6

An important function of the strategy of inversion is a challenge to the widely held beliefs and assumptions. This is one of the positive effects with which Decadence has been credited, especially by later critics. The essentialist view of gender and the preference of the natural to the artificial are just two examples of such believes. Denis Denisoff mentions others, such as the positive view of “birth and growth” and negative view of “decay and death” despite the fact that “they are all part of one indivisible, non-progressive package”

(32). Other common assumptions that were generally taken for granted but challenged by

Decadent writers were “the fundamental importance of the middle-class family model, industrial progress and a common moral basis to beauty and the meaning of life” (32). To put

6 Alongside the view of homosexuality as the intermediate sex, there was, however, a completely opposite view: homosexuality as the extreme form of masculinity or femininity, resulting from a polarisation of the gender differences. Homosexual men and women presented, then, “the most purely ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’ representatives of their sex. Their sexual preference for their own sex was seen as determined by their sexual disgust for the opposite sex rather than by their sharing of its desires. Lesbians were man-haters, gay men were misogynists; each repelled by the other” (Showalter 173). 28 it short, Decadence presented “a challenge to false realities” (39). Yet again, À rebours provides an illustrative example of this effect of Decadent writing on the reader: “Readers become less shocked with each new creation as their conventional assumptions become increasingly dislodged. More than celebrate depravity, the work threatens to dissolve readers’ long-held moral assumptions” (Denisoff 38). Exposing the reader to immorality in fiction dulled their moral sense and thus susceptibility to being shocked or outraged. Decadents achieved this by addressing topics, such as (particularly aberrant) sexuality, disease and decay, which had not been previously given so much space in literature.

This was especially subversive in late Victorian England where issues covered in realist literature were severely limited due to concerns about “the Young Reader,” meaning young unmarried women. George Moore (1852-1933) was concerned that “the cult of the young female reader threatened to emasculate literature” (Arata 175); Henry James (1843-

1916) spoke about “a damnable restriction” (qtd. in Arata 176), and Thomas Hardy (1840-

1928) described the problem as “the censorship of prudery” (qtd. in Arata 176). Not surprisingly, the excessiveness of censorship in Victorian England became a target of satire.

Nicholas Ruddick draws attention to the satirical novel The British Barbarians (1895), in which Grant Allen (1848-1899) “uses comparative anthropology to expose the ‘savage tribe’ notorious for being the most taboo-ridden: the Victorians” (204). The situation was further aggravated by Wilde’s trials: “The cultural chill following Wilde’s conviction in May 1895 made it more difficult than ever to refer openly to sexual matters in a realistic novel: hence the fantastic metaphor of vampirism” (201). The metaphor of vampirism managed to incorporate multiple fears and anxieties that afflicted Victorians, homosexuality being just one of many:

[V]ampirism is Stoker’s metaphor for the insidious destructiveness of all expressions of sexuality unsanctified by marriage. His novel dramatises moral panic: aliens (continental, oriental, Jewish) were secretly importing diseases (syphilis), practices (sexual perversions), and beliefs (feminism) into England that, infecting susceptible 29

women, caused them to lose their womanliness (their desire to be submissive wives and devoted mothers) but retain their beauty (their sexual power over men). The pillars of patriarchy were endangered and it was to these men that Dracula was chiefly addressed. (201)

Linda Dowling explains why the purity of literature was so fiercely protected in Victorian

England. Written language and literature were seen as both an expression and a guardian of a specific culture and civilisation. This idea can be traced back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(1772-1834), who was a proponent of the view of written language as lingua communis, which gradually lead to the view of literature as “a secularized scripture”: “For, spoken nowhere but intelligible everywhere, only the lingua communis of literature can lift men above their contingent, partial lives and bring them into communion with the higher life of ideas” (Dowling 28). Dowling writes about “the double function of literature as both expressive and formative of civilization” (36-37) and emphasises its paramount importance for Victorians:

For what we mean by high Victorian culture, with its distinctive ethos of earnestness and energy and supreme cultural confidence, is founded, as upon a rock, on Coleridge’s identification of literature and civilization, that interanimating synthesis of outward expression and inward essence or spirit by which civilization brought forth literature and literature articulated civilization. (30-31)

This view of literature as a scripture becomes particularly evident in the social practices typical of Victorian culture: “the cultivation of family reading-parties as a social institution, or the huge appetite for public readings of the sort given by Charles Dickens; the public perfection of conversational powers by men like Oscar Wilde . . . , or the attempts of Dr.

Bowdler to keep books, even Shakespeare or the Bible, from bringing a blush to the cheek of modesty” (40). This is in turn connected with the second idea inherited from Romanticism, namely, the organic view of language and culture, which were seen as being capable of growth and decay (29). Thus, the health of a particular language was believed, at the same time, to reflect and determine the nation’s health, which explains the excessive censorship:

30

“[E]ven behind the evident excesses of Bowdlerism lies the conviction that the state and fate of civilization itself, or at least of ‘our English civilisation,’ were inextricably bound up with the state of English language and literature; words, Coleridge had taught, ‘are moral acts’”

(40).

What severely eroded this ideal was the equation of language with living speech, advanced by the new philology (Dowling 65), and which can be traced back to William

Wordsworth (1770-1850), who advocated the primacy of speech over writing: “Thus did nineteenth-century linguistic science end by fully ratifying Wordsworth’s belief in rural speech as the real language of men, and by deeply undermining Coleridge’s ideal of literature and the literary dialect as a lingua communis” (83). What followed was legitimisation of

“substandard speech,” in other words of colloquial English and slang, in both linguistics and literature. Indeed, Oxford English Dictionary took no heed of the “literary value” of words and accepted slang expressions, and, in literature, colloquial English was no longer limited to the utterances of marginal characters and appeared in the speech of the protagonists (94). The resulting “linguistic relativism” came to be seen as a symptom of “cultural decay” (96). The subversion of the ideal and the linguistic anarchy that followed, coupled with the “threat to

Victorian values” (84), were conducive to the birth of literary Decadence: “Beardsley avails himself of the new linguistic freedom bestowed by linguistic science upon writers and indeed all users of language, the freedom to throw over, as the poet John Gray said, ‘the tyranny of the grammar book; to use the word that best conveys the impression desired, although such have not the sanction of custom’” (147).

The anxieties engendered by the linguistic science and the emergence of literary

Decadence are vividly conveyed by the trope of the “fatal book” (Dowling 164), the most influential being “The Golden Book,” i.e. Chapter 5 of Marius the Epicurean, in which Pater

“shows the profound literary and personal influence of Apuleius’s Golden Ass upon Marius

31 and Flavian” (164). Significantly, Wilde called Pater’s Studies in the History of the

Renaissance (1873) “his ‘golden book’, ‘the very flower of Decadence’” (qtd. in Thain 226), recognising its profound influence on his writing. He himself famously used the trope of the

“poisonous book” in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), where it heavily influences Dorian’s behaviour (Dowling 143). The book, which was “unmistakably modelled . . . upon elements in Huysmans’s A Rebours, Pater’s ‘Conclusion,’ Marius, and Gaston de Latour” (170), exemplifies the Decadent style:

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. (Wilde, The Picture 141)

Actually, The Picture of Dorian Gray is Decadent both in its style and in the themes it covers. John R. Reed points out this distinction, distinguishing between Decadence as a style vs. Decadence as a set of themes and thus between “decadent novels” and “novels of decadence.” A novel of decadence is then characterised by “rhetorical stress on perversity, androgyny, degeneration, and the rest” but “cast in a commonplace, conventional style”

(Weir 90-91). Similarly, Weir distinguishes between “thematics” and “poetics” as two aspects of decadence. In other words, he points out that “decadence is at once a subject and a way of approaching that subject” (120). The two aspects are connected, for “such themes as artificiality and decay affect the style and structure of the novel,” encouraging an emphasis on language, rather than the plot (120).

32

Due to the restrictions concerning the Young Reader, coupled with the emergence of new topics, which were inspired by groundbreaking scientific discoveries, such as Charles

Darwin’s theory of evolution, realism gave way to the fantastic genre as the dominant mode of expression in fin de siècle:

[I]n the aftermath of the Darwinian revolution, entirely new themes cried out for fictional treatment: for example, humanity’s place in biological nature, evolutionary time and the cosmos of the astronomers; traditional religion’s rearguard struggle against scientific materialism; the psychosexual consequences of our primitive inheritance. Mrs Grundy stood in the way of the development of a radical realism capable of exploring these new themes, some of which were ill-suited to realistic treatment anyway. Writers . . . adopted the indirect representational mode of the fantastic as a common stratagem to bypass censorship so as to arrive at new, unorthodox, or unpalatable truths. (Ruddick 205)

The hybrid half-human/half-animal figures of Pan and faun are particularly suitable for exploring the implications of Darwin’s theory, highlighting the precariousness of the categories such as human and animal.

On the whole, fin de siècle was a period of overcoming boundaries. So far, I have addressed the many ways in which Decadent writers transgressed various moral and social boundaries in defiance of Mrs Grundy. But what is also remarkable about fin-de-siècle art is the blurring of the various artistic boundaries: between high art and popular art: Decadent

“fiction mediates in fascinating ways between the high and the popular, as it brings elements of Decadence to the romantic comedy, the fashionable society novel, the fin-de-siècle gothic in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the detective story” (MacLeod 18). Furthermore,

“throughout the 1880s and 1890s, artists began to eradicate established boundaries between

‘high’ art and craft by turning away from easel painting in favour of furniture and design”

(West 135). The artists in this period also blurred the boundaries between the kinds of art, blending the elements of painting, literature and music. In fact, Baudelaire saw this as the central characteristic of Decadence, “its systematic attempt to break down the conventional boundaries between diverse arts” (Calinescu 166), which was connected with “his open

33 advocacy of ‘total’ or ‘synthetic’ art (166). Felski notes how, in this period, “literature seeks to approach the condition of painting” when it uses “formal structures that are spatial rather than temporal,” with “description tak[ing] precedence over narration” in prose (100). In poetry, a notable example is Algernon Swinburne’s (1837-1909) attempt to transform Dante

Gabriel Rosetti’s (1828-1882) painting Lady Lilith into a prose poem (West 134). Shearer

West points out that Swinburne’s melding of visual art and poetry was “one of Rosetti’s many legacies to the art of the fin de siècle” (134). Another example would be the writing of

Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), who “wrote an entire book of poetry based around art they had seen in the galleries of Europe” (Thain 227). Thain explains why this method was so appealing to fin de siècle artists: “it was often through art itself that fin de siècle poets sought to find this still moment in the midst of perpetual flux” (227). For Pater, it was the medium of music which was worth emulating: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it”7 (qtd. in West 139, original emphasis). A salient example of blending music and painting is the art of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), who gave musical titles to his paintings, such as “nocturnes” and “symphonies” and “was also known to include musical notation on picture frames to remind his viewers of the emotional experience of listening to music” (West 139).

What many commentators on Decadence agree upon is its challenge to the prevailing values, especially those of the middle class, and its transitional nature (described above).

Christine Ferguson, however, contests the prevailing view of Decadence as “an antagonist of mainstream values or even a liminal force,” and sees it rather as “the fulfillment and logical conclusion of one of the most fundamental of all Victorian values, scientific positivism”

7 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 135. 34

(466), arguing that what lies at the core of Decadent writing is the “epistemiphilic ethos”

(470), which means embracing knowledge and liberating it from pragmatism. In her view,

Decadence and science share common ground, “represent[ing] different incarnations of a desire for freedom from usefulness” (470). Progressive science “prizes knowledge for its own sake and seeks fulfillment in the destruction of old conventions and fears that have hidden fundamental truths” (470). This is connected with breaching the border between the sacred and the profane. A typical example is the view of the human body as sacred, which impeded progress in medicine: “By cutting into and opening the body, the experimental physiologist lets out the sense of the sacred clinging to it since the beginnings of human culture and shows it to be devoid of any divine difference from the other functioning systems, animal or human, that surround it” (469). And Decadence does the same in literature. That is why, as Ferguson writes, “the canonical features of the decadent text are . . . secondary symptoms of a fascination with the acquisition of forbidden knowledge and experience” (470). The themes of decay, morbidity, perversion, excess and artificiality, into which the idea of Decadence had crystallised, are then only the side effects of the epistemophilic endeavour. Ferguson follows the trend of positive reappraisal of Decadence in challenging the supposed failure of many Decadent protagonists. Instead, she argues, the self-destruction of the protagonists at the end of many Decadent texts is rather the result of “triumphant experimentalism” (471), of challenging the limits of knowledge:

When we recognize the decadent script as positivistic bildungsroman in which the subject develops by mastering approved forms of knowledge and then challenging the order of meaning in which subjectivity is articulated, it is no longer possible to view the suicides that frequently mark its conclusions as clumsy failures. Rather, such conclusions logically culminate an attempt to master, dissect, and transcend conventional modes of epistemology. (471-472)

The Decadent characters are thus those who fully explore their potential and show radical individualism (evoking Bourget’s description of the Decadent style, but manifested on the

35 plane of content, rather than style). In contrast, those characters who survive are “typically moderates who . . . lack the desire to push the limits of experience to their extreme or to obsessively assert individuality” (477). Ferguson, thus completely revises the typical reading of Decadent texts: “The moderates’ survival, finally, must be interpreted no longer as proof that decadence reinstates the norm and fails to disrupt social conventions but as a meditation on the necessary incompleteness of mundane existence” (477). This is where she sees the result of the Decadent experiment, which is characteristically paradoxical: “[D]ecadence exposes the deep contradictions and schisms inherent in all models of pure identity, whether that of the subversive artist, the libertine, or the conservative middle-class Victorian. The price of wholeness, decadence suggests, is disintegration: therefore, the only course is to accept partialness” (477, emphasis added). This idea is exemplified in Machen’s The Great

God Pan—in the act of seeing the god, and, thus, everything, which leads to insanity, the disintegration of one’s mind. Forster would, however, offer a more positive outcome of the encounter with Pan in his “The Story of a Panic.”

MacLeod finds a similar parallel between the principle of art for art’s sake and

“knowledge-for-knowledge’s sake” in the typically Decadent practice of dilettantism, both principles implying “a non-productive economy . . . that is at once anti-capitalist and anti- professional” (29). This idea can be traced back to Pater, one of the fathers of Aestheticism, who encouraged his readers “to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy” (qtd. in MacLeod 30). Unlike the writers associated with High Modernism, many Decadents despised the prevailing system of education, which, however, did not mean that they despised knowledge. As MacLeod explains, “While dilettantes are knowledgeable, they do not put this knowledge to productive use” (29, original emphasis). This attitude went directly against the bourgeois values of

Victorian Britain, “a culture that valued industry and utility” (30).

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Felski points out another connection between Decadence and science. Selecting an example from Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, she finds a paradoxical affinity between

Dorian’s desire to control his emotions and the typically bourgeois focus on rationalism: “‘I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.’ In this yearning for self-domination through self-discipline, aestheticism clearly reveals its underlying similarity with the rationalist and ascetic world-view against which is ostensibly defines itself” (Felski 108). Furthermore, Lord Henry Wotton adopts scientific methods to examine human psyche:

Thus Henry Wotton’s purely aesthetic appreciation of life is compared, in its disinterestedness and detachment, to the experimental method of science and the dissecting gaze of the surgeon: “He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others . . . What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.” Here aestheticism reveals its integral connections with naturalism, as exemplified in a shared reliance on an overarching trope of experimentation. (Felski 108)

Philosophically and politically, Decadence was marked by “a commitment to art for art’s sake, a rejection of bourgeois industrialism and utilitarianism, and a desire for intensity of experience” (MacLeod 2). Especially in popular imagination, Decadent lifestyle is characterised by hedonism and search for exquisite sensations in an attempt to overcome ennui, which also “became a quintessential fin-de-siècle theme” (76). Traditionally, Decadent works were defined by the themes and tropes they employed, such as artifice, morbidity, perversity, depravity, disease, decay, and degeneration. They were set in exotic locations or in the distant past, typically in the Ancient Rome. The language (of Decadent novels, as opposed to novels of Decadence) was highly heterogeneous, marked by the use of archaisms and neologisms, technical terms, argot and refined expressions. The style was elaborate and esoteric, obscure to the common reader. Description, typically including long lists of items, took precedence over narration. Reason gave way to imagination, and realism to fantasy.

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Nevertheless, these features seem to be too superficial to truly define Decadence. Beneath this surface lies a focus on detail at the expense of hierarchy and coherence, and a corresponding emphasis on individualism, as evidenced in the development of modern societies. This aspect of Decadence was criticised by Nisard and Nietzsche, and described more favourably by Bourget and Calinescu. Another core characteristic of Decadence is its paradoxical nature: Weir pointed out that it has been seen as both refined and degenerate, and that it was strongly opposed to tradition and prevailing conventions, but, at the same time, it was criticised for being too conventional and hence imitative. Thain identifies four kinds of

Decadent paradox. These concern time (the desire to capture flux); morality (art is moral as long as it is good art, not the other way round); aesthetics and economics (the inherent materialism of the Decadent lifestyle and the refusal to let art be affected by consumer desires, but unwittingly gratifying them by focusing on surface qualities, such as exquisite covers); and the affinity between Decadence and Catholicism. According to Riffaterre, paradox is what distinguishes Decadence and Romanticism. Although both movements cover similar themes, in Decadent texts, paradox arises, for instance, from the disparity between the denotative and connotative meanings of the motifs (depicting repulsive objects as beautiful), and from the indirect, intertextual treatment of symbols. Constable et al. and Bernheimer saw the essence of Decadence in the erasure of differences and blurring of boundaries between literature and history, art and life, aesthetics and politics, nature and artifice, as well as writing about Decadence and living Decadence. In this way, the arbitrary nature of these dichotomies was exposed. The paradox, coupled with boundary crossing contributes to the liminal nature of Decadence. Decadence provided a bridge between Aestheticism and

Naturalism (with Naturalism being seen as inartistic and Aestheticism having been appropriated by the middle class and losing its provocative potential, Decadence combined the good qualities of both the movements) and between Romanticism and Modernism (not

38 only temporally, but also in terms of style). Decadence came into existence as a derogatory term. The negative views of Decadence ranged from seeing it merely as an inferior, imitative movement to diagnosing it as a dangerous Other threatening the purity of literature and, consequently, of the nation, as Dowling demonstrated. The later critics showed Decadence in a much more positive light. While conceding to its imitative nature, Potolsky pointed out that imitation is at the core of all literary and cultural movements and that, being often “a repetition with a difference” (237), it is a source of original creation. Rather than seeing

Decadence as a poor imitation of Romanticism, the critics highlighted its innovative nature, so that Calinescu, Weir, and Felski saw Decadence as a kind of premodernism, representing a break between the classical and modern aesthetic. What made Decadent writing original was its antimimetic nature (imagination replacing realistic description) and the focus on the surface—language and style. Decadence has been seen as the “intellectual agent provocateur” (Bernheimer 8), provocative and controversial, questioning the prevailing

(especially bourgeois) values and lifestyle.

The present thesis partakes in the positive reevaluation of Decadence. Like the authors of Perennial Decay, in my analyses, I want to focus on what the texts do, rather than identifying what Decadent motifs and tropes the authors employ. In fact, although writing in the Decadent tradition (some more obviously than others), the authors examined here do not pursue what are commonly viewed as typically Decadent themes: artifice, morbidity, and decay. On the contrary, they all embrace Nature, with which Pan is inextricably linked, and their works often have a strongly life-affirming message, contradicting “the morality of negation, the rejection of life” (Weir 134), the common ground that Nietzsche found in

Decadence and Christianity. In this respect, they approach Romanticism, in which Decadence has its roots. What these works do share with the phenomenon of Decadence is, among other things, liminality, a characteristic embodied in the hybrid figure of the god Pan, which the

39 figurative thread that links them all.

3. The Betwixt-and-Between God Pan

Always peripheral to the potencies of others, Pan keeps slipping through the mesh: the comings and goings of this ‘monster’ reunite and restore continuity to a world otherwise

overly ordered by a rigid discontinuous conceptual grid.

Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, p. 175.

Pan is the god of the shepherds and herds. This is conveyed by his name, which is derived from paein, meaning “to pasture” (Graves 103). Accordingly, Pan’s duty is to guard flocks, herds and bee-hives in the pastoral Arcadia (102). However, the origins of his name were mistakenly traced to pᾶn, meaning “all”: “In our language pan means ‘All,’ and the god was later identified with the physical Universe—although his name, except for its sound, has nothing to do with this” (Kerényi, The Gods 174). Although wrong, this derivation has significantly enriched the literary history of the motif, as Merivale points out: “The history of the Pan motif would gain as much in logic as it would lose in variety and charm if this etymology had been recognized from the beginning” (9). This accident can be traced back to the Homeric Hymn to Pan, where “Pan’s career in literature begins” (1). The idea was that

“‘Pan’ is called ‘all’ because he charmed or delighted all the gods” (1). One of the consequences of this “philological accident” was that Pan was made “not merely the god of

Arcadia, but of the whole of nature” (vii).

In his personality, Pan in many ways reflects Arcadia, the region in which he originates and with which he is most closely connected: “Pan has long been thought of as the complete product of the Arcadian mountains and pastures, the divine projection of their shepherds and goatherds. Evidently everything follows from this: Pan’s music (the pastoral

40 syrinx); his activity as a huntsman; his erotic solitude (and the perversion it induces); the distance he keeps from urban life” (Borgeaud 3). However, the image of Arcadia presented in fiction was radically different from the hostile environment of the real Arcadia, the “barren and forbidding land” (6) that gave rise to it: “The Arcadia of the poets—that happy, free

Arcadia caressed by zephyrs, where the love songs of the goatherds waft—is a Roman invention, part and parcel of a meditation on the theme of the origins of Rome” (5). Where the two match is in the importance of shepherds and herding in the mountainous region.

Where they especially differ is in the nature of their inhabitants. The idyllic and peaceful fictional Arcadia stands in contrast with the real Arcadians, who “From the time of Homer . .

. had a firm reputation as warriors” (20). Music then played an important role in “appeas[ing] a latent violence” (20) encouraged by the hostile environment.

The places of worship associated with Pan were grottoes, which were symbolic of his closeness to Nature and distance from civilisation: they were “natural sanctuaries actually or symbolically at some distance from the urban centers” (Borgeaud 48). This indicates what

Pan’s domain was: “Pan, god of mountains, of snow, of forests, or, on the other hand, of the rocky coast and even of the sea, rules the frontier of human space. To speak of his landscape is, in effect, to define a limit. To Pan belongs all that the Greeks call the eschatiai, the

‘edges’” (60). Quoting Louis Robert, Borgeaud explains to what exactly the term eschatiai refers:

The eschatiai of a Greek city are the region outside culture, beyond the properties and farms that occupy the plains or little valleys; this is the “back country”; these are districts with poor communications, exploited with difficulty, sometimes shading into or including the mountain that always borders the territory of a Greek city; they adjoin the frontier or are based on it, upon the mountain and forest region that separates two civic territories and is left to the shepherds, the woodcutters, and the charcoal burners. (60)

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Pan’s domain, the border between the uncultivated and the urban areas, indicates his liminal position between Nature and civilisation,8 a position which is also symbolically expressed in the animal with which he is most closely associated: “[T]he animal whose form he takes is not quite wild. For the ancients, the goat was midway between the wild and the domesticated” (65). Pan’s liminal position between Nature and civilisation is particularly relevant for the works analysed in the present thesis, which often criticise the excessive focus on the civilised to the detriment of the natural in Victorian and Edwardian cultures. In these works, however, Pan is far from a marginal character, always playing a central role

Pan’s domain—the edges and margins—is also reflected in Greek literature and art in general. Especially in the Classical period of Ancient Greece, in the fifth and fourth centuries

BC, he is never a central character: “The poets allude to his powers of possession, panic, and seduction; they speak of his music and his dancing; they talk of his lustfulness and violent sexuality, and of the rocky landscape where he leads his flocks; for all that, even though they associate him with other divinities—the Mother of the Gods, Hecate, Artemis, Hermes and the nymphs, Apollo—Pan is in the scene at most as an extra” (55). One of the reasons Pan is just “an extra” is his “deferential or even dependent” position in relation to the other gods, which, however, makes him closer to the humankind:

Henchman of Zeus, servant of Dionysus, submissive if need be to Artemis, “dog” of Mother, somewhat clownish companion of the great Aphrodite, we have also met him acting the devotee of pastoral Hermes or Hecate of the crossroads. This inferior position brings him close to mankind, while making clear the necessary liminal function he serves. Through Pan, a group of divinities communicate with mankind just as they communicate with one another. (175)

The last sentence indicates Pan’s function of a mediator, supported by his liminal position between the gods and the humankind. His closeness to people is also conveyed symbolically

8 The following quotation demonstrates Pan’s importance as the god of the border between the rural and the urban: “The period when Pan’s cult was thriving, when his Attic sanctuaries were filling up with images that give evidence of a genuine folk piety . . . , corresponds strikingly with the period when, after the balance achieved in the first three-quarters of the fifth century, the relation between town and country was again becoming a critical problem for Athenian democratic institutions” (Borgeaud 161). 42 in art. Writing about the ex-votos in the form of reliefs, belonging to “a class of images particularly important in Athenian religiosity from the end of the fifth to the beginning of the third centuries B.C.” (158), representing Pan and the nymphs, Borgeaud notes:

It is an iconographic convention that the human beings in these “tableaux” should be much smaller in stature than the nymphs or than Hermes; they are, however, equal in size to Pan. This detail is worth our notice. Of human size although he is a god, the goatherd acts as a mediator. His music pervades the scene; it supports, sustains, the ritual communication between the dedicant and Hermes and the nymphs. (159)

Pan’s closeness to the humankind is further supported by his place of residence; he was not granted a place on Olympus and lives instead on earth, in Arcadia, creating an important link between people and gods, the human and the divine:

In the Homeric Hymn Pan crosses the gap between earth and Olympus; he thus signifies a union, as well as an opposition, between mortal terror and divine delight. The escape of his nurse and the charm that spreads about Olympus have but one cause: the appearance of the monster with his sweet smile. This monster is a musician. The syrinx, his most frequent attribute, instills inebriation everywhere; in the matrix of its harmonics, earth and sea and starry heaven melt together. It thus joins man with god and keeps the universe moving to its rhythm. (120)

Pan did not just mediate between people and gods, but also between the gods themselves.

Borgeaud points out his mediating function in the conflict involving Hades, Persephone, and

Demeter, where Pan “helps reestablish the broken lines of communication between Demeter and the other gods” (144).

Pan’s liminal position between Nature and civilisation is most obviously expressed by his half-human/half-animal appearance: he is “uncertainly situated exactly between man and beast, as if his function were, in certain circumstances, to open a passage we, with our claims to be human, reject—in Greece as elsewhere—even while we cannot deny that it exists”

(Borgeaud 125). This became especially relevant in Victorian and Edwardian England, when too much emphasis was placed on the civilised and the refined, denying the connection between humankind and animals. This position became particularly precarious after Charles

Darwin published his theory of evolution. Many of the authors who employed the Pan motif

43 in their works further reminded their readers of their proximity to animals, making the denial more and more difficult.

Pan’s liminal status can be traced back to his father Hermes. Although there are several versions of Pan’s ancestry, Graves claiming that Pan was “Zeus’s foster-brother, and therefore far older than Hermes” (102), the version describing him as the son of Hermes and

Penelope is the most common9: “It was only after the most painstaking research that the numerous scholars who were asked about the origin of the Great Pan whose death had been mourned under Tiberius came round to the most common opinion (that of Herodotus): Pan was the child of Hermes and Penelope. This was the version officially accepted in Athens; without doubt, it went back to Arcadian tradition.” (Borgeaud 54). Hermes is the trickster of

Western mythology, and as such a psychopomp and a messenger of the gods, his place being at the crossroads. Liminality is a central aspect of the trickster, who has been described as

“the enemy of boundaries” (Kerényi, “The Trickster” 185) and “a boundary-crosser” (Hyde

7). Indeed, according to Lewis Hyde, tricksters are “the lords of in-between” (6). Like his father, Pan has several important trickster characteristics, liminality being just one of them. A salient example of his use of trickery is the story of how he seduced Selene, the moon, by disguising “his hairy black goatishness with well-washed white fleeces. Not realising who he was, Selene consented to ride on his back, and let him do as he pleased with her” (Graves

103). In this story, Pan also appears as a shape-shifter, which is another aspect typical for the trickster.

Selene was not the only object of his sexual desire. After all, like his father Hermes,

Pan is a phallic god. Accordingly, he is characterised by rampant sexuality. And the nature of his sexual encounters match his personality:

A solitary vagabond, a wanderer through snowy wastes, in frontier territories off the

9 Karl Kerényi solves this problem by arguing that there was not one Pan, but several: “[E]ach generation of gods must have had its own Pan” (The Gods, 174). 44

beaten track (mountains, gullies, rocks), Pan seems gripped by a constant and eccentric restlessness. The erotic life of this creature follows the pattern of his wanderings, and consists of a sequence of passing encounters, furtive and violent couplings, often unnatural and altogether extramarital. (Borgeaud 83)

Pan’s constant wandering without ever settling anywhere and the character of his sexual encounters indicate his position outside society and its institutions. Correspondingly, his sexual behaviour is not governed or sanctioned by these institutions: “Pan’s sexuality seizes whatever is available, or becomes perverted. It is by definition nonfamilial and wild. The poets like to call Pan duserös (‘unlucky in love’). . . . The shepherds practice two expedients that they share with Pan, who may even have invented them: onanism and bestiality” (77).

His perverted sexual behaviour reflects his position at the edges of civilisation: “Just as Pan’s landscape is detached from the city and its agricultural land, so his erotic behaviour remains detached from the institution that gives passion its acculturated form” (83). Most of the time,

Pan is not successful in his sexual pursuits. A salient example is the story of his pursuing

Echo, which emphasises “the futility of panic desire, which pursues an unobtainable object”

(79). Borgeaud then describes Pan’s sexuality as “an exaggerated and distorted sexuality, which never achieves its object” (155). As a god, Pan “presides over sexual union” (75). And the unusual character of his worship corresponds to the extraordinary kind of love he represents: “To sacrifice to Pan means to make love; although sanctuaries generally admit only chaste behavior, his grotto makes a place for furtive unions and welcomes lovers.

Transgression thus acquires a ritual status” (156). There is one particular kind of transgression connected with Pan that is relevant for the present thesis. Borgeaud points out that “Unquestionably [Pan] is attracted to young men” (73), and so pederasty was “one way of sacrificing to Pan” (85). What is more, “the god, who in myth is himself gripped by desire, also has the power to affect whom he will with the pangs he knows so well himself” (85).

This may be one of the reasons why Reid chose Pan for his Garden God. Pan thus became an appropriate symbol for homosexuality in the literature of Victorian and Edwardian England.

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While, in the myth, he was associated with illegitimate and unnatural love, he became a suitable patron of the love that dare not speak its name.

Although Pan’s sexual pursuits are often unsuccessful, they sometimes have a positive outcome in the end. His sexual pursuit of the nymph Syrinx lead to the invention of the musical instrument bearing her name: “[T]he nymph Syrinx, pursued by Pan, escapes by being swallowed by Earth; some reeds come up where she disappears; Pan in his fury tears them up and breaks them. Then as he understands what has happened, his breath (his sighs) activate the pipes so formed, and he invents the syrinx” (Borgeaud 80). Afterwards, Pan uses the syrinx to produce his hauntingly beautiful music. Interestingly, his music stands in contrast with his animal nature:

Dance and music are among Pan’s most fundamental traits—and among the traits most often ascribed to him in literature and in the plastic arts. The god is at one and the same time animalistic, a ‘leaper’10 who is deformed and unhappy in love, and also a completely musical creature who, when he likes, is irresistibly charming. These two aspects do not merely coexist; they coincide. (86)

Pan can then be both ugly and charming. Accordingly, his appearance elicits different reactions in different individuals. This is evident in the story of Pan’s birth. The little Pan’s appearance provokes diametrically opposed reactions in people, represented by his mother

Penelope, who runs away in terror because she considers him a monster, and in the gods, who are delighted by his laughter:

Hermes’ son is rejected by his mortal mother, but no mischief or evil intention of his own brings on his abandonment; he is cast out because he frightens people, because he is disgusting. The infant Pan, a shaggy, bearded baby with horns, who laughs, is repellent. But we must go on to stress that he is repellent only to humans: the gods, and especially Dionysus, for their part find him charming. Pan is evidently the symbolic embodiment of the repressed. But everything man flees and rejects in order to distinguish himself from the animals makes him like to the gods. The myth seems to say: if we refuse the beast, we shall never know how to resemble a god. A double

10 “Pan’s dance, his animal leapings-about, are abundantly represented on Attic and Italian pottery of the classical era. It is sharply contrasted with the measured round dance of the nymphs as we see it on Attic reliefs and elsewhere” (Borgeaud 151).

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and liminal figure, always transformed already, Pan meets man only to leave him at the precise spot where animality corresponds to the divine.” (Borgeaud 54-55).

This is especially relevant for the analysis of Forster and Neuburg, who had both been influenced by Edward Carpenter. What they criticised was the repression of the body for the sake of the soul. Instead, they saw the physical, including sexuality, and the spiritual as inherently connected. This idea was explained by Charles Sixsmith in a lecture on Carpenter:

“The physical, the animal is as sacred and important as any other part of man, it is the base of all and a sane and healthy spirituality and mentality can only flow out of a sane healthy animality” (qtd. in Rowbotham 220). Significantly, Carpenter saw Paganism “as a way of acknowledging body and spirit” (Rowbotham 218). What is more, particularly in Neuburg,

Pan is presented as a harbinger of a new age. He is attributed with revitalisation and is invoked in an era which is presented by Neuburg as a period of sterility, in dire need of renewal. This again corresponds to the myth:

The goat-god’s laughter, part and parcel of his sexual energy, openly invites mankind to renewed vital activity: care of infants, fertility of the fields, and fecundity of the flocks. This laughter belongs both to the goat-god and to those who celebrate his festival; it works to create or recreate communication. . . . The cult of Pan has something to do with a return to laughter. (139)

Borgeaud connects this function with Pan’s trickster father: “He is the son of Hermes, and in his own way also a god of passages; his laughter, his erotic passion, his motions as of a young animal inaugurate a new order of things” (151).

Pan can then be charming (especially for the gods) and frightening (particularly for people). He appears at his most frightening when he causes panic, which represents the antithesis of his beautiful music:

[A] panic is always an irrational terror involving noise and confused disturbance that unexpectedly overtakes a military encampment, usually at night. Its suddenness, its immediacy, is stressed . . . Furthermore, there is a stress on the lack of any visible cause, a lack that leads to fantasy; the victims of panic are in the grip of the imagination, which is to say, of their worst fears. (Borgeaud 89)

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Consequently, panic may make the repressed come to the surface. Its “essential aspect” is

“the loss of the sense of belonging” (90). It “typically attacks a model of order [such as an army] and disrupts it” (101). Being “a collective disorder,” affecting groups, not just individuals, it causes “a breakdown in communication” (102). Pan can thus both facilitate communication (in his role of a mediator) and thwart it. For the present thesis, the most pertinent effect of panic is that it “diminishes the difference between man and animal, almost to the vanishing point” (125). Forster vividly depicted this effect in “The Story of a Panic.”

In many of the works analysed in the present thesis, Pan appears in the summer and at noon. This is no coincidence, as noon is “the hour of Pan” (Borgeaud 59):

Noon is typically silent and motionless; it is the still point of the day. Pan is the god of noise and movement; if we wake him at this hour when he should be asleep, we are in effect inviting him to fill up this silence and stillness. Pan is a god who should not be approached in silence. Consequently, noon is the moment of the day when there is the greatest danger that he may invade us, dispossess us. In his anger, Pan would be capable of transforming the shepherd, protector of the flock, into his worst enemy, the wolf. (111)

Nevertheless, in the works analysed here, Pan’s anger remains unleashed. Instead, the stillness of the summer day at noon inducing dreaminess is used to create a congenial environment for the appearance of the goat-foot god.

Having briefly examined Pan from the anthropological point of view, I will now turn my attention to his role in literature. Pan in literature has many faces. Some writers saw him as a benevolent and kind helper, as, for instance, Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) in his work

The Wind in the Willows (1908), which became a classic of children’s literature. This benevolent Pan can be traced back to Apuleius, who “in The Golden Ass (ca. A.D. 155), creates a Pan characterized as old, kindly, and helpful” (Merivale 3). Others chose to emphasise Pan’s terrifying aspect, focusing on the beast half of his body. Accordingly, he was compared (by different authors) to both Christ and Devil. His comparison to Christ reaches back to Plutarch and is based on “Pan’s fundamental character as a shepherd” (19).

48

However, in nineteenth-century literature, starting with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The

Dead Pan” (1844), “the conflict in which Christ and Pan become polar opposites” (Merivale

73) becomes a prominent motif. Pan’s identification with the Devil has several reasons: First, speaking about Milton’s “Pan-demon,” Merivale explains that all Pagan gods were equated with devils (29). Of course, due to his half-goat nature and rampant sexuality, Pan is particularly suitable for this characterisation; Milton, then, “establishes Pan’s role as an emblem of fecundity and bestial sexuality” (34). In the period “between 1890 and 1930, but especially from 1904 to 1912,” there was “an upsurge of the terrifying Pan in fiction” (154).

The progenitor of this sinister Pan in Victorian fiction was Algernon Charles Swinburne

(1837-1909) (154).

For others still, especially the Romantics and Transcendentalists, Pan was not really a figure, but rather an abstract principle, a spirit of Nature. The origin of this idea can be traced back to the Orphic Hymn to Pan, which “made the ‘allness’ of Pan essential and the pastoral characteristic peripheral,” his domain being extended “to include heavens, the sea, the earth, and fire ― universal Nature,” with Pan “becoming Supreme Governor or ‘soul’ of the

World” (Merivale 9). Pan’s double nature made him a fitting symbol of the whole world, for

“the goat half of Pan represents the earth and his human half the heavens” (Merivale 102). In

Romanticism, however, Pan was often “both universal and pastoral” (49). Indeed, Merivale points out that for the “major Romantics, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley . . . Pan was

Orphic, or pastoral, or most commonly some blend of the two” (74). Merivale also discusses the difference between the treatment of Pan in Romanticism and in Victorian fiction. While in Romantic writing, Pan is a marginal figure, Victorian poets made him into a central motif

(81). And, whereas in Romanticism Pan was “universal” and “invisible,” “an all-infusing spirit of the landscape” (76), Victorian poets “endowed him with elements of individuality and of personality, whether human, bestial, or divine, and stressed the paradox that he was

49 both a goat and a god” (76). What is also noteworthy is how the writers, taking the myth as an inspiration, further developed the motif of Pan and used it to address contemporary concerns. In this respect, Robert Browning (1812-1889) must be mentioned, whose

most important innovation was to see Pan, not as a goat-god outside ourselves, but as the goat-god within ourselves, not exclusively sexual, but largely so, because sexuality is, for poetic purposes, the most vivid aspect of our animal natures. This valuable Verinnerlichung of the motif was to be developed not primarily in poetry but in prose fiction; D. H. Lawrence, forty-five years later, would give the most thorough explication of the goat-god within us. (91)

Importantly, in some of the works analysed in the present thesis (such as Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” or Neuburg’s “The Triumph of Pan”), Pan appears as a character who significantly influences the behaviour of other characters, infusing them with some of his animalistic qualities and making them more alive. Thus, Pan’s presence is two-fold: he appears as a character and, subsequently, in the form of the Verinnerlichung which Merivale mentions, with the characters absorbing his characteristics and displaying a more animalistic behaviour.

There are two more important aspects of the treatment of Pan in Victorian literature that are pertinent for the present thesis. The first concerns Lord Alfred Douglas’s (1870-

1945) poem “Hymn to Physical Beauty” (1896), which was significant for associating Pan with homosexuality for the first time “since the time of the Greek Anthology (Merivale 260, note):

Dull fools decree the sweet unfruitful love In Hellas counted more than half divine, Less than half human now . . . Wither, red rose, the world is sad and brown, For Pan is dead. (qtd. in Merivale 112)

Here, Pan is a symbol of homoerotic attachment, condemned as sin in Victorian society, but in Ancient Greece, it was considered as a more noble form of love than heterosexual attachment (by Plato, among others). The second aspect is Pan’s role in the opposition of the

50 ascetic Christianity and life-affirming Paganism. In Georges Clemenceau’s (1841-1929) study of the Pan motif Le Grand Pan (1896), “Pan, in the first place, stands for classical culture, civilization, and values, as expressed in an art that affirmed the joy of life on life’s own terms. The Church killed the things Pan stood for . . . , but Christ’s victory was only temporary. The voices that claimed Pan’s death were in error; at the Renaissance artists began to express the beauty of life and nature once more” (Merivale 113-114). This opposition is particularly relevant in the analysis of Neuburg’s and Forster’s works. The double-natured god was as an especially suitable motif for addressing the dichotomies that were troubling Victorian society. The ebb and flow of his power and popularity (or rather his being dead or alive) was seen as reflecting the power of the values for which he stood: “[T]he

Victorians made good literary and symbolic use of the double metaphor ‘Pan is dead’ and its

Arcadiac offspring, ‘Pan is still alive,’ to express the dualities of which they were so painfully aware: Paganism or Christian faith; hedonism or morality; the truth of Romance or the truth of science; civilization or the retreat to Arcady” (116-117).

Pan is, thus, both benevolent and terrifying, animal and human, bestial and divine, melancholy and joyous. In his character, all of these contradictory features are subsumed, making him a deeply ambiguous figure, an embodiment of paradox, and a suitable motif for the equally paradoxical and liminal phenomenon of Decadence. Pan’s hybrid nature was particularly unsettling for the Victorian audience and to unsettle and provoke was what many

Decadent writers were striving for.

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4. The Awful God Pan: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets

elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. . . . All the

wonders lie within a stone’s throw of King’s Cross Station.

Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far, p. 56.

Arthur Machen: The Decadent Apostle of Wonder11

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) became famous after he published his influential novella

The Great God Pan (1894). The book caused an outrage when it first appeared in the

Keynotes Series published by John Lane’s Bodley Head Press, becoming “one of the nineties’ most common targets for antidecadence criticism” (Ferguson 474) and, at the same time, “one of the series’ most successful titles” (MacLeod 120), with the scandal fuelling demand. Machen summarised the reaction of the public in the following way: “There was a storm—in a doll’s teacup” (96). This suggests that he considered the reaction of the prurient

Victorian public to be rather exaggerated; however, he was not displeased. Since Machen was one of the authors associated with Decadence, one can only assume that such a reaction was positively received by the author. After all, Decadence is often associated with a desire to shock and provoke, in a relentless fight against Mrs. Grundy. And, indeed, Machen was

“fond of citing the horrified reactions of readers and reviewers alike” (Joshi 21). He quotes several negative reviews in Things Near and Far (1923), the second volume of his autobiography (96-99), and he even published a collection of negative reviews of his work, ironically called Precious Balms (1924).

Being one of the “modern masters” of supernatural horror (Lovecraft 81), Machen

11 Arthur Machen: Apostle of Wonder (1985) is the title of Machen’s biography by Mark Valentine. 52 created a sinister Pan, who―in the eyes of the characters of the story, if not necessarily in those of the author himself―represented the ultimate evil. Accordingly, Patricia Merivale in her study Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (1969) included Machen within the chapter entitled “The Sinister Pan in Prose Fiction.” However, when one examines Machen’s original intentions along with the final execution of the story, Pan becomes more awful in the original sense of word: inspiring feelings of awe and wonder, rather than horror. Indeed, at the beginning of Machen’s writing The Great God Pan stands a desire to express the sublime beauty of natural scenery in his native Gwent. What lies at the end, however, is a horror story, a cautionary tale of what might happen when the laws of Nature are tampered with.

Instead of expressing the transcendent beauty of Nature, Pan came to represent the ultimate evil.

At the heart of this discrepancy is Machen’s constant struggle with giving his ideas shape in writing, which he describes in Far Off Things (1922), the first volume of his autobiography: “[O]ne of the first agonies of the learner in letters is the discovery of the horrid gulf that yawns between the conception and the execution. . . . that gulf between the idea as it glows warm and radiant in the author’s heart, and its cold and faulty realisation in words is an early nightmare, and a late one, too” (100-101). Machen further describes how, as a budding author, he had some hope of overcoming this, but he admits defeat in the end: “But now, with riper understanding, [the struggling author] perceives, as he did not perceive in the days of his youth, the depth of the gulf between the idea and the word, between the emotion that thrilled him to his very heart and soul, and the sorry page of print into which that emotion stands translated. He dreamed in fire; he has worked in clay” (101). Machen portrayed this struggle in his semi-autobiographical novel (and his masterpiece) The Hill of

Dreams (1907), where Lucian, Machen’s alter ego, experiences the same difficulty with translating his ideas into words as a writer. In fact, when describing his feelings about his

53 rejected manuscript, Lucian uses the same metaphors as Machen does in Far Off Things:

He knew how weak it all was compared with his own conceptions; he had seen an enchanted city, awful, glorious, with flame smitten about its battlements, like the cities of the Sangraal, and he had moulded his copy in such poor clay as came to his hand; yet, in spite of the gulf that yawned between the idea and the work, he knew as he read that the thing accomplished was very far from a failure. (102)

Despite his alter ego’s acknowledgement that the work was “very far from a failure,” Machen was a very self-conscious writer, highly critical of his work.

As The Great God Pan was written at the beginning of Machen’s literary career, the gulf between the idea and the execution must have been especially wide. In Far Off Things, he describes his original aim behind writing the story as “an endeavour to pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that I had received” upon seeing “the valley of Usk . . . on one of those strange days of summer when the sky is at once grey and luminous

. . . and there is no breath of wind, and every leaf is still” (19-20). In this respect, Machen’s strategy approaches that of Symbolist writers, the aim of the story being to serve as a symbol for evoking the same feelings in the reader as Machen himself experienced while contemplating the valley. However, he regarded the result as a failure: “I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay” (123). This implies that the story was supposed to evoke sublime feelings of awe and wonder, but instead evoked horror due to Machen’s inability to successfully translate his ideas into words.

An important factor informing Machen’s works is his religious and philosophical views, which were shaped by his family. His father was a vicar, having come from a long line of clergymen. Machen himself was Anglo-Catholic and “firmly convinced that the orthodox belief was the right, the only belief”12 (Gawsworth 229). His philosophy is quite succinctly described by Joshi:

12 The fervour of Machen’s belief and his religious conservatism is evident from his description of the Protestant Reformation as “the most hideous blasphemy, the greatest woe, the most monstrous horror that has fallen upon the hapless race of mortals since the foundation of the world” (qtd. in Gawsworth 215). 54

The sole goal of Machen’s philosophy is to restore the sense of wonder and mystery into our perception of the world; everything that tended to foster such goal— mysticism, occultism, Catholicism, symbolism—was to be encouraged, and everything that hindered it—Protestantism (criticized as appealing too much to the rational intellect), science, rationalism, realism—was to be furiously combated. (16)

While for Machen everything that mattered in the world was indescribable, “ineffable”

(Machen, Far Off Things 155), at the same time to express the ineffable was his ultimate literary ambition. And if it could not be done directly, Machen reached for symbolism to achieve his aim. Quoting Machen, Joshi describes what exactly the author meant by a symbol: “‘We live in a world of symbols; of sensible perishable things which both veil and reveal spiritual and living and eternal realities.’ The only true ‘realism,’ therefore, is symbolism, because the symbol is the reality, or at least as close to the ineffable reality as we can get” (16, original emphasis). The veil is one of Machen’s most important metaphors. He uses it repeatedly to express his Neoplatonic view of the universe, in which the perishable material world is just a reflection, a shadow, of the ineffable reality: “I define realism as the depicting of eternal, inner realities—the ‘things that really are’ of Plato—as opposed to the description of transitory, external surfaces” (Machen, Far Off Things 42).

Not surprisingly perhaps, Machen despised materialism, which is reflected in one of the key notions of his work―ecstasy—meaning the sense of “a withdrawal from the common life” (Machen, “The White People” 111). In Machen’s view, this is the key ingredient of good writing: “[A]ll fine literature is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy”

(Machen, Things Near and Far 57). Joshi explained this notion further as “a penetration through the ordinariness of daily existence to the spiritual realities beyond” (27). Machen’s work in which this is most clearly conveyed is the short novel “A Fragment of Life” (1906), which, being centred on the notion of ecstasy, “captures the essence of Machen’s world view” (Joshi 27). “A Fragment of Life” tells the story of Edward and Mary Darnell, a young respectable (and repressed) married couple, who receive a gift of one hundred pounds from

55

Mary’s aunt and spend most of their time trying to decide how to spend the money most prudently. Indeed, the first part of the story consists of extensive discussions of the prices, quality and usefulness of the things they are considering purchasing. However, their mundane existence is gradually transformed by Edward’s awakening spirituality as he starts exploring his Welsh heritage. The following passage from Things Near and Far succinctly expresses

“what is the real heart of the story” (Joshi 27) and Machen’s life philosophy: “And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. . . . All the wonders lie within a stone’s throw of King’s Cross Station” (Machen, Things Near and Far

56). Ecstasy is, then, not about the place where one is, but rather about one’s perspective and state of mind. It can be achieved in rural Wales, as well as in urban London, although the former is much more conducive to it. The notion of ecstasy is also at the core of The Great

God Pan, as seeing the god represents penetrating the world of shadows and breaking into the eternal world of Forms. Dr. Raymond, the scientist who conducts the fatal experiment, says that the material world―the mountains, hills, fields and stars―“all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is . .

. beyond a veil. . . . and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan” (Machen, “The Great God” 10, ellipses added). Dr. Raymond is a typically

Gothic Frankenstein-like scientist, who tries to access forbidden knowledge regardless of the consequences. Indeed, when Clarke, a friend of Raymond’s who is about to witness the experiment, expresses his concern about Mary’s safety, the misogynistic Raymond replies: “I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit” (12). Raymond is far from a positive character, reflecting perhaps Machen’s profoundly negative view of science. What is more, the outcome of the story suggests that Machen disapproved of the attempt to access the world of Forms in

56 this way—by dint of the scientific method.

Despite being an orthodox Catholic, Machen was an “iconoclast” and “delighted in shocking the élite” (MacLeod 121). Like other Decadents, he despised materialism and

“loathed business in all its aspects” (Gawsworth 73), particularly industrialism as it led to ruining the countryside he loved so much. Embracing the doctrine of art for art’s sake, he detested “the notion that literature should be ‘practical’ or utilitarian” (191). In his works, he often criticises Victorian hypocrisy (particularly in The Hill of Dreams).13 Moreover, being frustrated with having to rewrite his works to satisfy Mrs. Grundy, in his preface to Fantastic

Tales, he compares Victorians to a generation “not of vipers, but of crocodiles, the which beast is pronounced by ancient authors to be exceeding hypocritical, and ferocious also”

(Machen qtd. in Gawsworth 95). His characters are “dilettantes” who, “in privileging the esoteric, . . . valorize the anti-bourgeois and anti-professional values of the Decadents who aimed to escape their [middle]class origins” (MacLeod 122). Lucian, the protagonist of The

Hill of Dreams, is a typical example of a life-negating Decadent hero in pursuit of the esoteric, “falling in love more and more with useless reading and unlikely knowledge”

(Machen, “The Hill” 79). Lucian’s opinions on language and literature are also consistent with the Decadent sensibility:

The common notion that language and linked words are important only as a means of expression he found a little ridiculous . . . Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious to the ear, by its capacity, when exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict thought than the impressions excited by music itself. Here lay hidden

13 A salient example of Machen’s satiric critique of Victorian hypocrisy is the following passage from The Hill of Dreams: “ . . . That wretched young man passed me this afternoon; he was quite intoxicated.” “How very sad,” said Mr. Dixon. “A little port, my dear?” “Thank you, Merivale, I will have another glass of sherry. Dr. Burrows is always scolding me and saying I must take something to keep up my energy, and this sherry is so weak.” The Dixons were not teetotallers. They regretted it deeply, and blamed the doctor, who “insisted on some stimulant.” However, there was some consolation in trying to convert the parish to total abstinence, or, as they curiously called it, temperance. (135)

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the secret of the sensuous art of literature, it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words. In a way, therefore, literature was independent of thought. (155)

And Lucian’s following statement about literature seems to be quintessentially Decadent:

“‘Literature,’ he re-enunciated in his mind, ‘is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words’” (156). Moreover, he finds sensations more important than matters of morality; in other words aesthetics takes precedence over ethics: “Lucian saw a coloured and complex life displayed before him, and he sat enraptured at the spectacle, not concerned to know whether actions were good or bad, but content if they were curious”

(157). Finally, he is capable of experiencing synaesthesia, which was quite a common motif in Decadent works: “‘Let us seek for more exquisite things,’ said Lucian to himself. He could almost imagine the magic transmutation of the senses accomplished, the strong sunlight was an odour in his nostrils” (156, emphasis added). Machen’s affiliation with Decadence also shows in his literary tastes: one of the books he loved was Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) (Machen, Far Off Things 41); he was “impressed by

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Gawsworth 100) and, most importantly, he counts

Swinburne among his most significant literary influences. In Far Off Things, Machen describes the effect Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise (1871) had on him as “cataclysmic”14

(92):

First there was the literary manner of the book, which to me was wholly strange and new and wonderful, and then there was the tremendous boldness of it all, the denial of everything that I had been brought up to believe most sure and sacred; the book was positively strewn with the fragments of shattered altars and the torn limbs of kings and priests. (92)

A statement like this might seem to be hard to reconcile with Machen’s orthodox Anglo-

Catholicism. However, as was pointed out earlier, this was far from unusual among Decadent

14 In Machen’s usage, the word “cataclysmic” has positive connotations. Talking about a doctrine of a friend of his, he explains that “we are all much bettered by an occasional earthquake, moral, mental or spiritual. He says that volcanoes which suddenly burst out from under our feet are the finest tonics in the world, that violent thunderstorms, cloud-bursts, and tornadoes clear our mental skies” (Far Off Things 92). 58 writers, many of whom converted to Catholicism. Machen’s case was then only different in the fact that he had already been Anglo-Catholic before he started writing Decadent works.

Many of the facts I have mentioned so far justify why Machen is considered a Decadent writer. Nevertheless, he himself was reluctant (to say the least) to accept the label:

Machen continued to disavow his association with Decadence, saying that he had ‘no part at all’ in the movement. He maintained this stance even as his Decadent 1890s works were gaining favour through the 1920s. The ‘products’ of the 1890s, he told an admirer in 1925, have ‘very little’ value: ‘I would rather read … one chapter of Mr Micawber’, he continued, ‘than all the literature produced between 1890 and 1895’.15” (MacLeod 164)

The Great God Pan as a Source of Horror

Having described Machen’s original idea behind The Great God Pan, I will now analyse the result in terms of its Decadent features and the reactions it triggered. The novella made Machen famous, or rather infamous at first, sparking outrage and making the critics question its author’s sanity (Gawsworth 125-126). Apart from the publication venue, the association of The Great God Pan with Decadence was also indicated by its refined design:

Design, after all, was an important feature of Bodley Head publications and each of the first 21 volumes of the Keynotes series had a cover, title page, and key monogram of the author’s initials designed by Aubrey Beardsley. At least one reviewer remarked on The Great God Pan’s ‘striking covers, the beautiful title-page especially, the fine paper, and the handsome type’, which he felt ‘point[ed] to the perfection of taste in the art of book production.’” (MacLeod 121)

Like other Decadent works, The Great God Pan blurred the boundaries between the literary genres, “combin[ing] elements of romance and realism – the ‘high imaginative faculty’ characteristic of romance, with the chirurgical interests of realist fiction” (MacLeod 124).

Similarly, it “threatened to erase” the distinctions between high art and popular art “by promiscuously mixing elements of high and low” (123). The Great God Pan tells the story of

15 Machen, Few Letters, p. 33. 59 an experiment gone wrong. Dr. Raymond, an expert in “transcendental medicine” (Machen,

“The Great God” 9), operates on the brain of Mary, a girl he has rescued “from the gutter”

(12), activating a group of nerve cells whose function has not been accounted for. The aim of the experiment is to “level utterly the solid wall of sense” (12) which prevents people from accessing the spiritual world behind―the world of eternal ideas hidden behind the perishable material symbols. In short, the aim is for Mary to “see the god Pan” (12) or the world as it really is. He is successful in activating those brain cells, but the operation has devastating consequences for the girl, who, having seen Pan, goes mad. However, she gives birth to a girl, an offspring of Pan, who becomes a femme fatale, causing a series of men to commit mysterious suicides.

The unfortunate experiment is witnessed by Dr. Raymond’s friend Clarke, a detective- like character with a typically Decadent curiosity and interest in the arcane. Clarke wants to uphold his image as a respectable gentleman, but, at the same time, is struggling with his keen interest in the occult: “In his sober moments he thought of the unusual and the eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men” (Machen,

“The Great God” 17). This interest resembles addiction, which, throughout the story, Clarke keeps battling: “For more than a week he had succeeded in keeping away from the

‘Memoirs,’ and he cherished hopes of a complete self-reformation” (32). Contrasting with the more serious addiction to alcohol and other drugs typically associated with the image of

Decadents, the passage has a somewhat comic tone, being probably a parody of the Victorian desire for self-development and earnestness.16 Another detective-like character with a

16 Machen shared Clarke’s interests and approved of them. When Clarke comes up with a rational explanation of Villiers’ feeling of sickness after visiting Herbert’s house, he “secretly congratulat[es] himself on having successfully kept up the character of advocate of the commonplace” (Machen, “The Great God” 36). And, for Machen, an advocate of wonder, the commonplace was something he despised. This transpires from his critique of the education system in “The Fragment of Life”: “Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that 60 similarly Decadent disposition and inquisitive nature is Villiers, who enjoys rambling through the city “in search of those mysterious incidents and persons with which the streets of

London teem in every quarter and at every hour” (24). As a proper Decadent dilettante,

“Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment” (24). Moreover, he has “a constitutional liking for useless information”

(55). In its uselessness, Villier’s hobby is then very similar to Clarke’s, which is collecting manuscripts with all sorts of bizarre incidents and “documents on the most morbid subjects”

(18).

It is in one of these documents that Clarke learns, years after Raymond’s experiment, of two curious incidents centred around Helen Vaughan, an orphan who was sent by his guardian to “a village on the borders of Wales, a place of some importance in the time of the

Roman occupation” (Machen, “The Great God” 19). The guardian turns out to be Dr.

Raymond, and Helen is the daughter of Mary and Pan. She is sent away because of her disturbing encounters with her father, as Raymond explains in a letter to Clarke: “When [the child] was scarcely five years old I surprised it, not once or twice but several times with a playmate, you may guess of what kind. It was for me a constant, an incarnate horror” (66). It is the nature of these encounters that inspires dread in all who witness them. The first incident happens “on one of the very hottest days in this summer,” when Helen goes for her regular walk in the woods, taking “the old Roman Road” (20). She is witnessed by a little boy, as she is “playing on the grass with a ‘strange naked man’” (20). The boy is “dreadfully frightened”

(20) and runs to his father. For several weeks, he is plagued by recurring nightmares from which he awakens with a cry “The man in the wood! father! father!” (21). The problems

was worth thinking; but he grew certain on these mornings that the ‘common sense’ which he had always heard exalted as man’s supremest faculty was, in all probability, the smallest and least-considered item in the equipment of an ant of average intelligence” (204).

61 gradually recede until the boy accompanies his father on his way to work at the house of a gentleman where he sees a statue which frightens him so much he loses consciousness and is found “lying senseless on the floor, his face contorted with terror” (21). After he regains consciousness, he suffers from “violent hysteria” (21). On leaving the house after being medicated, he sees the statue again and cries “The man in the wood” (21); this second shock leaves him mentally ill permanently. The reason the statue, “evidently of the Roman period”

(21), frightens him so much is the fact that it depicts “a faun or a satyr” (22) and it is described by one of the witnesses as “a vivid presentment of intense evil” (22). In the second incident, Helen is accompanied on her walk to the woods by her friend Rachel, whom her mother later finds in her room deeply traumatised, undoubtedly by witnessing Helen frolicking with Pan and perhaps even participating. After this incident, Helen disappears from the village, but later appears in London as a woman who brings utter ruin to Villier’s friend

Herbert, “corrupt[ing] him body and soul” (26). She is also responsible for the demise of a man found in front of Herbert’s house, who “blank died of fright, of sheer, awful terror” (30).

Finally, Helen is discovered to be Mrs Beaumont, whose utter depravity compels five London gentlemen to commit suicide, after each had spent a night at her house. Significantly, all of them had been very happy before their encounter with Helen and the subsequent death: “Each of these men who had resolved to die a tortured shameful death was rich, prosperous, and to all appearance in love with the world, and not the acutest research could ferret out any shadow of a lurking motive in the case of any of them” (46). As a force negating life, Helen thus parallels Nietzschean understanding of Decadence.

It is never said explicitly what is so shocking about Helen’s behaviour that such disastrous consequences await the people involved—it is only vaguely described as “awful, unspeakable events” (Machen, “The Great God” 23)—but it can be assumed that the horrors concerned transgressive sexual behaviour, which must have been particularly outrageous for

62 an orthodox Catholic like Machen. Joshi describes the story as “a frenzied expression of horror over illicit sex” and notes that readers did not fail to grasp the source of horror in the story, to which their reaction corresponds: “Machen’s early readers . . . reacted with the shock and disgust to be expected of late Victorian audiences. . . . But Machen’s own reaction, implicit in the story, seems even more exaggerated than that of his contemporary readers: aberrant sex becomes, for Machen, a sort of ‘sin against Nature’―something that threatens the very fabric of the cosmos” (21). Here Machen’s conservative (and possibly repressed)17 nature comes to light. However, he seems to have been both terrified and fascinated by the idea of transgressive sex, be it homosexual intercourse, unconventional sexual practices or even incest, since Helen was Pan’s daughter. Quoting Lovecraft, Joshi explains why Machen felt that way: “People whose minds are―like Machen’s―steeped in the orthodox myths of religion, naturally find a poignant fascination in the conception of things which religion brands with outlawry and horror” (21).

Machen’s fascination with the forbidden (the homoerotic in particular) also transpires from an episode in The Hill of Dreams, in which Lucian ventures on a trip to an old Roman fort, a place which he finds highly tantalising, and encounters a faun. The episodes starts with an act of transgression; Lucian enters a place he is not allowed to enter: “Lucian, in spite of his respect for the law of trespass, slid over the gate. The farmers and their men were busy on the uplands with the harvest, and the adventure was irresistible” (Machen, “The Hill” 83).

The setting is very similar to other episodes featuring an encounter with Pan or a faun; it happens on a hot summer day: “The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hot August weather” (83). As in Neuburg’s “The Triumph of Pan” analysed later in the present thesis, the metaphors of fire and flame are employed to signify ecstatic experience: “ . . . looking into that enclosed and secret valley, it seemed to his fancy as if

17 The theme of repression also underlies the relationship of the married couple in “The Fragment of Life,” a novella with autobiographical features. 63 there were a halo about the hill, an aureole that played like flame around it” (83), and the

Roman fort is described as “that fantastic hill about whose steep bastions and haggard oaks he had seen the flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before” (82). Lucian’s way to the top of the hill is described in a typically Decadent language, using metaphors denoting a disease: there are “stones white with the leprosy of age”; “unknown herbs, that smelt poisonous”; “The earth was black and unctuous” and “from it, it the darkest places where the shadow was thickest, swelled the growth of an abominable fungus, making the still air sick with its corrupt odor, and he shuddered as he felt the horrible thing pulped beneath his feet”

(84). When Lucian finally reaches a clearing, it provides a much healthier environment: “It was a lawn of sweet close turf in the centre of the matted brake, of clean firm earth from which no shameful growth sprouted” (84, emphasis added). Indeed, Machen is able to make even a landscape seem indecent. On his way to the summit, Lucian is stung by a strange nettle: “There were nettles growing thick and rank in the foss; they looked different from the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand touch a leaf by accident, felt the sting burn like fire” (84). The metaphor of the fire signifies ecstasy again, and the nettle indeed induces an erotically charged hallucination:

He was utterly alone. He still grew hotter as he sat on the stump, and at last lay down at full length on the soft grass, and more at his ease felt the waves of heat pass over his body. And then he began to dream, to let his fancies stray over half-imagined, delicious things, indulging a virgin mind in its wanderings. The hot air seemed to beat upon him in palpable waves, and the nettle sting tingled and itched intolerably; and he was alone upon the fairy hill, within the great mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart of the matted thicket. Slowly and timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the rotted bark he saw the masks of men. His eyes were fixed and fascinated by the simulacra of the wood, and could not see his hands, and so at last, and suddenly, it seemed, he lay in

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the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun. (85, emphasis added)

The word “straight” can simply be describing the shape of the branch. However, its other meaning “heterosexual,” combined with the negative, fits here as well. The image of intertwined branches and “protuberant roots” evokes an orgy, which is further supported by

Machen’s comparison of the trees to “human shapes.” Notably, Lucian sees in the rotted bark

“the masks of men”; women are absent, making the imagined orgy homoerotic in nature.

Likewise, the description of the faun has erotic undertones as it focuses on his body and emphasises his beauty. The following passage further supports the homoerotic reading, as well as the fact that Lucian is hallucinating:

Quick flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, hints of mysteries, secrets of life passed trembling through his brain, unknown desires stung him. As he gazed across the turf and into the thicket, the sunshine seemed really to become green, and the contrast between the bright glow poured on the lawn and the black shadow of the brake made an odd flickering light, in which all the grotesque postures of stem and root began to stir; the wood was alive. The turf beneath him heaved and sank as with the deep swell of the sea. He fell asleep, and lay still on the grass, in the midst of the thicket. (85-6, emphases added)

The metaphor of the flames appears again to signify ecstasy. Waking up sober after an hour of sleep, Lucian remembers what happens, and the transgressive nature of his actions is conveyed by his feeling of shame, described again using the metaphor of flames: “He huddled on his clothes and laced his boots, wondering what folly had beset him. Then, while he stood indecisive, hesitating, his brain a whirl of puzzled thought, his body trembling, his hands shaking; as with electric heat, sudden remembrance possessed him. A flaming blush shone red on his cheeks, and glowed and thrilled through his limbs” (86). Despite his feelings of shame, he longs for the faun to return, only to repress the feeling again: “He stretched out his hands, and cried to his visitant to return; he entreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart, and he ran blindly, dashing through the wood” (86). Back in the lane past the gate, he looks again at

65 the fort: “the sunlight seemed to play about the fort with an aureole of flame” (86). When he is back home, drinking strong black tea, “the thought came with great consolation that he had only been asleep and dreaming queer, nightmarish dreams” (87). Again, the word queer may mean “strange” here, but, considering the homoerotic nature of Lucian’s dreams, its other meaning fits here as well. As Showalter notes, “the homosexual significance of ‘queer’ had entered English slang by 1900” (112). When Lucian shows the nettle to his father, he identifies it as “a Roman nettle—urtica pilulifera” (87). Significantly, according to Borgeaud,

“Nettle (knide) is, in fact, a metaphorical term for the pangs of love” (68-9).

Going back to The Great God Pan, to a more liberal-minded reader, the vague descriptions sometimes seem ridiculous and exaggerated to the point of being absurd as, for instance, in Herbert’s description of Helen’s shocking depravity:

I can say you may have heard the talk of the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I know, no, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard—and seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street, and ask whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live. (Machen, “The Great God” 26)

In this novella, which, not surprisingly, gave rise to parodies,18 Machen employed a strategy used by many Decadent writers for good reason: had the work been more explicit in its depictions of these vague horrors, it could not have been published in the prurient Victorian society. Kirsten MacLeod explains that “The gaps and silences make an otherwise unpublishable story publishable” (127). Even so, it caused considerable controversy. Another reason to employ this strategy was its aesthetic effect. Commenting on The Picture of Dorian

Gray, Wilde explained that the purpose of the vagueness and indeterminacy allows every reader to fill the gaps with what is―for them―the most dreadful abomination: “Each man sees his own sins in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds

18 The Great God Pan inspired two parodies published a year later: Arthur Compton-Rickett’s “A Yellow Creeper” (1895), and Arthur Sykes’s “The Great Pan-Demon: An Unspeakable Story” (1895). 66 them has brought them” (Wilde qtd. MacLeod 125-6). This required a greater deal of imagination on the part of the reader, but the effect was personalising the sins and horrors that constitute the central part of the story. What is more, this strategy had “the added bonus of exposing the prurience of his detractors” (MacLeod 126).

What exactly happens in these incidents is never said, but the basis of the horrors is easily deduced. At the very centre is Helen, part human, part god, or simply, a devil, as the

Latin sentence in Clarke’s “Memoirs” conveys: “Et diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est” (Machen, “The Great God” 23) meaning “And a devil was made incarnate. And a human being was produced.” Pan, Helen’s progenitor, has often been identified with the devil, and this novella is no exception, especially when he is the source of all the evil happening there.

Helen’s Graeco-Roman heritage is clearly visible in her features; she was born in England, but she has a “clear, olive skin and almost Italian appearance” (22). The Graeco-Roman culture was particularly appealing for Decadent writers with homosexual inclinations. It is not surprising, then, that Machen chose a lustful Graeco-Roman god to represent—what were in the eyes of many Victorians—the evils of sexual transgression. Elaine Showalter explains why transgression in general was so disconcerting to many Victorians at the end of the century, when the strict divisions between genders, sexualities, and races began to crumble:

In periods of cultural insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality, becomes especially intense. If the different races can be kept in their places, if the various classes can be held in their proper districts of the city, and if men and women can be fixed in their separate spheres, many hope, apocalypse can be prevented and we can preserve a comforting sense of identity and permanence in the face of that relentless specter of millennial change. (4)

It is also significant that the source of terror in the story is a woman. This seems to reflect

“the late-Victorian fascination with an atavistically aggressive female” (Kaye 57), with Helen joining the company of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha and Bram

Stoker’s vampirical women. In fact, Nicholas Ruddick argues that Machen’s The Great God

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Pan “anticipates Dracula’s theme of the dangers of unrestrained female sexuality” (204).

These femme fatales were probably inspired, to some degree, by the rise of the New Woman and the anxiety this triggered: “Men feared emasculation or supersession by the rising generation of well-educated, free-thinking, assertive New Women, but their fears were often modified into ambivalence by erotic excitement” (Ruddick 192). Showalter further explains the unsettling effect of women, pointing out that “Women have traditionally been perceived as figures of disorder,” and that “Women’s social and cultural marginality seems to place them on the borderlines of the symbolic order, both the ‘frontier between men and chaos,’ and dangerously part of chaos itself” (8).

What helps to clarify the disturbing impression Helen makes is the concept of the uncanny, ranging from Sigmund Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (1919) to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abjection. What produces the uncanny effect in Helen is the paradox of her being both stunningly beautiful and utterly revolting, which is very difficult to process.

Indeed, she is described by people who have seen her as “at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on” (Machen, “The Great God” 31); and, according to Herbert, she spoke “in her beautiful voice . . . of things which even now I would not dare whisper in blackest night, though I stood in the midst of a wilderness” (26). Again, the surface is beautiful, but the core abominable. To put it short, she is a monster in a human body. The beauty in her face comes from Mary, her mother; the repulsiveness, from an inner corruption she has inherited from Pan. In her outward beauty and inward corruption, which shows in her facial expression, Helen evokes a similar disparity between Dorian Gray’s physical beauty and inner corruption, which is only given expression in Basil’s painting.

Machen was “a good deal impressed by” The Picture of Dorian Gray (qtd. in Gawsworth

100), so this similarity is probably not coincidental. The names are symbolic, too: her mother’s name is suggestive of Virgin Mary, whose innocence was―in being seduced by

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Pan―corrupted by the sinful Graeco-Roman god. Kostas Boyiopoulos supports this connection, noting that, like Virgin Mary, Helen’s mother is “dressed all in white” which symbolises her “youthful innocence,” and “her blind compliance to the scientist” is comparable to Virgin Mary’s “absolute faith in God” (364). Helen inherits her mother’s beauty, but her identity is much closer to her Graeco-Roman father, her name evoking Helen of Troy, the daughter of Zeus and Leda. After all, seeing Zeus had the same fatal consequences as seeing Pan. What further supports Helen Vaughan’s link with Helen of Troy is her stunning beauty. The latter appears as the embodiment of physical beauty in Thomas

Nashe’s play Summer’s Last Will and Testament, specifically in the song “Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss” about the transience of life on earth, which resonates with Machen’s

Neoplatonism and foregrounding of the spiritual over the material:

Beauty is but a flowre, Which wrinckles will deuoure, Brightnesse falls from the ayre, Queenes haue died yong and faire, Dust hath closde Helens eye. I am sick, I must dye: Lord, haue mercy on vs. (283)

Helen is an apt symbol here, being, according to the myth, the most beautiful woman in the world. Her ultimate beauty makes the contrast with Helen Vaughan’s utmost inner corruption even more striking. Boyiopoulos, however, sees Helen as an embodiment of “Lilith, the

Judaic figure and archetype of feminine horror” (369). He makes a very good case for this comparison when he points out “Lilith’s familial bond with the Devil and the incestuous, sexual relationship with him” (369) and the fact that, like Helen, she “kills the men she is entangled with by means of asphyxiation” (371).

Helen defies the neat categories Victorians cherished so much in being a shape- shifter. This starts at a symbolic level with her unstable identity. In the course of the story, she assumes three identities (apart from her original one): Mrs. Herbert (after her marriage),

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Mrs. Raymond, and Mrs. Beaumont. But, at the end of the story, when Clarke and Villiers make her commit suicide, she becomes a shape-shifter at a much more fundamental level.

The strange course of her death is recorded in Dr. Matheson’s manuscript:

“. . . I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve. . . . there was some internal force, of which I knew nothing, that caused dissolution and change. “Here too was all the work by which man has been made repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained, while the outward form changed.” (61-62, ellipses added)

Helen’s death is another moment of abjection, both in Machen’s story and in Nashe’s poem, where the embodiment of physical beauty is subject to decay. Kristeva describes the abject as

“the jettisoned object,” something “radically excluded” that draws one “toward the place where meaning collapses” (2). Seeing the abject is accompanied by feelings of deep revulsion, which function as a defence mechanism: “Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck” (2). It makes one avert one’s gaze and get away to avoid contamination, as in Kristeva’s most famous example of abjection―beholding a corpse: “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (4). The witnesses of

Helen’s death experience abjection not only because, at the end, they see her corpse; her death is much more disturbing because it represents the ultimate breakdown of boundaries, not only those between life and death, but also those between human and animal. Her dying, transforming body shows them the human form and what may become of it (at least in the scope of the fictional story). Helen ceases to be a subject, becoming abject by being expelled

70 from the symbolic order. The abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4), and that is certainly Helen’s case. Not fitting into the symbolic order, the abject is something we cannot grasp because it does not match the established concepts, as in Kristeva’s examples of

“a friend who stabs you” or “the criminal with a good conscience” (4), or, as in Machen’s story, a beautiful woman who is a monster. Helen’s transgressing the boundaries between the species is another contamination from which the abject is supposed to protect us: “By way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder” (12-13). Helen transcends this boundary both in her identity and her behaviour.

And so does Pan. At one moment, the jelly-like substance which is left after Helen disappears assumes the shape of Pan:

I watched, and at last saw nothing but a substance like to jelly. Then the ladder was ascended again . . . [here the MS. is illegible] for one instant I saw a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not further describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of . . . as a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast, was changed into human form, there came finally death. (Machen, “The Great God” 62, original ellipses)

Just like Helen, Pan is seen as abject. What is disturbing about him is not only his sexual frolics; it is mainly the fact that he is “neither man nor beast,” transcending the boundary between human and animal. In this respect, the story reflects the fears that followed from

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which wrought havoc upon the strict division between species. Commenting on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Haggard’s She, Ruddick points out that these works “participate in the cultural absorption of the Darwinian insight into the proximity of the human and animal realms” (193). And the same applies for The Great God Pan. The omissions in the manuscript show that the

71 witnesses experienced considerable difficulty putting what they had seen into words; after all, standing outside the symbolic order, the abject is impossible to translate into language. Susan

J. Navarette further explains the characters’ speechlessness: “Trapped in their pre-Freudian nightmare worlds, such tongue-tied characters . . . see to express an irreferable something that triggers an unnameable response . . . . Their encounter with the unheimlich coincides with a momentary surcease of expressiveness, in a stifling of speech signaling an abrupt reversion to hereditary memories, latent instincts, perhaps instinctive loathing” (198). According to

Navarette, the reaction of the characters provides a clue for the reader of such works:

In their unveiling not merely of a decompositive body occupying an otherwise unthinkable plane of existence, but also of those other bodies that are degraded by what is itself degraded, many works of fin de siècle horror explore precisely this form of abjection, which seeks to elicit a physical response in the reader―a visceral shudder or a sense of physical aversion brought on by the propinquity of something lacking “cleanliness or health,” something degenerative, “radically separate, loathsome,” often something unnameable. The propriety of such a response is never in doubt because in all such stories the hero or narrator reacts in precisely the same fashion―setting an example, as it were, for the reader to follow. (196)

Linda Dowling points out that the inability of the characters to express what they experience in words is a particularly recurrent motif in Decadent literature, identifying it as “the unutterability topos, the familiar convention that asserts the total inadequacy of language to express what is meant” (161). In The Great God Pan, this topos “operates thematically to associate written language itself with the literary ‘unspeakable’ phenomena of primeval physical horror” (162). In Lacanian terms, these traumatic moments of “primeval physical horror” that Helen as the abject induces would be described as the eruption of the Real, threatening one’s material existence. Like the abject, the Real cannot be expressed by language because it stands outside the Symbolic, the realm of signifiers.

The Great God Pan is a notable example of fin de siècle Gothic, taking place not in an ancient castle or magnificent mountains, but in contemporary London, and dealing no more with evil monks or hereditary curses, but with science: “If the city is now the primary Gothic

72 landscape, the primary figure at the heart of most Victorian fin de siècle texts is the scientist”

(Byron 188). What is more, Helen is not the only example of the abject in this genre; Byron points out that the abject is what “the transgressive monsters of Victorian fin de siècle

Gothic” share, reflecting the fears about an unstable identity (195) (resulting, among other things, from Darwin’s discoveries). This is connected with another shift in the genre of

Gothic: the source of terror is no longer external, for “The threat . . . seems to reside within human nature itself, a nature potentially deviant and destructive when freed from the fetters of social and ethical taboos and codes of behavior, taboos, and codes that, the text ultimately suggests, are necessary for the stability of both society and the individual” (191). And Pan, especially the animal-half of him, is an appropriate figure for expressing the socially deviant part of human nature. Accordingly, Byron argues that “the trauma represented by Helen has less to do with supernatural forces than with a simple liberation from repression” (191).

Pan as the Sublime Spirit of Nature

Having examined the terrifying aspect of Pan, which makes the story a piece of horror literature, I will now turn my attention to the less obvious aspect of Pan in the story and that is his connection to Nature, where Pan appears as a more benevolent force. After all,

Machen’s original motive behind writing The Great God Pan indicates his close connection to Nature, which played an important role in his works. Indeed, he often contrasts the urban and rural landscapes in his writing, clearly preferring the latter. This is particularly apparent in “A Fragment of Life” and The Hill of Dreams. His relationship to Nature and the countryside was forged by the place in which he grew up: Caerleon-on-Usk, Monmouthshire, in south east Wales, which he describes (using its Welsh name) as “that wonderful magic

Gwent” (Far Off Things 19). In his autobiography, he expresses the deep attachment he felt to his birthplace: “I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me, that I was born in that noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent” (8). His

73 favourite occupation was solitary strolls in the hills and forests around the rectory of

Llanddewy where he lived, and he even attributes his interest in writing and his literary achievements to his birthplace: “The older I grow the more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in earliest childhood they had before them the vision of an enchanted land”

(8). The beautiful countryside of Gwent, which for Machen was imbued with wonder and mystery, is probably also from where his interest in mysticism stems. In his imagination, the region was populated by fairies, and he often compares Gwent to a “fairyland” (21), although

Machen’s fairies are far from the charming winged creatures one knows from fairy tales.

Caerleon was not only rich in folklore, but also a place steeped in the legends of King Arthur and his knights: the town is said to be “the legendary capital of their realm” (Gawsworth 3).

The second moment19 to which he attributes his desire to write is his walk “in the woods of

Hereford,” the town where he studied: “Being caught in the rain with the birds singing about him and the mystic atmosphere of the tale of Owain from the Mabinogion20 clouding his senses, he says it ‘left on my mind a very strong and singular impression which, when the desire to write literature came upon me, I yearned to put into words’” (Gawsworth 25). It was then Machen’s enchantment by the Welsh countryside coupled with his interest in Celtic legends that fuelled his desire to write.

Not surprisingly, then, Machen’s love of Nature and his Celtic heritage had a strong bearing on his writing. His metaphors and comparisons are often based on Nature, making his writing lyrical (like Forrest Reid’s). What follows is an example of this lyricism from The

Great God Pan: “Clarke watched changes fleeting over that face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun” (15). But there are many more in “The Three

19 Another moment to which Machen attributes his “inoculation with the specific virus of literature” is reading Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832). He says that it was then “that I first delighted in poetry as poetry, for its own sake, apart from any story it might tell” (Far Off Things 58-59). 20 The Mabinogion is a cycle of Welsh legends which includes stories about King Arthur and Merlin. Owain is one of the Knights of the Round Table. 74

Impostors” and The Hill of Dreams. Machen ascribed his lyrical disposition, the desire to reflect the beauty of Nature in the beauty of the language, to his Celtic origins: in Far Off

Things, he says that “Celtdom,” as opposed to “Anglo-Saxondom” is more sensitive in perceiving “the music of words and the relation of that music to the world” (87). When he was trying to learn the pronunciation of a particular Welsh phrase, he was told to “speak it so that it makes a sound like the wind about the mountains” (87). Accordingly, to express the sounds of Nature in the sound of words became the aim of both Machen and Lucian, the protagonist of the semi-autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams: “He had tried to sing in words the music that the brook sang, and the sound of the October wind rustling through the brown bracken on the hill . . . To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line” (“The Hill” 213-214). Actually, the aim of Lucian’s work is very similar Machen’s idea behind The Great God Pan: “[I]t was a pious attempt to translate into English prose the form and mystery of the domed hills, the magic of occult valleys, the sound of the red swollen brook swirling through leafless woods”

(101). Indeed, Nature is intrinsically connected with Lucian’s writing. As he is reading his manuscript, he remembers exactly what the weather was like when he was writing the particular passages:

This had been painfully excogitated while the snowstorm whirled about the lawn and filled the lanes, this was of the summer night, this of the harvest moon rising like a fire from the tithebarn on the hill. . . . he had thought out the sentences one evening, while he leaned on the foot-bridge and watched the brook swim across the road. Every word smelt of the meadowsweet that grew thick upon the banks; now, as he recalled the cadence and the phrase that had seemed so charming, he saw again the ferns beneath the vaulted roots of the beech, and the green light of the glowworm in the hedge (213).

However, both Machen and Lucian believed to have failed. At the end of the story, Lucian admits his defeat:

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He remembered that in some fantastic book he had seen a bar or two of music, and, beneath, the inscription that here was the musical expression of Westminster Abbey. His boyish effort seemed hardly less ambitious, and he no longer believed that language could present the melody and the awe and the loveliness of the earth. He had long known that he, at all events, would have to be content with a far approach, with a few broken notes that might suggest, perhaps, the magistral everlasting song of the hill and the streams. (214)

This concern with the superficial qualities of language—with the way it sounds—was also typical for Decadent writers, who “exploited the musicality of language, sought to capture the intensity of a moment” (MacLeod 11). In this aspect at least, Machen definitely succeeded, as not only the quotations above show, but also the following melodious sentence from “A

Fragment of Life,” which, in its musicality, resembles a poem: “. . . from the depths of some futile task he had looked up with puzzled eyes, wondering why the close air suddenly grew scented with green leaves, why the murmur of the trees and the wash of the river on the reeds came to his ears; and then that sudden rapture to which he had given a name and an individuality possessed him utterly” (209).

Considering how close a relationship Machen had to Nature and what a significant role it plays in his writing, it is surprising that the association between Pan and Nature in The

Great God Pan is not particularly strong. After all, the Pan of the finished novella is a negative force, giving rise to an incarnate evil in the shape of his diabolical offspring. It has already been said that Machen considered the result a failure. However, there are traces of his original intention at the beginning of the story, with Nature playing an important role. The odour Clarke smells during Raymond’s experiment brings to his mind a memory of a sweltering summer day “fifteen years ago, that he had spent roaming through the woods and meadows near his old home” (Machen, “The Great God” 13). The odour brings about a change in Clarke’s consciousness, making the present blurred and the memory vivid.

Actually, the following depiction of Clarke’s memory could have been inspired by the sight of the valley of Usk in the summer that gave rise to the story:

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[I]t was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child, and now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before him. Above all there came to his nostrils the scent of summer, the smell of flowers mingled, and the odour of the woods, of cool shaded places, deep in the green depths, drawn forth by the sun’s heat; and the scent of the good earth, lying as it were with arms stretched forth, and smiling lips, overpowered all. (14)

The description of the beauties of the English countryside gradually yields to a more

Mediterranean region evoked by “a vine . . . droop[ing] with purple grapes” and “a wild olive-tree [which] stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex” (14), anticipating the appearance of Pan, whose arrival is marked by “an infinite silence [which] seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed”21 (14). It is then when Clarke, in his altered consciousness, has a vision of Pan: “[F]or a moment of time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither living nor dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form” (14). The drug that Raymond uses in the experiment and that induces this vision in Clarke is then similar in effect as the operation itself. However, since Clarke only seems to be dreaming of Pan and does not encounter him in all his awe, it does not drive him mad; his presence is safely veiled by the dream. It is then here that

Machen manages to approach his original aim in writing the story: here Pan truly inspires feelings of awe, rather than horror, and appears as a transcendent spirit of Nature. It is this aspect which makes Machen’s Pan ambiguous rather than evil. Being “all things mingled” and a deity representing Nature, he necessarily comprises both good and bad.

In fact, the origin of Machen’s Pan can then be traced back to Swinburne, the

Decadent writer who influenced him so much, and whose originality in his treatment of Pan, according to Merivale, lies “in his combination of the notion of terror with that of a universal nature spirit, in the manner suggested by Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson in prose. These two had developed the Romantic ‘universal’ Pan by adding the possibilities of malevolence

21 Pan appears in similar circumstances in E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” (1903) and Forrest Reid’s “Pan’s Pupil” (1905). 77 and terror, for ‘all’ nature, they said, must inevitably include terror as well as beauty and joy”

(98). Writing about Swinburne’s poem “A Nympholept,” Merivale describes the prevailing emotion conveyed by the poem as “a religious terror” (98): ‘fear / So deep, so dim, so sacred, is wellnigh sweet.’ When a man’s small soul is exposed to or merged with the soul of all things, whose unity, Pan, is made up of the duality of good and evil, the resulting emotions are terror and ecstasy, which blur together into the mystical emotion which might be called

‘Panic’” (98). Machen was not the only writer inspired by Swinburne’s Pan. Merivale points out that, apart from Machen, other horror writers, such as Saki (Hector Hugh Munro; 1870-

1916), Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940), William Faulkner (1897-1962), and David

Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) “use Swinburne’s clues to indicate Pan’s awe-inspiring presence or approach, but the important similarity is in the extreme and ineffable emotions to which the experience gives rise” (99).

Revisiting the Awful God Pan

Although The Great God Pan made Machen famous and influenced not only writers employing the Pan motif in their work, but also those writing in the horror genre, the author himself considered it a failure. Actually, when one examines Machen’s view of literature, it turns out that the failure was inevitable: “I think . . . that all that really matters and really exists is ineffable; that both the world without us—the tree and the brook and the hill—and the world within us do perpetually and necessarily transcend all our powers of utterance, whether to ourselves or to others” (Far Off Things 155). At the core of his failure, then, is the fact that the topics that are—in his view—worth writing about are at the same time inexpressible, outside the realm of language.

Nevertheless, Machen did not give up. Dreaming in fire, yet working in clay, he created a horror story where Pan and Pan-like figures represent, what is according to the account of the characters in the story, “an incarnate horror” (Machen, “The Great God” 66),

78 an evil that is beyond anything they can imagine. Instead of communicating to the reader the ineffable, sublime feeling Machen experienced upon beholding the valley in Gwent, Pan, and his offspring Helen, came to symbolize something completely different, yet equally inexpressible, the abject—that which stands outside the Symbolic, and, thus, cannot be translated into language.

However, Machen’s original aim in writing the story and his dissatisfaction with the result problematises the categorisation of the story as a piece of horror literature. The Graeco-

Roman god was not supposed to be the villain or the monster of the piece, but rather a symbol of the transcendent beauty of Nature. What is more, Machen had been “fascinated from youth by the Roman ruins of Isca Silurum near his birthplace” (Joshi 12), so the

Graeco-Roman culture was not something he found repulsive or of which he disapproved.

But even the idea of Pan in the story could not be entirely negative. In embodying the world of Forms, the god approaches the Orphic Pan, which is described by Merivale as the spirit of

“universal Nature” or “‘soul’ of the World” (9). The only difference is that he is not only the spirit of Nature, but is also nature in the sense of “the essence of all things.” Claiming that

Pan is evil would imply that the world of Forms is inherently evil.

Machen’s Pan was supposed to work as a symbol which would inspire the reader with an overwhelming, sublime feeling of awe. The emotion conveyed by the story was, thus, supposed to be what Merivale described as “a religious terror,” Swinburne’s “fear / So deep, so dim, so sacred, is wellnigh sweet.” However, the result was rather a feeling of horror engendered by the idea of illicit sex, which, although sinister in Machen’s view, would later be represented more positively in the writing of other authors in this Pan tradition, writers such as Victor Benjamin Neuburg, Forrest Reid and E. M. Forster, who are analysed in the following chapters.

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5. The Liberating Pan: E. M. Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” and

“The Curate’s Friend”

There is nothing particularly classical about a faun: it is only that the Greeks and Italians have ever had the sharpest eyes.

Forster, “The Curate’s Friend,” Collected Short Stories, p. 86.

He concluded that he could not be a Christian, because there was no evidence in the Bible that Christ had a sense of humor.

Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M.

Forster, p. 37.

Writing the Unspeakable Desire

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) is a writer significantly different from Arthur

Machen discussed in the previous chapter. Unlike the orthodox Anglo-Catholic Machen,

Forster was “deeply committed liberal humanism” (Herz 4) and had refused Christianity. The same applies to their works. Whereas in (the final version of) The Great God Pan the Graeco-

Roman god represents the evils of sexual transgression, in Forster’s writing, Pan becomes a liberating force, freeing an individual who does not fit into the heteronormative, conservative

English society from its entrapment. To put is simply, what is presented as evil in The Great

God Pan, is defended in the “The Story of a Panic.” The example of Machen and Forster demonstrates just how different the writers associated with Decadence are.

“The Story of a Panic” (1904) has a special place in Forster’s oeuvre. In the introduction to his Collected Short Stories, Forster claims that it “is the first story I ever wrote” (5) and that it was given to him by a genius loci during his stay in Italy “in the May of

1902”: “I sat down in a valley, a few miles above the town, and suddenly the first chapter of

80 the story rushed into my mind as if it had waited for me there. I received it as an entity and wrote it out as soon as I returned to the hotel” (5). This is one of the reasons why the story assumes a particular significance for Forster: “Never before had he sat ‘down on the theme as if it were an anthill’” (Forster qtd. in Moffat 61). In fact, a similar experience in Greece resulted in “The Road from Colonus” (Forster 5). The importance of “The Story of a Panic” in particular is indicated by its position in the collection—it is the first story—and by

Forster’s comment in a letter to Robert Trevelyan, in which he wrote “I like it more than I ought to” (qtd. in Hai 231).

Forster’s comment already signifies something transgressive, implying that there is something wrong about his strong preference for “The Story of a Panic.” What may be the reason why the story was so precious to him is the fact that it is one of his stories that are slightly more explicitly homoerotic than his other published works (at that time), but not enough to be singled out for censure. However, Forster was not aware of its homoerotic subtext at the time of writing. He seems to have sublimated his homoerotic feelings into the story, giving expression to them unwittingly. He was alerted to this subtext by his friends’ interpretation of the story, which

. . . “horrified” and disgusted the young Morgan. They treated it like a salacious tidbit. Someone gave the manuscript to Maynard Keynes, who shared it with Charles Sayle, a university librarian who cultivated a baroque effeminacy. “Oh dear oh dear, is this Young King’s?” Sayle asked in knowing mock horror. “Then he showed Maynard what the Story was about. B[uggered] by a waiter at the hotel, Eustace commits bestiality with a goat in the valley where I had sat. In the subsequent chapters, he tells the waiter how nice it has been and they try to b[ugger] each other.” Thus opened the abyss between men like Sayle and Lytton Strachey, who took satisfaction and pride in calling homosexuals “buggers,” and Morgan, who even years later would not spell out the whole word. It was not until two decades later―in the mid-1920s―that Morgan had the detachment to observe how much the story of writing ‘The Story of a Panic’ was the story of his own sexual anxiety. (Moffat 62)

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“The Story of a Panic” is not the only work by Forster where his homoerotic feelings played an important role. In fact, his sexuality was “a wellspring of his creative work” (63).

Nevertheless, it gradually came to interfere with his writing, as Edwardian England was an environment in which such feelings were met with vehement denunciation. Consequently,

Forster’s homosexuality coupled with the impossibility to express his desires, lie at the core of his identity as a writer, as well as a source of constant frustration. Not being able to write publishable fiction about his sexuality, Forster experienced a writing crisis (Hai 219), which became especially acute in 1911 when he decided to republish his short stories in an effort to solve the crisis by “seek[ing] inspiration in his own past work” (221). Actually, his lifetime struggle is epitomised in the story of his writing Maurice, the homoerotic novel he

“suppressed for almost sixty years” (Moffat 7). When working on the novel, Forster confided his feelings to Forrest Reid: “One lives bottled up in a beautiful land of dreams. No more than a cocoon of frustrated desires, these dreams seem sometimes, something which I have spun round me to hide my love . . . and which cramps my power” (Forster qtd. in Kaylor xxix, original ellipsis). Forster’s close friends knew about the novel and encouraged him to publish it, but he resisted their effort to persuade him (Moffat 17) in fear of offending his mother, who never learned about her son’s sexuality (32). Another reason why the story was unacceptable is the fact that it was “a gay love story that ended happily,” making it “a revolutionary new genre” (7). Forster never overcame his anxiety about the novel, and it was only published posthumously. His frustration with the homophobic society lasted a lifetime.

At the end of his life, he wrote: “How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided” (Forster qtd. in Moffat 18, original emphasis).

Forster’s homosexuality was closely linked to his desire to transcend class boundaries that were still strong in Edwardian England: “Since he had begun teaching at the Working

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Men’s College, the romantic idea that love could be both an expression of lust and tolerance was incarnated in a particular form” (Moffat 71). In this respect, his ideas were similar to

Edward Carpenter’s, whom he later met. In his journal from 1920, Forster expressed the desire “to love a strong young man of the lower classes” (qtd. in Stape 85). Actually, his desire to transcend boundaries between people were not limited to those of class, but encompassed all differences, which is succinctly expressed in his motto “Only Connect.”

This democratic idea came to dominate Forster work. In an entry in his Commonplace Book, he writes: “[T]wo people pulling each other into salvation is the only theme I find worthwhile” (qtd. in Herz 13). Wendy Moffat comments on this further: “Morgan discovered the richness and complexity of his entire oeuvre, his whole aesthetic enterprise in a single subject: the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being.

Especially someone unlike himself” (69). She observes how, in his works, Forster would employ textual strategies that make the readers step out of their limited viewpoints: “He would discomfit his readers by looking all round a question, asking them to identify with unlikely characters―an Indian doctor, a working-class clerk struggling for an education, a headstrong young widow who falls impetuously in love with the wrong man” (69).

Undoubtedly, the aim of this textual strategy was to teach his readers tolerance by broadening their horizons.

The fantastic genre, in which Forster wrote his short stories, may suggest his desire for an escape from the constraining and frustrating reality, which is partially true. Indeed,

Moffat notes that “The retreat into his imagination as a way to explore his desire safely became a lifelong pattern for Morgan” (32). However, the escape was by no means a passive surrender. Indeed, Ambreen Hai emphasises the political nature of Forster’s short stories published in the collection The Celestial Omnibus (1911), noting the connection between his

“critique of homophobic oppression” with his broader concern about not only class

83 inequality, which is expressed in “The Story of a Panic,” but also discrimination based on gender and race expressed in “Other Kingdom,” as well as oppression based on age which is the subject of “The Road from Colonus” (224). The original publication venue reflects

Forster’s political views: “The Independent Review . . . to which Forster dedicated The

Celestial Omnibus in 1911, was committed from its founding to a range of liberal political causes, both domestic and imperial, which included women’s rights, labor unions and worker’s rights, the reduction of landed wealth, home rule for Ireland, and ‘sanity in imperialism and foreign affairs’ (Furbank, Life 1: 107-09)” (Hai 224). The fantastic genre was useful in an environment hostile to progressive liberal ideas. Consequently, whereas writers such as Arthur Machen and Oscar Wilde employed vagueness to be able to address tabooed topics in publishable fiction, Forster reached for the genre of fantastic which enabled him “to represent forbidden desire” while escaping “the constraints of realism” (Hai 223).

Hai describes Forster’s use of the fantastic as “a coded but transgressive form of law breaking, a radical attempt to speak the unspeakable with impunity” (222), enabling Forster

“to queer norms of both genre and sexual desire” (221). Quoting Tzvetan Todorov, Hai emphasises the liminal nature of the fantastic genre, which “hesitat[es] ‘between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described’” (222-223). One such natural explanation of

“The Story of a Panic” (quoted above) was provided by Charles Sayles, a friend of Maynard

Keynes, and it deeply upset Forster:

It seemed to him [Maynard] great fun, to me disgusting. . . . In after years I realized that in a stupid and unprofitable way he was right and that was the cause of my indignation. I knew as their creator that Eustace and the footmarks and the waiter had none of the conjunctions he visualized. I had no thought of sex for them, no thought of sex was in my mind. (Forster qtd. in Herz 56-57)

In the case of The Celestial Omnibus, the liminal nature is further enhanced by the fact that the fantastic appears in the form of short stories (as opposed to the novel). Commenting on the short story in fin de siècle, Jenny Bourne Taylor notes that it “became a kind of fictional

84 laboratory . . . : probing the boundary between body and mind, between the normal and the pathological, the child and the adult, the animal and the human, even the living and the dead, while also exploring the fluctuating self as subject, dramatising specific moods and patterns of consciousness” (17). Forster seems to continue this tradition. This, coupled with the fact that, in his short stories, he enjoyed more freedom to address the topics about which he most wanted to write, but which were considered a taboo in Edwardian society, might be the reason why he valued his short stories more than “the four acclaimed novels he had published by then” (Hai 217). Writing about the short stories to be published in The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911), Forster acknowledged: “I think them better than my long books” and “I would rather people praised them than anything else I wrote” (Forster qtd. in Herz 24).

Forrest Reid felt the same way. In a letter to Forster, he wrote:

I remember very well reading [The Celestial Omnibus] last summer, lying on my back in a punt under trees, & how the beauty of everything around me melted into & became part of the delicate beauty of your stories. . . . I liked your short stories more than your novels. . . . But in the novels too, & particularly The Longest Journey, there is the same spirit if not quite so clearly revealed. That is to say the visible world is not everything, there are deeper and more hidden things touched on, & above all there is a sense of beauty, both of material beauty & spiritual beauty, without which, I confess, no book is of much interest to me. (Reid qtd. in Herz 25)

This passage reveals a shared sensibility between not only Forster and Reid, but also Machen.

It also hints at the affinity between the short stories and The Longest Journey (1907), “which was not only published in the same year but similarly used the Wiltshire setting as an imaginatively generating, mythic space” (Herz 52). What is more, it was Forster’s favourite novel (25).

Nevertheless, employing the fantastic genre to tackle proscribed themes did not accommodate Forster’s writing needs completely, and he seems to give voice to his frustration at the end of “The Curate’s Friend” (1907) (analysed later in this chapter), in which the curate complains about the impossibility of telling others about the Faun’s beneficial influence on the parish, of which the curate was a medium:

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And though I try to communicate that joy to others – as I try to communicate anything else that seems good – and though I sometimes succeed, yet I can tell no one exactly how it came to me. For if I breathed one word of that, my present life, so agreeable and profitable, would come to an end, my congregation would depart, and so should I, and instead of being an asset to my parish, I might find myself an expense to the nation. Therefore in the place of the lyrical and rhetorical treatment, so suitable to the subject, so congenial to my profession, I have been forced to use the unworthy medium of a narrative, and to delude you by declaring that this is a short story, suitable for reading in the train. (Forster 93-94)

The curate’s frustration with the inability to acknowledge the Pagan force affecting the

Christian parish, as it would ruin his reputation, reflects Forster’s frustration with the inability to address homoerotic themes in a more realistic manner. In Judith Scherer Herz’s reading, the passage indicates that the “subject is poetry (‘that evening, for the first time, I heard the chalk downs singing to each other across the valleys’ – p. 123); the medium is prose” (50), which is why she describes the story as “poetry disguised as prose” (52).

Both “The Story of a Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend” are necessarily informed by

Forster’s attitude to Christianity, a religion in which he grew up but came to refuse. In fact,

Christianity was one of the factors that had eroded his close relationship with Lily, his mother. When, as a four-year old child, Forster innocently shared his first experience of masturbation with his mother, it was met with strong disapproval: “presently . . . ‘help me get rid of the dirty trick’ figured in my prayer” (Forster qtd. in Moffat 32). Moffat notes that

Lily’s “invocation of Christianity was the first step in the separation of mother and son.

Encountering this boundary alerted him to things that could not be said, not even to his beloved mother” (32). Forster’s disagreement with Christian doctrines was cemented at university under the influence of Hugh Owen Meredith, one of his close friends: “Within weeks of meeting Morgan, Hugh boldly announced he was an atheist, and proceeded to separate Morgan from the last remnants of his faith” (44). This might imply that Forster just blindly followed his friend. However, refusing Christianity was not a rash decision on his part. He did not give up his faith without giving the matter proper consideration. He spent

86 time “examining the Gospels carefully to discern the personality of Christ” (45) and reached the following conclusion: “So much moving away from worldliness towards preaching and threats, so much emphasis on followers, on an elite, so little intellectual power . . . such an absence of humour and fun that my blood chilled” (Forster qtd. in Moffat 45, original ellipsis). His rejection of Christianity was sealed by his tour around Italy, which helped him realise another major problem within the religion; he came to believe that “Christianity had fatally separated the soul from bodily pleasure” (Moffat 70). This is where he saw a profound difference between Italians and the English: “The Italians had retained the classical ideal:

‘[C]herish the body and you will cherish the soul. This was the belief of the Greeks. The belief in wearing away the body by penance in order that the quivering soul might be exposed had not yet entered the world’” (Forster qtd. in Moffat 60). Often choosing Italy as the setting of his works, Forster played with the contrast between the two nationalities, believing that the

English could learn a great deal from Italians. Indeed, he was convinced that “passion was the key to redeeming the English soul” (Moffat 70). On the whole, his homosexuality and his rejection of Christianity came to be “the two great discoveries of his youth” (65).

“The Story of a Panic”: The Conflict between Nature and Nurture

“The Story of a Panic” takes place in Ravello, a town in southern Italy, where Forster claimed to have gained the inspiration. The setting is quite congenial to the homoerotic theme of the story, for Italy was at that time very popular with homosexual men. But the choice of the narrator is quite peculiar. The story is presented through the perspective of the priggish and opinionated Mr Tytler, who seems to be a caricature of a Victorian Englishman.

Although he promises to “give an unbiassed [sic] account of the extraordinary events of eight years ago” (Forster 9), his depiction is necessarily skewed by his prejudices against Italians

(29) and the working class, and he judges other characters based on how much they conform to Victorian values. His racial prejudice is reflected in his comment on the trees in Italy:

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“Those sweet chestnuts of the South are puny striplings compared with our robust

Northerners” (12). The comparable weakness of the Italian trees to the English ones suggests that, in his view, the environment determines the nature of its denizens. Commenting on the form of the story, Moffat points out that the basis is informed by Ovid’s “fantasy of metamorphosis,” but the choice of the narrator is Forster’s innovation: “ . . . male, married, middle-class, middle-aged . . . Never has a more pedestrian mind encountered bacchanalian forces” (61). Herz attributes the disparity between the narrator and the perspective with which the reader regards the story to Hermes, the trickster god to whom Forster devoted the short stories: Hermes “informs the controlling point of view, which is often distinct from the teller of the tale. For the narrators can be dull and uncomprehending, unaware of the story that is really happening on the other side of their narration” (30). Merivale explains the effect of this type of narrator on the reader. In her view, Forster employs a strategy previously used by other writers discussed in her chapter “Sinister Pan,” such as Machen in The Great God Pan,

Saki in “The Music on the Hill” (1911), E. F. Benson in “The Man Who Went Too Far”

(1912), and Stephen McKenna in The Oldest God (1926):

[I]f they, sturdy, normal, sane, unimaginative Britons, were convinced of the existence of Pan as seen in his effect on their oversensitive and recently deceased friends, and it takes little more than hoofprints and the goaty smell to convince them, why should we not be? Forster improves upon this same narrative formula. Tytler, who betrays himself as not only insensitive but actually hostile to the life of the spirit, has himself felt inexplicable terror and seen the hoofprints. How can we not believe him? (181, original emphasis)

The narrator is, thus, a textual strategy that makes the story more credible (within the constraints of fiction), compensating for the whimsy and implausibility associated with the genre of fantasy.

The story revolves around a day on which the narrator and other guests at the hotel decide to go for a picnic “up in the chestnut woods” (Forster 10). The theme of the story is the clash between two contrasting ways of life: English and Italian. Believing that “the best

88 lessons of Italy for the Englishman were corporeal” (Moffat 60), Forster makes the god Pan teach the refined and self-righteous English a lesson. He himself describes the idea behind the story as follows: “I would bring some middle-class Britishers to picnic in this remote spot, I would expose their vulgarity, I would cause them to be terribly frightened they knew not why, and I would make it clear by subsequent events that they had encountered and offended the Great God Pan” (Forster qtd. in Moffat 61).

The god Pan is first brought up when the company of the English tourists sits down in a clearing and the artist Leyland complains about cutting down trees: “It is through us, and to our shame, that the Nereids have left the waters and the Oreads the mountains, that the woods no longer give shelter to Pan” (Forster 13). This meets with a reaction from the curate, Mr

Sandbach, who gives a sermon-like lecture about the death of Pan: “‘Pan!’ cried Mr

Sandbach, his mellow voice filling the valley as if it had been a great green church, ‘Pan is dead. That is why the woods do not shelter him. And he began to tell the striking story of the mariners who were sailing near the coast at the time of the birth of Christ, and three times heard a loud voice saying: ‘The great God Pan is dead’” (13). It is noteworthy that the death of Pan is described by a curate, who has a rather dismissive attitude towards the topic; when

Rose expresses her interest in “ancient history” (13), the curate replies “It is not worth your notice” (13). Undoubtedly, this is one of the things that offend the god and trigger his response. Mr Sandbach’s attitude evokes the opposition between Christianity and Paganism, supported by Forster’s rejection of the former. However, this opposition is problematised in

“The Curate’s Friend.” Here, Mr Sandbach’s behaviour stands in contrast to Henry, a curate who is much more receptive towards Paganism and manages to reconcile the two religions.

Significantly, Henry is a much more likeable character than the serious Mr Sandbach. What differentiates him from the other curate is a sense of humour, a quality which Forster found lacking in the figure of Jesus.

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As if in response to Mr Sandbach’s proclamation of his death, Pan’s presence is felt when the company is overcome by a sudden, inexplicable feeling of panic:

I became terribly frightened, more frightened than I ever wish to become again, frightened in a way I never have known either before or after. And in the eyes of the others, too, I saw blank, expressionless fear, while their mouths strove in vain to speak and their hands to gesticulate. Yet, all around us were prosperity, beauty, and peace, and all was motionless, save the cat’s-paw of wind, now travelling up the ridge on which we stood. (Forster 14) The fact that there is no apparent cause for this feeling since the tourists are surrounded by

“prosperity, beauty and peace” underscores their irrational behaviour. Indeed, they respond to their basic instincts and, like a herd, begin to stampede, being utterly deprived of their senses:

I saw nothing and heard nothing and felt nothing, since all the channels of sense and reason were blocked. It was not the spiritual fear that one has known at other times, but brutal, overmastering, physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes. And it was no ordinary humiliation that survived; for I had been afraid, not as a man, but as a beast. (15) Italy taught the English tourists a corporeal lesson indeed. The feeling of panic reduces the respectable, refined, and possibly repressed English to their animal nature, reminding them of their not so refined origins. In this episode, the human realm approaches the animal one, evoking Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. And what better agent to trigger this than the liminal god Pan with his half-beast/half-human appearance. The panic ceases as suddenly and

“without cause” (15) as it began. Having calmed down and discovered that they are missing a member of their company, the English tourists decide to return to the clearing.

The missing person is Eustace, “a boy of about fourteen” (Forster 9), who frequently meets with the narrator’s disapproval because he does not fit his idea of a healthy English boy: “[H]is features were pale, his chest contracted, and his muscles undeveloped. His aunts thought him delicate; what he really needed was discipline” (10). The intensity of Tytler’s aversion to the boy is revealed when he characterises him as “indescribably repellent” (9).

Nevertheless, this does not prevent Tytler from trying to turn Eustace into a proper young

Englishman, perhaps in an effort to uphold the respectability of the English abroad. Actually,

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Tytler’s personality and the values he holds seem to be the product of the public school system, which Forster hated. Moffat notes that he “was supremely ill-suited to the public school ethos, with its hierarchies of power and its emphasis on manly sport, and he quickly came to hate it with a fervor he sustained into old age” (34). With his disdain for working class Italians, his outrage when observing the class boundaries being transgressed, and the emphasis he puts on physical activity as a remedy for Eustace’s character flaws, Tytler embodies the values Forster despised. Like Forster, Eustace is utterly unfit for the public school mindset.

Eustace’s difference is further enhanced by the fact that he is not affected by the feeling of panic the rest of the company experiences. When they return to the clearing, they found him “lying motionless on his back” (Forster 16). Contrary to their expectations,

Eustace “opened his eyes and smiled” (17). Far from being frightened, he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed Pan’s visit, which transpires from his conversation with Mrs Tytler, the narrator’s wife:

‘Well, Mr Eustace,’ she said, . . . ‘how have you been amusing yourself since we have been away?’ ‘Thank you, Mrs Tytler, I have been very happy.’ ‘And where have you been?’ ‘Here.’ ‘And lying down all the time, you idle boy?’ ‘No, not all the time.’ ‘What were you doing before?’ ‘Oh; standing or sitting.’ (17)

Eustace’s answers hint at his sexual frolics with Pan, which is further supported by the fact that, when they found him, his hand “was convulsively entwined in the long grass” (17).

Based on what he is saying, it was not because he was frightened. On the contrary, the passage seems to describe the reaction of his body to orgasm. This is where the word “panic” in the title of the story acquires a double meaning, although it was not intended by the author, as Elizabeth Wood Ellem points out (and as has been noted earlier), since Forster was at first

91 oblivious to the homosexual reading of the story (90, note). After the incident, Eustace

“seemed so natural and undisturbed” (Forster 17), which, coupled with his “disquieting smile” (17), is all the more disturbing for the other members of the company. The exception is Rose, the narrator’s daughter, who “with more freedom than she generally displayed, ran her fingers through the boy’s tousled hair” (17) and is eager to hear what has happened:

“‘Eustace! Eustace!’ she said hurriedly, ‘tell me everything - every single thing’” (17). Pan’s visit seems to have influenced her behaviour as well, making her more at ease. Moreover, it turns out that she was not affected by the panic in the same way as the others. Despite being frightened, she would “have stopped . . . if [she] had not seen mamma go” (16). The visit of

Pan then affected the younger members of the group differently from the older ones. This disparity echoes the myth of Pan’s birth, according to which his nurse ran away in terror upon beholding him, whereas the gods on Olympus were delighted when they saw him and heard his charming laughter. This suggests that Eustace and Rose are closer to the divine than the older members of the company.

The change that Eustace undergoes is profound. The previously listless, sullen, sickly looking teenager is suddenly brimming with energy. Upon discovering the “goat’s footmarks” (Forster 18), a sign of Pan’s presence, he rolls in them “as a dog rolls in dirt”

(18), further expressing the sheer happiness he feels, his indifference to propriety, and perhaps the acceptance of the animal part of his nature. This is also symbolised by the lizard, which “dart[s] out under his shirt-cuff” (16) when he is found by the others. According to

Merivale, this indicates that “he is now closer to Nature” (182), but Hai offers a different reading, arguing that the lizard is “a suggestion of his new sexuality, his link with the serpentine, phallic, earthy, animal world” (232), which also fits in better with Tytler’s reaction to seeing the reptile. Indeed, without the homoerotic interpretation of the incident,

“unspeakable horror” (Forster 16) would seem rather exaggerated. On the whole, however,

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Eustace’s transformation is initially viewed positively by the narrator: “[Eustace] stepped out manfully, for the first time in his life, holding his head up and taking deep draughts of air into his chest. I observed with satisfaction to Miss Mary Robinson that Eustace was at last taking some pride in his personal appearance” (19). Whereas Mr Sandbach is suspicious of this change, the narrator acknowledges that Eustace is “right enough – improved, if anything”

(19). In other words, now he (apparently) matches the Edwardian idea of masculinity: he is

“racing about, like a real boy” (20). Furthermore, the encounter with Pan seems to have awakened Eustace to the beauty of Nature; he is climbing onto rocks and picking flowers (19,

20) and the woods seem to invigorate him even more: “Each time Eustace returned from the wood his spirits were higher” (20). What is more, he also becomes musical, singing his answer to the question why he wants to see Gennaro, and dancing: “‘Because, because I do, I do; because, because I do.’ He danced away into the darkening wood to the rhythm of his words” (20). This is another symptom of Pan’s influence on Eustace, for he “is a god not only of the body, of the Dionysiac spirit, but also of song. His invocation and appearance suggest both the inspiration of the creative urge and the fulfillment of Forster’s aspiration to integrate the carnal into literature, and particularly to speak the unspeakable body” (Hai 233).

It is the carnal aspect of Eustace’s transformation that is met by the otherwise relieved

English tourists with growing uneasiness. Eustace insists on seeing Gennaro, the Italian waiter whom the narrator despises for his lack of manners and his inability to speak English properly. Upon finding Gennaro, Eustace “leapt right up into his arms, and put his own arms round his neck” (Forster 21-22). The reason the English tourists find this so disturbing is the fact that Eustace has broken two important boundaries—those of gender and class. According to the prevailing conventions, men were not supposed to be this intimate with each other, especially in public. What is more, as the scandalised narrator points out, Eustace cannot behave like this with “social inferiors” (22). Tytler is outraged again when Gennaro

93 reciprocates this intimacy and uses “the second person singular – a form only used when addressing those who are both intimates and equals” (23), when speaking to Eustace: “an impertinence of this kind was an affront to us all, and I was determined to speak, and to speak at once” (23). It is only Rose who does not feel offended by this, maintaining that “everything was excusable” (22). Consequently, the encounter with Pan also has “political consequences” for Eustace, effecting “his shift to an egalitarian vision” (Hai 233). This is where the meaning of Eustace’s name becomes significant; after his encounter with Pan, Eustace “entered a new, good state: status bono or Eu-stace. Hence it would seem that the encounter produces in him not only a (homo)sexual awakening but a pan-urge to question social or political inequity, to abandon restrictions not only of sex but also of race, class, and gender” (233).

Eustace’s transformation, manifesting itself in his unprecedented liveliness and talkativeness signifies his release from repression, which is presented as threatening in

Machen, but liberating in Forster (at least in the case of Eustace). As Merivale puts it,

Eustace’s encounter with Pan and the following transformation, which “perfects his humanity by bringing him into intimacy with nature . . . spoils him for the Anglo-Saxons and makes him a brother of the Italians” (181). Pan’s visit seems to work as a test of character. It generally divides the characters along the national lines, with the English being terrified by him while the Italians consider him a benevolent force. Indeed, Mr Sandbach, the curate, immediately interprets the goat’s footmarks as the sign of the devil: “The Evil One has been very near us in bodily form” (Forster 18). This is in contrast to the reaction of the old Italian woman whom Eustace kisses and to whom he gives flowers. Although everybody is astonished by this event, worrying about Eustace’s sanity, “she herself had put the flowers in her bosom, and was murmuring blessings” (21). Still worshipping the old gods, the old woman believes herself to have been blessed by Pan. Nevertheless, the division of the characters is not black and white. Pan’s visit reveals a potential for change, not only in

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Eustace, but also in Rose, in other words, in the younger generation of the English tourists.

The Graeco-Roman god is then perceived differently by the characters in the story: whereas for Eustace, Gennaro, the old woman, and Rose, Pan is a benevolent figure, for the others, it is a source of evil. Accordingly, only the latter are susceptible to the feeling of panic.

An interesting case is the artist Leyland, who, one would expect, should welcome Pan as the spirit of Nature, judging not only by his vocation, but also by his proclamations, such as the following: “‘All the poetry is going from Nature,’ he cried, ‘her lakes and marshes are drained, her seas banked up, her forests cut down. Everywhere we see the vulgarity of desolation spreading’” (Forster 12). In fact, Leyland is the first to mention Pan: “‘[W]e are all hopelessly steeped in vulgarity. I do not except myself. It is through us, and to our shame, that the Nereids have left the waters and the Oreads the mountains, that the woods no longer give shelter to Pan’” (13). However, when he describes “the line of the hill” against the sky as “intolerably straight” and the colours as “monotonous and crude” (11), it turns out that

“like the poet Gray, who asked for a little more art to make a landscape satisfyingly picturesque, Leyland wishes to improve what nature provides” (Merivale 182). What is more,

Pan’s presence makes him flee in panic, just like the others, revealing him a sham. This is also indicated in his relationship to Eustace; Leyland does not feel any affinity to him before

Eustace’s encounter with Pan, and his opinion does not change after Eustace’s transformation, surpassing even the narrator in his criticism. Indeed, as Merivale notes,

Leyland “disapproves (in his effeteness, it is implied) of Eustace’s displays of primitive energy, finds the boy’s raptures over the beauties of nature to be ‘diabolical caricature’”

(182). Furthermore, he breaks Eustace’s whistle, a symbolic connection to the god, as

Merivale points out: “however excruciatingly discordant it may sound to the civilized, [the whistle] represents the pipes of Pan in this story” (182). Finally, when Tytler discovers that

Eustace has left his room and is frolicking in the garden, Leyland is keen to assist in his

95 capture. This seems to be another test of character, which Leyland has failed, proving to be a pretentious hypocrite. On the whole, Leyland seems to stand for a stereotypical aesthete, with his effeteness and preference for artificiality (despite his proclamations). Consequently, this implies that Forster either disapproved of the strain of Decadence represented by writers such as Oscar Wilde, or using the contrasting characters of Leyland and Eustace offered a way of distinguishing between those for whom poetry is just a pose and true poets. Forster was familiar with Wilde’s writing, having read his works extensively (Herz 12). Herz discusses

Forster’s relationship to Wilde and Walter Pater, noting that, while he was interested in the subject matter of their writing, he disliked the typically Decadent style:

Pater could be called ‘great’, Forster wrote, because he had ‘something to say’. But Pater’s style was ‘too fastidious and involved with no trace of raciness’, nor ‘could . . . [he] reconstruct other people’s lives, he had not the dramatic sense’ (n.d., KCC). Earlier, in a diary entry, Forster had talked of ‘an absence of vulgarity [in Pater’s prose] which is something like fatal’ (2 May 1905, KCC). (Forster qtd. in Herz 16)

In contrast to Aesthetes and Decadents, then, Forster preferred an earthier style, more in touch with the body. What Forster later appreciated about Pater, however, and what distinguished him from “Wilde and the aesthetes” (Forster qtd. in Herz 16), was “an instinctive hatred of triviality. He was not content with feeling a sensation: he insisted . . . on estimating its value” (Forster qtd. in Herz 16). Leyland, thus, seems to embody the qualities of which Forster disapproved in Aesthetes and Decadents.

The full extent of Eustace’s transformation shows in the final part of the story. The narrator is awoken by a feeling of apprehension so strong that it approaches the panic he experienced the day before: “[I]mmediately, before my eyes were open, cold terrible fear seized me – not fear of something that was happening, like the fear in the wood, but fear of something that might happen” (Forster 24). The fact that Tytler felt this even before he opened his eyes, coupled with the fact that the impulse was only hypothetical, “something

96 that might happen,” underscores the irrational, instinctual nature of the feeling. His animal instincts resurface to alert him to the presence of Pan’s spirit again:

Trembling all over, I stole to the window. There, pattering up and down the asphalt paths, was something white. I was too much alarmed to see clearly; and in the uncertain light of the stars the thing took all manner of curious shapes. Now it was a great dog, now an enormous white bat, now a mass of quickly travelling cloud. It would bounce like a ball, or take short flights like a bird, or glide slowly like a wraith. (25). Eustace is enjoying a complete liberation from convention and propriety, the freedom of being and doing whatever he pleases no matter what the others might think of it. Imitating the movements of various animals, he seems to be experimenting with different identities. This symbolic shape-shifting could express his rejection of the social categories he was confined to―that is, an upper-class male. Moreover, he seems to have achieved what Dr Raymond aimed at in Machen’s The Great God Pan, although, unlike Mary, Eustace did not go mad after seeing Pan: “‘I understand almost everything,’ I heard him say. ‘The trees, hills, stars, water, I can see all. But isn’t it odd! I can’t make out men a bit. . . .’” (29). Eustace’s claim recalls the (significant, albeit mistaken) idea that “Pan” means “all.” It suggests that he understands Nature, but is losing his grip on civilisation. Actually, the passage evokes Ralph

Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature (1836): “I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances, ― master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty” (13). The sentence “The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental” is echoed in Eustace’s claim that he “can’t make out men a bit”; they are not important and only seem “a trifle,” just like the petty concerns about the seeming superiority of one class of people over another. Like Emerson, Eustace becomes “the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty” and is overflowing with the desire to express these insights, using music and poetry: “He had stopped his running, and was singing, first low,

97 then loud – singing five-finger exercises, scales, hymn tunes, scraps of Wagner – anything that came into his head” (Forster 26). Nevertheless, this meets with incomprehension from the narrator: “[H]ere was a boy, with no sense of beauty and a puerile command of words, attempting to tackle themes which the greatest poets have found almost beyond their power.

Eustace Robinson, aged fourteen, was standing in his nightshirt saluting, praising, and blessing the great forces and manifestations of Nature” (26). And yet it is Eustace who “can see all” and understands everything, unlike the philistine narrator, so Tytler’s taste is probably not to be relied on.

The only one who truly understands Eustace is Gennaro, who has had the same experience. He tries to make the others understand what Eustace is experiencing: “‘I understand, but I cannot explain. I am a poor Italian fisher-lad. Yet, listen: I will try.’ . . . he sat down on the edge of the table and started off, with some absolutely incoherent remarks”

(Forster 31). Gennaro fails to communicate what he means not only because of his poor command of English, but also because expressing what he has experienced in language means to translate it into concepts and logical relations. And, in this case, language does not seem to be an adequate means of expression.

Eustace loses the ability to “see all” when he is captured and closed in his room. He is

“sobbing bitterly, and saying: ‘I nearly saw everything, and now I can see nothing at all’”

(Forster 30). He repeats that he hates his bedroom because “it is too small” (25). He needs an open space outdoors to run around and he loses his connection to Nature. What is more, if he remains isolated in his room, he will die, as Gennaro maintains (31). Gennaro also explains why he himself has survived: “‘I am alive now . . . because I had neither parents nor relatives nor friends, so that, when the first night came, I could run through the woods, and climb the rocks, and plunge into the water, until I had accomplished my desire!’” (32). In other words, he had nobody to restrain him in the time when his desire to be outdoors was most acute,

98 nobody to impose social constrictions on him. Eustace’s bedroom is, then, a physical constraint that symbolises the social and moral constraints he has had to endure: as “the artificial construct of society” (Hai 234), the house and “the cloistered interiors . . . represent social convention and containment” (223).

But Eustace does not die. Gennaro saves him by taking him in his arms and jumping out of the window of his bedroom, avoiding Mr Tytler, Mr Sandbach, and Leyland who are in pursuit of them: “[A]s soon as his bare feet touched the clods of earth he uttered a strange loud cry, such as I should not have thought the human voice could have produced, and disappeared among the trees below” (Forster 33). Eustace’s jump out of the window coupled with his cry, expressing the joy of newly gained freedom, is reminiscent of Peter Pan and his rapturous cries. After all, the play appeared on stage in 1904, the same year as “The Story of a Panic” was published (although it had been written two years earlier). The fact that Tytler thought it was impossible for a human to make that sound underscores the animal nature of the cry, linking it further to Peter Pan’s crowing.

The reader does not know what happens to Eustace after he flees, but there are two hints in the text. Describing Eustace’s facial expression, the “disquieting smile” (Forster 17), when they find him after the episode of panic, Tytler says that he has “often seen that peculiar smile both on the possessor’s face and on the photographs of him that are beginning to get into the illustrated papers” (17). The smile seems to highlight Eustace’s unconventionality, since, as Tytler notes, it “always seemed to be without adequate reason” (17). Tytler’s remark about the newspapers acquires significance when it is judged along with the first sentence of the story: “Eustace’s career – if career it can be called – certainly dates from that afternoon in the chestnut woods above Ravello” (9). Eustace’s career thus began after his transformation, when he stopped regarding convention and discharged all that creative energy associated with

99 his repressed sexuality. This suggests that he may have become a famous artist or possibly a notorious celebrity, echoing perhaps the trials of Oscar Wilde, or both.

“The Story of a Panic” is a story about a boy who has managed to get out of the fetters of Edwardian social constraints, which he, as a homosexual, necessarily finds repressive. For Eustace, then, Pan is a liberating force, ridding him of a burden that has been weighing on him until their encounter. The significance of this liberation shows in the dramatic transformation Eustace undergoes after the encounter; his behaviour is no longer limited by considering whether his actions are appropriate or not. He is no longer troubled by the prevailing conventions and embraces Nature, meaning not only the world of animals and plants, but also nature as opposed to civilisation, his instincts. This corresponds to what R. A.

Scott-James wrote about Pan; he “equates the Pan spirit with a ‘belief in the natural, the spontaneous, the unashamed’” (qtd. in Merivale 185). Similarly, F. R. Leavis, contrasting

Forster’s novels with his short stories, points out that “Italy, in those novels, represents the bent of interest that Pan and the other symbols represent in the tales . . . a radical dissatisfaction with civilization” (qtd. in Merivale 185; Leavis 296). For the other English tourists in the story, however, (except perhaps for Rose) the social constraints are not a burden, but a source of safety, protecting them from chaos. That is why, when the constraints are suspended, they run away in terror. For the conformist, civilised, upper-class English tourists, Pan is, thus, a menace, reducing them to the animals that in their essence they are, as demonstrated by Darwin’s discoveries. The story thus points to the artificiality of the conventions that English society was based on, challenging the supposed superiority of the

English over other nationalities, such as Italians, in which many of Forster’s contemporaries

(represented in the story by the narrator Tytler) firmly believed and which was one of the cornerstones of their identity. Nevertheless, it is necessary to point out that Forster did not argue for the complete suspension of conventions and living with complete harmony with

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Nature. After all, compared to the younger generation of modernist writers, Forster was fairly conventional. Actually, this was one of the questions that concerned him, the “‘question I am always discussing with myself’―‘whether I am conventional or not’” (Forster qtd. in Moffat

69). According to Moffat, “The oscillation between conventional and not was in his marrow”

(70, original emphasis). What he seems to be doing in “The Story of a Panic” is criticising the excessive emphasis on convention that he found in Edwardian society, and his aim as a writer would be to “redefine the old conventions” (Moffat 69).

“The Curate’s Friend”: The Conflict between Respectability and Sincerity

“The Story of a Panic” is not the only short story in The Celestial Omnibus featuring a hybrid Pagan figure. Although Pan does not make an appearance in “The Curate’s Friend,” a figure in many ways similar to him does. Indeed, like Pan, the Faun has a liminal, half- human/half-animal nature, which is suitable for Forster’s treatment of the conflict between the civilised and the atavistic or instinctual. Moreover, “The Story of a Panic” and “The

Curate’s Friend” employ similar motifs, such as the association of Paganism with Nature and a disparity in perceiving the Pagan creature. Nevertheless, the nature of this disparity differs.

Whereas in “The Story of a Panic” Pan evoked diametrically opposed emotions in the English tourists―ecstasy in Eustace and panic in others, in “The Curate’s Friend” the disparity lies in the (in)ability to see the Faun at all. As the title indicates, the story centres on a curate, who, along with his then-fiancée Emily, her mother, and “a little friend” (Forster 87), decides to have their afternoon tea outside in “a small chalk down, crowned by a beech copse and a few

[apparently] Roman earthworks” (87). However, there is a growing sense of misunderstanding between the curate and the other three, stemming from the fact that only the curate is endowed with the ability to see the Faun that joins their company in the woods and begins to wreak havoc upon the curate’s relationship with Emily.

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Again, the Faun in this story is an apt symbol of the duality of human nature; in his hybrid body, the animalistic and cultivated aspects of human nature are reconciled. The unsettling nature of this hybridity is noted in the story, echoing The Great God Pan: “Now the Faun is of the kind who capers upon the Neo-Attic reliefs, and if you do not notice his ears or see his tail, you take him for a man and are horrified” (Forster 89). This hybridity is also at the core of the (un)ability to see him. The fact that only the curate can see the Faun is explained at the beginning of the story, when the narrator says: “There is nothing particularly classical about a faun: it is only that the Greeks and Italians have ever had the sharpest eyes”

(86). Forster seems to continue here the critique of the English started in “The Story of a

Panic” where he contrasted them with Italians. Of course, the opposition between the two nationalities is not absolute or insurmountable, and there are characters among the English who―in their mindsets―approach Italians, such as Eustace or Henry, the curate. The narrator (this time the curate himself) tries to pinpoint what exactly makes them different from their compatriots; what enables this heightened perception: “For to see him [a faun] there is required a certain quality, for which truthfulness is too cold a name and animal spirits too coarse a one” (86). Combining the two qualities, what is required is being true to one’s nature, not curbing one’s basic instincts excessively. The Faun himself attempts to explain the reasons for the (in)ability to see him: “‘No one else has seen me,’ he said, smiling idly.

‘The women have tight boots and the man has long hair. Those kinds never see. For years I have only spoken to children, and they lose sight of me as soon as they grow up’” (90). What seems to compromise the ability to see the Faun, then, is convention and social constrictions, suggested especially by the tightness of the women’s boots. Conforming to social constrictions is a necessary part of being civilised, which, however, distances us from our basic instincts, from our original nature. This is what the narrator might have meant by something between “truthfulness” and “animal spirits.” As Sigmund Freud argued in

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Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929), civilisation is only possible when we suppress our natural instincts, our id. This is the sacrifice that has to be made for civilisation to be possible; “it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction . . . of powerful instincts” (Freud 44).

In a way, then, the sacrifice consists in losing the sincerity to our selves. Of course,

Civilisation and Its Discontents was published much later than The Celestial Omnibus, and, even so, Forster “would later distance himself from Freud” (Moffat 71). Nevertheless, “The

Curate’s Friend” contains a germ of the idea that suppressing our nature is a problem, although in a much milder version. Forster seems to criticise the excessive suppression of nature, in other words of those instincts that are still compatible with civilisation.

The Faun’s comment about the uniqueness of children’s perception of nature, which is later marred by their upbringing (i.e. becoming civilised), echoes Emerson’s “Nature”: “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature . . . . The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood” (11). Only children (and poets) are capable of perceiving the beauty of Nature, ignoring its pragmatic aspects. Interestingly, there is an example of a poet in “The Curate’s Friend”―the little friend, who seems to be partially Leyland’s (albeit slightly more genuine) counterpart. Nevertheless, although he is described as “a pleasant youth, full of intelligence and poetry, especially of what he called the poetry of earth”

(Forster 87), he is unable to see the Faun. In this respect, his “long hair” criticised by the

Faun suggests that rather than truly being a Romantic poet, he fashions himself into the role of one. Here, the story corresponds again to Emerson’s essay: “The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ‘tis mere tinsel; is will not please as when

103 its light shines upon your necessary journey” (24). The little friend is too eager in his pursuit of the beauties of Nature, which makes him unable to truly see them.

Although the Faun must have seen some potential in the curate that differentiated him from the others, the curate himself had his fair share of insincerity. He describes his former self (before meeting the Faun) as being “facetious without humour and serious without conviction” (Forster 86). And he regards his former sermons with equal criticism: “Every

Tuesday I gave what I called ‘straight talks to my lads’ – talks which led straight past anything awkward” (86), implying that issues that must have troubled his parishioners, being a natural part of their lives, were not addressed because it would not be appropriate to discuss them. This is where Hai’s notion of “the unspeakable body and bodily desire” is evoked again, being suggested by the equivocal expression “straight.” The curate is looking back on his attempts at conforming to the social rules that he now recognises to be a pretence: “I took myself in, and for a time I certainly took in Emily” (86). Eventually, then, the Faun revealed to the curate his true self, making him take off the mask of a respectable Englishman, for himself if not for the others.

However, at one point, the Faun acquires a more sinister aspect when he says to the curate: “But you will not be able to lose sight of me, and until you die you will be my friend.

Now I begin to make you happy: lie upon your back or run races, or climb trees, or shall I get you blackberries, or harebells, or wives ―” (Forster 90). This is a possible reference to

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun. Although the Faun in Forster’s story seems to be more benevolent than the one in Hawthorne’s novel, his statement―despite containing the word “friend” and expressing a desire to make the curate happy―sounds like a menace; the curate has no say in the matter, and his newly acquired friendship could easily become a curse, like the one in The Marble Faun. The link with the novel is further supported by the curate’s referring to the Faun as “My tormentor” (92). Thus, at first, the curate seems to view

104 the Faun as a curse and struggles with the effect the Faun has on him―his heightened perception of Nature: “Already in the wood I was troubled by a multitude of voices – the voices of the hill beneath me, of the trees over my head, of the very insects in the bark of the tree. I could even hear the stream licking little pieces out of the meadows, and the meadows dreamily protesting” (90). This is where his difference from the rest of the company is most apparent, for the others are utterly oblivious to what is happening around them:

There was a little cry, faint but distinct, as of something in pain. ‘How silent it all is up here!’ said Emily. I dropped a lighted match on the grass, and again I heard the little cry. ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘I only said it was so silent,’ said Emily. ‘Silent, indeed,’ echoed the little friend. ‘Silent! the place was full of noises.’ (89)

The elements of Nature [grass and insects in this instance] are personified, crying in pain when burned by a lighted match.

At one point, the curate overcomes his anger; realising (what he considers) the Faun’s ignorance, he expresses pity for him and a desire to convert him, evoking the contrast between Paganism and Christianity: “‘Poor woodland creature!’ . . . ‘How could you understand? It was idle of me to chide you. It is not in your little nature to comprehend a life of self-denial. Ah! If only I could reach you!’” (Forster 90). The curate then says that he will accept the Faun’s “offer of service” if he helps him “to make others happy” (91), and he challenges him to demonstrate his powers by making Emily happy. The Faun does so, but his idea of happiness proves to be radically different from the curate’s. He makes Emily happy by provoking lust between her and the little friend: “They, who had only intended a little cultured flirtation, resisted him as long as they could, but were gradually urged into each other’s arms, and embraced with passion” (91). In this way, the Faun deliberately thwarts

Emily’s engagement to the curate. He defends himself thus: “Stand aside. You are in the presence of that which you do not understand. In the great solitude we have found ourselves

105 at last” (91). The quotation has homoerotic overtones, suggesting an encounter of two soulmates. As Hai notes, “Invisible and inaudible to those clouded by convention, the Faun . .

. represents both bodily and sexual truth, that is, not only the hidden world of homosexual society, but also the impulse of truth that ruptures convention to reveal suppressed desires”

(228), like Pan in “The Story of a Panic.” As Emily and the little friend leave and the curate falls to the ground “with every appearance of despair” (92, emphasis added), the Faun shows again that he knows what the curate desires better than the curate himself: “My tormentor made me look at him. ‘I see happiness at the bottom of your heart,’ said he. ‘I trust I have my secret springs,’ I answered stiffly. And then I prepared a scathing denunciation, but of all the words I might have said, I only said one and it began with ‘D’” (92). The Faun is not at all offended by being compared to the devil. On the contrary, he embraces the curate’s reaction:

“He gave a joyful cry, ‘Oh, now you really belong to us. To the end of your life you will swear when you are cross and laugh when you are happy. Now laugh!’” (92). The Faun’s cheerful response to the curate’s emotional reaction shows his appreciation of spontaneity and sincerity in the expression of feelings, as opposed to respectability and good manners, epitomized by the stiff upper lip, which was seen as a typical characteristic of an upper-class man. Seeing Emily and the little friend leave, the curate actually laughs, realising his liberation and completing his transformation.

Another aspect of the Faun’s influence over the curate, which has already been suggested, is the fact that Nature literally comes alive for him. Indeed, the elements of Nature are personified in the story, engaging in conversation with the Faun: “‘Does he cry?’ said the

Faun. ‘He does not cry,’ answered the hill. ‘His eyes are as dry as pebbles’” (Forster 92).

And, as the curate overcomes his initial reluctance, he begins to view them as living creatures:

That evening, for the first time, I heard the chalk downs singing to each other across the valleys, as they often do when the air is quiet and they have had a comfortable

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day. From my study window I could see the sunlit figure of the Faun, sitting before the beech copse as a man sits before his house. And as night came on I knew for certain that not only was he asleep but that the hills and woods were asleep also. (93)

As the curate embraces his friendship with the Faun, the initial sinister aspect disappears, with the story presenting an alternative relationship to the one described in The Marble Faun.

Here, the Faun is clearly seen as a blessing, not a curse: “The joy of that first evening is still clear in my memory, in spite of all the happy years that have followed” (93). By thwarting the curate’s relationship with Emily, preventing him from marrying her, the Faun saves him from the entrapment in convention, and the repression resulting from that, while, at the same time, preserving his image for his parishioners: “This is one of the rare occasions when

Forster is able to reconcile the greenwood with middle-class respectability” (Wood Ellem

91). However, he cannot dispense with the pretence completely and reveal the Faun’s presence. The curate, then, mediates the Faun’s beneficial influence on his parish. In fact, the curate’s relationship with the Faun reflects Forster’s (and Carpenter’s) idea of politics on a personal level.

Forster’s Greenwood: Shedding the Shackles of Civilisation

What both short stories share, apart from a Pan-like figure, is the motif of the greenwood. As Wood Ellem notes, the greenwood appeared repeatedly in Forster’s writing in the course of twelve years, but with different aspects (89):

In its simplest aspect, it is a refuge from the cultural and intellectual life: the habitat of the unspoilt, uneducated country-dweller. On other occasions it is a place of spontaneous joy, of incredible happiness, where the fortunate learn the secrets of Nature. In its final phase it becomes once more a place of refuge, but now the refugees, far from gladly relinquishing the world, are in reluctant exile from it. (89) “The Story of a Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend,” as well as “Other Kingdom” (1909), all feature the second kind of greenwood (89), which is described as “always a summer one, inhabited by Pan who possesses his chosen ones and makes them forever his. It is a joyous place, where one gains knowledge of Nature and a lifelong peace and happiness” (90).

107

Coincidentally, Wood Ellem’s description of Forster’s greenwood corresponds to Emerson’s statement “In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth” (12). The greenwood then becomes a place where the laws that govern society become momentarily suspended. For a brief, but life-changing moment, Nature beats nurture, freeing the chosen individuals from constraining conventions and revealing their true selves.

In this respect—in embracing Nature rather than artifice, Forster is more Romantic than Decadent, at least in the form of Decadence embodied by the dandy: “To the dandy the self is not an animal, but a gentleman. Instinctual reactions, passions and enthusiasms are animal, and thus abominable. Here the dandy temperament diverges most widely from the romantic” (Moeurs qtd. in Weir 62). Actually, the idea central to both “The Story of a Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend,” the dichotomy between the animalistic and the civilised parts of human nature, with the former being presented as more authentic, is succinctly expressed in the metaphor of a palimpsest that appeared in André Gide’s novel L’Immoraliste (1902). Its theme is a transformation of Michel, at first a typically Decadent protagonist with a taste for the arcane, “a sickly academic who has rejected life for ancient ruins and rare books” (Weir

142). But, after recovering from a serious illness, he becomes an anti-decadent, life-affirming character. Gide’s metaphor likens “the self to a palimpsest under which some earlier, more authentic text lies, obscured by the factitious text of excessive culture” (Weir 145-6); culture is compared to “a hard shell or rind (‘gaine’) that inhibits the spirit’s contact with nature”

(145). Weir considers Gide a predecessor of modernism, and in his analysis of L’Immoraliste juxtaposes Decadence and Modernism, seeing “modernity as a form of antidecadence” (139) and arguing that Michel’s transformation reflects Gide’s move from Decadence to Modernity,

“the process of transition from artificiality to spontaneity, from sickness to health, from a kind of decadence to something new and modern” (141, original emphasis). The expression

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“kind of decadence” is important here, as Weir’s description applies to the Decadence represented by the dandy. By contrast, Forster represents the third generation of Decadents, which is closer to Modernism. The difference is also evident in Forster’s style, which is by no means as ornate as Wilde’s. The focus is no longer on the surface, but on the content. To put it short, Forster’s writing is Decadent in its subject matter rather than its style.

At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the differences between Machen and

Forster, who are indeed contrasting personalities, and the contrasts are reflected in their works. In essence, their Pan is the same, a being that facilitates transgressive behaviour concerning, among other things, sexuality. But whereas for the conservative and religious

Machen this has disastrous consequences, for the liberal Forster the transgression has positive implications, being conducive to the reform of society. His essentially liberating Pan brings about a temporary suspension of social constraints, imposed on the individual by the heteronormative, class-conscious society. Forster’s greenwood with Pan as the spirit of

Nature represents an alternative environment which compensates for what is seen as the excess of civilisation, which causes repression in individuals who, like Forster, do not fit the norm. The real-world counterpart of Forster’s fantastic greenwood is Italy. The Italians and their way of life is seen as more authentic, affectionate, and more in touch with their body, as opposed to the reserved, repressed and alienated English, or as Moffat puts it, “The Story of a

Panic,” as well as Forster’s “subsequent fiction” captured “the contrast between the tumultuous warmth of Italy or India and the chilly English heart” (62). This reflects Forster’s

“preoccupation with emotional vitality, with the problem of living truly and freshly from a centre” (Leavis 296), in other words, with living in sincerity with oneself, which is what the

Faun in “The Curate’s Friend” facilitates for the curate, and through him, for the whole parish, and what Pan facilitates for the repressed Eustace. Unfortunately, Pan and Faun, despite being boundary-crossers, were confined to the fictional realm, unable to do for

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Forster what they did for his characters, and his struggle with repressing his homosexuality only ended with his life.

6. Pan as a Spirit of Nature and Psychopomp: Forrest Reid’s The

Garden God and “Pan’s Pupil”

Forrest Reid always looked rather deeper into scenery and nature than most of us do.

E. M. Forster qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber, p. 21.

Mr Forster’s heroes are the sort of men Forrest Reid’s boys might have grown into, if

Forrest Reid had allowed his boys to grow up.

Anonymous reviewer qtd. in Taylor, pp. 3-4.

Forrest Reid as ‘Pan in Ulster’

I began the previous chapter with pointing out the contrasts between Arthur Machen and E. M. Forster. As the quotation above already adumbrated, the present chapter starts with the similarities. Not only are the works of Forster and Forrest Reid (1875-1947) which are analysed here very close to each other in their date of publication. Their authors were also close friends, whose lifelong friendship started when Reid sent Forster his novel The

Bracknels (1911) (Kaylor, Tom Barber 164). Their shared literary sensibility was aptly described by an anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer quoted above: “Mr Forster’s heroes are the sort of men Forrest Reid’s boys might have grown into, if Forrest Reid had allowed his boys to grow up” (qtd. in Taylor 3-4). But Reid did not let his characters grow up; he belonged to the tradition of Uranian writing, which focused on boyhood. The Uranians were “a group of poets, artists, and prose writers who constituted a vague ‘fellowship of pederasts’ in England between roughly 1858 and 1930, a group who celebrated pederastic love and its attendant pedagogical practices, practices tracing back—or so the Uranians liked

110 to assert, however histrionically—to ancient Greece” (Kaylor, Garden God xix). Specifically,

Reid’s writing was part of “the distinctly ‘elevated’ tradition of Victorian and Edwardian pederastic literature” (xxxiv), as opposed to “the blatantly ‘carnal’ tradition established by

Pater’s former disciple Oscar Wilde—for, as Gerald Monsman explains, Wilde’s tradition is based on ‘seductive (mis)constructions of Paterian aesthetic theories’” (xxxv). The elevated tradition was Platonic, which means that Reid’s desire remained unfulfilled. Otherwise, the essential aspect of that desire—innocence—would disappear. As Michael Matthew Kaylor explains, “typical Uranian posturing involves an aesthetic proximity to the object of desire without that voyeuristic distance ever being transgressed, as is illustrated in Peter Pan”

(Garden God 82, note 22). There Peter dodges Wendy’s attempt to hug him, saying “You mustn’t touch me . . . No one must ever touch me” (qtd. in Garden God 82, note 22).

According to Brian Taylor, Reid’s sexuality is a “crucial” factor “in any interpretation of his life or appreciation of his work” (2), as in the case of Forster. Indeed, the hindrances connected with Reid’s sexuality necessarily affected his art: “Desertion and unreciprocated, sometimes unsuspected, love, the inevitable pains of pederasty, nourished Reid’s art and his response to his heart’s deepest longings formed and developed his particular genius” (175).

There is one more important aspect of Reid’s life that brings him close to Forster and that is his strongly anti-Christian stance: “Temperamentally I was antagonistic to this religion, to its doctrines, its theory of life, the shadow it cast across the earth”22 (Reid qtd. in

Kaylor, Tom Barber 17). The intensity of his feelings about the religion is conveyed in the following quotation:

I hated Sunday, I hated church, I hated Sunday School, I hated Bible stories, I hated everybody mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments, except perhaps the impenitent thief, Eve’s snake, and a few similar characters. And I never disguised these feelings. From dawn till sunset the day of rest was for me a day of storm and battle, renewed each week, and carried on for years with a pertinacity that now seems

22 Apostate, p. 204. 111

hardly credible, till at length the opposition was exhausted and I was allowed to go my own way.23 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 13) Like Victor Benjamin Neuburg and Aleister Crowley (who are discussed in the next chapter),

Reid grew to detest the religion in which he was brought up, and his animosity “lasted a lifetime” (Kaylor, Garden God xxii). Therefore, it was only appropriate for him to call his first biography Apostate (1926), signifying, as is does, his renouncement of Christianity and his embracement of Paganism. As Kaylor notes, Apostate “suggests his lifelong affinity with—if not near-worship of—the Greco-Roman deities he saw as infusing the physical world, namely Pan and Hermes” (Kaylor, Tom Barber 18). In Reid’s own words: “My deities were the Arcadian gods, the lesser gods, Pan and Hermes. . . . These gods I loved because they had human limitations, were beautiful and strong and passionate . . . and had morals not very different from my own”24 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 18). Again, he shares his preference for Pan and Hermes with Forster, who wrote about the former and dedicated his collection of short stories to the latter. Similarly to Forster, who did not like Christ because he seemed to have no sense of humour, Reid prefers the Arcadian gods for being more human, which is even more evident here: “The deities I invoked, or evoked, were friendly, and more than half human; they were the deities of the poet and the sculptor”25 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor,

Garden God 81, note 18). At the same time, however, he found them more divine, more worthy of admiration: “It seems to me that they possess more godlike qualities and that their cult inspires a nobler as well as more beautiful view of life …” (Reid qtd. in Taylor 29).

About Arcadia itself, Reid writes enthusiastically: “‘My world! My world!’ I could have shouted . . . There—there—or nowhere. It was the only heaven I wanted, or ever was to want”26 (qtd. in Kaylor, Garden God 81, note 18). What made Arcadia a heaven for Reid was, among other things, its pederastic associations; as Kaylor points out “Pater’s most

23 Apostate, p. 19. 24 Apostate, pp. 210-211. 25 Apostate, p. 211. 26 Apostate, pp. 27-28. 112 pederastic essay, ‘Winckelmann,’ in The Renaissance, has as its epigraph Et ego in Arcadia fui, literally ‘I too have been in Arcadia’” (Garden God 81, note 18). What the title of Reid’s first biography also evokes is the historical figure of “Flavius Claudius Julianus, or ‘Julian the Apostate,’ the last pagan Emperor of Rome, who watched the grandeur of the ancient world crumbling beneath the puritanical advance of Christianity and, apocryphally, voiced from his deathbed: Vicisti, Galilæe—‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’” (Kaylor, Tom

Barber 20). As Kaylor notes, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) used the same phrase to begin his poem “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866):

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. (qtd. in Tom Barber 20) These lines recall Reid’s above-quoted statement that Christianity cast a “shadow . . . across the earth.” Moreover, the same lines seem to reverberate in Neuburg’s poem “The Triumph of Pan” analysed in the next chapter.

There is one more aspect of Paganism that needs to be mentioned and that is Reid’s love of Nature. Having rejected Christianity and yet being deeply spiritual, he found divinity in Nature, embracing “Wordsworth’s pantheistic creed” and referring to it as “a higher paganism”27 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 22): “Wordsworth’s pantheism is a psychic experience, and my own state of mind comes nearer to it than to any other I can think of”28

(Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 21, note 3). However, Reid’s paganism was not restricted to the countryside. As Kaylor points out, “given the right time of day, the right context, this

‘higher paganism’ could even be experienced in an urban setting” (Tom Barber 22):

At night Bruges becomes wonderful. At night it is transformed, and seems to waken to a new and mysterious life. … Then one may feel—or at any rate I felt— that behind all this there is an enchantment—and I mean literally an enchantment—the spell of witchcraft. Is this most religious city given over at night to the powers of sorcery? … I became as suspicious, as credulous, as the hero of The Golden Ass; tales

27 Milk of Paradise, p. 14. 28 Private Road, p. 179. 113

of the grotesque and arabesque floated up in memory; a silhouette behind a blind, in the solitary lighted window of a dark narrow street, had a strange and sinister suggestiveness.29 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 22)

This passage, which comes from Reid’s essay “Bruges” published in May 1916, recalls the adventures of Machen’s heroes, and Reid’s “enchantment” seems to parallel Machen’s

“ecstasy” (although, unlike Reid, of course, Machen was an orthodox Christian). What follows is a passage from Machen’s novella “A Fragment of Life” (1906), which makes this link more apparent:

. . . he was already aware of the enchantment that was transmuting all the world about him, informing his life with a strange significance and romance. London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe. (217) What also connects the two writers is the love for the region in which they grew up. In Reid’s case, it was also the region where he spent most of his life (unlike Machen, who moved to

London). Reid loved the Ulster countryside (Taylor 27) and used it as a setting for his works.

However, although being provincial, he was certainly not nationalistic: “Provincialism was always a strong streak in Forrest Reid’s character, but it was a provincialism based upon a simple preference” (Taylor 28). Indeed, when the magazine Úlad, the aim of which was “to foster an Ulster Renaissance that would rival the Irish Renaissance blossoming in Dublin and elsewhere in the south” (Kaylor, Tom Barber 113-14), asked him: “How would you define . .

. the relevance of your art to these existing conditions,” Reid replied: “It has no more and no less relevance to them than the Odyssey has to the ‘existing conditions’ of the age of Homer, or than Midsummer Night’s Dreams has to those of Elizabethan age” (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom

Barber 114). The phrase “Pan in Ulster,” which has been used to characterise Reid, succinctly expresses the peculiar image of “this youthful nature worshipper convinced of the

Greek view of life, yet living in dull Presbyterian Belfast” (Taylor 19). Even more striking is

29 “Bruges,” Retrospective Adventures, pp. 200-206. 114 the fact that the name “Forrest Reid” “suggests woodlands and a whittled pipe” (Kaylor,

Garden God viii).

Having mentioned the link between Reid and some of the other authors addressed in the present thesis, I am also going to discuss his connection to J. M. Barrie (1860-1937), with whom he shared preoccupation with boyhood. Reid’s first biography Apostate only covers the first seventeen years of his life. Incidentally, that is also when he lost access to his dream world, a garden inhabited by his dream companion: “Somewhere about my sixteenth or seventeenth year, the whole thing was permanently cut off”30 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom

Barber 27). Like Barrie, he seems to have regretted (and perhaps resented) having had to grow up. As Taylor puts it: “[I]n his subsequent writing, he never really travelled beyond that part of the story. In a sense – perhaps the deepest sense – he never really travelled beyond the confines of his own adolescence” (26). Like Barrie, he seems to have derived a vicarious pleasure from writing about boyhood and returning to that part of his life in his works, since, in his own words, his protagonists were “mere pretexts for the author to live again through the years of his boyhood” (Reid qtd. in Taylor 4), and his writing was “really an attempt to get back to my mysterious garden”31 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17). Kaylor convincingly demonstrates the link between Reid and Barrie’s Peter Pan using the following quotation:

“The thought that I was growing older tormented me too. I wanted to be a boy always . . .”32

(Reid qtd. in Tom Barber 85), which clearly echoes The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.

The Garden God: Reid’s Dreamworld and Secret Companion

The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys was published in 1905 “during that vitriolic

‘decade of silence’” which followed Wilde’s trials (Kaylor, Garden God xxi). The stricter censorship associated with the period was probably the reason why Reid replaced the original

30 Apostate, pp. 76-77. 31 a letter to André Raffalovich, 1920. 32 Apostate, p. 218. 115

“daring” dedication expressing his feelings towards “his beloved friend Andrew Rutherford”

(xv) by an apparently safer dedication to Henry James, “the Master” to whom he looked up:

TO HENRY JAMES THIS SLIGHT TOKEN OF RESPECT AND ADMIRATION (Reid 3) The extent of his admiration for James transpires from the following quotation: “Every printed line the Master had written was in my possession, and I am not referring only to his books. I knew his work inside out. I was probably the only person in the world except himself who did know it like that, or who now ever will”33 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 100, note 1). Reid had written to James asking for permission to dedicate The Garden God to him.

The basis of the book was “his abandoned novel” The River, which Reid revised based on

Pater’s work, “whose imaginary portrait ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) . . . was then a particular favourite of his” (Kaylor, Tom Barber 79-80). However, James’s reaction to the dedication in The Garden God was entirely unexpected; he was “furious” due to the

“unmistakable note of eroticism” which underlies the story (Taylor 43). His reaction left an indelible negative impression on Reid, affecting his own view of the work: “[Henry James] never forgave me for The Garden God . . . When he read it, he was furious. I never got such a shock in my life. For the book, whatever one may think of it, was conceived and written in the most profound innocence. . . . All this in strictest confidence. I want the whole thing to be forgotten, the book with it”34 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 169). Reid had reason to believe that James had read and liked The Kingdom of Twilight, Reid’s first novel, which is

“in many ways, far more overtly erotic, even in a pederastic sense, than The Garden God.

Therefore, Reid must have pondered whether ‘the Master’ had ever actually read it” (Kaylor,

33 Private Road, p. 31. 34 an unpublished letter from Reid to Mark André Raffalovich, dated 28 March 1920. 116

Tom Barber 109). Unfortunately, Reid’s negative opinion on The Garden God never changed: “Towards the end of his life, he implored a friend who possessed a copy of The

Garden God to relegate it to ‘the darkest corner reserved for disowned juvenilia’” (Reid qtd. in Taylor 47). What is more, the dedication inevitably ended his relationship with the Master.

Reid kept sending him his works, but never received a reply (Taylor 44).

The story of The Garden God is a frame narrative. Graham Iddesleigh, a middle-aged man, is replying to a letter from Allingham, a friend from his studies at Oxford (Reid 5).

Looking around the room, his gaze fixes on a painting of a boy, and he starts reminiscing about his idyllic childhood and the boy with whom he had a very special relationship thirty years ago (9). The name “Allingham” looks like a blend of “Alan Cunningham,” a boy with whom Reid was in love when he was an adolescent. However, Kaylor notes that it “derived from William Allingham (1824-89), an Irish writer and a close friend and correspondent of

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), whose poetry plays a cardinal role in The Garden God”

(Garden God, 74, note 1). Nevertheless, Alan Cunningham provided the impetus for Reid’s writing The Garden God. This is how Reid characterises his relationship with Alan in

Apostate:

Half unconsciously I pursued this process of idealization [of Alan], until at last I came even to think he must in some mysterious way be connected with my dreamworld, and the longing to put this fantastic notion to the test began to haunt me. Such thoughts would come to me not so much during the day as during the long summer evenings, when we would sit side by side, under a creepered garden wall, with a book between us. . . . I did not really read, but only watched him reading.35 (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 33) As Kaylor notes, Alan would later appear in The Garden God as Harold Brocklehurst, with

Read himself appearing as Graham Iddesleigh (Tom Barber 34). About his feelings for Alan,

Reid writes: “For the first time I felt that I wanted to draw a being from the waking world across its threshold, and this being was the boy beside me”36 (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 34).

35 Apostate, p. 106. 36 Apostate, p. 107. 117

However, in the end he did not. One day, after the boys broke “into an empty house” (Kaylor,

Tom Barber 35), the spell was broken and Reid grew disenchanted: “It was in this cold and rather dreary light that I saw the boy beside me, nor could I even understand what I had before found so attractive about him. Yet only two evenings ago I had been on the point of pouring all my confidences into his ear! For this escape at least I was thankful”37 (qtd. in

Kaylor, Tom Barber 35). It was only when he made friends with Andrew Rutherford that his dream world approached the real one. Andrew was a new apprentice at Musgraves’, a company selling tea and sugar, where Reid served his apprenticeship (Taylor 21). And as

Reid was showing Andrew around and teaching him the tasks he had to do, he fell in love:

And through it all I was becoming more and more conscious of something pleasanter still, of an uplifting of the spirit that turned everything to beauty and filled my mind with sunlight…And thus began a friendship which . . . grew ever closer and deeper, till at last it seemed to draw into itself the two divergent streams of my life, so that for the first time, in dreaming and waking, they found a single channel…It was as if in my spirit a new day were breaking, transforming everything in the world around me, because I saw everything now in its fresh clear light.38 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 22-23) Reid’s dream world appears to have merged with the real world, with Andrew becoming his companion. While Alan had inspired Reid with the idea behind The Garden God, it was probably his relationship with Andrew that is reflected in the story. It was also Andrew to whom Reid had originally dedicated the novel before it was replaced by a safer dedication to

Henry James:

DEDICATION My little love tale I offer to you now; So slight a thing, So full of garden scents and flowers And noise of running water, Yet deep as secret lives— For I have strewn before my Garden God, And on his brow and on his pedestal, Flowers that once blossomed in my soul and yours— That dropped to us

37 Apostate, p. 116. 38 Apostate, p. 231. 118

From the wide opened door of heaven; And I have told, In every little sound of leaf and bird And softly splashing stream, Of nothing but my love Of nothing but my love for you, dear boy, Who walk within my garden evermore.

ENVOY When you have closed this book, lean back and dream Of him who made it, and the tender love He had for you: and how in every word He wrote of these two boys that love did seem To be foreshadowed, till at last above The lonely silence of his life he heard The god that spoke to bid his dream come true. (qtd. in Kaylor, Garden God xv-xvi) The dedication, which was, as Kaylor puts it, “as daring as could be—especially in 1905”

(Garden God xvi), anticipates the three major themes that appear in The Garden God: homoerotic love, the beauty of Nature, and the Pagan god Pan, who connects the two. Even the juxtaposition of Paganism and Christianity is adumbrated in Reid’s using the Christian notion of “heaven.” And, like the rest of Reid’s work, the dedication reads like a poem.

Graham, the main protagonist of The Garden God, had been brought up and—in his early years—educated by his father, who had taught him to read Greek, “and before Graham had ever heard of either Shakespeare or Milton, he had read again and again many of the writings of Sophocles and Plato” (Reid 10). This reflects Reid’s own extensive reading of

Greek writers. His thorough knowledge of Greek literature is the reason why Taylor describes

Reid’s paganism as “a secondhand, or at any rate a literary paganism, built up from the dialogues of Plato, the fragments of Sappho, from Theocritus and from the Homeric Hymns”

(19). The particular circumstances of Graham’s upbringing, coupled with an innate predisposition for imagination, and the wonderful countryside around him, nurtured his a capacity for dreaming: “Given such influences—his unconventional upbringing, his ignorance of the world, his beautiful surroundings—was it a wonder that that strange faculty for dreaming with which he had been born should have been perfected—perfected until in

119 broad daylight he would slip unconsciously from one world to the other” (Reid 10). This is the first mention of Graham’s dream world, which was based on Reid’s own, although, in his case, his capacity for vivid imagination, with which he was endowed, was encouraged by

Emma Holmes, his beloved nurse and “a powerful shaping force” in his life (Taylor 11):

“From the simple beginnings of Emma’s readings with the young Forrest sprang his life-long belief in an immanent world of the imagination” (10). The extraordinary intensity and peculiar quality of Reid’s imagination transpires from his autobiography:

Very early I perceived that one’s mind was swarming with ghosts; very early I became convinced that one had thoughts that were not one’s own thoughts, that one remembered things one had never been told (certainly not by Emma); and these thoughts and memories one could not speak of – not here, not now – though one could speak of them in the dream place. Only, there I did not need to speak of them: there, somehow, they were no longer thoughts, but things that happened – beautifully, wonderfully – so that I could have cried on awakening.39 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17) Reid’s dreams were no ordinary reflections of what happened during the day, but seemed to have a life of its own. The significance of his dream world is evident from the fact that, in his mind, he lead two lives, which were equally authentic: “one the external life…of games, collections, and the rest of it; the other private life haunted by visions of beauty and the longing for an ideal companion…and it never occurred to me to ask myself whether one were less real than the other”40 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17). Reid’s dream world is described in his first autobiography and deserves to be quoted at length:

The place was a kind of garden…Always when I first awakened I was in broad sunlight, on a low grassy hill that was no more than a gentle incline, sloping down to the shore. A summer sea stretched out below me, blue and calm. No white sail ever drifted across the horizon; no footsteps ever marked the unbroken crescent of the sandy beach…But I did not feel lonely…I was waiting for someone who had never failed me – my friend in this place, who was infinitely dearer to me than any friend I had on earth. And presently, out from the leafy shadow he bounded into the sunlight – a boy of about my own age, with eager parted lips and bright eyes. But he was more beautiful than anything else in the whole world, or in my imagination…from the moment I found myself on that hill-side I was happy.41 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17)

39 Apostate, p. 7. 40 Private Road, p. 15. 41 Apostate, p. 73 120

The surroundings of Reid’s dream world are noteworthy: “it was always summer, always a little after noon, and always the sun was shining” (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17). In this respect, it is remarkably similar to the circumstances in which Pan appears in Forster’s “The Story of a

Panic” and even Machen’s The Great God Pan (in Clarke’s vision before the experiment).

Also, it is completely devoid of other people, both on the sea, as there are no “white sail[s],” and on land, as the phrase “no footsteps” signifies. It is reserved for him and his companion.

Reid’s dream world was intrinsically connected with the companion he mentions above. Having refused the Christian god but being deeply spiritual and feeling the need for a god in whom he could believe, Reid searched for a god he would find congenial. In Private

Road (1940), his second biography, he writes “Looking back at the remote and rather lonely figure of the boy I wrote about in Apostate . . . I see him as sharing this very general, if not universal, desire for God. Only in his case it was a God”42 (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 18).

The indefinite article signifies that he was not searching for an abstract principle, but rather an individual, and one can see how paganism with its many diverse gods suited him much better than Christianity. What is more, the Pagan gods he particularly liked were the Arcadian deities, the ones who were perhaps the most human, Pan and Hermes. In Apostate, he describes Hermes as “a kind of divine playmate”43 (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 19), suggesting a personal relationship. Being highly imaginative, Reid created a personal god for himself: “Man has made God—many Gods indeed—in his own image—I have made one myself”44 (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 18). That was the secret companion of his dream world.

Reid’s dream world and his imaginary friend became the main theme of The Garden

God. Graham, Reid’s alter ego, describes him as his “secret playmate,” “the companion of his dreams—day-dreams and sleeping-dreams” (Reid 10). He regularly meets him in his

42 Private Road, p. 15. 43 Apostate, p. 211 44 Private Road, p. 15. 121

“dreamland” (22). But this time, his companion is closer to Pan than Hermes. Interestingly enough, there are quite a few parallels between Graham’s companion and Peter Pan. First, as

Kaylor points out, Graham’s dreamland is reminiscent of Peter Pan’s Neverland (Garden

God 81, note 21), a land made up of children’s dreams. Like Peter Pan, Graham’s playmate seems to have broken out of the dreamland and got into the real world. When Graham’s father sends him to school, he meets Harold Brocklehurst, a boy bearing an uncanny resemblance to his imaginary friend, who “had ceased to visit him” in his dreams at this point45 (Reid 16). The act of leaving home for school represents a clear break:

The visible world!—was it not almost sentient? From the trees and the sky, from the restless sea and the wind had emerged, at any rate, that imaginary playmate who the garden god had made his life beautiful; the messenger of Eros; the fair boy who had come to him from his strange garden, his meadow of asphodel. And then—he had gone to school. (Reid 12-13) Harold’s connection to Peter Pan is suggested again when he tells Graham about his former habit of escaping the dormitory at night through the window:

45 There is also a parallel between Reid’s dream companion and Edward Darnell’s imaginary companion in Machen’s “A Fragment of Life”: And as he recovered as best he could these lost dreams of an enchanted land, there came to him other images of his childhood, forgotten and yet not forgotten, dwelling unheeded in dark places of the memory, but ready to be summoned forth. He remembered one fantasy that had long haunted him. As he lay half asleep in the forest on one hot afternoon of that memorable visit to the country, he had ‘made believe’ that a little companion had come to him out of the blue mists and the green light beneath the leaves—a white girl with long black hair, who had played with him and whispered her secrets in his ear, as his father lay sleeping under a tree; and from that summer afternoon, day by day, she had been beside him; she had visited him in the wilderness of London, and even in recent years there had come to him now and again the sense of her presence, in the midst of the heat and turmoil of the City. The last visit he remembered well; it was a few weeks before he married, and from the depths of some futile task he had looked up with puzzled eyes, wondering why the close air suddenly grew scented with green leaves, why the murmur of the trees and the wash of the river on the reeds came to his ears; and then that sudden rapture to which he had given a name and an individuality possessed him utterly. (209). In The Garden God (published a year before “A Fragment of Life”), Graham’s dream companion leaves him when he goes to the public school, shortly before meeting Harold: . . . the old playmate of his dreams had ceased to visit him, that he could no longer even call up very clearly his image, remember what he was like. It was as if the change which had come into his everyday world had extended on into the dusky ways of sleep, and though he did not dwell upon it at all, yet he felt, obscurely, that something that had been had ceased to be, and that there was a blank, a void in his existence, which none of the many new pleasures and interests in his life would ever be able to fill. (Reid 16). In both works, then, Graham’s and Edward’s companions stop visiting them when they meet their real world counterparts. There are also similarities in the writing of both writers, which is marked by a wonderfully lyrical style and is—to a large extent— autobiographical. 122

‘. . . You see, I used to get out at night—not very often, but now and again—and they didn’t understand.’ ‘Get out?’ ‘Yes; through one of the windows. . . . And because I didn’t take anybody into my confidence, they were sure I was up to no good. . . . I had to go. . . . I can’t explain.’ ‘You mean, it wasn’t to do any harm?’ ‘It was only to be out there—to breathe the air, to be under the sky.’ ‘But in the daytime—couldn’t you——’ ‘No. I wanted to run in the moonlight; to run over the meadows; to bathe in the river; to be free.’ (36-37, original ellipses, original emphases) Harold’s urge to be outside and “free,” conveyed by the emphasis “I had to” recalls Eustace’s need to be outdoors after his encounter with Pan in Forster’s “The Story of a Panic” (1904), published a year earlier. What he also shares with Eustace is a disregard for conventions and authority. When Graham asks why he did not give the reason of his night walks to the teachers, he replies: “Oh, they are welcome to their thoughts. I’ve never in my life explained any of my actions, and I’m not going to begin now” (37). What Harold says next about his night wanderings supports the idea that he is indeed Graham’s secret playmate from his dreams:

‘Only a strange fancy I used to have at such moments. It was rather queer’—he smiled shyly. ‘I used to feel just as if I had gone back to the life I had always been accustomed to—as if I had just awakened, if you can understand—while the other, my ordinary life, appeared to be a kind of dull dream, a kind of captivity which I should have to return to, but which, nevertheless, was not real.’ (37) This could mean that the boys used to meet in Graham’s dreams while Harold was outside his dormitory at night. Going back to Harold’s similarity with Peter Pan, another thing they share is a bad memory; Harold only remembers the dreamland when Graham tells him about it

(38). And Graham, too, has trouble recollecting what has happened in the dreamland (21).

After all, dreams are—according to Jung and Freud—intrinsically connected to the unconscious. Finally, there is one more thing that Harold has in common with the Boy Who

Wouldn’t Grow Up: his untimely death has preserved his youth and beauty in Graham’s memory. When contemplating Harold’s painting, Graham—as a middle-aged man—says:

123

“Thus he had been when he had first met him; thus he was now; thus he would be for ever!

For he would never grow old—he would be a boy always” (9). This seems to be a direct reference to Peter Pan, who, like Harold, is a dead boy, with Neverland being something of an Otherworld.

The link between Graham’s secret companion and the god Pan is first suggested by the fact that Graham refers to him as “this Greek boy” (Reid 10) and later it is further supported by the fact that he “played on the flute of Pan” when they first met in Graham’s dreams (37). Likewise, Harold, Graham’s companion in the real world, is Greek in his appearance. He is described at the beginning of the narrative when Graham contemplates his painting:

. . . he beheld the full length figure of a boy—a boy of fifteen, sixteen, slight, dark- complexioned, with delicately oval face, and long silky hair falling in a single great wave over his forehead. The features were very finely moulded; the mouth especially being quite perfect. A somewhat exotic looking youngster, extraordinarily aristocratic one imagined, even a little disdainful,—yes, that too, perhaps, despite the wonderful charm of expression. (8-9) Later in the story, the symbolic implications of Harold’s Greek appearance are mentioned:

“His skin—contrasting with the broad linen collar he wore—was of that dark, olive-brown hue which the Greeks, in their own boys, believed to be indicative of courage” (19). Fatally,

Harold lives up to this description at the end of the story, upholding the virtue when he sacrifices his life while saving Graham’s. Of course, Harold’s appearance is no coincidence, since Graham’s dream companion is intrinsically connected to the culture of ancient Greece, as the cultural references show. Indeed, Graham seems to have got the idea of his imaginary friend based on “the broken statue, an antique version of the famous Spinario, which his father had come by . . . in one of his many wanderings through Greece. And it came suddenly into Graham’s mind that this statue was the centre from which everything had radiated; the touchstone around which his whole life had revolved. It was the beginning, then—the starting point” (10). Furthermore, when Graham and Harold play on the rocks after

124 they had bathed, Graham uses him as a model, making him imitate the statue of a “young woodland Faun”46 (59), the “Spinario,” the “Adorante,” “a youthful Dionysus” and

“Leonardo’s ‘Bacchus’” (59).

Another Greek reference is that Graham’s companion is described as “the messenger of Eros, the fair boy who had come to him from his strange garden, his meadow of asphodel”

(Reid 12-13). The comparison with Eros coupled with the adjective “fair” already reveals the nature of their relationship. It is not a simple friendship, but love; Platonic love to be precise.

Indeed, assuming that Harold is Graham’s secret playmate, the relationship of the two boys seems to be too pure and innocent to show any signs of lust, Graham’s admiration of Harold being aesthetic in nature: “For Graham, . . . he was beautiful as an angel—was, in truth, a kind of angel, a ‘son of the morning’” (19). This is also where Reid’s anti-Christian stance comes to light, comparing, as he does, Harold to Lucifer (Kaylor, Garden God 81, note 19).

Harold’s beauty is emphasised in the following passage, when Graham identifies him with his dream companion: “‘You were beautiful,’ he whispered under his breath; ‘more beautiful than any one I have ever seen’” (Reid 23). In fact, this fits in well with the concept of Eros as, in the Platonic sense, “Eros is the love of Beauty and of the Good” (Demos 339). It is a force of striving to an ideal: “the Eros is the primordial attraction of the actual by the idea” (339) as

“all things crave the Good by their very nature” (339-40). In fact, Graham’s story seems to be a symbolic expression of the following Platonic idea: “We already desire our ideal and then go about seeking an object toward which we might express that desire; love is recollection, it is a priori. This is the aspect of the inherent connection between the realms of transcendental things and of the flux” (340). Graham’s ideal (of a companion) had been revealed to him in his dreamland. Then he discovered his real-world counterpart in Harold Brocklehurst. In this

46 As Kaylor notes, the statue to which Graham refers may be “the famous Barberini Faun, a marble sculpture discovered in the Mausoleum of Hadrian, Rome” (Tom Barber, 95, note 2) or perhaps “the ‘Faun of Praxiletes,’ invented by Nathaniel Hawthorne for his romance The Marble Faun (1860), but based on the Statue of a Resting Satyr, a marble in the Musei Capitolini, Rome, that is commonly considered a copy of a lost sculpture by Praxiletes (4th century BCE)” (96, note 2). 125 respect, Graham’s dreamland, which was based on Reid’s own, evokes the world of Forms. It is as if he accessed the world of Forms in his dream garden. The following excerpt from

Apostate (quoted above, but in a different context) evokes this idea:

Very early I perceived that one’s mind was swarming with ghosts; very early I became convinced that one had thoughts that were not one’s own thoughts, that one remembered things one had never been told (certainly not by Emma); and these thoughts and memories one could not speak of – not here, not now – though one could speak of them in the dream place. Only, there I did not need to speak of them: there, somehow, they were no longer thoughts, but things that happened – beautifully, wonderfully – so that I could have cried on awakening. (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17, emphasis added)

There is one more sense in which Eros is pertinent to this story and that is the status of mediator: “The Eros is a . . . principle of betweenness . . . it is an intermediary between the two realms [of being and non-being], actively engaged in interpreting the Gods to men, conveying the commands of the ones, and the prayers of the others” (Demos 340). Harold is the bridge between Graham’s dreamland and the real world, a psychopomp.

The homoerotic nature of Graham’s feelings is indicated by the repetitive use of the word “queer.” Mostly it appears in its primary meaning “strange; odd” (OED). In many cases, however, the word is used ambiguously, meaning both “strange” and “homosexual”:

“‘Aren’t you a rather queer fellow?’ [Harold] suggested with a kind of charming easiness.

‘We are both a little queer,’ Graham answered. ‘At least … I beg your pardon——’” (Reid

20, original ellipsis). Although Graham might have apologised for calling Harold “peculiar,” his tentativeness and subsequent apology could likewise suggest the homosexual connotation of the word “queer.” As pointed out earlier, “the homosexual significance of ‘queer’ had entered English slang by 1900” (Showalter 112). When trying to identify what he feels for

Harold, Graham refers to the kind of homosexual friendship practiced in Ancient Greece:

[A]ll save himself were fast asleep; but he lay awake still, thinking of the afternoon that had just passed, and of the strange emotion it had swept into his life. He wondered how it could have come about, and he pondered old tales he had read— some of them long ago—tales of a pagan world, in which this wonderful passion of friendship, then so common, had played its part. (Reid 24)

126

The fact that Graham is in love with Harold is further conveyed by the fact that he finds his feelings expressed in love poems—in some of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Dante Gabriel

Rossetti’s poems—and in Plato’s writing: “And it seemed to Graham that nowhere, save only in a few poems, and in one or two passages of Plato, he could find the expression of a sentiment even approximating to that he felt for his friend” (39). To make the poems fit the object of his love, Graham is “altering the gender of the personal pronouns, and thinking of

Harold while he said them” (40). In this way, he managed to compensate for the lack of publishable homoerotic writing at the time. In Plato’s case, of course, the change of gender was not necessary. Plato’s Phaedrus, advocating homosexual love—specifically, pederasty,

“a love between an older and a younger man”—as “the most noble of all human relationships” (Rowbotham 37), was one of the few works in which homosexual writers of the time could find their sentiments and desires not only expressed, but also celebrated. As

Sheila Rowbotham notes, the idea was “electrifying and revelatory; it shook contemporary presumptions to the core” (37).

Graham’s (and Reid’s) homosexuality is not the only reason why he finds Plato so congenial to his own thoughts and feelings. What he also finds captivating about Phaedrus is its vivid depiction of the beauty of Nature:

Nothing he had ever read, he thought, called up more vividly the impression, the very sound and smell of life out of doors. In each word was an exquisite suggestion of nature, of the open air, of the trees and green grass, and the cool shallow stream up which Socrates and Phaedrus had walked. The spirits that had haunted the bank under the plane-tree seemed now to haunt the pages of the dialogue. (Reid 46) What Graham describes here is what Machen (and his alter ego Lucian) wanted to achieve in his writing. Machen’s aim in writing The Great God Pan was “a pious attempt to translate into English prose the form and mystery of the domed hills, the magic of occult valleys, the sound of the red swollen brook swirling through leafless woods” (Machen, Great God Pan

101). And Lucian’s aim is described in the following way: “He had tried to sing in words the

127 music that the brook sang, and the sound of the October wind rustling through the brown bracken on the hill . . . To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line” (213-214). Furthermore, in Graham’s description of Phaedrus, there is again a sense that only certain people can perceive Nature in this way, just as only some people are able to see Pan (in Forster’s work): “Could it be, then, that there were certain persons—like Plato, like himself—who were actually nearer to the unseen than others were? Surely things came to him, with the scent of flowers, with the sighing of wind, with the splash of the sea! There was a spirit which breathed upon him from the rustling trees and from the grass under his feet” (Reid 47). This could also mean that some people are closer to the world of Forms than others, to seeing the world as it really is, or, in Machen’s words, seeing the god Pan. In fact, the last sentence of the quotation signifies

Pan’s presence. After all, being the spirit of Nature, his presence is signalled by Nature’s elements.

Nature is also what provides another link between Pan and Graham’s companion, who seems to be inherently connected to it: “From the trees and the sky, from the restless sea and the wind had emerged, at any rate, that imaginary playmate who had made his life beautiful”

(Reid 12-13). And, for Reid, Pan was connected with Nature and its music: “Pan, who loved the rocks and woods, was associated in my mind with music, the music of leaves and running water and his own pipes”47 (Reid qtd. in Kaylor, Garden God 85, note 33). In this respect, he might have again been inspired by Wordsworth, whose treatment of Pan is marked by an

“auditory emphasis” (Merivale 52). This is recognised by Emerson, who, in his poem “The

Harp” (1876), calls Wordsworth “Pan’s recording voice” (qtd. in Merivale 91).

47 Apostate, p. 211. 128

Accordingly, in The Garden God, Graham’s affinity with Pan shows in his heightened perception of the sounds of Nature, which he identifies with music: “[T]hrough all his childhood a subtle music had whispered like an undersong—the music of water, the music of running water, of sighing water—seeming to shape his very soul, making it pliant, graceful, gentle and pure, giving to it that gift or malady of reverie, which was itself like the endless flowing away of a stream” (Reid 11). In fact, his whole view of the world around him is different from other people’s; similarly to Eustace and, even more obviously, the curate in

“The Curate’s Friend,” in Graham’s mind, Nature and its inanimate elements seem to be alive, as the following two examples show: “The visible world!—was it not almost sentient?”

(12); “when the voice of water, and the whisper of the wind in the trees and in the grass had been for him almost as the sound of human voices, and the broad open sky and sea as the sight of human faces—then, when such things had seemed to have the power to speak to him directly, to speak from their own soul to his—when Pan and his followers had been in every thicket by the way!” (18). As Kaylor points out, the last sentence is a reference to Arcadia

(Garden God 80, note 18). After all, Reid’s favourite gods where those from Arcadia, Pan and Hermes, and Arcadia itself was the place where he most wanted to be. Graham’s naturally heightened perception of Nature is further enhanced by Harold, the incarnation of

Pan:

Had not their friendship helped him to realise the mystery and loveliness of nature; helped him to make things out; helped to unseal his eyes? It was the force of a temperament that found expression very easily, which he felt to be working now upon his own simpler nature, his spirit, his mind,—altering everything around him, awakening a new beauty in familiar things, suggesting a wider, deeper, more mystical beauty where before he had only been conscious of a material impression. It carried with it, too, a hundred hints, memories, of a strangely familiar paganism, of a fresher, younger world; a hundred touches of poetry:—the sun, the climbing plant: Apollo, Dionysus:—strong, beautiful, swift. This boy!—what had he to do with them? Why should he suggest them? (42-43)

129

Harold’s influence on Graham could be illustrated by means of Machen’s notion of “ecstasy.”

Thanks to Harold (and his natural disposition), Graham penetrates the material and accesses the spiritual in the world around him.

Reid’s treatment of Nature is redolent of Transcendentalism. Graham, as a child, can truly see the beauty of the natural world, not just its function, corresponding to the description of children’s view of the world by Emerson: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood” (11). And some passages are strongly reminiscent of

Walt Whitman (1819-1892):

And life!—yes; and life itself was beautiful! For the same life that was moving joyously within his young warm blood, was moving in the sap of tree and grass. . . . Every day a miracle was wrought when some delicate leaf, or the spiral of a new- born fern, unfolded itself in the soft air, or pushed up through the dark clinging soil. And this was life! And he was alive! He found an exquisite happiness in the thought that he himself was thus a part of nature, so close to nature in her simpler forms. (Reid 41) However, in Reid’s case the democratising idea of the proximity Graham feels to “nature in her simpler forms” does not extend to society, as was the case of Whitman, who advocated the equality of all people. In fact, Reid was against democracy, finding the idea of aristocracy more appealing, which transpires from the following passage: “[Graham] noticed [Harold’s] delightful courteousness, his perfect breeding, his wonderful distinction. Yes, there was a great deal in birth, in blood! For even in his short experience of school life he had learned something of the hopelessness and vulgarity of a spreading democracy” (49). As Kaylor comments, “More often than not, the Uranians advocated ‘The New Chivalry’; hence, they were against democratic institutions, recognising that aristocracy was more compatible, in many ways, with the hierarchical pederasty they lauded” (Garden God 88, note 45). Reid’s

130 embracement of aristocracy also shows in the sense of pride that he felt of his mother’s ancestry (Taylor 7):

Her own name was there for me to read in Burke, the Burke of 1863 (coming almost at the end of the article headed ‘Parr of Parr’, with the whole history of her forbears right on back to the eleventh century, a great family even then, though it has since, in the direct line, died out. I would pause over the more spectacular names: Anne Parr, married to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (grandfather of Shakespeare’s Mr. W. H.); Katherine Parr, last and most fortunate of the wives of Henry VIII. It pleased me, I confess, to find my own mother in a book. . . My whole feelings were, in truth, mixed up with an outlandish and inarticulate chivalry. . .48 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 8)

At the same time, however, he resented her reserved attitude towards him: “As a small boy,

Forrest craved affection more than anything and his mother’s seeming indifference must have hurt him deeply” (Taylor 9). Instead of Whitman’s ultimate democracy, then, Graham’s feeling of affinity to Nature in its simplest forms fits in better with the ideas and practices of

Greek Paganism:

It was as if—always alive to the charm of such things—he understood now for the first time the full meaning of the old Greek ‘tree-worship,’ realised, as it were, its origin, in his own emotions. That faculty for noting the listening soul, the spirit that is in leaf or plant, seemed to be a part of his very human nature, seemed as some ancient bond of relationship that bound him then, and would bind him for ever, to stiller and less perfect forms of life—to a whole world of pastoral divinities—the great god Pan himself; the Hamadryads, who inhabit the forest trees; and Oreads, and Naiads, and Hyades—the deities of water-springs, and streams, and showers of summer rain. (Reid 41) Indeed, in ancient Greece, the elements of Nature—the trees, mountains and streams—were believed to be inhabited by spirits. And it is to those that Graham feels close; those he is able to hear.

In the story, Pagan motifs are blended with Christian references. Growing up in a

Christian background must have influenced Reid despite the fact that he rejected the religion.

In the novel, Reid sometimes refers to Christian practices, but places them in a different context. A salient example is Graham’s description of his affection towards Harold: “He kept it in a place sacred, beautiful, quiet; a chapel within his own spirit, a chapel into whose soft

48 Apostate, pp. 38-39. 131 light he passed from time to time to worship, to be alone there, alone there with his love, alone there before the altar he had decked with candles and flowers, with the white stainless flowers of his boyish admiration, his innocence and faith” (Reid 30). It is striking that

Graham chooses a Christian place of worship for his homoerotic feelings towards Harold. As homosexuality is not viewed favourably within Christianity, this passage is rather subversive, and yet it conveys clearly the innocence and purity of Graham’s feelings. Similarly, at the end of the story, having visited Harold’s grave, Graham tries to find consolation in an empty church. When “a strong desire to pray had come over him,” he considers praying to “the unknown God” (70). However, the words that emerge in his mind are from the Bible: “Little children, love one another … ”49 (70). By placing the sentence in this context, Reid rewrites the original Christian message, giving it a homoerotic meaning. Gradually, Christian surroundings start to fade out and blend into a more Pagan context: the church gradually transforms into a garden; a place of Christian worship is replaced in Graham’s mind by a place more suitable to pagan worship. After all, an open space is more congenial to the worship of the spirit of Nature, or his embodiment. As Kaylor notes, “the Christian church disappears and, in its place, Elysium resurfaces in all its glory, with Harold as its sole resident” (Tom Barber 98).

Then across the hush there came a low sigh—a whisper as of the brushing together of innumerable leaves—a whisper which grew deeper and deeper, till at last it seemed the music of some wonderful summer, and Graham raised his head. Surely the light had grown marvellously clear and soft. A scent of many flowers was in the air; a murmur of a fountain. And as he knelt, motionless, the walls of the church sank away from before him, and there—standing there in that radiance of perfect light—ah, there, at last, was Harold! (Reid 71) Graham seems to reach Harold in a blissful, celestial place that could be Heaven in the

Christian context, Elysium in Paganism, or perhaps his dreamland. His secret companion might have returned there after his visit to the real world. After all, Graham describes his dream garden as “his meadow of asphodel” (13), which suggests a link with the Ancient

49 As Kaylor points out, the sentence comes from John 13:33-34 and 15:12-13 (KJV) (Garden God 92, note 62). 132

Greek Otherworld, asphodel being “An everlasting flower said to grow in the Elysian fields”

(OED). Kaylor supports this link with a quotation from Homer’s The Odyssey: “Off

[Achilles] went, the ghost of the great runner, Aeacus’ grandson loping with long strides across the fields of asphodel, triumphant in all I had told him of his son, his gallant, glorious son” (qtd. in Garden God 80, note 15). What is more, earlier in the story, Graham indicates that dying is the way of getting back to the dreamland:

‘If we really could get there!’ ‘Oh, well, I’ll come with you any time if you’ll show me the way.’ ‘Suppose you had a dream,’ Graham said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘and in your dream you saw there was only one way—should you have the courage to take it? I mean, if it was a way that seemed to lead into the darkness?—death!’ (Reid 38) Throughout the story, the boundary between dreams and reality is blurred, as it was for Reid during his childhood. Harold seems to have emerged from Graham’s dreams and return there after his death. The theme of memory, which is suggested in some of the poems referred to in the story, as Kaylor points out (Garden God 88, note 46), is adding complexity to the interpretation of the story. It is hard to tell which incidents are real (within the frame of the story) and which are supposed to be a product of Graham’s imagination, or as Graham himself suggests, wishful thinking: “I remember! Sometimes I remember too much!— remember, in other words, what never really was; what, alas! only might have been. You see, the dividing line is so apt to shift a little, grow dimmer, as the years pass” (Reid 6). Graham’s exclamation that he remembers “too much” and “what never really was” echoes Reid’s claim that “one remembered things one had never been told” (Reid qtd. in Taylor 17).

“Pan’s Pupil”: Pan as a Spirit of Nature

Reid’s short story “Pan’s Pupil” is very similar in tone to The Garden God. With its dreamy atmosphere, extensive lyrical passages describing the beauty of Nature, and a lack of narrative, the story almost resembles a poem, rendering the term “short story” somewhat imprecise. As Kaylor notes, “what Reid writes about [Edward Perry] Warren’s Wilde Rose is 133 equally true of his own oeuvre: ‘With the exception of a few pieces the entire collection really forms one single poem—an apologia pro vita sua, a confession, a creed’” (Kaylor,

Tom Barber 8).

The lyrical story seems to be a result of a particular experience Reid had one summer day and which, in his own words, “had never ceased to be relevant” (qtd. in Taylor 19). His rendering of the experience in Apostate deserves to be quoted at length:

It was hot and still. The breathless silence seemed unnatural; seemed, as I lay motionless in the tangled grass, like a bridge that reached straight back into the heart of some dim antiquity. I had a feeling of uneasiness, of unrest, though I lay so still – of longing and excitement and expectation; I had a feeling that some veil might be drawn away, that there might come to me something, someone, the Megistos Kouros perhaps, either with the winged feet of Hermes, or the thyrsus of Dionysus, or maybe only hairy-shanked Pan of the Goats. My state of mind just then was indistinguishable from that of the worshipper…I was certainly prepared to join in whatever rites or revels might be required. My body seemed preternaturally sensitive, my blood moved quickly, I had an extraordinary feeling of struggle, as if some power were struggling to reach me, as I was trying to reach it, as if there was something there, something waiting, if only I could get through. At that moment I longed for a sign, some definite and direct response, with a longing that was a kind of prayer. And a strange thing happened. For though there was no wind, a little green leafy branch was snapped off from the tree above me, and fell to the ground at my hand. I drew my breath quickly; there was a drumming in my ears; I knew that the green woodland before me was going to split asunder, to swing back on either side like two great painted doors…And then – then I hesitated, blundered, drew back, failed. The moment passed, was gone, and at first gradually, and then rapidly, I felt the world I had so nearly reached slipping from me, till at last there was all round me only a pleasant summer scene, through which, from the hidden river below, there rose the distant voices and laughter of a passing boating-party.50 (Reid qtd. in Taylor 18-19, original emphasis)

The beginning of the description might have been Eustace’s account of his encounter with

Pan. The “breathless silence” and eerie calm that aroused a feeling of intense anticipation, anxious and yet pleasant, coupled with “longing and excitement and expectation,” matches what Forster’s Eustace must have felt before meeting Pan. The metaphor of the veil connects

Reid’s account with Machen; what Reid felt must have come very close to Machen’s notion of “ecstasy.” But the feeling ends irretrievably when Reid hears sounds indicating the presence of other people. Reid’s “Pan’s Pupil” seems to be based on this mystical experience,

50 Apostate, pp. 212-13. 134 but providing an alternative ending. What if he had not “hesitated, blundered, drew back, failed”; what if “the green woodland” had “split asunder” and opened “like two great painted doors,” forming “a bridge” to “some dim antiquity” through which the “hairy-shanked Pan of the Goats” could have crossed into the present moment.

Reid was sixteen at the time of the experience (Taylor 19). Correspondingly, the main protagonist is a boy, who is basking in the summer sun in the woods, playing a pipe. This seems to draw the attention of Pan who approaches him. As in The Garden God, it is not entirely clear whether this really happens of whether he is just daydreaming, the whole experience being just a product of the boy’s imagination:

. . . and whether it was suggested by his piping, or whether it was merely the beauty of the summer morning that made him think of it, he could never afterwards tell, but the old pagan world seemed in some unaccountable way to have drawn very close to him, and he could half believe that through the leafy shadows of the trees he saw the dim paleness of a god, could half believe that he heard a low sound of a voice in the sleepy noontide hum, and in the faint noise of falling water coming from the weir. And presently from the deep slumbrous quiet there slid into the boy’s soul a gentle drowsiness, as a light summer shower sinks down into the soil. (94) The blurring of reality and dream is supported by the expressions “half believe” and his

“drowsiness.” As in The Garden God, the elements of Nature are imbued with voice, possibly again a product of the boy’s imagination. Like Machen, Reid uses metaphors and comparisons based on Nature, and so the way he is gradually filled with the feeling of drowsiness is compared to summer rain gradually soaking into the ground.

As the boy falls asleep, or perhaps at the moment when he is no longer fully awake, but not yet fast asleep, he meets the god whom he attracted by his piping. In the god’s appearance, the beast-like features are pronounced, standing in contrast with his kind eyes, which indicate his benevolent character:

‘Little piper, do you know into whose kingdom you have strayed?’ He who spoke was a man, no longer young, dark like some statue of dark bronze, and naked. His thick shaggy hair curled over his low forehead, his features were ill-formed, his ears pointed, but his eyes were gentle.

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The boy . . . shook his head. ‘I do not know,’ he made answer, ‘but I think you must be Pan.’ ‘Did you not call me to you? Do not be afraid. I will not harm you. You are a human boy, and must live out your destiny. I will not keep you. Someday, however, when the world seems very hard and cold, you will perhaps seek again the door to my fairyland, and if you find it then and enter, it will be to stay for ever and ever. (Reid 94-95) This is where the story differs from the novel. Pan actually appears here, not just his embodiment, and he is an unattractive (even though charming), old demigod who has not been granted a place on Olympus:

‘I was a god in Sicily when you were a shepherd boy; and they gave me a grotto on the side of the Acropolis hill at Athens. But among the Olympians I have no place. Eternal youth is not mine, as you may easily see,’ he added, with a strange, half- smiling tenderness. ‘Already I feel the creeping snows of old age in my blood; and though your love to-day has warmed my heart a little, as the winter is warmed by the sun, yet am I still the winter, and when you have left me night will follow quickly.’ (95) This passage suggests that meeting the young boy and conversing with him is for Pan like taking a sip of the elixir of life, an invigorating experience, hinting at a pederastic relationship. The passage also highlights the human in Pan, which is what Reid particularly liked about the Arcadian gods. His place is in a grotto near people, not high on Olympus, unreachable among the more majestic gods. And he has not been granted immortality.

As the boy looks into Pan’s eyes, he has a transcendent, sublime experience, merging with Pan and experiencing eternity:

As he spoke, the boy looked into his eyes, and it was as if already he gazed into the darkness of that eternal night. And slowly, slowly, the river and the fields and the trees and the sky itself seemed to shrink together, and to fade away like smoke, while a cold deathly wind from some sunken well of space older than the world blew past his cheek. He shut his eyes and clenched his hands tightly; and his soul seemed to be drawn out from his body, and in a few minutes to live through endless ages. (Reid 95)

Having seen the unspoilt beauty of Nature in a vision of “the morning of the world” (95) in

Pan’s youth, the boy pledges an eternal allegiance to Pan, recognising him as the supreme god of Nature:

But gradually, through the darkness, he saw the breaking of a dawn—a light reaching back—back into the morning of the world. He saw a countryside rich with green grass

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and slender flowers. He saw faint sleepy poppies, and bending fields of corn. He saw the first beauty of the earth, of silver streams, and golden woods, and violet valleys, and tree-shaded water springs. He saw, in forest glades, fauns and nymphs dancing under the red harvest-moon, and beside haunted pools in whose still water the over- world was mirrored. And he knew that from all these things he had drawn the strength of his life, and he dropped upon his knees and cried: ‘O Pan, I am your child for evermore, and none save Death shall take me from you.’ (95)

This idyllic scenery is not exactly typical of the Greek Arcadia. Instead, the landscape closely resembles the English countryside, making Pan a god native to Britain (and Ireland) in this story. The fact that Pan’s longevity stems from this environment and now he is growing old may suggest that the countryside is not so unspoilt any more. Or, Nature can only prolong

Pan’s life. After all, he is not immortal.

The story addresses the conflict between Christianity and Paganism more explicitly than the novel. The boy asks Pan whether he has heard of a generous god who seems to confer immortality on whomever asks for it: “‘Have you not heard of a gentle god who came into the world to put an end to suffering and sorrow—one who, like you, wandered in the fields and valleys, and whose roof was the open sky? He had the secret of a certain water that bestowed everlasting life, and he gave of this water unto all who asked of it’” (Reid 96). The boy is, of course, speaking about Jesus converting people to Christianity by christening them and, in that way, promising life after death. This is not exactly immortality, which is possibly the reason why Pan says that he has not heard of this life-giving water, although he knows to which god the boy is referring. When replying to the boy, Pan alludes to the conflict between

Christianity and Paganism, and offers a critique of the former:

Like Dionysus [Christ] came out of the East, and was pale with the burden of his dreams. But of the water of youth I know nothing. Nay, was not he of whom you speak slain by his own disciples?—a philosopher rather than a god, a poet, a dreamer, a lover of flowers and gardens and of a life untroubled by riches and the cares of the world. But I forget. Only I know that in the past his priests tore down my altars. They tore down my altars, and yet I am to-day the spirit of the earth, and I am worshipped in the beauty of each passing hour.’ (96)

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Pan refers to the demise of Paganism with the arrival of Christianity. However, he questions

Christ’s status of a god and asserts his enduring power which resides in his personifying the beauty of Nature.

Like The Garden God, the story finishes with underscoring the dreamy quality of the experience, making the reader question if what happened was real, a vision, or a dream:

Pan himself was fading—fading back into a green dimness that was soon but the deep shadow of the wood. Had there ever been anything there but that shadow? Had his fancy played him a trick? Had he been asleep, and was it all only a dream? Presently the boy rose to his feet and walked slowly homeward. But in his heart the leaves were whispering still, and deep down in his soul he knew that one day he must return. (96) As in the novel, Reid offers a rational explanation of the event. However, the boy’s determination to return to Pan’s fairyland at the end of his life suggest that Reid may have preferred the supernatural to the realistic reading.

The Dreamy Poet of Nature and Boyhood

Forrest Reid was indeed a “Pan in Ulster,” a worshipper of youth and Nature, with a close relationship to the countryside of his beloved Ulster. As in the works by Machen, with whom he shares a deep love for the region in which he grew up, Nature plays an important role in Reid’s writing and is intrinsically connected with the god Pan. This, coupled with the wonderfully poetic and dreamy nature of his writing, gives Reid’s Pan a Romantic inflection with traces of Transcendentalism. Moreover, Reid’s mystical experience which was the basis of “Pan’s Pupil” could be compared to Machen’s notion of “ecstasy.” What divides the two writes, however, is their religious views: while Machen was an orthodox Anglo-Catholic,

Reid had a strong anti-Christian stance, fully embracing Paganism.

His religious views and the homoerotic undertones in his writing link him with

Forster, his close friend. Both writers had rejected their religious background and the conflict found a way into their writing, in which Christianity and Paganism were sometimes juxtaposed. Both also struggled with their sexuality, which was a wellspring of their

138 creativity. The relationship between their works and their sexuality could thus be described as symbiotic; writing helped them cope with being homosexual (in the case of Forster) and pederastic (in the case of Reid) in a society where these desires were viewed unfavourably to say the least. Indeed, as Kaylor writes, “even among the university educated of [Reid’s] day, same-sex desire, in any of its manifestations, was beyond the pale of consideration, perhaps even mention, hence truly warranting the dub Lord Alfred Douglas had bestowed upon it more than a decade before: ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’” (Garden God xvii).

At the same time, however, their struggle profoundly enriched their writing. And even though their works discussed here were not explicitly homoerotic, in Reid’s case, the intensely lyrical story of a Platonic love between two boys was sufficiently erotic to irretrievably end his relationship with Henry James, “the Master,” whom he deeply admired. Where Reid and

Forster differ is in their political views. Whereas Forster advanced democracy and opposed inequality in race, class, as well as gender, Reid was clearly in favour of aristocracy, an attitude which was quite common among Uranian writers.

Finally, there is an important link between Reid and Barrie. Like Barrie, Reid resented having to grow up and his works enabled him to continue enjoying the pleasures of childhood at least vicariously. By focusing on the theme of boyhood, Reid found his niche in literature, attracting “a small but loyal readership; a small because of the undoubted ‘limitation’ of his chosen subject, and loyal because of the unfailing clarity and style with which he treated it”

(Taylor 1). As in Barrie’s iconic work, Reid’s hero in The Garden God was not the god Pan himself, but his embodiment, a lively boy playing pipes and enjoying a close relationship with Nature. Both Peter Pan and Harold were psychopomps. Peter, who accompanies deceased children to the world of the dead (Barrie 8), lives in Neverland, a place based on children’s dreams and also a kind of otherworld, and is able to travel between Neverland and the real world. Similarly, Graham’s companion, who is the sole resident of Graham’s

139 dreamland, breaks into the real world and emerges in the shape of Harold, Graham’s schoolmate. When he dies while saving Graham’s life, he returns to Graham’s dreamland,

“his strange garden, his meadow of asphodel” (Reid 13), and, hence, also a place of the dead.

Whereas The Garden God told a story of a Platonic love between two boys, one of whom was an incarnation of Pan, in “Pan’s Pupil,” the god himself appears. Although the old, kind Pan of “Pan’s Pupil” resembles his benevolent counterpart in Kenneth Grahame’s

The Wind in the Willows (1908), published three years later, there is a clear hint of the motif of pederasty in his relationship to the boy. But Pan’s sexuality is only implied, expressed in the form of desire which is never fulfilled. In the work of Victor Benjamin Neuburg analysed in the next chapter, the motif of sexual desire becomes much more explicit.

7. Pan as an Androgynous God of Ecstasy in Victor Benjamin

Neuburg’s Poem “The Triumph of Pan”

[I]n the stifling atmosphere in which he had been brought up anything which he did spontaneously or that was any fun was displeasing God. God was not merely the God of Vengeance; he was Fraub, argus-eyed. The discovery that there existed people who did not believe in the existence of this ogre was electrifying and liberating. Jean Overton Fuller, The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg, p. 103.

The Anti-Christian Advocate of Androgyny

Like Forster and Reid discussed in the previous two chapters, Victor Benjamin

Neuburg (1883-1940) was concerned with sexuality and strongly opposed Christianity. “The

Triumph of Pan” (1910), the title poem of Neuburg’s collection bearing the same name and the focus of the present chapter, addresses sexual and gender ambiguity, expressed through the themes of hermaphroditism and sexual inversion, and the relation of these themes to organised religion, Christianity in particular. The poem is informed by the theories of two major fin-de-siècle thinkers who greatly influenced Neuburg: Edward Carpenter (1844-1929),

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“a pioneer sex reformer who wrote on homosexuality, the emancipation of women and mutuality in loving” (Rowbotham 1), who also made an indelible impression on Forster, and

Edward Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the famous magician, occult writer, Decadent poet, and general contrarian. Neuburg was particularly interested in Carpenter’s notion of “double nature,” denoting people who had both male and female attributes and who were attracted to both sexes (The Intermediate Sex 22). The notion was elaborated in Carpenter’s book The

Intermediate Sex (1908), a book which strongly influenced Neuburg (Fuller 128). Crowley entertained a similar notion in The Book of the Law (1904), in which he theorised three aeons of mankind, the last of which—the Aeon of Horus—is characterised by a union of male and female attributes embodied in the androgynous figure of the Egyptian god Horus. Similarly,

Carpenter saw “his intermediates as harbingers of the new age” (Rowbotham 283). Carpenter and Crowley also shared a critical view of what they saw as repressive attitude to sex and body in Christianity, an opinion which Forster definitely shared with them. Neuburg’s poem

“The Triumph of Pan” is in a way lyrical expression of these theories.

Exploring the world of Victor Benjamin Neuburg means entering the realm of magic—the world of fin-de-siècle magical orders, most famous of which was the Hermetic

Order of the Golden Dawn. Neuburg was closely associated with Crowley, who had been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, but after conflicts with W. B. Yeats and the ensuing “power struggle” (Owen, “The Sorcerer” 103), he left it and later established his own magical order, the Order of the Silver Star. When Neuburg met Crowley, he “was already a published poet” (Owen, The Place 192). Crowley knew his work and sought him out because he “had been attracted by the mystical leanings in his work” (192). Subsequently, Neuburg became Crowley’s chela, “a novice initiate” of his magical order (“The Sorcerer” 99). As such, he “had taken a vow of obedience to Crowley as his Master,” which basically meant

141 that “Crowley’s word was now law” (99).51 This fact alone indicates quite clearly just how important an influence Crowley was on Neuburg; he was in awe of Crowley, “whom he both loved and admired” (99). In 1909 the two men travelled to Algeria to perform magic rituals aimed at developing techniques of sex magic (100). This experience gave rise to Neuburg’s poem “The Triumph of Pan.”

Apart from an interest in mysticism, the two men also shared opposition to organised religion, both of them rejecting their religious background. Crowley felt a deep loathing for

Christianity, brought about by the effect its practice had on his mother and his father, specifically the life-negating asceticism of his mother (Churton 6) and the death of his father, which might have been avoided if he had not undergone the “misguided cancer treatment” recommended to him by the Plymouth Brethren Christian sect (5). Consequently, Crowley made it “his mission . . . to ‘make war on the saints’ of meek, self-denying Christendom, and to bring in a religion for the strong” (Fuller 109). Similarly, Neuburg, held markedly different views on religion from those of his family, having “rejected conventional Judaism along with all organized religion” and “espous[ing] Freethought views and progressive values” (Owen,

The Place 193). This is expressed in his poem “Vale Jehovah!”:

What if to the Race I was born? To me that’s no reason why I Should cling to a faith that I scorn, When my birthright’s the infinite sky! … Thy yoke I for ever throw over! (qtd. in Fuller 104, original ellipsis)

Moreover, both Neuburg and Crowley deeply despised the conformity and propriety typical of Victorian England. For Neuburg, this was embodied in his Aunt Hannah,

51 The more common name of the order is A∴A∴. The letters A probably refer to “Astrum Argentinum,” which is Latin for “Silver Star” and the dots are possibly a reference to “spiritual activity, derived from 17th-century Rosicrucian sources” (Churton 124). The order was supposed to “eschew formal religious, moral codes, concentrating on communicating with the ‘True Will’ or the ‘Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’: the individual’s hidden essence” (143). And to root out the inculcated moral convictions in his chela, Crowley often made Neuburg pay a visit to a brothel as part of the “A∴A∴’s balancing regimen” (149). 142

whom he called Frau B, until he shortened it to Fraub, which later became his generic name for any woman of the type of an overbearing Mrs Grundy. She always knew what was ‘right’ to do in any circumstances and she would say, ‘in my opinion,’ in a way that maddened Vicky, for everything pronounced following these words was held to be incontrovertible. She was a woman of invincible propriety. It would be impossible to overestimate her influence; his whole life was a rebellion against her. (Fuller 100)

Neuburg, as a freethinker, was in his views diametrically opposed to the conservatism of his family. Although his family were not unkind, he could not bear their “stuffiness” (101).

Being naturally very contemplative and perceptive, childhood was a traumatic part of his life:

“[I]n the stifling atmosphere in which he had been brought up anything which he did spontaneously or that was any fun was displeasing God. God was not merely the God of

Vengeance; he was Fraub, argus-eyed. The discovery that there existed people who did not believe in the existence of this ogre was electrifying and liberating” (103).

The Contest of Three Gods, Three Religions, and Three Genders

Neuburg was “dreamy and mystical by nature” (Owen, “The Sorcerer” 99), having

“experienced mystical states in childhood” (The Place 193). He was described by his acquaintances as “elfin and ‘faunlike’” in appearance (“The Sorcerer” 107), and by one of his friends as “awfully goat-like” (130). This must have made him particularly eligible for the rituals in the Algerian desert, in which he came to invoke and then embody the god Pan. The similarity between the apprentice and the god was further accentuated by Neuburg’s hair: his

“head was shaved, leaving only two tufts at the temples which were ‘twisted up into horns.’”

(104). The purpose of this was to make the locals think Neuburg was actually “a demon compelled by magick to serve Crowley” (Churton 163) and, in this way, to raise Crowley’s esteem. During the Algerian rituals, Crowley was “sodomized by Neuburg in a homosexual rite offered to the god Pan” (Owen, “The Sorcerer” 101), whom he worshipped “as the diabolic god of lust and magic” (107).

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Neuburg’s poem “The Triumph of Pan” was undoubtedly inspired by the rituals performed in Algeria, in the northwest of Africa. The poem takes place “in the waiting west”

(XVIII) and draws on the imagery of the desert:

The ways have parted, and the sun is glowing Over the eternal sand, And the endless road grows steeper; we are going Into a nameless land. (XXI)

But the part that reveals the origin of the poem unambiguously is when the poet says: “And I am grown a god, a sinewy token / Of Pan’s most ardent strife” (VI), which clearly describes

Neuburg’s invocation of the god Pan. Finally, the lines “O world of shadows, slowly disappearing / Under the Master’s wand!” (XXXIII) contain a reference to Crowley, the person whose every command Neuburg, as his chela, obeyed, the wand being a symbol of

Crowley’s status as a magician.

The title of the poem, “The Triumph of Pan,” reveals the main topic and the most important motif. The question remains what kind of a triumph it celebrates, or more specifically, over what or whom Pan triumphs. At the beginning, the poet encounters three gods: “The first a woman” who seduces the poet “with burning glances mingled / With longings soft and pure . . . To ease her fierce desire / With my consuming fire.” However, the sexual act resembles that of a praying mantis: “But while I love her she consumeth me; / She withereth my soul, that erst was free” (II). The first goddess seems to have used the poet to feed on his soul. The sexual intercourse with the second god is less voluntary and more straightforward:

The second god laughs loud upon my plaining, Seeing in me his prey; He girds austerely at my dreadful straining To hold myself in play: He hath no pity now (III).

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In both of these images the poet is the quarry although the strategies for ensnaring him differ.

Whereas the first goddess uses the more subtle and feminine techniques of seduction, the second uses physical force to capture him, representing a more masculine and violent aspect of sexual intercourse. Both gods then exhibit the behaviour typically associated with the two sexes: the goddess stands for the soft, tender and yet deceitful feminine side, while the god personifies the aggressive and forthright masculine side. In both cases, it is a rather one-sided affair, the gods being the ones benefiting from the encounter; and, in both cases, the gender is clearly determined.

It is only in the encounter with the third god that the interaction ceases to be one- sided, in both ways—the pleasure of the sexual intercourse is shared, and the gender becomes much more ambiguous:

Lastly, there is one Great one, cold and burning, Craft and hot in lust, Who would make me a Sapphist and an Urning, A Lesbian of the dust. (IV)

The third god transcends the dichotomy dividing the sexes, as the words “sapphist,” “urning” and “lesbian” imply. What is more, his power to transcend gender boundaries is coupled with an ability to transform the gender and sexuality of others, as the verb “make” entails. The words “Sapphist” and “Lesbian” denote female homosexuality, deriving, as they do, from the

Greek poet Sappho, residing on the isle of Lesbos. The less familiar word “urning” is a term

Neuburg perhaps first encountered Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex. Originally the term had been used by the German jurist and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to denote a person who belonged mentally to one sex, but physically to another (Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex 19-

20). The poet’s encounter with the third god resonates with Carpenter’s notion of the

“doubleness of nature.” In the poem, Neuburg “reworks [this concept], combining contemporary discussions of homosexuality with the enduring motif of the hermaphrodite.

When he positions himself in his poem as both woman-desiring woman and man-desiring 145 man, Neuburg is claiming a radically different ‘hermaphroditism’: two ‘inversions’ ‘at once’”

(Owen, “The Sorcerer” 129-30). In fact, the poem reflects Neuburg’s and Crowley’s personalities and sexual preferences; the two men were sexually attracted to both men and women, and were not afraid to accept their feminine sides. In fact, Crowley “said the male magician must, without losing his virility, cultivate his female side” (Fuller 129). What is more, in Crowley’s and Carpenter’s thinking, these double-natured individuals anticipated a new age.

In his depiction of the three gods, Neuburg was probably inspired by The Book of the

Law (Liber Legis), Crowley’s most famous work, which, according to his claim, had been dictated to him by his guardian angel Aiwass (Urban 9-10). Here Crowley theorised three aeons of mankind: “the first aeon was that of the Goddess Isis, centred around matriarchy and the worship of the Great Mother; the second aeon was that of Osiris, during which the patriarchal religions of suffering and death—i.e., Judaism and Christianity—rose to power”

(Urban 9). The first goddess would then be Isis, representing the age of matriarchy, which is suggested by the goddess’s femininity. The second god would be Osiris, representing the harsh age of Judeo-Christian patriarchy.52 This is symbolised by the god’s violent masculinity, which is implied in the words “girds austerely” and “no pity.” Moreover, this seems to echo Neuburg’s poem “To Count Tolstoy” (published in the Agnostic Journal in

1904): “I will not crush my nature ‘neath my heel / To please a problematic, tyrant God” (qtd. in Fuller 104). The third god, the only one described positively in the poem, would then represent the age about to come. In the The Book of the Law, Crowley announced that “the world stood on the threshold of a new age—the New Aeon of Horus—the ruling characteristic of which is the unification of the male and female as represented in the

52 The austerity and sternness of Judaism and Christianity had been noted by others as well, for example by Matthew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy (1869). As Philip Davis points out, Arnold criticises the power of morality and conscience typical for “the stern Hebraic world-view,” which was “still strong in the first half of the nineteenth century,” and emphasises the need for liberation from “the grim chains” of the strict Hebraic view in the period that followed (17). 146 androgynous figure of Horus” (Owen, “The Sorcerer” 126). The new age was supposed to start in 1904 (Fuller 118). In the age of Horus, gender differences are finally transcended, which is expressed in the poem by the sexual union of the androgynous couple. What is more, in his encounter with the first two gods, the poet’s freedom is restricted: the goddess

“withereth [his] soul, that erst was free” and the god hinders his movement to be able to do with him as he pleases. This, too, is to be overcome in the aeon of Horus, which is to replace the two previous aeons “by freeing the power of the individual will” (Urban 17). The interpretation of the third god as Horus is also supported by the following lines:

The dung of all ages clings unto him, And a fierce light shines through; They are the dead who once, long, long since, knew him: The Pagan and the Jew Have lent him, one by one, Seed with their orison, But he hath spurned their offerings, seeking me, A god, a victim slain in majesty. (V)

Possibly, the words “The Pagan and the Jew,” now “dead,” refer to the past two aeons. The god whom Horus seeks, impersonated by the poet, could be Pan himself. The words “a victim slain in majesty” would then refer to the death of Pan with the arrival of Christ. “Pan’s most ardent strife” might mean the rivalry between Paganism and Christianity. Another possible interpretation is that the third god, the “Great One,” is Pan, “great” being a reference to

Arthur Machen’s influential novella The Great God Pan. Moreover, Neuburg bestowed this epithet on Pan in the verse “The vision of great Pan” (XIII). The words “craft and hot in lust” in the fourth stanza would then point to Pan’s deceitful nature and ravenous sexual appetites.

Jean Overton Fuller offers yet another reading: she identifies the first goddess as Joan Hayes,

Neuburg’s lover, and the third god as Crowley. She was “unable to place” the second god

“unless it be Pan himself” (162).

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According to Crowley, the transition to the Age of Horus will be violent, “the nature of Horus being ‘Force and Fire’” (Crowley qtd. in Churton 186), and this seems to be echoed in the poet’s longing for the excitement of battle:

And storm the mountains; we are sick of dreaming Of a dim past unknown; Oh! for the sight once more of red blood streaming, Of rotting warrior-bone, Of eagles hovering far Around the field of war, Of lust and love and longing breaking through The chill gray garb of life to flame anew. (XXIX)

The motifs of fighting, sex and passion share a certain intensity that contrasts with the dullness of the existing age. In fact, the celebration of invigorating barbarism in this stanza recalls Flaubert: “Perhaps we need barbarians. Humanity, the perpetual old man, requires infusions of new blood during his occasional agonies. How low we are! And what universal decrepitude!” (qtd. in Weir 28). In the stanza the contrast is expressed through the metaphors of fire and frost: through passion, be it in fighting or love, the “chill gray” world is melted. In fact, in the poem flame and fire are recurring metaphors expressing rejuvenation and positive change. Here is another example:

But roses, roses flame, As ever, since they came From the wild marriage-bed of young Desire, And younger Love, the children of the Fire. (XL)

The positive view of Desire and Love, “the children of the Fire,” as agents of revitalisation, corresponds to Crowley’s and Carpenter’s views, according to which embracing sexuality is an inherent part of spiritual awakening. The motif of roses could be a reference to one of the parts of Crowley’s Order of the Silver Star,53 namely the order of the Rose Cross, which— judging by its name—probably has roots in the Rosicrucian tradition. Owen explains that “the

53 The Order of the Silver Star, the A∴A∴, consists of three parts: “the order of the Silver Star proper (the ‘Secret Chiefs’), the second order of the Rose Cross, and the outer order of the Golden Dawn, putting the Golden Dawn in its place” (Churton 146). 148 term ‘Rosicrucian’ derives from the name ‘Rosencreutz’ or ‘Rose Cross’” (“The Sorcerer”

101).

Pan is then an apt herald of the transition to the new age, being characterised by unbridled sexuality. This, coupled with his goat-like features, encouraged his association with the devil, especially by Christians, and this connection is not omitted in the poem:

We found sleeping; yea, the Panic revel, Had drawn his spirit far; Asleep, he bore the aspect of a devil; Awake, the morning star Flashed in his eyes; oh, scan The vision of great Pan; Thrust tongue and limbs against his pulsing side, And thou shalt know the dayspring as a bride! (XIII)

This passage refers to another transitional aspect of Pan; after “the Panic revel” in the morning, he watched over the transition from night to day: “At night he led the dance of the nymphs, and he also ushered in the morning and kept watch from the mountain summits”

(Kerényi, The Gods 175). The last two lines in the passage suggest sexual union with Pan, a coupling which would help one share the experience of the transition, as the line “thou shalt know the dayspring as a bride” indicates. Interestingly enough, the word “dayspring,” meaning the dawn, usually appears in a religious context and is most associated with the King

James Bible (Job 38:12, Luke 1:78). Judging from Neuburg’s and Crowley’s shared attitude to Christianity, coupled with the fact that the word is used to describe a homosexual act, this phrasing can be considered one of the means of subverting Christianity within the poem.

The lustful Pan and Pan-like figures are—in the poem—closely connected with the abundant motifs of desire and longing:

My heart is broken, but mine eyes are tearless: I seek the hidden grove Where Pan plays to the trees, The nymphs, the fauns, the breeze, And the sick satyr with his syren-song

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Makes the world ache with longing. I am strong. (X)

The grief-stricken poet is not without hope, for he is seeking Pan’s grove and anticipating the rejuvenating pleasures that Panic revels offer. The word “sick” is here used in its now archaic sense, meaning “pining or longing for someone or something” (OED). The “syren-song” associates Pan and his companions with the beautiful and seductive femme fatales of Greek mythology, and hints at his more sinister aspects, a theme that is developed in the following stanza, in which the poem touches on Pan’s corrupting influence:

This I can bear, though I am lone and cheerless, A withered fruit of spring; This I can bear, for all my soul is fearless, So shall my soul not sing? Rejoice that I am thine, That I have given thee wine From out my virgin heart, my stainless soul; I am corrupted utterly; and whole. (XI)

Evoking the ritual sacrifice of virgins, the poet offers up his innocence to the god of lust.

Wine is an especially apt metaphor here. First, wine as an alcoholic drink provokes lust on a chemical level. Second, it draws on the imagery of sacrifice as it resembles blood. Moreover, wine represents the blood of Christ, commemorating his sacrifice for mankind. And as

Christianity and Paganism are often opposed to each other, the corruption of the young poet offering himself to the Pagan god would be all the more acute. It would also invert the relationship of Pan and Christ, since Pan’s death is announced with the coming of Christ. In this imagery, however, Christ would be sacrificed to Pan. Finally, wine is closely associated with Pan (and Bacchus) and hence an appropriate offering for them. Moreover, there is a reference to “wine, / Fresh from the Bacchic vats, and foaming grape” (XXVI) later in the poem.

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Sex and Spirituality: Embracing the Body

There is a strong contrast between the poet and those he calls “slavish singers.” These could be Neuburg’s and Crowley’s contemporaries, representing what Crowley hated and fought against: Christianity and conformity. According to Tobias Churton, his biographer,

Crowley was “implacably opposed to . . . sex-negative, evangelical beliefs” (6). In his view, the sin “lies in treating sex at the level of base instinct, smothering it with guilt and shame.

Such conduct degrades and blasphemes a holy sacrament” (138). Accordingly, in Crowley’s teaching, sexuality and spirituality are inherently connected, and, what is more, the unity of the two is crucial for a free and vigorous society: “Deprived of the power to combine physical and spiritual love, the world is a waste. Magick would restore light, life and liberty to the wasteland” (6-7). Carpenter held a very similar view. Observing a Hindu festival, he saw that

“sexual energy seemed to charge spiritual ecstasy” (Rowbotham 153). He believed that “the fierce, earthy passions were ‘half the driving force of the soul’, while ‘sensuality . . . underlies all art and the high emotions’. He wanted to validate physical desires denigrated by

Christianity” (Rowbotham 147). He expressed these ideas in his prose poem Towards

Democracy (1883): “Sex still goes first, and hands eyes mouth brain follow; from the midst of belly and thighs radiate the knowledge of self, religion, and immortality” (Carpenter,

Towards Democracy 18; see also Rowbotham 74). Neuburg undoubtedly shared many or all of these views. Indeed, Fuller suspects that his poem “To Count Tolstoy” “must be the reply to some diatribe on chastity. This, says Victor, may be all right when one is ninety-one, but he is only twenty now and means to have some fun!” (104). That is why he “will not crush

[his] nature ‘neath [his] heel / To please a problematic, tyrant God” (qtd. in Fuller 104).

Accordingly, the twelfth stanza of the poem can then be read as a condemnation of conformity and the “sex-negative” Christianity (the second aeon):

The slavish singers of the barren years, What have they left to say?

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Upon the Moribund they waste weak tears, And slobber o’er dull day. But we, my God, have been Sublimely wise; obscene In passion; and her light is round us strown; We have enmeshed in passion’s web the Unknown. (XII)

The words “barren,” “weak,” “moribund” and “dull,” coupled with the question, describe a dying and stagnating world in desperate need of change. By contrast, the poet and the god are very much alive, which is implied in the sexually charged words “passion” and “obscene.”

What is more, they are the ones who have something to say, some wisdom to convey. What is implied here is that wisdom lies in gratifying one’s desires rather than in curbing them, an idea redolent of Decadent hedonism. The critique of the compliant “slavish singers” continues in the fifteenth stanza:

What do they know of joy? They tamely wander In barren paths and straight; With down-cast modest eyes they sit and ponder Outside the mystic gate. (XL)

The atmosphere that is evoked by these lines is that of passivity and surrender. The slavish singers sheepishly follow the “straight” paths of tradition and convention, and, in their modesty, do not have enough courage to stray. They “sit and ponder,” but the words “outside the mystic gate” indicate that their religion is mistaken; they have not managed to get inside and discover mystical truth. While this is one possible reading, one must bear in mind that this is a Decadent poem about sexual inversion; hence it is infused with homoeroticism.

Consequently, conformity in this stanza can be narrowed down to the sphere of sexual behaviour. Another meaning of the word “straight” is “heterosexual” and the mystic gate probably symbolises the bottom, which is further supported by the word “sit,” the reader’s attention being drawn to that part of the body. Sitting “outside the mystic gate” then means the exclusion of the slavish singers - the compliant Christians - from homoerotic practices.

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However, the slavish singers are not just passive unhappy creatures; they are active agents responsible for death and stagnation:

They cast out Love, but Love for aye hath dwelling, Sleeping, within the spirit; They have murdered Joy, but Joy reborn is swelling In earth, and shall inherit Anew the realm of Time And earth shall grow sublime . . . (XVI)

The line “They cast out Love” may mean the repression of sexuality in general (in

Christianity) or homosexual love in particular. The poet, however, believes that this wrong will be redressed, and the second part of the stanza contains the anticipation of the rejuvenating Pagan Spring.

In the thirty-eighth stanza, this joyful expectancy is reiterated when the poet expresses his desire to “right the ancient wrong,” probably referring to the “death of Pan” at the arrival of Christ, and the intention to bring back the Pagan past:

Oh, shadows, shadows, shadows, shadows ever; They lisp, the fools, their song: But where is fled the lusty, wild endeavour To right the ancient wrong? They mouth their feeble prayer Unto the empty air. . . . But we will bring the past, the past, again, The lust of joy, the rapture and the pain! (XXXVIII)

The first part of the stanza is concerned with the slavish singers, whose delusion is evoked by the image of shadows, suggestive of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. This is supported by the fact that Neuburg was “an agnostic platonist” (Fuller 107). Their “feeble prayer” (contrasting with the intense “joy,” “rapture” and “pain”), goes unheard; they lisp it “unto the empty air,” implying again that their religion, Christianity, is mistaken. There is no god to hear them.

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The interpretation of the “ancient wrong” as the death of Pan is supported by the two stanzas directly preceding the thirty-eighth stanza (considered above), which possibly describe the end of Paganism:

And lo! We find the Panic revel over, The cups down-turned; the grape Is trampled level with the lowly clover; There is no brooding shape, Bright-eyed, bright-winged, and strong As a piped mountain-song In the keen Alpine air: No joy is here, Only the shadow of man’s foolish fear. (XXXVI)

The lively world of Panic revels is trampled by the fearful and gloomy age of Christianity.

The wine grapes, associated with Bacchus and Pan, are crushed and are now no more important than “the lowly clover,” which, ironically, came to symbolise the Christian Trinity.

The mournful tone continues in the following stanza, describing Pan’s dethronement and the disappearance of his followers:

The revellers are fled; where, no man knoweth, Save it be whence they came; The chill, dull wind of desolation bloweth Upon the flickering flame Of the old lost delight: There is no garland bright On the brows of the old Hermaphrodite, whose eyes Glowed ever newly once with new surprise. (XXXVII)

Calling Pan the “Hermaphrodite” gives prominences to his ability to transcend gender boundaries, possibly connecting the strict gender division in the austere Judeo-Christian world with the loss of joy. The absence of a garland on Pan’s head perhaps symbolises the loss of his power and of joy and vitality in general, all extinguished by the “chill, dull wind” of the Judeo-Christian. Neuburg was not the only one to describe the Judeo-Christian world in these terms. Merivale mentions several writers who felt this way. She notes that Heinrich

Heine (1797-1856) considered

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Christ’s cold, gray victory over Pan . . . the victory of morality over beauty. “Die öde Werkeltagsgesinnung der modernen Puritaner verbreitet sich schon über ganz Europa wie eine graue Dämmerung” (The gloomy workaday mood of the modern Puritans spreads itself over all Europe like a gray twilight), said Heine, echoing Schiller: “What blight-wind from our bitter North / Hath seared your hues and shrunk your flowers?” (qtd. in Merivale 106)

Apart from Heine and Schiller, Merivale quotes Théophile Gautier’s poem “Bûchers et

Tombeaux” (1852):

Des dieux que l’art toujours révère Trônaient au ciel marmoréen; Mais l’Olympe cède au Calvaire, Jupiter au Nazaréen;

Une voix dit: Pan est mort! — L’ombre S’étend. — Comme sur un drap noir, Sur la tristesse immense et sombre Le blanc squelette se fait voir.

Gods whom art always reveres Are throned in the marmoreal sky; But Olympus is yielding to Cavalry, Jupiter to the Nazarean;

A voice says: Pan is dead!— The shadow Stretches out. — As if on a black sheet Upon immense and gloomy sadness The white skeleton becomes visible. (qtd. in Merivale 106-7)

Merivale further quotes Sir Richard Burton’s take on the same theme—a section of his poem

Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû el-Yezdî (1880):

And when, at length, “Great Pan is dead” uprose the loud and dolorous cry, A glamour wither’d on the ground, a splendor faded in the sky Yea, Pan was dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three and three is one, Whose saddening creed of herited Sin spilt o’er the world its cold gray spell In every vista showed a grave, and ‘neath the grave the glare of Hell: Till all Life’s poesy sinks to prose; romance to dull Reality fades:

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Earth’s flush of gladness pales in gloom and God again to man degrades.54 (107)

Swinburne’s depiction of Christ’s victory over Paganism in his poem “Hymn to Proserpine”

(quoted in the previous chapter) is marked by a similarly dark tone:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 20) Reid used similar metaphors to characterise his relationship to Christianity:

“Temperamentally I was antagonistic to this religion, to its doctrines, its theory of life, the shadow it cast across the earth”55 (qtd. in Kaylor, Tom Barber 17). And Oscar Wilde in his poem “Pan. Double Villanelle” (1880) appeals to the god thus:

O goat-foot God of Arcady! This modern world is grey and old, And what remains to us of thee? . . . And dull and dead our Thames would be, For here the winds are chill and cold, O goat-foot God of Arcady! . . . Ah, leave the hills of Arcady, Thy satyrs and their wanton play, This modern world hath need of thee. (“Pan” 880-1)

A gloomy atmosphere pervades these extracts, conveyed by the adjectives “cold,” “gray,”

“dull,” “old,” “dead,” and the verbs “withering” and “fading.” The tone is either regretful, bemoaning the demise of a more joyful age (in Heine, Schiller, Gautier, Burton, and

Swinburne), or galvanising (in Wilde and Neuburg), appealing to Pan to return and rejuvenate—what the writers see as—the world afflicted by Christianity.

In accordance with the motifs of desire and passion permeating Neuburg’s poem, the climax—“the Pagan spring”—is described in a sexual tone:

54 Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû el-Yezdî (New York, 1929), p. 30, section IV, lines 24-31. The poem was written in 1853. 55 Apostate, p. 204. 156

Grant me again thy lyre! Let me awaken The old eternal spring; So shall each soul with pangs of birth be shaken, Let the good juices sting. The song I craved is mine, Thy song of blood and brine; Men shall stand unashamed and free, To flaunt abroad their new-born ecstasy! (XLII)

These lines could be read as an expression of a desire to break free from a world governed by austere Christian morality. Unlike Adam and Eve after the Fall, men shall be naked and unashamed again. Correspondingly, the language Neuburg uses in describing the revolution consists of metaphors referring to the body and bodily fluids—“the good juices,” “blood and brine,” words suggestive of semen and sweat—as well as physical pleasure. In fact, the poem seems to echo Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, in which he speaks of “a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies—shall attain freedom and joy” (5; see also Rowbotham 74). The following example, from an earlier part of Neuburg’s poem, is characterised by a similar tone and sexually charged language:

The fire of generation, the salt juices Within my body rare, Shall remedy our winter-time abuses; The odour of thy hair, Thy feet, thy hands, shall bring Again the Pagan spring, And from our bodies’ union men shall know To cast the veil from the sad face of woe . . . (XIV)

The sexual language of the poem, focused on the body, stands in direct opposition to the typically Christian detachment from the body and its focus on the soul, implying that the soul cannot thrive without the body. Correspondingly, the rejuvenation of the body goes hand in hand with the revitalisation of the soul.

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Two prominent metaphors in the description are wine and ecstasy, both of which, as has already been noted, are associated here and elsewhere with Pan and Dionysus; these are the means and the effect of the Pagan spring:

It shall be mine, O Master, in my singing To call the brooding light Back to the earth; would that my soul were winging To victory through the night! Yea! And it shall be mine To pour the sacred wine, And make men drunk with ecstasy as I, Drunken with joy whether I live or die. (XXXIX)

In this context, “the sacred wine” is liberating in its effect of loosening the inhibitions, which makes it easier to break the long-established conventions and the deeply ingrained, and yet false, convictions. This interpretation is further supported by the forty-first stanza, in which the same theme appears:

Give me thy wine! So shall my song unending Break through the barren prayer Of fear and fashion; let the mystic blending Of perfumes fill the air With hues of light and things Unutterable; the stings Of joy shall pierce men’s hearts, and there shall be Unending, throbbing, passioned ecstasy. (XLI)

The words “fear and fashion” could be read as convention and the fear of breaking it. While the word “barren” implies not only the suppression of sexuality, which is countered by the sex-and-body-embracing “throbbing, passioned ecstasy” at the end of the stanza, it also suggests a stifling of creativity, to which a blind following of tradition and convention leads.

At the end, as was foreshadowed by the title, Pan regains his power and, with him, the world of revels, feasting and joy:

Grant me, Eros, thy kiss, That I may speak thy bliss— The revel and the rapture and the feast,

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The Pæan, and the Crowning of the Beast! (XLIII)

The phrase “the Crowning of the Beast” can be read in several ways. Apart from the half- human, half-goat god Pan, it may refer to Crowley, whose famous moniker was “Beast

666.”56 The moment of triumph is anticipated earlier in the poem and described in very ecstatic language, suggestive of orgasm: “There shall be no despair, / But Pan! Pan! Pan! and all the world shall be / Mingled in one wild burning ecstasy” (XV). In the last stanza, the poem reaches its triumphant climax:

Yea! And the lyre is mine, and I am fearless, Naked, and free, and young; The torch is out; no longer night is cheerless; The hot young day is sprung From out the loins of God! Rise from the barren sod, Raise high the Pæan of the God in Man! Io Triumphe! / Hail to the new-born Pan! (XLIV)

The “barren sod” of the world governed by Christianity is rejuvenated from the seed from the fertile loins of the Pagan God, and the poet is liberated from the grim chains of Judeo-

Christian constriction. The verse “the God in Man” may reflect Crowley’s teaching in which the aeon of Horus is marked by “the emphasis . . . on the self or will, not on anything external such as gods or priests” (Symonds qtd. in Urban 9), corresponding to the emphasis on individuality which characterises Modernism during this period.

What makes the poem Decadent is its contempt for conformity; the embrace of intense experience (be it positive or negative), endorsing both rapture and pain; the bodily metaphors analysed above and the images of death and decay (“red blood streaming”;

“rotting warrior-bone”; “eagles hovering far / Around the field of war”). Last but not least,

56 In Crowley’s case, “Beast 666” does not signify the devil, as is commonly assumed. In the Bible, the “beast” represented “the Roman Empire, which had initially impinged upon Judean consciousness from across the Mediterranean Sea” (Asimov 1211). The number was used to denote a particular man, possibly Nero, whom the author of Revelation could not name directly for fear of persecution (1213). Churton explains that the “beast” “became a symbol for the Roman Empire, scourge of the Church,” but Crowley “interpret[ed] it as the Sun, or light source” (6). Moreover, his mother called him “the Beast” (6). 159 like many other Decadent works, the poem tackles the themes of hermaphroditism and sexual inversion, questioning the rigid categories concerning gender and sexuality and attempting to transcend them.

Like the figures of Pan analysed in the two previous chapters, Neuburg’s Pan is a source of knowledge, helping one to see the world as it really is, unveiling the illusion. The shepherd in the poem “The Lost Shepherd” from the collection The Triumph of Pan visits

“the groves of Pan” and acquires this knowledge as a result of the encounter with the god:

“Then did I learn the lore of Earth, / For mine was the light of Pan” (50, XII). In accordance with Neuburg’s and Crowley’s philosophy, this knowledge is gained during a sexual intercourse, described in the preceding verses:

And as he clasped me, slim and slight, I roared with the pain he gave, And he cried, “I will hold thee here all night, My beautiful, dark-haired slave; Kiss my lips and laugh in my eyes, And I’ll bring magic out of the skies . . . (49, XI)

Like the other Pans, Neuburg’s Pan is again inherently connected to Nature, for the knowledge is described as “the lore of Earth.” When Pan leaves the shepherd in the morning, he falls asleep exhausted. Upon awakening, the beauty of the Nature around him reminds him of the encounter:

After long dreamless sleep I knew The tale that had fled my tongue, I found it far in the water blue, In the song by the skylark sung, In the melody slow of the waving corn, In the rushing of wind through the vines re-born, And wherever the water-lilies grew, And the green, green willows swung. (XV)

Like the writing of Machen and Reid, the poem is thus characterised by natural lyricism.

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The Triumph of Fire over Ice: Passionate Paganism and Cold Christianity

On the whole, the poem is characterised by a sharp dichotomy between two worlds: that of a cold, dull, dead and desolate world, populated by obedient “slavish singers” whispering their “feeble prayers” to a god who does not hear them, and a lively world of revels, in which sexuality is liberated and gender is not restricted to two prescribed roles, making place for individuality. In accord with Neuburg’s and Crowley’s hatred of

Christianity and organised religion, the first world, figured as the second aeon in Crowley’s

The Book of the Law, will be overcome by the third aeon of Horus. In the poem, the dead world is reborn during the Pagan spring, a time when Pan’s world of revels, feasting, joy, rapture, and ecstasy returns. The coldness of death is replaced by the warmth of passionate life, conveyed by the metaphors of fire and flames. What these elements have in common is intensity of experience and emotion; they spark life into the world of resignation, combating dullness and despair. People are not slaves to the austere Judeo-Christian morality any longer; they stand naked and free, unashamed of their bodies and bodily needs, which are amply illustrated in the sexual tone which permeates the poem. The poem thus seems to contrast two approaches to life: it celebrates hedonism, expressed in the motifs of wine, ecstasy, body and an overall embracing of intense experience, characteristic of Decadence, Crowley’s sex magic, and Carpenter’s positive view of the body and its pleasures.57 And it criticises asceticism pursued in the poem by the “slavish singers” representing the austerity of certain segments of Victorian England, particularly what Crowley saw as “self-denying

Christendom” and what Neuburg saw as people under the yoke of the “a sky-seated tyrant he was sure was non-existent” (Fuller 121).

57 However, Carpenter, as an avid socialist, did not advocate pleasure for its own sake; he did not approve of pursuing pleasure at all costs. Rather, he believed that one should enjoy the moments of pleasure when they come and not suppress them: “Carpenter is careful to distinguish himself from the ‘Decadents’’ delight in sensation: ‘The maximum of enjoyment is not got by the pursuit of Pleasure; but rather by going your own way and letting the pleasure pursue you.’” (Rowbotham 255). 161

In fact, what Crowley, Carpenter and Neuburg fought against can also be expressed by Showalter’s metaphor of syphilis, representing the fear of sex and the resultant repressive attitude towards it:

For the male literary avant-garde . . . syphilis was the excrescence of a sexually diseased society, one that systematically suppressed desire and so produced anxious fathers and divided and disfigured sons. In the work of such writers as Ibsen, Stevenson, Hardy, Wells, and Joyce, the sins of the fathers are not lust and vice, but ignorance, guilt, shame, and fear. . . . Ibsen’s ghosts are not the invisible spirochetes of syphilis but the virulent prohibitions of religion and bourgeois morality. Mistaken ideas about sexuality constitute the true hereditary taint: “It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs . . . They are dormant, and we can never be rid of them. . . .” (199-200)

Crowley, Carpenter and Neuburg did their best to fight these old beliefs and Neuburg’s poem expresses the hoped-for triumph. They advanced the view that sexuality and spirituality are intrinsically connected, that embracing one’s sexuality can be a means of achieving not only physical, but also spiritual ecstasy. The primal sexuality of the goat-footed god made him a potent symbol of reconciling the physical and the divine. Actually, this is where Merivale sees the originality in D. H. Lawrence’s (1885-1930) take on Pan: “Lawrence, the myth- maker, created his Pan myth by respecting the Pan paradox, the mysterious synthesis of goat and god, and by taking it to one possible logical conclusion: he sees the goat in man ― the demonically and often sinisterly sexual ― as synonymous with the divine in man” (219).

However, Neuburg and Crowley had seen this before him.

In many ways, the poem reflects the Zeitgeist of a world in transition. Christianity had lost much of its power, and writers such as Neuburg, Crowley and Carpenter had found better alternatives in Eastern religions and Paganism, all of which grew in popularity and relevance during their period, because, instead of denying the body and sexuality, they embraced them.

This embracing of sexuality went hand in hand with a blurring of gender boundaries, starting in fin de siècle in the figures of Decadent Dandies and New Women, who often shocked the

162 public by being effeminate or too masculine, respectively. Both were often a reaction to the prudency and strict gender division of Victorian and Edwardian England. Even more importantly, gender boundaries were becoming more indistinct in the emergent homosexual culture, especially in one of the models of homosexual identity:

According to this model of border-crossing and liminality, gay people were an “intermediate sex,” “exactly at the threshold between genders.” Homosexual men were people born with a high percentage of essential femininity, with a “woman’s soul trapped in man’s body.” Homosexual women were mannish lesbians, women with a high percentage of essential masculinity. (Showalter 172)

This model corresponded to Carpenter’s notion of double-natured individuals, or “the intermediate sex,” and is celebrated in Neuburg’s figure of Pan as the Hermaphrodite. “The

Triumph of Pan” then anticipates a triumph of sex-embracing and rejuvenating Paganism over sex-negating and stifling Christianity, a triumph celebrating fluid sexual and gender boundaries and denouncing the constricting black and white division of gender identities, a triumph symbolised by the god Pan, the Hermaphrodite.

8. The Betwixt-and-Between: Peter Pan as a Trickster Figure

The question concerns how we live time, whether as the adults and Hook do, dwelling upon (and in) the past and future (Hook’s memories of schooldays, Mr. Darling’s concern with finances), or as Peter does, glorying in the opportunities of each moment as it occurs and living that moment to the full with no concern about what has gone before or what might occur afterwards.

Paul Fox, “The Time of His Life: Peter Pan and the Decadent Nineties,” p. 30.

The last work analysed here does not feature Pan, but a character inspired by him, which does not in any way diminish his importance. J. M. Barrie’s protagonist Peter Pan, the rebellious boy who refuses to grow up, has become an iconic character of not only children’s literature, but British culture in general. Being a part of the British canon, the story has been thoroughly studied, but I want to view Peter Pan from a new perspective, examining his link

163 with the archetypal trickster figure. The trickster appears mainly in the sphere of mythology,

Native American in particular. In fact, that is where the concept originated (Carroll 106).

However, the term has gradually spread into folklore and later into modern culture. Today, the figures to which this term applies include not only Coyote, Esu-Elegbara, Anansi, and

Loki, but also Felix the Cat (Tom) and Bugs Bunny (Abrams and Sutton-Smith). Making

Peter Pan join their company slightly alters our understanding of his significance, throwing light on his function as a trickster interacting with Victorian and Edwardian ideas and assumptions.

Choosing the story of Peter Pan for a thesis about Decadence may be unexpected.

However, Paul Fox in his paper “The Time of His Life: Peter Pan and the Decadent Nineties” explains what exactly makes the iconic children’s story Decadent. Fox sees Peter Pan as “the personification of [l’] art pour l’art, the repeatedly reimagined present as an end in itself”

(23). He demonstrates the influence of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the

Renaissance (especially its infamous “Conclusion”) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian

Gray58 on Peter Pan, presenting him as “the fin de siècle artist/e, the creative role-player, the actor of his own drama who creates his moments as ends in themselves, simultaneously forgetting the past and creating anew each present moment. It is this conceit of the ‘moment’ when time stands still, in which the artist sees himself and the world of his making as all that there is and has ever been” (24). Both Dorian Grey and Peter Pan do not age, but they differ in one important aspect. Dorian endorses “New Hedonism” advocated by Lord Henry in The

Picture of Dorian Gray, which is “directly descended from Pater’s aesthetic, albeit perverted from the course of its main argument, the encouragement to live fully, enacting experience for its own sake” (29). Nevertheless, whereas Dorian eventually fails, Peter Pan succeeds.

58 There are clear parallels between Peter and Wendy and The Picture of Dorian Gray, such as the episodes featuring Wendy plucking a flower and Dorian plucking a bud. For the whole analysis see Fox, pp. 25-6. 164

Indeed, Peter Pan is able to truly live in the moment, forgetting the past and not being concerned about the future:

Peter Pan portrays a successful revision of the failed aesthete portrayed in Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Dorian cannot forget his past and recurrently worries about his future. Peter’s capacity to willfully disregard both past and future marks his signal success in creating a reality and an identity for himself that precludes the angst and obsessions of his Wildean counterpart. (24)

According to Fox, Barrie also shows what happens to those who are not able to live in the present. The deterrent example is Hook’s obsession with Peter Pan, which shows “the calamity awaiting those unable to live in and for the moment. The tick-tocking crocodile consumes the present when we will not fully live our own lives” (25). Indeed, the crocodile is the embodiment of time in the timeless Neverland, “the name itself playing upon the possibility of a space existing outside time” (23). The crocodile keeps pursuing Hook throughout the story and devours him in the end. Ironically, however, Hook looks like a typical Decadent: “A degenerate, well-educated dandy, obsessed with ‘form’: this is surely society’s conception of the 1890’s aesthete writ large” (41). Although Peter Pan is not what most people imagine under the term Decadent, he achieves what other Aesthetes and

Decadents dream about―genuinely living in the present moment. However, not everybody views this positively. Sarah Gilead “writes that ‘Peter, forgetting the past, is entrapped in an eternal present’” (qtd. in Fox 28). But, as Fox retorts, “this is precisely why forgetting is the sine qua non of life in Neverland and the basis of the aestheticism of the British Decadents”

(28). Moreover, Fox points out what remembering the past entails: “It is only because Peter on occasion is forced to recall his past (by Wendy or in his dreams) that he has moments of suffering in the novel. When one remembers nothing, everything is new. As such, forgetting is a liberating essential to an aesthetic life—not its tragedy, but its justification” (28).

The name “Neverland” signifies the story’s concern with time. In fact, the name has changed several times: “Peter Pan’s island was called the Never, Never, Never Land in the

165 first draft of the play, the Never, Never Land in the play as performed, the Never Land in the play as published, and the Neverland in Peter and Wendy” (Hollindale qtd. in Fox 27). The importance of the word “never” in the name of the island “divulges to the reader the place’s nonexistence in any traditional, linear conception of temporality” (27). It is interesting to compare Neverland with the notion of utopia. Calinescu explains that “The concept of utopia was originally based on a spatial association (topos—place, u—no, utopia—nowhere), but today its temporal implications far outweigh whatever it may have preserved of its strict etymology” (63). Existing outside of time, Neverland is then a kind of utopia. In this respect, it is an ideal place for Decadents: “Neverland is a Never Land because it does not exist in real time, the movement of flux, of change and aging, but is created outside this linearity in a concentration of moments and elements” (30). This concentration of moments is also what enables Neverland to change: “In the aesthete’s creation of each moment as if it were an eternity unto itself, Neverland displays a constant return of difference under the pretence of the unchanging eternal” (27).

The second aspect which links the story of Peter Pan with Decadence is Peter’s use of language. In Peter’s hands, language is not just descriptive. The importance of make-believe in the story shows that Peter uses language to create, rather than just describe what is already there:

Language for Wilde’s aesthetes and for Barrie’s Peter Pan is used whimsically to create worlds, meaningful only for the moment because in constant flight. Meaning alters with each new utterance as languages re-construes existence. I have stated above that Peter and the Lost Boys apply language to life to bring things, as they are said, into being, not to describe or relate events as objective reality. There is no mimetic correspondence between the word and the world; in fact (or rather in fictions) words create the world. (Fox 37-8)

A salient example of this is Peter’s complaint about the birds in Neverland: “He regretted now that he had given the birds of the island such strange names that they are wild and

166 difficult of approach” (Barrie, The Annotated 145). In Peter Pan’s mythology, the act of naming affects the nature of the thing, person, or animal that is being named.

So far, I have referred to the subject of my analysis as the story of Peter Pan instead of naming a specific work. The reason is that the story exists in several versions and it has quite a complicated textual history. The origin of Barrie’s idea of an eternal child can be traced back to the novel Tommy and Grizel (1900), but the child has no name yet. That changes with the novel The Little White Bird (1902), in which Peter Pan appears for the first time, but he does not get much space yet. The character is more developed in the play Peter Pan or The

Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, which was performed for the first time in 1904. This time Peter

Pan is the main character. But the play existed only on stage; it had not been published yet. In

1906, the novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was published, but, in fact, the book only consists of the chapters from The Little White Bird featuring Peter Pan. In 1908, the one-act play When Wendy Grew Up: An Afterthought was performed for the first and only time. But it was later incorporated into the novel Peter and Wendy (1911), in which the character of

Peter Pan is most developed and appears in his final form. The play was still not published at this time. In fact, the script was not published until 1928. The reason why the textual history is so complicated is the fact that Barrie was very reluctant to put the story into writing. The only reason he published the novel is because other writers had started publishing their own versions of the story. He liked the shape-shifting quality of the story and kept changing it even after the play was published. The text was secondary to him; he preferred the (theatre) performance which was more open to change.

Playing Hyde-and-Seek with the Trickster

Before analysing Peter Pan, I am going to characterise the concept of the trickster, which has already been briefly outlined in the chapter on Pan. The trickster is a highly complex figure, which is one of the reasons why it successfully eludes definition. What

167 seems to be at the very core of the trickster’s nature is their opposition to borders, limits, restrictions and boundaries in general; he or she is the “enemy of boundaries” (Kerényi, “The

Trickster” 185) and the ultimate “boundary crosser” (Hyde 7). This makes tricksters deeply ambiguous characters because they never stick to one side of a dichotomy, such as good/evil, man/woman, human/animal. They want to find out what makes the boundary, exploring both sides and blurring the boundary in the process: “The best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found―sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms” (Hyde 7-8). Tricksters are able to show any seeming unity as a mere illusion by

“uncover[ing] the hidden duplicity” and “confus[ing] polarity” (231). The black and white world of good and evil is nothing for the betwixt-and-between tricksters, for they move in both these spheres, making the world (morally) grey.

What follows from tricksters’ opposition to boundaries is their becoming an anomaly.

Tricksters—“the lords of in-between” (Hyde 6)—do not fit any category, for to categorise or define “(de-finis) is to draw borders around phenomena, and tricksters seem amazingly resistant to such capture; they are notorious border breakers” (Hynes, “Mapping” 33). Not belonging anywhere implies a lack of identity since people are usually defined by their background—by the culture, customs and rules of the group to which they belong. But tricksters do not limit themselves to a single identity. Instead, being skilful imitators and shape-shifters, they are free to assume any identity they fancy at the moment or find useful:

“Anomalous, a-nomos, without normativity, the trickster typically exists outside or across all borders, classifications, and categories” (Hynes and Steele 161). The transformative abilities, implied in their shape-shifting skills, are not limited to the trickster’s body. Hynes notes that the trickster is a “bricoleur,” in other words “a tinker or fix-it person,

168 noted for his ingenuity in transforming anything at hand in order to form a creative solution”

(“Mapping” 42).

Based on what I have written so far, the trickster may seem to be a Robin-Hood-like character, breaking rules for the greater good. However, the trickster is first and foremost a

“deceiver/trick-player” (Hynes, “Mapping 37), and their actions are mostly motivated by selfishness, not by a desire for greater societal good. They use their tricks to gain what they want, to satisfy their ravenous physical needs, their curiosity, or their fondness for pranks.

Nevertheless, their escapades often have positive results.

The trickster is “the spirit of disorder” (Radin 185) and personifies the energising, chaotic force of change and spontaneous, playful creativity—in literary terms, he or she is “a postmodernist gone riot” (Hynes and Steele 162); in physical terms, an agent of entropy.

Tricksters make the world they live in more like themselves. Or rather, they reveal the world to be, like themselves, ambiguous, polyvalent, changeable, and unpredictable: “The true trickster’s trickery calls into question fundamental assumptions about the way the world is organized, and reveals the possibility of transforming them (even if often for ignoble ends)”

(Lock).

J. M. Barrie: A Boy Trapped in a Man’s Body

In many ways, J. M. Barrie was forever straddling lines―betwixt and between in real life and as narrator in his fictions.

Maria Tatar, “Introduction to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan,” p. xlvii.

As one studies the life and the personality of J. M. Barrie, it comes as no surprise that it was him that produced the mischievous boy who refused to grow up. Indeed, Barrie himself was endowed with some of Peter Pan’s trickster traits. He was good at imitating others,

169 which was a skill he developed after the death of his brother David, their mother’s favourite.

He wanted to alleviate his mother’s suffering by impersonating her favourite child: “Barrie describes how he developed an ‘intense desire . . . to become so like [David] that even my mother should not see the difference,’ and he practiced in secret until he had the boy’s whistle and stance (legs apart and hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers) down pat”

(Tatar, “J. M. Barrie” lxxii-lxxiii). But he did not stop after his mother’s recovery. Imitating and impersonating others had become his habit, which came to be manifested in his writing:

“Barrie himself recognized that his own voice rarely came through, for he had a habit of impersonating others: ‘Writing as a doctor, a sandwich-board man, a member of the

Parliament, a mother, and explorer, a child ... a professional beauty, a dog, a cat. He did not know his reason for this, but I can see that it was to escape identifying himself with any views ...’”59 (lxxvi). Barrie’s unwillingness to accept just one identity also shows in his shifting perspectives, which is evident in his use of pronouns: “In his newspaper articles, as in his fiction, he moves seamlessly from ‘I’ to ‘he’ or from ‘we’ to ‘you,’ never allowing himself to be pinned down to one identity or point of view” (lxxvi). Like Peter Pan, Barrie is experimenting with and exploring various identities, which makes his writing persona unstable.

Barrie was betwixt and between himself. In many ways, he was a still a boy, which made him an excellent candidate for the role of a mediator between the child and the adult.

And this liminal position benefited his writing: “Barrie’s addiction to youth―his infatuation with its games and pleasures―enabled him to write something that, for the first time, truly was for children even as it appealed to adult sensibilities” (Tatar, “Introduction” xliii, original emphasis). Indeed, with his work, Barrie managed to weld two broad domains of literature:

“At long last, here was a cultural story that would bridge the still vast literary divide between

59 Barrie, Greenwood Hat, p. 29. 170 adults and children” (Tatar, “Introduction” xlvi). This is also one of the reasons why Pan is particularly suitable as an inspiration for Barrie’s iconic character. In his essay “Pan and Puer

Aeternus,” Jean Perrot comments on the complexity of the works of Henry James, Oscar

Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson, arguing that it derived from “the union of opposing attitudes” and that it “fostered a type of narrative that can be appreciated by adults and young readers alike” (165). More importantly, Perrot gives credit for this uniting effect of their works to the god Pan: “This was the ultimate magic of the double-natured god: to bring together what was usually kept apart” (165). Tatar emphasises Barrie’s innovative role in the genre of children’s literature:

Barrie turned a category that was once “impossible” (for [Jacqueline] Rose there is nothing but adult agency in children’s literature) into a genre that opened up possibilities, suggesting that adults and children could together inhabit a zone where all experience the pleasures of a story, even if in different ways. Old-fashioned yet also postmodern before his time, Barrie overturned hierarchies boldly and playfully, enabling adults and children to share the reading experience in ways that few writers before him had made possible. (“Introduction” xliii)

In fact, writing the story of Peter Pan had a therapeutic effect on Barrie, who, just like his iconic character, seemed to have mentally remained a boy even after he had grown up:

“Barrie bemoaned the fact that ‘he was still a boy, he was ever a boy, trying sometimes, as now, to be a man . . . . He was so fond of being a boy that he could not grow up’”60 (Tatar, “J.

M. Barrie” lxxxvii). Barrie’s 1922 notebook entry clarifies the relevance of Peter Pan to his own life: “It is as if long after writing ‘P. Pan’ its true meaning came to me―Desperate attempt to grow up but can’t” (qtd. in Barrie, The Annotated 12, note 1). Unlike Peter Pan, however, Barrie could not avoid physically growing up and so became a boy trapped in a man’s body. As compensation, he enjoyed the joys of childhood vicariously through his writing and through his friendship with the Five. Barrie’s focus on youth and his regrets at having had to growing up connects him with Forrest Reid.

60 Barrie, Tommy and Grizel, p. 399. 171

Barrie’s unstable identity and liminal position between the child and the adult is reflected in the narrator of Peter and Wendy. When Barrie writes about himself in his introduction to Peter Pan, he, too, keeps switching from “I” to “he” and vice versa, using the third person when writing about his younger self. Similarly, the narrator sometimes uses a child’s perspective and at other times adopts an adult’s point of view, “forever flirting with readers without revealing an identity of his own. Shifting rapidly and with ease from the register of an adult narrator to that of a child, he seems sometimes to be a grown-up . . . and sometimes a child” (Tatar, “Introduction” xlvii). While using “sophisticated adult diction,” the narrator is also “playful, capricious, and partisan in ways that third-person narrators rarely are” (xlvii). The words “playful” and “capricious,” coupled with the narrator’s overall liminal nature, evoke the trickster spirit that permeates the whole work. The narrator is even able to combine both of the perspectives in one sentence: “Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be embraced instead of smacked” (Barrie, The Annotated 126). As Tatar points out in her notes, the narrator skilfully combines the child’s perspective with that of the adult, identifying himself with the children as the use of the pronoun “we” indicates, but at the same time producing adult judgments about the children, describing them as “heartless,”

“attractive,” and “selfish” (126, note 2). Despite being a third-person narrator—formally, he is far from being objective or omniscient, which is particularly evident in his following statement: “Now I understand what had hitherto puzzled me, why when Peter had exterminated the pirates he did not return to the island and leave Tink to escort the children to the mainland. This trick had been in his head all the time” (Barrie, The Annotated 171-172).

The narrator seems to be genuinely confused about the story, supporting the impression that

“the characters have a life of their own, with motives that are not always transparent to him”

172

(171, note 17). This conveys the impression that the narrator has no control over the characters. On the contrary, it often seems as if he has experienced the adventures with them.

That is why he often uses the pronoun “we” when narrating the story: “The extraordinary upshot of this adventure was―but we have not decided yet that this is the adventure we are to narrate” (93). In this way, Barrie subverted the hierarchy between the third-person narrator and the characters. They seem to be equal. What is more, he uses here a strategy that is typical of postmodernism: multiple outcomes. Since the narrator cannot decide which story to tell, he offers summaries several adventures, voicing the flow of his thoughts and trying to decide which one to narrate in more detail: “The narrator produces a fictional space in which multiple outcomes are possible and in which everything remains provisional and contingent.

Like Peter, the narrator is unpredictable, mercurial, and resistant to being fixed” (93, note 12, emphasis added). Describing some of the typical trickster characteristics, this comment strongly indicates the trickster nature of the narrator’s voice.

Peter Pan’s Mythical Origins

Considering Peter Pan’s mythological origins, trickery runs in the family. His surname comes from Pan, whose link with the trickster is described in the second chapter.

Peter Pan shares many of his trickster features. Both the god Pan and Peter Pan have a hybrid nature, being part human and part animal. Whereas Peter Pan is originally half-bird, Pan is half-goat, bearing a strong resemblance to what would become the typical representation of the Christian devil. This resemblance lends him a slightly sinister aspect, which was inherited by Peter Pan. Although Peter does not have any goat features himself, in The Little White

Bird (1902), he rides a goat, which is a motif which further strengthens his link to the goat- footed god. The goat was given to him by Maimie, a peculiar little girl who scares her brother every night with a monster with horns, bringing him into a state of panic every time, and then falling asleep like “the sweetest little angel” (Barrie, The Little 147). Peter is half-bird

173 because he got stuck in his transition from a bird (which is how children are born in the Peter

Pan mythology) into a human. His transitional status dawns on him in his conversation with

Solomon Caw:

“Poor little half-and-half!” said Solomon, who was not really hard-hearted, “you will never be able to fly again, not even on windy days. You must live here on the island always.” . . . He promised very kindly, however, to teach Peter as many of the bird ways as could be learned by one of such an awkward shape. “Then I shan’t be exactly a human?” Peter asked. “No.” “Nor exactly a bird?” “No.” “What shall I be?” “You will be a Betwixt-and-Between,” Solomon said, and certainly he was a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out. (Barrie, The Little 115) Indeed, as a trickster, Peter is a liminal figure, residing on the threshold between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Like other tricksters, Pan shows a strong focus on satisfying his physical needs. As a phallic god (Kerényi, The Gods 174), he has voracious sexual appetites. Not only did he

“seduce several nymphs,” he also “boasted that he had coupled with all Dionysus’s drunken

Maenads” (Graves 102). This is one of the aspects in which Peter Pan differs from the god

Pan: he has not inherited Pan’s libido. This is largely due to his being a hero of children’s literature and that he is a child himself. Instead, Peter’s greediness is directed at stories, to which he eagerly listens (Barrie, The Annotated 45-47).

Another personal quality that Peter, Pan and tricksters share is boastfulness. Peter never misses an opportunity to brag about his achievements, be they real or just figments of his imagination. This is particularly evident in the episode where Peter tries to attach his shadow back to his body with no success. It is Wendy who sews the shadow back onto him, but Peter automatically assumes it was he who had done so: “He was now jumping about in the wildest glee. Alas, he had already forgotten that he owed his bliss to Wendy. He thought he had attached the shadow himself. ‘How clever I am!’ he crowed rapturously, ‘oh, the

174 cleverness of me!’” (Barrie, The Annotated 40). The narrator confirms Peter’s conceit when he says: “To put it with brutal frankness, there never was a cockier boy” (40). As is the case of many other tricksters, Peter’s cockiness sometimes gets him into trouble. In one episode,

Peter deceives the pirates by faithfully imitating the voice of Hook, but then spoils everything when he lets himself be easily persuaded to play a guessing game, during which he reveals his name: “‘Can’t guess, can’t guess,’ crowed Peter. ‘Do you give it up?’ Of course in his pride he was carrying the game too far, and the miscreants saw their chance. ‘Yes, yes,’ they answered eagerly. ‘Well, then,’ he cried, ‘I am Peter Pan.’” (103). Peter’s conceit sometimes completely clouds his judgment.

Both Pan and Peter Pan often change their appearance to gain what they want. Peter appears as shape-shifter when he impersonates Wendy in order to save her when she has been captured by the pirates, thus, symbolically, changing his sex as well (Barrie, The

Annotated 161). And, in the context of the play, sexual ambiguity does not end there, since the role of Peter Pan has traditionally been played by women:

It was assumed from the beginning that Peter would be played by a girl; until 1982 only twice in the play’s history, in productions in France and Germany in the 1950s, was the part taken by a boy or young man. In fact in the first production and for some years afterwards, all the boys were played by girls or young women, with the exception of John Darling and Slightly, the Lost Boy who provides comic relief. (Carpenter 405)

Women were probably better suited than men to play the part of a small boy, making the character androgynous. However, the main reason was the fact that the play belongs to the tradition of the pantomime, as has been convincingly demonstrated by Donna R. White and

C. Anita Tarr:61

61 White and Tarr also offer explanations that have been provided by other scholars: “The favourite theory is that Barrie was working around a British law that made it illegal to have children under fourteen on stage after 9:00 at night. Casting a grown woman as Peter meant that the other children’s roles could be scaled according to her height rather than a boy’s, allowing older children to play younger parts (Birkin 105). Other scholars suggest that the part of Peter Pan was so demanding that a child could not have handled it” (xiii). 175

[T]he most logical reason for the cross-gendered casting is that the male lead of a pantomime was always played by a woman. One of the burlesque elements introduced into pantomime in the 1850s was the practice of cross-gendered roles, usually for comic effect. Thus, Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters were usually played by men, preferably big, hairy men. Similarly, the young male lead was a role called Principal Boy, always played by a woman. There was a Principal Girl too, also played by a woman. In Peter Pan, Wendy is the principal Girl. There was never any question that Peter Pan would be played by an actress. All but one of the Lost Boys were also portrayed by women, as was one of Wendy’s younger brothers. The other brother, John, and the sixth Lost Boy were tall young male actors, and their size in comparison to the others was used for comic effect. (xiii-xiv)

White and Tarr also note that “Barrie himself said he was writing a pantomime” and that

“Contemporary audiences and theater critics knew it was a pantomime” (x). What is more, the pantomime also explains other aspects of Peter’s personality. White and Tarr identify him as a Harlequin figure:62

Harlequin was the star of the Harlequinade; he was adept at disguise and mimicry and was a gifted acrobat, musician, and dancer. Mostly, though, he was an inveterate trickster and magician. Peter Pan’s antics and actions retain much of Harlequin’s personality. His self-identification as ‘a little bird that has broken out of the egg’ may actually be a tribute to John Rich, the original English Harlequin, who always portrayed Harlequin hatching from an egg—a famous bit of stage business (Wilson 22). (xiv)

Impersonating Wendy was not an isolated case of Peter’s shape-shifting; Peter thoroughly enjoys swapping identities, making his identity unstable. The narrator describes an episode which is “especially interesting as showing one of Peter’s peculiarities, which was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change sides” (Barrie, The Annotated 93). The story is as follows:

At the gulch, when victory was still in the balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out, “I’m redskin to-day; what are you, Tootles?” And Tootles answered, “Redskin; what are you, Nibs?” and Nibs said, “Redskin; what are

62 “Another type of pantomime character used in Peter Pan was the animal character. Actors call such roles ‘skin parts.’ Wendy and her brothers have a large Newfoundland dog as their nursemaid. Nana, the dog, was usually played by a man, but never by an actual dog, although Barrie claims he allowed his pet Newfoundland to do a walk-on one night” (White and Tarr xv). By putting a dog, Nana, in the role of the nurse and later making Mr. Darling live in her kennel, Barrie also managed to confuse the division between the world of people and that of animals (Barrie, The Annotated 16, note 12). 176

you Twin?” and so on; and they were all redskin; and of course this would have ended the fight had not the real redskins, fascinated by Peter’s methods, agreed to be lost boys for that once, and so at it they all went again, more fiercely than ever. (93)

This episode also illustrates Peter’s tricksterish capriciousness and openness to new experiences that he passes to others as well. He also shows that identity is a performance, not something inherent and stable.

Like many other tricksters, both the god Pan and Peter Pan are bricoleurs. Pan shows this ability in his sexual pursuit of the nymph Syrinx, who, trying to escape the libidinous god, was saved by being changed into a reed. Pan then cut several of them, making a Pan- pipe (Graves 103), also called syrinx, a musical instrument he used to produce such hauntingly beautiful music. Peter Pan inherited this ability from his mythical godfather:

Peter’s heart was so glad that he felt he must sing all day long, just as the birds sing for joy, but, being partly human, he needed an instrument, so he made a pipe of reeds, and he used to sit by the shore of the island of an evening, practising the sough of the wind and the ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon, and he put them all in his pipe and played them so beautifully that even the birds were deceived, and they would say to each other, ‘Was that a fish leaping in the water or was it Peter playing leaping fish on his pipe?’ And sometimes he played the birth of birds, and then the mothers would turn round in their nests to see whether they had laid an egg. (Barrie, The Little 117)

This passage also shows how supremely skilful Peter is at imitation, another important skill from the trickster’s repertoire. Moreover, Peter’s pipe-playing shows his boundless creativity.

Imitation and creation may seem to be two mutually exclusive concepts, but, in Peter’s activities, they are reconciled. A salient example of his imitative creativity is the lullaby he composes based on the way his mother calls him: “Sitting on the foot of the bed, he played a beautiful lullaby to his mother on his pipe. He had made it up himself out of the way she said

‘Peter,’ and he never stopped playing until she looked happy” (Barrie, The Little 141). He is even able to play his mother’s kiss on his pipe (142). As a trickster, Peter also uses his imitation skills for deception: he faithfully imitates the voice of Hook to deceive the pirates and save Tiger Lilly (Barrie, The Annotated 98-99); and he successfully imitates the ticking

177 sound of the crocodile “so that wild beasts should believe he was the crocodile and let him pass unmolested” (155). Being a bricoleur is inherently connected with creativity and Peter shows this quality when he and Wendy get stuck in the lagoon when the tide is approaching.

Catching sight of a flying kite, it immediately strikes Peter how to use it to save Wendy.

Later, when the Never bird saves him by giving him the nest with her eggs, Peter, again, does not fail to figure out a way to save the eggs as well. He puts them into Starkey’s hat that is hung on a stave on the rock, “a deep tarpaulin, watertight, with a broad brim” (112). In fact, this new nest is even better than the traditional one, such that “all Never birds now build in that shape of nest, with a broad brim on which the youngsters take an airing” (Barrie, Peter

Pan 103).

When Peter invents a nest for the Never birds, he shows himself not only as bricoleur, but also as a culture hero63 in the context of Neverland. In fact, he is like a god of the island.

He has named the birds (and probably other animals, too), affecting their natures: “He regretted now that he had given the birds of the island such strange names that they are wild and difficult of approach” (Barrie, The Annotated 145). And he has a powerful influence on the island as a whole to the point where Neverland changes its character according to Peter’s presence or absence. During his absence it is rather passive, but as he approaches, it comes back to life:

Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened, but woke is better and was always used by Peter. In his absence things are usually quiet on the island. . . . But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life. (64)

This passage also shows Peter’s disregard for rules, in this case grammatical.

Peter’s first name is no less interesting than his second name because, as Maria Tatar notes, he shares it with Saint Peter (“Introduction” xlix), who appears as a trickster in

63 For a discussion of trickster as culture hero, see Michael P. Carroll’s article “The Trickster as Selfish-Buffoon and Culture Hero.” 178

“popular interpretations of Peter . . . particularly those within the Christian folklore of the

Yaqui, Spanish, Mexican, and New Mexican cultures of the American Southwest” (Hynes and Steele 159). As tricksters, both Peter Pan and Saint Peter are psychopomps. Saint Peter guards the gate to heaven and Peter Pan accompanies children who have died on their way to the world of the dead: “When children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened” (Barrie, Peter 8). Even his clothing symbolises his position at the crossing between life and death: he is “clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees” (Barrie, The Annotated 25). The skeleton leaves underscore his “connection with seasonal change and death,” whereas “the oozing juices that hold the leaves together weld vitality to the hint of death in ‘skeleton’ leaves” (25, note 30). Moreover, Neverland, Peter’s home, could be interpreted as the land of the dead: “As a place where lost boys sleep, it . . . becomes the domain of the dead, with the boys moving almost directly from the womb to the tomb” (20, note 21). Indeed, it is implied that the lost boys are actually dead: “The term ‘lost’ is used frequently as a euphemism for ‘dead,’ as in ‘he lost his father’ or ‘she lost a child.’”

(44, note 18). Furthermore, Neverland bears a striking resemblance to the land of the dead in

Irish mythology, as Tatar points out:

Neverland may be modeled on Tír na nÓg, the most prominent of the Otherworlds in Irish mythology, and island that cannot be located on a map. Mortals can reach it only by invitation from one of the fairies residing on it. A place of eternal youth and beauty, it is a utopian land of music, pleasure, happiness, and eternal life. (20, note 21)

Similarly, the children can get into Neverland only when invited or accompanied by Peter.

Finally, Sarah Gilead describes Neverland as a “realm of death under the cover of boyish and adventure,” and goes so far as to compare their house to a graveyard: “the boys live underground in houses that resemble coffins” (20, note 21). Peter Pan is thus in a similar position to Saint Peter: he is the only one who grants access to the land of the dead. But, unlike Saint Peter, Peter Pan brings Wendy and her brothers back home, to the world of the

179 living. Even Peter Pan’s name is then a betwixt and between, because it bridges a gap between two historically contradictory religions—Christianity, represented by Saint Peter, and Paganism, symbolised by the Graeco-Roman god Pan.

Victorian Child: An Angel or an Animal?

Having discussed Peter Pan’s character and origins, I am going to examine his historical background. Victorian England was the “Golden Age” of children’s literature

(Gubar). Accordingly, the child became one of the central topics of not only Victorian literature, but also an object of scientific study. In fact, the child became “the focus of unprecedented observation, analysis, and speculation” (Shuttleworth 4). However, the representation of children was profoundly ambiguous, ranging from seeing children as little saints to comparing them to primitive savages (Wood 116). Again, this was true for literature as well as for the scientific discourse: “Psychology and psychiatry, for example, produced from the same biological principles highly discrepant models of the child: naive innocent, living in a world of wonder and mythological fancy, or animalistic product of a savage past”

(Shuttleworth 3-4). Actually, Sally Shuttleworth points out that “Our own schizophrenia with reference to the figure of the child—an innocent to be protected at all costs, or a feral being to be feared—has its roots in the Victorian age” (361).

On the one hand, then, children were seen as being far superior to adults, edifying them morally and spiritually, while resisting their corrupting influence (Wood 116). But, of course, the protecting shield of childhood ceases to work in the child’s transition to adulthood. That is, unless they avoid this transition. That is why the death of children was glorified as a way of sealing off their innocence (117). Gradually, the image of the child was inflated into a saviour and a Christ-like figure (117), with children being depicted as “holy innocents dying for the benefits of guilty adults around them” (119). Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that “the child replaced God as an object of worship” (Gubar).

180

Alongside the view of children as innocent angels, there also existed an entirely opposite view, in which children were denied their humanity, being compared to animals, which had to be tamed and restrained by the superior adults until they finally fit the existing social structures and obeyed all the rules: “Other writers figured children as primitive pre- humans who needed to be moulded through education and experience into beings acceptable, and accepting of, society’s norms of gender and class expectation” (Wood 116). The language of some writers was permeated with tropes of colonialism, comparing children to savages (120). Moreover, this comparison was not limited to literature. On the contrary, it

“was given apparent scientific validation in theories of recapitulation, in which the child was seen to mirror in its early years ancestral forms of the species, both human and animal”

(Shuttleworth 4).

One can see how a society like this was in need of the trickster, who would violate the social constraints which stifled the natural liveliness, spontaneity and creativity of children and rooted out signs of individuality. Naomi Wood describes how Lewis Carroll subverted the opposing images of the child in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which Alice is “a synthesis of these idealizing and realistic constructions” (116). He tackled the problem linguistically, “locat[ing] the conflict in the realms of language and power. By making nonsense of the abstract and reductive categories through which children were defined,

Carroll’s work celebrates and problematizes the Victorian cult of childhood” (116). Barrie, too, manages to disrupt the established representations of the child, but in a different way— by disputing both the idea of children’s perfect innocence and of their animality.

First of all, Peter Pan is a seven-day-old baby64 that will never grow up and hence be stained by the vices of adulthood, the reason being that Peter is a dead baby (Barrie, The

Annotated 44, note 18) and “The dead child . . . is destined not to change” (Ferrucci 119).

64 To be more precise, Peter Pan is a week-old baby in The Little White Bird. When he appears on stage, he becomes a teenager. After all, it would be difficult to find a suitable actor who could play a baby. 181

According to the Victorian view of children, then, Peter Pan should be the ultimate model of innocence: he is a baby, hence innocent, and his innocence is confirmed and protected by the fact that he is dead. However, Peter is far from being a little angel, making the premise wrong. His sinister aspect is pointed out by Andrew Birkin, who speaks about “the Devil in

Peter” (qtd. in Tatar, “A Note” xxiv); Mr. Darling calls him a “fiend” (Barrie, The

Annotated 27); and, most importantly, Barrie himself identifies him as the villain of the story in his first draft of the play: “P[eter] a demon boy (villain of story)” (Birkin).65 Accordingly, he only comes to the nursery when the night-lights, which are supposed to protect the children, have gone out (Barrie, The Annotated 36). Their protective function is expressed in the dialogue between Michael and Mrs. Darling: “‘Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?’ ‘Nothing, precious,’ she said; ‘they are the eyes a mother leaves behind her to guard her children.’” (34). The implied menace of Peter’s and Tinker Bell’s visit is further supported by the folklore: “In traditional lore, fairies are associated with the practice of stealing human children, and Peter and Tinker Bell might be seen as co-conspirators as they enter the Darling home” (43, note 17). However, Peter does not come to the nursery to steal the children. The primary purpose of his visit is to listen to stories (45). Nevertheless, this changes after he finds out how many stories Wendy knows. It is then that the thought of abducting her occurs to him, and the sinister aspect of his character comes to light: “He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her, but did not. ‘Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!’ she cried, and then Peter gripped her and began to draw her toward the window” (45-47).

Actually, Peter’s sinister nature is only implied. He does not take Wendy to Neverland against her will. Instead, he tries to seduce her into going with him: he promises her to teach

65 Indeed, the character of Hook was introduced for purely practical reasons—to add a scene designed to “give the stagehands time to change the scenery” (Birkin). 182 her to fly and to show her mermaids. He uses his cleverness instead of violence to achieve what he wants. That is why he craftily appeals to her maternal instincts:

He had become frightfully cunning. “Wendy,” he said, “how we should all respect you.” She was wriggling her body in distress. It was quite as if she were trying to remain on the nursery floor. But he had no pity for her. “Wendy,” he said, the sly one, “you could tuck us in at night.” “Oo!” “None of us has ever been tucked in at night.” “Oo,” and her arms went out to him. “And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us. None of us has any pockets.” How could she resist. (Barrie, The Annotated 47, emphasis added)

The fact that Wendy is “wriggling her body” as a reaction to Peter’s verbal seduction implies hidden sexuality, evoking Peter’s association with the god Pan. And, actually, the passage could reflect the “concern about the dangers of child sexuality,” with which Victorian culture was “suffused” (Shuttleworth 161). However, the implication is purely symbolic because

Peter’s seduction is in sharp contrasts with the innocent chores he uses to tempt

Wendy. Moreover, Peter does not really understand the notion of sexual attraction, which is conveyed by the fact that he does not even know what a kiss is (Barrie, The Annotated 41).

Nevertheless, the scene evokes the image of Peter as “a Pied Piper figure, seducing the children, in this case, with the promise of flight and leading them out of their homes into an enchanted retreat” (52, note 33).

The image of children as adorable little angels is further subverted by Barrie’s repeated implications of their heartlessness and selfishness, often combined with craftiness.

The deviousness of Darling’s children is evident in the scene before their escape when Liza is coming to check on them. When they are alerted by Peter, their faces assume “the awful craftiness of children listening for sounds from the grown-up world” (Barrie, The

Annotated 48), and they begin to pretend they are the sweet little angels everybody assumes

183 them to be: “And thus when Liza entered, holding Nana, the nursery seemed quite its old self, very dark; and you would have sworn you heard its three wicked inmates breathing angelically as they slept. They were really doing it artfully from behind the window curtains”

(48). Barrie’s subversion of the supposed innocence of children is emphasised here by putting the contrasting words “wicked” and “angelically” close to each other. In fact, the novel is intertwined by the narrator’s (often) sarcastic comments concerning children’s heartlessness:

“They knew in what they called their hearts that one can get on quite well without a mother, and that it is only the mothers who think you can’t” (128, emphasis added); “Thus children are ever ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones” (130). It is, in fact, heartlessness that grants children the ability to fly:

“Why can’t you fly, mother?” “Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way.” “Why do they forget the way?” “Because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless. It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly.” “What is gay and innocent and heartless? I do wish I was gay and innocent and heartless.” (182)

Being “gay and innocent and heartless” seems to be the essence of children’s nature in the story, considering the fact that the characteristics are repeated four times in the passage above. Innocence and heartlessness66 seem to be two mutually exclusive qualities, but they are reconciled in the notion of amorality; it could be argued that children do not distinguish between right and wrong, hence cannot be considered guilty. In fact, the novel concludes by repeating these same three qualities, emphasising their importance (187).

Peter’s heartlessness partly results from his egotism; he usually does not care much for others and only thinks about his amusement, totally oblivious to the fact that he puts

66 The heartlessness of the children in the story is based on Barrie’s personal experience. Although he loved the Llewelyn Davies boys he adopted, in his introduction to Peter Pan, he mentions their heartless treatment of the play, which is typical for children’s treatment of toys: “You had played it until you tired of it, and tossed it in the air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib” (“To the Five” 216). 184 others in danger. This is most evident in the episode where the children are flying to

Neverland. They are getting sleepy and run the risk of falling into the sea. Not only does

Peter find this funny, his motivation in saving them is also disturbing: “[H]e always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go” (Barrie, The Annotated 54). Indeed, Peter could let somebody die out of boredom. Like any trickster, he is not a reliable companion for situations like the one described above—not only because of his egotism, but also because of his capricious nature and resistance to emotional attachments. On the other hand, however, he does not understand the notion of death and, hence, is not aware of the danger.

Barrie’s subversion of the view of children as saints does not mean that he is an advocate of the opposite view. On the contrary, Barrie manages to subvert even the animalistic view. As noted earlier, Peter has a liminal status, being half-animal and half- human. What is more, he grows up without parents and without any adult supervision in general: “His age is one week, and though he was born so long ago he has never had a birthday, nor is there the slightest chance of his ever having one. The reason is that he escaped from being human when he was seven days old; he escaped by the window and flew back to the Kensington Gardens” (Barrie, The Little 109-110). Peter’s escape may have started as a result of “a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops” (Barrie, The Little 110), which is natural for all new-born children in the Peter Pan mythology, but, in his case, the desire to be free as a bird persisted, outweighing his wish to be with his mother: “Certainly it would be pleasant to be her boy again, but on the other hand, what times those had been in the Gardens! Was he so sure that he should enjoy wearing clothes again?” (140-141). The price of going back to his mother is too high. He would have to give up his freedom and

185 conform to social norms and conventions, such as wearing clothes. In fact, freedom is essential for the trickster, and unwillingness to conform is yet another typical trickster characteristic. But freedom comes at a price. Peter delays his return so long that, in the end, it is too late. When, finally, he flies to the window with the firm decision to return, he finds it closed with “iron bars on it, and peering inside he saw his mother sleeping peacefully with her arm round another little boy” (143). The iron bars support the suggestion of a lack of freedom, comparing home to a prison, “a place of limited mobility and magic, too confined and narrow to contain the expansive desires of children as they grow up” (Tatar, “An

Introduction” 244). Peter chooses to be alone and free, not bound to any home or family.

Barrie does not omit to show us the alternative: the children who stay at home, with their mothers, are gradually moulded into responsible beings who conform to social norms.

This is symbolically expressed in Mrs. Darling’s tidying up the children’s minds, trimming the characteristics which do not fit the pattern:

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. . . . It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. (Barrie, The Annotated 17-18)

From this lovely description, tidying up children’s minds may seem as an innocent and beneficial activity—right up to the point where Mrs. Darling starts to put out of sight the things she does not like or find appropriate: all the bad personal traits and “evil passions” have to be hidden somewhere in the deep recesses of the mind, no doubt giving rise to neuroses later in the adulthood, as Freud would have it. As Tatar notes, “Mrs. Darling is a true Victorian at heart, taming and domesticating her children by concealing everything that 186 does not conform to her standards of innocence and sweetness. There is no evidence that

Barrie knew of Freud’s work, but many of his ideas seem to capture in poetic terms concepts such as repression, as developed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)” (Barrie, The

Annotated 19-20, note 19). In fact, Mrs. Darling’s efforts sharply contrast with what Peter does when he is looking for his shadow: “Peter jumped at the drawers, scattering their contents to the floor with both hands, as kings toss ha’pence to the crowd” (38). Tatar’s note about this passage is especially relevant when considering Peter as a trickster: “If Mrs.

Darling tidies up the metaphorical chests of drawers that are the children’s minds, Peter Pan flings the contents of the real chest of drawers in the nursery to the ground, creating disorderly clutter” (38, note 6). Indeed, as a trickster, Peter messes up the established order and embraces chaos.

The Victorian advocates of the animalistic view of children would no doubt approve of Mrs. Darling’s method and see it as a way of eliminating the animality of children and forming them into proper human beings. And that is what Barrie subverts. It is true that Peter is basically half-animal, symbolising perhaps the supposed animality of children, but he does not behave like one. Certainly, he has many negative characteristics that Victorian parents would be only too happy to eliminate, but he is not wild or barbarous. On the contrary, despite the fact that he lives without any adult supervision, he sometimes shows very chivalrous behaviour, as in the episode where he lets Wendy fly off on the kite whereas he himself stays in the lagoon expecting to be drowned by the rising water:

“Michael’s kite,” Peter said without interest, but next moment he had seized the tail, and was pulling the kite toward him. “It lifted Michael off the ground,” he cried; “why should it not carry you?” “Both of us!” “It can’t lift two; Michael and Curly tried.” “Let us draw lots,” Wendy said bravely. “And you a lady; never.” Already he had tied the tail round her. She clung to him; she refused to go without him; but with a “Good-bye, Wendy,” he pushed her

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from the rock; and in a few minutes she was borne out of his sight. Peter was alone on the lagoon. (Barrie, The Annotated 107, emphasis added)

This is not the only place in the story where Peter behaves like a true gentleman. In the final fight with Hook, Peter does not seize the chance to kill him easily when Hook drops his sword “at the sight of his own blood” (163). Instead, he invites him to pick it up before they continue to fight. His behaviour here is in contrast with the other boys who encourage Peter to seize the chance and kill Hook when he is defenceless. This contrast underscores Peter’s integrity which is apparent in this particular case (but which is in no way consistent): “[T]he sword fell from Hook’s hand, and he was at Peter’s mercy. ‘Now!’ cried all the boys, but with a magnificent gesture Peter invited his opponent to pick up his own sword. Hook did so instantly, but with a tragic feeling that Peter was showing good form” (163). In these passages Peter could indeed pass as a model of honesty and virtue (if his other, not so virtuous, qualities were ignored). More importantly, he did not need any adults to teach him this—at least not those in the traditional role of parents and teachers. Instead, Peter seems to imitate the heroes of the stories he likes so much, and to have internalised a moral code based on the stories told by Wendy.

Finally, Tatar points out the significance of Peter Pan in capturing the child’s nature:

“Few literary works capture more perfectly than Peter Pan a child’s desire for mobility, lightness and flight. And it is rare to find expressed so openly and clearly the desire to remain a child forever, free of adult gravity and responsibility” (xxxv). Actually, children share these qualities with tricksters, and more could be added: a penchant for chaos and resistance to rules; enjoyment of imitation and role playing; openness to new experiences and creative energy. One of the reasons why the characteristics of children and tricksters partially overlap is the fact that the trickster is—in many respects—a representation of the child archetype.

According to C. G. Jung, the child is “a mediator,” “a symbol which unites the opposites”

(The Archetypes 164), just like the trickster. In its largely still preconscious state of mind, the

188 child embodies a natural wholeness which gradually disappears with the increasing differentiation resulting from the emergence of consciousness that inevitably comes with the transition to adulthood (Kassel 249). That is why the child “anticipates the figure that comes from the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements of the personality” (Jung, The

Archetypes 164). In Peter Pan, the archetypes of the trickster and the child merge. His home,

Neverland, is the land of children’s dreams (Barrie, The Annotated 19), and, as such, it is associated with the unconscious as, in dreams, the unconscious is revealed (Jung, The

Archetypes 5). This dreamy and unconscious aspect of Neverland is further supported by the fact that there is no lasting memory associated with it, which is why Peter keeps forgetting everything. At the same time, however, Peter always comes in with a light—a symbol of consciousness (23), emanating from Tinker Bell. In fact, Jung himself compared the trickster with the archetype of the shadow, which is the archetype that corresponds to the “uncivilised” features of the trickster, representing the traits that people normally try to suppress: “The trickster is a collective shadow figure, an epitome of all the inferior traits of character in individuals” (“On the Psychology” 209). However, the archetype of the child is more accurate when considering the trickster as an embodiment of paradox and his role as a mediator. Therefore, the two archetypes draw attention to different aspects of the trickster: the archetype of the child highlights his positive qualities, while the archetype of the shadow stresses the negative ones.

Breaking down Barriers: The Hybrid Nature of the Story

It has already been noted that the story of Peter Pan is a story for adults, as well as children, providing a bridge between the two literary domains. The story is also a hybrid of two genres: It exists in two versions created by Barrie, as a play and as a novel. But the distinction between the two genres in Barrie’s rendition is rather blurred. In the script of the

189 play, this is apparent in the stage directions, which, as Fabio Vericat notes, resemble

“comments made by the narrator of a novel” (119). He illustrates this, using the following example: “[Peter] often wanders away alone with this weapon, and when he comes back you are never absolutely certain whether he has had an adventure or not. He may have forgotten it so completely that he says nothing about it; and then when you go out you find the body. On the other hand he may say a great deal about it, and yet you never find the body”67 (qtd. in

Vericat 119). Not surprisingly perhaps, it later appeared exactly in these words in the novel.

Conversely, the novel contains elements of drama. Vericat describes the narrative voice as more theatrical than literary (120). This is evident in the narrator’s comment on the lost boys, pirates, redskins and beasts marching round the island in pursuit of one another: “Let us pretend to lie here among the sugar-cane and watch them as they steal by in single file”

(Barrie, The Annotated 65), which indeed suggests watching a theatre performance. But the style is not the only aspect that makes the novel theatrical: everything Peter does in

Neverland is a performance; the story is full of “masquerade, mimicry, disguise, performance, role playing, and masks” (Tatar, “Introduction” xxxix), make-believe being one of the keywords of the story. In fact, according to Tatar, it was, among other things, theatricality which set the story apart from its predecessors in children’s literature (xxxix).

Barrie also managed “to dismantle the opposition between creator and consumer”

(Tatar, “Introduction” xlvi). In his introduction to the play, Barrie confuses the notion of the authorship by saying: “I have no recollection of writing the play of Peter Pan” (“To the Five”

216). In this way, he supports (even if indirectly and possibly unintentionally) the mythological character of the work. The story indeed resembles a myth in some respects. Not only does it revolve around a trickster figure, it also has a quasi-explanatory function, providing an imaginative explanation of (among other things) the way children come into this

67 Peter Hollindale points out that Barrie’s stage directions “liberate the printed script from enslavement to dialogue, and reproduce the truth that speech is only one of theatre’s several languages” (xvi). 190 world: “[A]ll children in our part of London were once birds in the Kensington Gardens; and

. . . the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney” (Barrie, The Little 16-17). The birds that are to become little children are born on a special island in the Kensington Gardens, from which they are then sent to their prospective mothers. No people have access to this unique island, except for

Peter Pan because of his liminal status: “No one who is human, except Peter Pan (and he is only half human), can land on the island, but you may write what you want (boy or girl, dark or fair) on a piece of paper, and then twist it into the shape of a boat and slip it into the water, and it reaches Peter Pan’s island after dark” (106). Through the whole introduction to Peter

Pan, Barrie continues doubting his authorship of the story: “Notwithstanding other possibilities, I think I wrote Peter” (“To the Five” 218, emphasis added). In fact, he even tries to come up with some evidence of his authorship: “This journey through the house may not convince any one that I wrote Peter, but it does suggest me as a likely person” (219). All this uncertainty of Barrie’s about having written the work seems to suggest that Peter Pan is a product of his unconscious and supports the dreamy and mythical nature of the story. The question of authorship is also pertinent to the method Barrie used to construct the story:

Barrie borrowed much from his literary forebears, creating a story that is not so much original as syncretic, uniting disparate, often contradictory bits and pieces from his own experience and from the foundational stories of Western culture . . . . It was Barrie’s genius to use that same skill, what the anthropologists call bricolage, making resourceful use of materials close at hand to construct a new myth. (Tatar, “Introduction” xlviii)

Indeed, by his ingenious use of material that was available for creating something new, Barrie evokes the bricoleur aspect of the mythical trickster.

The story indeed seems to have a life of its own, or at least that is how Barrie perceives it: “The conventional story . . . is far less stable than most of us realize. . . . For

Barrie, Peter Pan existed in performance, and the various typescripts reveal exactly how

191 much he loved to see the character come alive onstage and transform and renew himself with each new production” (Tatar, “A Message” xviii). The permanency and lifelessness of the written word is probably one of the reasons why Barrie did not want to “fix his iconic character in print” (xviii). However, through the capricious and mercurial narrator, he managed to bring life into the written story, with all its contingency and unpredictability.

From Literature to Myth

The myth of Peter Pan is deeply imbued with the trickster spirit, concerning not only the character himself, but also—to a certain extent—the author and the narrator. Peter Pan is a deft shape-shifter, a creative imitator and a bricoleur, often finding a clever solution in a seemingly hopeless situation. And he is also a psychopomp, helping children who die cross the border between life and death. Of course, like other tricksters, he possesses many other less desirable personal traits: he is greedy, boastful, and incredibly egocentric, unable to maintain any long-term relationships, except for his friendship with Wendy, a kind of surrogate mother.

In several aspects though, Peter Pan departs from the idea of a typical trickster. First of all, he is not dominated by his sexual appetites. Instead, the object of his greediness is listening to stories. He is extremely selfish and is able to risk the lives of others for his own entertainment, but he is also prepared to die to save the life of a lady. These deviations, however, stem from the cultural background, specifically from the social context of Victorian and Edwardian England, and they have an important function in subverting the principal streams of thought about the nature of children. With Peter Pan, Barrie helped to liberate the

Victorian child from the rigid categories to which it was confined, blurring the boundary between the ideas of children as sweet angels or wild animals, and showing that they are much more complex than that.

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Most importantly, Peter Pan is a betwixt-and-between, a mediator, residing on the border between human and animal, life and death, and lacking a stable identity. And it is this in-betweenness—this ambiguity—that he shares with Barrie himself. Barrie, a skilful imitator and a boy trapped in a man’s body, helped to bridge the gap between children and adults in literature.

Unlike the traditional mythical tricksters such as Hermes, Loki, Anansi, Coyote or

Esu-Elegbara, Peter Pan is a literary figure. Nevertheless, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up left an indelible impression on his audience and gradually evolved to have a myth of his own.

Although Peter Pan is technically a dead child, with Neverland being something of an

Otherworld, the story is very much alive, as the annual performances of the play and new adaptations of the story show.

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9. Conclusion

Fin de siècle was a period of intellectual turmoil, with gender and sexuality being among the most discussed topics. Indeed, fin de siècle had been famously described by

George Gissing as a period of “sexual anarchy” (Showalter 3). With feminism, emerging in the shape of New Women, and a “burgeoning homosexual subculture,” far from being suppressed by the Labouchere Amendment criminalising “all male homosexual acts” (14-

15), the neatly defined Victorian categories concerning gender and sexuality began to crumble, giving rise to new concepts denoting people who did not fit, the in-betweens, as

“Inverts, Hermaphrodites, Uranians, Urnings and Intersexes” (Kaye 62). Showalter aptly described this period as not only “a battle between the sexes” (with men resenting women’s struggle for emancipation), but also “within the sexes” (9, original emphasis), with people trying to grapple with changes in gender and sexual identities. The changes in thinking about gender and sexuality went hand in hand with a shift in religion. Many fin-de-siècle writers turned away from Christianity, embracing Eastern spirituality and/or New Paganism, which were, among other things, more sexually liberal.

The literary and cultural phenomenon that tackled these themes, many of which had previously been considered taboo in British literature, was Decadence, a liminal movement which matched the period in its heterogeneous nature. Fin de siècle was a period in transition, and Decadence was a literary phenomenon representing the transition from Romanticism to

Modernism (and hence a transition between the classic and modern aesthetics) and between

Aestheticism (considered artistic, but not subversive) and Naturalism (which was seen as subversive enough, but also as inartistic). Decadents brought new energy into British literature, which had been viewed by many writers as emasculated and sterile due to the excessive censorship, which followed from the efforts to protect the Young Reader. By addressing topics, which had not been covered before, such as disease, perversion, and

194 aberrant sexuality, often depicting them in terms of beauty, the Decadents challenged the prevailing views and beliefs, problematising the dichotomies such as the sacred and the profane, healthy and sick, male and female, right and wrong, and the like. Like the archetypal trickster, they violated the line between the dirty and the clean, bringing back the dirt, in other words, what had been excluded, the necessary “by-product of creating order” (Hyde

176). This had a revitalising effect on literature, for as Lewis Hyde warns, “purity often ends in sterility” (185). The Decadents (and the Naturalists before them) disturbed and muddied the clean and calm waters of Victorian literature.

The Graeco-Roman god Pan was a perfect figure for disrupting such dichotomies. He is the embodiment of the liminality that characterises both the period of fin de siècle and

Decadence. Being half-animal and half-human in his appearance, he represents both the conflict and the reconciliation of the primitive and the civilised. As a hybrid he was a particularly unsettling symbol for both Victorian and Edwardian readership, disrupting the clear division between the species. This became especially disturbing in the light of Charles

Darwin’s theory of evolution, which showed that people are much closer to animals than what many were (in their conceit) prepared to admit. With his unbridled, aberrant sexuality,

Pan—and his diabolical offspring Helen—represented unspeakable horror in Arthur

Machen’s The Great God Pan, a novella which—despite its vagueness—caused outrage in the prurient Victorian society. Nevertheless, the same qualities were embraced by Victor

Benjamin Neuburg in his poem “The Triumph of Pan,” where the figure of Pan, the

Hermaphrodite, is used to overcome the dichotomies between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and Pan is celebrated as a saviour, rejuvenating what Neuburg saw as the grey, cold, and sterile world of Christianity. In his view of Pan, Neuburg is similar to

Nietzsche, who counted “the animal vitality and sexuality . . . among the Dionysian virtues”

(Merivale 170). Similarly, E. M. Forster saw in Pan a liberating figure. In fact, in “The Story

195 of a Panic” Pan is a figure which evokes both horror and ecstasy, depending on the personality of the people he encounters. The respectable and repressed English are—in their panic—reduced to a herd of animals, whereas Eustace is freed from his repression, embracing his homosexuality and getting to know his true self, like the curate in “The Curate’s Friend.”

Pan and the Faun respectively are the facilitators of this life-changing knowledge. Both

Forster and Neuburg, having been inspired by Edward Carpenter, employed the motif of half- goat and half-god Pan to show that the bestial and the divine are not necessarily mutually exclusive; in their view, the body and the spirit, sexuality and spirituality, complement each other. Forrest Reid and J. M. Barrie gave Pan in their works a youthful shape. Neither Harold nor Peter Pan will ever grow old because they both died when they were young, Harold as an adolescent and Peter as a baby (in The Little White Bird). They are both psychopomps, travelling between the real world and the land of the dead, Graham’s garden of asphodel in

The Garden God and Neverland in the story of Peter Pan. Consequently, they both occupy a liminal position between life and death.

What links all the figures of Pan presented by the authors analysed in the present thesis is Nature, with which the goat-footed god is intrinsically connected: Machen’s Pan was supposed to be a symbol which evoked the sublime feeling Machen experienced when he beheld the valley of Usk on a summer day in his beloved Gwent. Forster and Reid imbued the elements of Nature with life and made their Pans (and the Faun) facilitate this view of Nature in the characters of Graham in The Garden God and Eustace and the curate in “The Story of a

Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend.” In “Pan’s Pupil,” Pan is presented as the spirit of Earth and thus more significant than Christ. Neuburg describes the knowledge which the lost shepherd acquires after his encounter with Pan as the “lore of Earth” and the beauty of Nature reminds him of Pan. Peter Pan’s relationship to Nature is evident in his faithful imitation of the sounds of Nature when he plays his pipes and in his clothing. After all, he is “clad in

196 skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees” (Barrie, The Annotated 25), which also symbolises his liminal position between life and death. Embracing Nature is also what differentiates the five authors analysed here from the works which are seen as the epitomes of the Decadent style. Indeed, whereas Huysmans’s A Rebours and Wilde’s The Picture of

Dorian Gray embraced artificiality and claimed that the artificial and the civilised are superior to Nature, the authors analysed here often criticised the excess of civilisation in the form of social norms and constrictions. In the story of Peter Pan, this is conveyed by the image of the bars on the window of Peter’s former room and in the act of Mrs Darling tidying their children’s minds, and in Forster it is symbolised by the effort of the respectable English tourists to entrap Eustace indoors and their concern about Eustace’s manners, coupled with the effort to make him behave appropriately to his social status.

There is one more aspect that is pertinent to the comparison of the five authors and that is religion. A significant number of Decadent writers converted to Anglo-Catholicism, which they found congenial to their aesthetic sensibility. Three of the authors analysed here followed the opposite direction. Forster, Reid, and Neuburg resolutely refused their Judeo-

Christian background in favour of Paganism or Eastern spirituality, and their works address the opposition between Christianity and Paganism. They found the Judeo-Christian ethics too strict and oppressive, with Forster and Neuburg criticising the detrimental division between the body and the soul. They viewed Paganism and Eastern spirituality as, among other things, more sexually liberal, an idea which seemed to be terrifying (although at the same time fascinating) for Machen.

Although all the authors analysed here are all associated with Decadence, they do not fit the image of typical Decadents. Machen is probably the closest to this image, representing the first generation of Decadents, his characters being dilettantes with an interest in the arcane. Forster is at the opposite end of the spectrum, being more politically engaged and

197 closer to Modernism. All these authors mediate between Romanticism and Decadence. Their

Pan is a spirit of Nature associated with the idyllic (fictional) Arcadia, but they also focus on his more sinister and sexual animal half. The nature of the two literary styles is captured in the image of the horned (and horny) god of Nature.

198

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207

Abstract

The present dissertation aims to examine the remarkable rise in popularity of the

Graeco-Roman god Pan as a literary motif in British literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on Merivale’s work Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern

Times (1969), which presents a literary history of the Pan motif, the present thesis offers a detailed analysis of the motif, limiting the scope to fin de siècle Decadence.

The analytical part of the thesis focuses on five authors associated with Decadence and consists of in-depth studies of their works featuring Pan or Pan-like figures. Decadence is a highly heterogeneous literary movement, notoriously difficult to define, and the selected works represent different aspects of the phenomenon. Arthur Machen’s novella The Great

God Pan (1894) and his masterpiece The Hill of Dreams (1907) are the most quintessentially

Decadent, exemplifying the Decadent style: Machen was concerned with language, particularly its superficial features such as sound. Both works were equipped with a refined cover illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and feature typically Decadent dilettantes with an interest in the arcane. By contrast, E. M. Forster’s short stories “The Story of a Panic” (1904) and “The Curate’s Friend” (1907) are much more politically engaged. In addressing the issues of ethnic and gender (in)equality, religion, and heteronormativity, they are closer to

Modernism. Forrest Reid’s novella The Garden God (1905) and the short story “Pan’s Pupil”

(1905) are part of the Uranian tradition of elevated pederasty, the former telling a story of a

Platonic love between two boys and the latter an encounter of a boy with Pan. Although intensely lyrical and dreamy, Reid’s writing is Decadent in its subtly subversive use of

Christian references for describing homoerotic feelings. Despite the innocence of the boys’ love, the underlying note of eroticism was strong enough to grossly offend Henry James, to whom Reid devoted the novella, which led to the end of their epistolary relationship. What remained implicit in Reid’s writing was expressed much more explicitly in the work of Victor

208

Benjamin Neuburg. His poem “The Triumph of Pan” (1910) addresses the themes of sexual and gender ambiguity, which inform Neuburg’s scathing critique of the Judeo-Christian ethics, particularly the suppression of the body and bodily needs. Like Forster and Edward

Carpenter, who influenced both these writers, Neuburg firmly believed in the intrinsic connection between the physical and the spiritual. The analysis concludes with J. M. Barrie’s iconic story of Peter Pan, a character which, as Paul Fox has demonstrated, manages to successfully apply Walter Pater’s dictum to live fully in the present moment (although he is, in fact, a dead boy, and his home is Neverland, a place existing outside time).

What made Pan a particularly suitable symbol for expressing the issues with which

Decadent literature was concerned was his liminal and transgressive nature. The fact that he was half-god and half-goat made him a useful figure for addressing the Nature vs. civilisation dichotomy. In Forster’s work, Pan is a figure restoring the characters’ connection to Nature, which is liberating for some, but terrifying for others, evoking feelings of ecstasy and panic, respectively. The other meaning of “nature” is pertinent here as well since Pan makes Eustace in “The Story of a Panic” and Henry in “The Curate’s Friend” understand and live in accordance with their own nature, which involves an acknowledgment of their homoerotic feelings. The primal sexuality of the goat-footed god made him a potent symbol of reconciling the physical and the divine. Forster and Neuburg (influenced by Carpenter) criticised the sharp distinction between the body and the soul typical for the Judeo-Christian ethics, advocating the embracement rather than repression of the physical and the sexual.

What is more, as a hermaphrodite (in Neuburg’s work), Pan became a patron of alternative sexualities and was used for criticising heteronormativity. Finally, in espousing Pan, a spirit of Nature, the authors analysed here expressed their preference for Nature as opposed to artifice, representing a strain of Decadence which is close to Romanticism. In this way, they problematise the image of Decadence exemplified by the work of Oscar Wilde, who fully

209 embraced artifice. In a way, the authors analysed here mediate between Romanticism and

Decadence. Their Pan is a spirit of Nature associated with the idyllic Arcadia, but they also focus on his more sinister and sexual animal half.

210

Anotace

Předmětem této disertační práce je řecko-římský bůh Pan, který jako literární prvek zažil pozoruhodný nárůst popularity v britské a americké literatuře konce devatenáctého a začátku dvacátého století. Práce staví na knize Patricie Merivale Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (1969), která popisuje literární historii Pana jako literárního motivu. Rozsah práce je ale omezen na Dekadenci v období fin de siècle, což umožnuje detailní analýzu tohoto literárního prvku.

Analytická část práce se zaměřuje na pět autorů spojovaných s Dekadencí a skládá se z podrobných studií jejich děl, ve kterých se objevil Pan a jemu podobné postavy. Dekadence je vysoce heterogenním literárním jevem, který lze jen velmi těžko definovat, a díla analyzovaná v této práci reprezentují různé aspekty tohoto jevu. Novela The Great God Pan

(1894) od Arthura Machena, stejně jako jeho vrcholné dílo The Hill of Dreams (1907), jsou pravděpodobně nejtypičtějšími díly Dekadence jako literárního stylu (z děl analyzovaných v této práci). Povídky „The Story of a Panic“ (1904) a „The Curate’s Friend“ (1907) napsané

E. M. Forsterem jsou naproti tomu mnohem více politicky zainteresované. Vzhledem k tomu,

že se zabývají tématy jako je etnická a genderová (ne)rovnost, náboženství a heteronormativita, blíží se modernismu. Novela The Garden God (1905) a povídka „Pan’s

Pupil“ (1905) od Forresta Reida patří do tzv. „uraniánské“ tradice. První dílo zachycuje příběh platonické lásky dvou chlapců a druhé dílo líčí setkání chlapce s Panem. Ačkoliv je

Reidův styl značně lyrický, jeho dílo je mírně subversivní v tom, že používá křesťanské pojmy k popisu homoerotických pocitů. Ačkoli je láska chlapců v novele líčena velmi nevinně, její erotický podtext natolik pohoršil Henryho Jamese, kterému Reid novelu věnoval, že definitivně ukončil jejich korespondenci. To, co zůstalo implicitní v Reidově stylu, bylo vyjádřeno mnohem explicitněji v díle Victora Benjamina Neuburga. Jeho báseň

„The Triumph of Pan“ (1910) se zabývá tématy sexuální a genderové nejednoznačnosti, která

211 jsou spojena s Neuburgovou ostrou kritikou judeo-křesťanské etiky, zejména pak potlačování tělesných potřeb. Jako Forster a Edward Carpenter, který ovlivnil oba tyto spisovatele,

Neuburg pevně věřil ve vnitřní spojitost fyzična a spirituality. Závěrem je analýza ikonického příběhu Petera Pana od J. M. Barrieho, který, jak ukázal Paul Fox, úspěšně aplikoval vybídnutí Waltera Patera žít plně v přítomném okamžiku (i když je Peter Pan—podle mytologie příběhu—mrtvým chlapcem, jehož domovem je Neverland, místo existující mimo

čas).

Důvodem, proč je Pan obzvláště vhodným symbolem k vyjádření témat, kterými se dekadentní literatura zabývala, je jeho liminální a transgresivní charakter. To, že byl napůl bohem a napůl zvířetem, bylo užitečné k vyjádření rozporu mezi přírodou (i ve smyslu přirozenosti, tělesných potřeb a pudů) a civilizací (společenských pravidel a hodnot). V díle

Forstera je Pan postavou, která obnovuje spojení postav s přírodou (a zároveň přirozeností), což je osvobozující pro některé postavy, ale děsivé pro jiné, a podle toho vyvolává setkání s Panem pocity extáze v prvním případě a paniky ve druhém. Díky Panovi Eustace z povídky

„The Story of a Panic“ a Henry z povídky „The Curate’s Friend“ porozumějí a začnou žít v souladu se svou podstatou, což znamená i uznání své homosexuality. Díky své primální sexualitě byl Pan, který byl napůl kozlem, účinným symbolem sjednocení fyzična a božského. Především Forster a Neuburg (ovlivněni Carpenterem) kritizovali jasné rozdělení mezi tělem a duší typické pro judeo-křesťanskou etiku. Zastávali názor, že bychom měli přijmout fyzično a sexualitu, a ne je potlačovat. Jako hermafrodit (v Neuburgově básni) se navíc stal Pan patronem alternativních sexualit a—jako literární motiv—byl využit ke kritice heteronormativity.

Autoři analyzovaní v této práci vyjadřují pomocí boha Pana svou blízkost k přírodě a tím patří k proudu Dekadence, která se blíží romantismu. V tomto ohledu komplikují obraz

Dekadence představovaný například dílem Oscara Wildea, který upřednostňoval kulturní a

212 společenskou stránku lidstva před jeho přirozeností. Jejich Pan je duchem přírody spojený s idylickou (byť fiktivní) Arkádií, ale zároveň není opomenuta jeho (méně idylická) sexuální a živočišná půlka.

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